#140 – 20 Meal Ideas from Real Kitchens

Imagine if you could put yourself inside ancestral kitchens all over the world and watch a week’s worth of food. Real people cooking for their real families using real ingredients.

That’s what we’re talking about today. Because, thanks to our supporter community, we’ve made that possible for you. Answering a callout for weekly menus, our supporters sent them in and we’re sharing it all in a new expanded book called A Treasury of Ancestral Menus: 50 pages of a week’s worth of food from all over the world.

When I sat down to read this book, it blew me away. I was reminded that this way of cooking doesn’t have to be perfect. I saw some ingenious ideas for cooking once, eating multiple times, some simple options I’d never even thought of, some nutritious flavour combinations that were brilliant and some breakfasts, lunches, and dinners I just wanted to copy! These people get it, I thought, and wanted to jump into the kitchen straight away and start cooking!

Today we’ll share 20 meal ideas that come directly from these menus. Thank you to all the supporters that wrote down what they ate for a week and sent it to us. You’ve already got the treasury in your inbox. But more than that we wanted to make it available to everyone listening – because we know it will encourage and support more real food in more kitchens around the world. If you’re not a supporter, head to ancestralkitchenpodcast.com/menus and give us what your pocket can afford to download your copy.

Resources:

Get Your Copy of A Treasury of Ancestral Meals here

Episode 132: A Week of Ancestral Meals: what we really ate 

Episode 56: Preparing Nutrient-Dense Meals From Scratch Every Day

Spelt Sourdough Every Day

The Best Way to Soak Oats

Naturally-Fermented Staffordshire Oat Cakes

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Transcript:

Andrea:
All right.

Andrea:
Hello, Allison. How are you today?

Alison:
I’m good. Thank you, Andrew. How are you?

Andrea:
I am super well because I have a delicious steamed, it’s like, well, what did I put in here? Milk and maca powder and nutritional yeast. There’s only one company I’ve found that doesn’t use the fake, what is it, folate?

Alison:
Oh, yeah. The fake one. For the nutritional yeast. Yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah. So anybody who’s buying nutritional yeast, you know, double check your ingredients because.

Alison:
How’s the flavor of that in what you’re drinking? Because it’s quite savory.

Andrea:
It’s really good. I like it. I put in also a tiny bit of cocoa powder, just like unsweetened cocoa powder. And then the milk is so sweet, you know, when you steam milk, all that kind of sugar comes up out of it. So the milk is real sweet. And then I put a little bit of hot coffee in there.

Alison:
Wow, that is a concoction. I feel like my oat straw tea with a tiny bit of vanilla in pals into kind of bland nothingness compared to yours.

Andrea:
Made me yeah I don’t know what made me want to do it I did it yesterday and I had kind of had you know Sally Fallon has that uh, raw milk warmer in her cookbook and I kind of had that in the back of my mind and I just thought this sounds I don’t know why but it sounds really good and I used to drink maca powder all the time when we lived in Virginia, and I kind of got out of the habit so anyways yeah that’s that’s a nice cozy warm beverage keeping me, happy and warm today did you but you have oat straw tea but what did you have for breakfast i had lunch yeah i had lunch you can hear about my breakfast.

Alison:
If you want oh i was.

Andrea:
I was ready to.

Alison:
Tell you about my lunch i have to remember.

Andrea:
This every time it might sound really like.

Alison:
Smooth and flowing on episodes but i’m going what did i.

Andrea:
Just do how many times have we started an episode and we’re like wait what are you going to say you ate. I don’t remember. What did I eat?

Alison:
What did I eat?

Andrea:
It was 10 minutes ago.

Alison:
So we had, Gabriel and I had sausage made from rabbit. There’s a wild kind of game stall at the market and they make their own sausages. So Gabriel and I had a rabbit sausage, but Rob ate some leftovers from yesterday. Rob is generally the, receptacle of random leftovers if you have to choose one of us um and so he had some leftover beef because i’ve been experimenting making what’s called a kale bros recipe which is a scottish recipe for the book um, and it involves beef stock and beef so there’s a bit of leftover beef from that and also there was a bit of leftover kind of we call it muff from the bones so when you make beef broth the bones have got meat and bits of gelatinous stuff on yeah, rob eats all that stuff usually so there’s a bit of that you made up yeah or gave.

Andrea:
Made up yeah.

Alison:
Yeah i think i don’t remember who made it up originally one of us made it up it’s either me or gable that makes up words um so one of us did yeah um so he had that we had um greens which we steamed um and interestingly i had a conversation on discord, a couple of weeks ago with hannah who’s a supporter in belgium asking me about my steaming pan because I use a metal steaming pan which goes on the hob with two steaming levels rather than I think plastic steamers are quite popular in Europe I don’t know if they are in the states as well, yeah so my greens were steamed in that pan and then we had some brown rice which we cooked in some of the beef stock from the beef bones that we made for the kale bros yesterday how about you this is your breakfast that you’re drinking now is it.

Andrea:
I guess so but i’ll tell you.

Alison:
What about last night.

Andrea:
Which was just a really really simple meal and lee is here visiting from alaska and, she brought down her husband who runs the he’s the guy who did the fish episode.

Alison:
Just a little bit ago.

Andrea:
So he also does a lot of hunting and he had And made a bunch of like summer sausage venison. I don’t know where to look, Allison. I’m getting used to this camera and I’m like, do I look here? Do I look at the camera? So sorry, if you’re watching this, I’m getting used to where to put my eyes. I’m not used to this. Anyways. He makes this summer sausage with venison and pork combined. And it is so delicious. And Leah brought a bunch of it down. It’s like kind of little log rounds. And I had bought this buckwheat baguette. It’s a gluten-free buckwheat baguette from the bakery in town, the gluten-free bakery. And then I had one of the five-pound blocks of raw cheddar from Azure Standard. And so I took a wedge off of that and I sliced it into pieces. I sliced the buckwheat, I sliced the summer sausage, and then my neighbor had just given us bags of Asian pears and Bartlets off her tree. And so I cut a bunch of those up into wedges, and then I took out a container of dill pickles from the summer, just refrigerator dill pickles, and that was our meal.

Alison:
So you did it like on a platter? A platter, being named, people just took what they wanted.

Andrea:
Yeah, all just, all on the same cutting board I cut it on, I just lined everything up. It was so good.

Alison:
You know what?

Andrea:
So simple, so good.

Alison:
It sounds wonderful. And we’re going to talk a bit about platters and how simple and easy they are and how they are proper meals. So we’re going to talk about that later on.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
But it sounds absolutely delicious. Now, I know you have some clothes, some Ancestral Kitchen podcast clothes since we’ve last talked about this.

Andrea:
Yes, Alison, I am clothed.

Alison:
So would you like to talk to us about what clothes you and your family have.

Andrea:
Which have the wonderful Ancestral Kitchen podcast? I wish I wore this shirt today. I didn’t think about it until last night, and I thought, oh, we should have had that shirt washed and ready for today. But I did wear it in an episode that will be upcoming in November that I already recorded with Anita. And that is a video episode, too. So you’ll actually see me wearing it there. Excellent. But, yes, the tea mill is awesome. The clothes are awesome. I made one for each of the kids also. So Jacob has a Bigfoot one. Camille has an owl, which is a picture that she took. Um, and Adelaide has a shirt with Elsie and Angel on the front. And of course, you know, I made these designs kind of with the kids in mind, but they’re just on any t-shirt. Anybody can get it. So they, they absolutely love those. And, um, then we have some bags. I’ve been using my bag for just kind of my, I don’t actually have, I don’t have like a bag or a purse or a diaper bag or anything like that. I don’t carry anything with me.

Andrea:
So I’ve been using it just to throw my, I don’t know, stuff that I carry out to the car in. Yeah, yeah. My book for on the go and all of that. So, yeah, it’s been really awesome having these fun things. And the kids might, you know, we got some for… Um my friend kara who bought elsie back in the day yeah she has a little boy so we got him one of the little bigfoot shirts nice i need to get him one of the cow ones now so are the bigfoot and the cow shoes wearing one.

Alison:
Are they actually on the site if someone wanted to go.

Andrea:
And buy those they are they’re on there yeah they’re on there so anybody can get them the bigfoot one says bigfoot says eat more liver, of course he would of course he would of course he would you know it’s a picture we took up bigfoot ourself when we saw so yeah, anyways yeah it’s it’s also fun and so people if i want to go and get some more.

Alison:
If you want to see those um clothes you can go to ancestral kitchen podcast.com forward slash merch m-e-r-c-h and that redirects to our t-mill site who we’ve talked about them before they’re an ethical sustainable supplier of organic cotton clothes And when you buy from them, you’ll be supporting the podcast. So do go and check that out.

Andrea:
Do also remember that was that’s the hardest thing is to find cute. Printed t-shirts logos of companies you like that aren’t fast fashion.

Alison:
Yeah that aren’t made in china and just doing awful things yes yeah it took us a while that’s why it took us so long isn’t it really, um i’ve been wearing my top to the market in the hope that you know wandering around the stroud farmers market that people will be the sort of people that are our people you know um.

Andrea:
So gary really wants me to make him a shirt with like a thing that people can scan on the back okay of course all of the phrases he comes up with that i should write are kind of outrageous.

Alison:
And yeah you don’t want to go with our we won’t we won’t we won’t say what rob said to put on there because that would be a bad thing anyway that couldn’t.

Andrea:
Be a special category um.

Alison:
I also want to remind people of the podcast newsletter we have a newsletter which goes out once a month um and that gives all the news of kind of what we’re up to what’s coming what what episodes have happened what the extras are where you can get downloads from etc um, if you want to sign up for that go to our website which is just ancestral kitchen podcast.com and at the top of every page you’ll see how you can sign up for it um and.

Andrea:
Now you have to say this so i’m gonna say it it’s written by me not ai yeah.

Alison:
It’s written by andrea i’m.

Andrea:
Gonna sit down and write that thing by hand.

Alison:
I reckon.

Andrea:
You know i i refuse to use an ai generator even for the titles i’m like no my brain is better than ai.

Alison:
I reckon that anyone who’s been listening to us for a while will be able to tell which newsletters which stuff comes from me which stuff comes from you you’ve given the game away now yeah but yeah andrea writes that one it’s not from me, yeah i can tell i can tell definitely.

Andrea:
It’s all my typos. I just know it.

Alison:
Let’s move on to this episode, which is a very exciting one. It’s kind of been generated by the community, really, and something that kind of floored me. So back on episode 132, we recorded a topic which we titled A Week of Ancestral Meals, What We Really Ate. And the idea was to talk about what our menus were, you know, pull back the curtain, let’s see what Alice and Andrea actually eat. And as we started planning it, other members of the podcast community started to send in menus we put a kind of a call out and lots and lots and lots of menus came in from people all over the globe who are our supporters, and they were so wonderful that um andrea you put them together using your skills, into um a book which we called treasury of ancestral menus and then that went out to all our supporters, for them to get inspiration from, to read, to learn from, and just to see how other people.

Alison:
Are living ancestrally and cooking ancestrally. So when I downloaded the document, I was just so inspired. I wasn’t expecting necessarily to be because I couldn’t really thought about what was in there, but reading all these menus and the way that, people who listen to us cook and what they’re providing on their tables at every meal, every day for all of their family, it was just so amazing, first of all to actually just see what they’re eating secondly reading all the menus gave me so many ideas for meals like whole meals for combinations like oh look look what Leah did she combined this with this I never thought about that, um for leftovers for carrying over leftovers from one meal to the next but for so many types of dishes, and then thirdly it made me look at my play that’s in front of me three times a day differently. And one example of that is I looked at, the seasonings that people use. And for a while, I found a mayo here that I can buy from a shop that’s made with avocado oil. And I kind of was feeling guilty, like I shouldn’t be using this mayo from this shop because it’s from a shop and I haven’t made it and I shouldn’t be using much of it. I should be just, you know, happy just to have my salad and my things that are on my plate in the austere manner.

Alison:
And then I saw what other people are eating and I thought, hey I’m allowed to have this mayo you know I’m allowed to actually have that to combine with all the other foods that I’ve got on my plate and enjoy it and so it gave me, it kind of gave me permission in the kitchen to eat certain things in a way that I you know I’ve been doing it for ages but yet I still didn’t feel that I had, um and so I just think this book is absolutely amazing Andrea you wrote the intro for it I’m looking at it now could you read me the second paragraph that you wrote on page four, please, because I just thought it was a wonderful paragraph.

Andrea:
Seeing the plates, menus, pantries, and gardens of those immersed in or just starting out in or anywhere in between on their ancestral journey provides a kind of inspiration and light we need. It is rare to visit a home where packaged food is not the meal du jour, or where plastic bags of Crispy snacks and microwaved entrees aren’t a common happening. It is hard at times to glean inspiration, encouragement, and ideas we didn’t even know we needed when those we know who eat like we do are all so far away.

Alison:
Yeah. Amen. That bit in the end there where you say inspiration, encouragement, and ideas we didn’t even know we needed, that’s what I felt like when I was reading through this document. I didn’t think I necessarily needed anything. And then I was sitting on the sofa in the evening reading through it. I was like, oh my gosh, look at this, look at this, look at this.

Andrea:
So I don’t think we realize sometimes, Allison, how maybe isolated you are. I know we know it. We talk about it. We say, oh, the community is so great because, you know, sometimes we’re the only one we know. But we don’t realize the impact of it until you realize, I can’t even look at somebody else’s table and think, oh, I could copy that.

Alison:
I could even eat that. Yeah.

Andrea:
Yeah, you just realize, wow, I really do have to come up with all these ideas on my own. And then when I was going through the menus, that’s exactly what I felt, what you described. That’s exactly what I felt as well. I didn’t know how much I wanted to just not have to think of it all.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. And it made us want to do it more, you know, to have more of this because it’s just so amazing. So we put a call out again to the supporter community and we’ve got more menus in. So Andrea has created an expanded version of the book. How many pages do we have on that book at the moment, Andrea?

Andrea:
It’s over 70 pages, and I’m still adding a few more things. So it has grown quite a bit.

Alison:
So we’ve got more menus and more recipes. It’s got recipes as well. That document has been sent out to everyone who’s our supporter at the moment, who’s on the companionship or above level, and they can download that and print it off or just have it on their computer. If you’re not a supporter at this time, I felt like I wanted people who can’t be a supporter right now, but would like to have a copy of this amazing document full of real meals and real menus.

Alison:
That felt really important to me because the whole point of this podcast, is to encourage each other and to provide that space where we can be together and grow together and be inspired together and cook together, even though we’re spaced out all over the world. And anyone who can be inspired a bit more, do something more, we want that support to be there for you. So if you would like a copy of the Treasury of Ancestral Menus and you haven’t got one because you’re not a supporter, you can get hold of one by giving us a donation.

Alison:
We’ve set a suggested donation at $12. But if you can’t pay us $12, then you can give an amount which feels right to you. If you would like to pay us more for the work that we’re doing, then you can give us more than $12. Every penny that you donate in return for this booklet goes towards us doing the work to get real menus and real food into kitchens and to support people to make this happen, to create a network of kitchens where we help and share and learn and cook together, so the url where you can get hold of a copy of the download is ancestral kitchen podcast.com forward slash menus, we’ll put that in the show notes and i’ll repeat it later on um so you can you can go and get it if you want to do it now you can hit pause on this episode and you can go off to ancestral Ancestral Kitchen Podcast forward slash menus, and get hold of your copy. It’ll be sent to you and then you could print it out or you could have it on your screen. You could come back to this episode and go through it with us. You don’t have to do that though because I’m going to explain everything. Okay, let’s go to an outbreak and we shall come back with more.

Alison:
Okay. So, Andrea, what I felt when I was reading this wonderful document that you put together was that there were themes in all of the menus. You know, there’s lots and lots of menus in there, but there are just these commonalities between all of them. And they’re commonalities that I do in my kitchen. That’s how I cook. That’s what you do in your kitchen. So, they belong to kind of everyone who’s trying to cook this way. And the first one I thought was that it doesn’t have to be perfect, you know we we try to say when we put the call out we want to see what you’re eating you don’t it doesn’t have to be gourmet it doesn’t have to be the ancestral kitchen you know wonderful cookbook it just has to be the food that you’re feeding your family and my food isn’t perfect, your food you will probably say isn’t perfect andrea right yeah well no, yeah and i feel like the menus that i read i was like oh, my food doesn’t have to be perfect because the food isn’t perfect it’s food that means something to us and that is nutritious and that feeds our family in the way that we want to it’s not perfect food, number two that.

Andrea:
That message allison is one that i know you and i say all the time but i realized that there when i put the call out for this i realized that to some level people hadn’t fully not everybody was fully, um kind of understanding maybe how, much we meant that honestly and one thing that i received a number of messages on when i sent the call out the second time was a number of people said, i didn’t send a menu in the first time because i thought maybe ours wasn’t as good as everybody else’s ours is very boring we still have elements from the store i thought you know it’s not good enough, they said, then I realized everybody’s doing the best they can.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly.

Andrea:
Everybody’s at some point along the way. And that’s exactly what we wanted to see in the menus. And so then everybody felt better about, you know, if everybody else looks perfect, it’s hard to say, yeah, I’m over here an imperfect person, which we actually all are. But then when we all say, look, we all have imperfections and we’re all trying to learn from each other, then there’s This sort of community sense of, okay, we actually are growing together. We actually are all imperfect. And I was so happy to hear that that message came through.

Alison:
You know. Yeah, it certainly did. Certainly did.

Andrea:
That’s why I made it number one. That is something that kept me off of listening to food podcasts for years because, these people would come on here and talk about their micros and macros and all these things. And I just felt like it’s all over my head. I’ll never be as perfect as you. And I don’t have 32 and a half minutes of red light therapy in the morning and I’m not on your level. And then come to find out that’s probably not how they live either.

Alison:
But, anyways, so number two, after imperfection is that there’s much, much repetition in menus.

Andrea:
You could say that again.

Alison:
And I mean, just we, how many times do we need to say we do not need to apologize for repetition? We should revel in repetition because it’s what keeps our kitchens going. It’s how we can manage to do as much as we can do. And you know there are such simple ways to repeat staples and change tiny things to make it so different um there was a quote from jc on page 13 which i loved she said, we eat basically the same breakfast every day it makes it easy for me because i don’t have to think about what we’re having and that just felt like it epitomized the whole thing about repetition repetition you know there are lots of things we have to think about and you know we have to think about lunch and dinner as well. And so if we can put breakfast on just a kind of auto, then why shouldn’t we? Because, Then we can think about other things, you know, and I think we don’t have to apologize for that at all. Number three.

Andrea:
How many decisions do you have to make in a day?

Alison:
Too many. Too many.

Andrea:
Too many.

Alison:
Take one off. Number three, leftovers were everywhere. Bridget said at one point in the book when describing one of her meals, she called it the, what do I have in my fridge casserole? And I thought that was so kind of perfect because that epitomizes what I do a lot of the time. I open the fridge, right, what’s in the fridge? Okay, that’s what we’re having for dinner.

Alison:
There was another example with Cherry, which is on page 33 of the book. And she uses millet. She makes it for breakfast on a Sunday. She has it with leftover beef and mustard, cream sauce and sauerkraut. Then she slices it and fries leftovers on Monday for lunch with eggs and sauerkraut. Then on Tuesday, she has the same sliced and fried millet for breakfast. That’s three meals done in one and I thought that was a fabulous example of kind of using leftovers how you do it exactly number four, um what I noticed was that getting nutrients doesn’t have to be complicated and we go back to what you were talking about when you were explaining what you ate last night Andrea there are platters in these menus you get some stuff, you put it on a plate simple as that you know that’s what you did last night you had some good stuff you put it on a plate, and there are many examples in the book where um.

Alison:
People are doing that for their families. They’re getting their food, they’re putting it on a plate. Simple as that. Cooking rice in broth, really simple. You know, you’ve got the rice, you’ve got all of the nutrients from the broth. It’s not complicated. Organs blended into meat, again, not complicated. You don’t have to come up with some finicky menu to make the organs palatable to whoever. You just put it into the ground meat. So simple. Leah’s menu, the lady who’s been staying, who is staying with you at the moment, on page 30, she’s got so many repeats and the dishes are so simple, that really as i looked through it i saw that really she’s only cooking three or four lunches or dinners in one week, which you know when when you consider that there’s 21, meals potentially in a week that that’s quite amazing um so i.

Andrea:
Told her she she should.

Alison:
Come on.

Andrea:
Sometime and do an episode on how to eat really good food without cooking.

Alison:
Yeah but she she epitomizes that definitely.

Andrea:
Yeah she loves to have good food obviously their standard is quite high she doesn’t want to spend a long time cooking that isn’t where she finds her creative expression.

Alison:
And her joy yeah.

Andrea:
So she’s kind of figured out a way to have the good food.

Alison:
And you.

Andrea:
Know every once in a while she can dive into something more complicated if she wants to.

Alison:
And that’s what we should do you know we shouldn’t be doing things that it’s like what I say about sauerkraut you know if you if you don’t enjoy making sauerkraut because you’d rather be fermenting some other weird and wonderful thing which is like me basically then just make the sauerkraut as simple as possible make it in really big batches put it on autopilot find a way to make it simple because you don’t need to be punishing yourself in the kitchen doing something that you don’t enjoy doing just because you think you need to do it and Leah’s a fabulous example of she’s not doing it like that because she knows she doesn’t want to and she knows that she’s going to be, a lesser mum because she’ll be grumpy because she’s in there doing stuff she doesn’t want to do. So, yeah, it’s wonderful. Okay, let’s look at some actual meal ideas because I have got at least 20 meal ideas to share and they are really, really wonderful. Do remember that all of our podcasts, there are transcripts for them. I’ll remind you of this later on when I come up with a recipe, but you do not need to worry about writing things down when I talk about any of these things I’m going to talk about because you can go to Ancestral Kitchen Podcast, find the episode number and find, Under the description, there will be a transcript and you can search for anything that I’ve said. So, you can come back later and find these details if you need to. So, on page seven.

Andrea:
Alison, did you see in Discord like a couple of weeks ago, I think it was Rachel posted a screenshot from one of our transcripts. And she was like, it was funny when I heard it, but it was funnier when I read it. Something you and I said.

Alison:
I can’t remember what it was, but I remember thinking, oh my gosh, did Andrea really say that?

Andrea:
Probably. If you ever wonder, did Andrea really say that? The answer is, yeah, she probably did.

Alison:
Probably. Okay. So Amanda, who is on page seven in the Treasury, lives in Alaska. We’ve talked about her a fair bit on the podcast. She has in her menu a chili with beef and organs. And I wanted to bring this up just to remind people, you can put organs in anything. Sometimes I buy a heart and I cut it up small and I mix it with ground meat you don’t have to have a food processor you can just chop it up or you can put it in the food processor with other ingredients and mix it in and then you know once I’ve got that mix, with organs and meat I might use it for the cast iron ground meat the recipe that’s in meals at the ancestral hearth our first cookbook, or I might use it for burgers or I might use it to make tomato bolognese. Sometimes I have liver and kidney, not heart, and I mix that with ground pork and I make it into faggots. I’ll put a recipe for that in the show notes. Amanda here is using it for chili, which is just, is such a simple, you can literally make up a ton of organ meat mix and then use it for a ton tonne of different dishes, including chilli. Andrew, what do you, what are some kind of meals that you often use organ and ground meat mix for?

Andrea:
Well, if you have ground meat here, you’re probably eating organs.

Alison:
Okay, so everything, basically.

Andrea:
So we just, when we put the meat, you know, we chop the meat into kind of big coarse cubes and we’re grinding it and we drop it through the grinder and we just drop through organs, you know, at the same time. So it kind of just all gets ground and then Gary mixes it all by hand in a big, giant tub so it’s kind of even. And nobody’s ever noticed or complained or complimented either way. But another way to do it is we freeze liver in small packets. And when I was making, I had some ground beef that I bought from our dairy farm where she doesn’t mix the organs into that. So when I was making a big batch of, I don’t know, I call it meatball dough, but it’s, you know.

Alison:
Yeah, I know what you mean.

Andrea:
The ground meat. Okay, the meatball dough. And I blended up the livers just basically into puree and poured them in and mixed it in, kind of how you’d mix in eggs. And… A friend who was over, she said, I was watching you do that. I didn’t say anything, but I was like, I will try it. And she goes, yeah, I couldn’t. It was delicious. I don’t know. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to eat it. She said she couldn’t even tell when she ate it.

Alison:
It’s amazing when you mix it like that, you very often can’t. The faggots that I make, they have got a lot of organ meat in. They’ve got a whole pig kidney and a lot of liver. And Cable just devours them. And yet he won’t eat the liver or the kidney on their own. And yet it’s transformed, you know, some like magic happens.

Andrea:
So, I mean, there’s a lot of people who don’t want to eat a raw egg white.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
But they’ll eat a scrambled egg. You know what I mean? It’s just sometimes a food is appealing one way and not another. And that’s just the facts of it. So, yeah, exactly. Whatever you got to do to get it in.

Alison:
So let’s move on to Amy. Amy’s on page nine in the booklet. And she lives in Northumberland, which is in the UK. love her schedule that she oh it was wonderful i’ve got quite a lot of options from her um, northumberland is almost scotland from my point of view coming from the south of england it’s quite far north um and i’ve got several options from her the first thing she said was a small thing which i thought was really handy which is she boils eggs on a sunday for the week so she’s got them on hand for breakfast lunch and snacks, and in a household where i mean i think she’s got two or three children, to have boiled eggs just in the fridge ready to go. Then when a child’s hungry or when you want something to go with a salad or when you want something to go with some bread, then it’s just there. The second idea she had in her menus was a brisket cooked in a slow cooker. Do you have the brisket cut in America, Andrea, or not? It’s beef.

Andrea:
I mean, yeah, we have brisket.

Alison:
You do? Okay.

Andrea:
When I read hers, I thought, we might cut it differently. The brisket is a place where, on the cow.

Alison:
It’s kind of like the low chest, I think, isn’t it?

Andrea:
Yeah, yeah, like the low chest. So when you walk up to a cow, that’s where you like scratch her and say hello. And I think we, maybe it’s just cut differently in different places because I thought, well, I don’t know, unroll it. What are you talking about? So, but is yours cut like in a slab?

Alison:
So the brisket usually is a flat piece, but then the butcher will roll it up and tie it so you can use it as a roasting joint so it’s simpler than having a big long piece of meat yeah.

Andrea:
I’m not saying that they don’t do that here but it’s not like i don’t typically see that.

Alison:
Okay well it’s a it’s a cut of beef which is more gelatinous than what might be considered a roasting joint you know it’s got if you slow cook it it will give you some unctuous kind of stuff, Amy unrolls it. Maybe you won’t need to unroll it if it’s not rolled. And she cuts it into chunks, six or seven chunks maybe. And then she browns the meat in some lard or tallow, whatever she’s got. Then she’s in the slow cooker. She’s adding some stock to about half cover it and a little bit of apple cider vinegar. And then she’s basically said to me, that’s the basic recipe. That’s the simple bit. And from there, she’s making lots of changes based on what she’s got, what’s available, what she feels like. So she might add some fresh herbs or she might add a tomato kind of paste and put cumin and paprika into that.

Alison:
She then slow cooks it for eight hours or she’s got an Instapot recently. So she would pressure cook it for an hour and 45 minutes. She then takes the meat out when it’s done, shreds the meat, simmers the liquid to make a broth or a sauce. And then once that liquid has reduced she pours it over the shredded meat then she keeps that in a glass of dish in the fridge and that’s it for the for the food for the kind of you know the next three or four days she pulls that out for breakfast for lunch and you’ll see it in her menu when you look at it that she’s just she’s take it’s available it’s there it’s ready it’s cooked it’s delicious and she uses it in many different ways she said sometimes she use it with rice and carrot salad or some kimchi. Sometimes she has it for breakfast. Really, really simple way to do something once and then have it serve you for many days. Do you want to say something, Andrea?

Andrea:
Honestly, I just feel like there’s two thoughts that come to mind here. One is virtually nothing tops the convenience of having cooked meat in your fridge.

Alison:
No.

Andrea:
Like, in my opinion. If I have cooked shredded turkey, if I have cubed cooked beef, I don’t care what it is. If I have cooked meat in there, you can get a meal of some fashion on the table. Like we had the summer sausage and I just had to slice up bread and cheese and boom, we had a meal. So that is one thought. The other thought is… If you think of the simplicity of a repetition of something like cooking a turkey on Sunday, cooking a brisket on Sunday or something, it might sound just outrageously expensive, off the cuff because you’re thinking of if you, not because you are, but if you were to think of that in the context of also having all the other things. So when I, I’ve walked into a grocery store multiple times now, and it’s not in my life, but like since, you know, my whole going off the grocery store. I think now I’ve gone multiple times for specific things or for specific people. And I just look at all the things I’m not buying. And I look at people’s carts, you know, and I’m thinking the cereal that they’re getting, the protein bars.

Andrea:
Just all the little things that don’t typically fall into our menu. And then I think, well, I’ve bought this giant bag of oats. So that kind of did away with the cereals. And then if you have a huge piece of meat, you’re not buying all the little packets of meat and proteins and little things. And so, yeah, in our head, a brisket is expensive when you think of it in the context of also buying protein bars and also buying cereal and also buying snacks. But once you’ve really distilled your purchasing down to a couple big key things like you get your millet you get your coffee beans you get your, nice meat on Saturdays and your nice vegetables on Saturdays you’re like the budget is there for them so, anyways that’s just something that came to my mind when I saw this because like it’s a huge piece of meat people are thinking oh that’s like a you know a big barbecue or a festival but she’s just using that one piece of meat and then it’s going for how many meals you saw that that turned up in for, you know, multiplied by how many people, then it’s extremely economical, even though it’s a very valuable and, um… You know high quality piece of meat that she got.

Alison:
So yeah I I did the same thing on on Saturday with this kale bros recipe I was telling about the Scottish one um I bought a joint of meat that I don’t usually buy from our farmer and it was expensive I was like oh, but when I cooked it and I saw how many portions it was going to give us, it was just like wow you know actually it was a big outlay but I’ve got yeah we had it you know for we had it on the day we had it the day after Rob I’ve had some of it today and I froze a load of it that I know I can use in other dishes.

Andrea:
So I think Sam mentioned that too, when we talked about the fish.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Like fish, honestly, some of the fish is now on par with beef prices, depending on what state you’re in here. So maybe fish isn’t the luxury one thought it was. But fish is still pretty expensive, generally speaking. But like sam pointed out you don’t eat as much volume of fish as you might of something like beef so when you think like i have to make less pounds for a meal and then if i’m making a chowder don’t take much at all and you know, there’s all kinds of other other things that can go into that dish and or if i’m making you know rice with fish or something like it goes kind of far well and like the chili you’ve.

Alison:
Got beans in there as well you know so we’ve.

Andrea:
Talked about many times you’ve Vegetables of the tomatoes and how to, I don’t know, I keep squash.

Alison:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. There’s one more idea from Amy that I want to say before we take a break, which is similar to kind of what you were saying. She blends up liver and then freezes it in small pots or in ice cube trays and she adds it to soups and stews. So she might just be making a random soup or a random stew and she’s getting one or two of those ice cubes of liver up and plopping it into her dish. And she said afterwards when she sent me an email telling me the details of it she said no one’s noticed yet so it’s like what you were saying Andrea earlier on, you can do this kind of thing and your family are eating liver in a way that, they don’t realise they’re eating liver, Okay, let’s go to an ad bracket and come back with some more.

Alison:
Okay, I’ve got one more from, or maybe two more from Amy. Thank you, Amy, for your wonderful contributions. This one is carrot cake porridge. You might not have heard that, those two terms together in one go. So she’s soaking the oats overnight with a handful of either freshly ground rye or buckwheat, which is.

Alison:
If people haven’t heard me talking about the best way to soak oats, I will link my blog post in the show notes and that helps with the phytic acid, and she puts a spoonful of sourdough starter in then in the morning she’s adding stock and she’s doing that because one of her, girls can’t have dairy and she wanted that porridge to be more nourishing so she’s just using stock rather than using milk or cream, she’s heating it up brilliant and then she’s whisking up some eggs and putting those into the porridge as well. Sometimes she does it, sometimes she does, doesn’t, but that’s giving obviously extra protein, extra vitamins and minerals from the eggs. Then once that’s done, she’s adding some combination of, this is the.

Alison:
Grated carrot, grated apple or pear, fresh or ground ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and raisins. And she’s adding a bit of salt. And she said she does it in various ways, depending on, you know, what fruit or what things she’s got on hand. Sometimes she adds honey, maple syrup. But if you’ve got the dried fruit, maybe you don’t need to do that. And she has that. That was on her kind of breakfast menu quite a few times in the menus. And so I wanted to know more about it. So there we go. That’s carrot cake porridge. She also had a lamb meatloaf, which I wanted to share, particularly because she plays around with the recipe so much. And, you know, that’s something we talk about a lot and all of us do. And it’s a really good example of it. So the lamb meatloaf in and of itself has courgette, carrot, onion, tomatoes, lamb mince, garlic cloves, pecorino, breadcrumbs, eggs, tomato paste, cumin, allspice, tahini and lemon juice. And she shared that recipe with me, but she then said, we’re swimming in red currants. So I served it with a red currants sauce instead of a tahini sauce.

Andrea:
Yum.

Alison:
She said, I also did saute…

Andrea:
On lamb, that sounds so good.

Alison:
Exactly, exactly. Also did saute broad beans, garlic scapes and spring onions, some rice cooked in chicken stock and a salad. So you can imagine a lamb meatloaf with red currants with boiled beans garlic scapes and spring onions on the side and some rice cooked in chicken stock with a salad sounds wonderful doesn’t it i’m just gonna be going to northumberland for dinner um but, what what i wanted to also share was that when she made it she did a triple recipe so she used a kilogram of lamb mince 500 grams of pork so that’s like over two pounds of lamb mince in american and over a pound of pork and she made three of them, and she put two of them in the freezer. She used ground almonds instead of the breadcrumbs. So you don’t have to use breadcrumbs if you haven’t got them. If you kind of gluten-free, something like that, use ground almonds. She said, I didn’t have courgettes. So I put celery in instead. Also, I didn’t use the pecorino. And then she said, I’ve previously done it with the tahini and that was really good too. So she’s taken a recipe and she’s just gone, well, we don’t have breadcrumbs, don’t want breadcrumbs. I’m going to use ground almonds, don’t have courgettes. I’m just going to put some celery in. It’s a bit like that. You know, what do I have in my fridge casserole?

Alison:
It’s not essential to follow exactly what every recipe says. She’s using what she’s got and making the best of it. And I feel like with meatloaf, meatloaf is a million different dishes in one. You know you can put whatever meat you want in it you can put whatever organs you want in it you can put eggs in it or not eggs in it you can use breadcrumbs you can use almonds you can use oats you can put vegetables in it depending on what vegetables you have you don’t have to put cheese in it but you can you can top it with something that you don’t have to you know just it goes on forever and and that feels really inspiring to me that I could just make a meatloaf out of whatever I’ve got you know um.

Alison:
Yeah so thank you um Amy for those recipes it was really wonderful to read about them and to read your menu for the week in the treasury.

Alison:
Okay, let’s move on to page 11. If you’re following along, you can turn to page 11. This is from Lizzie, who is in the States, in New York. And she shared quite a few wonderful ideas. One of them was corn muffins. She said that this originally came from the Pioneer Woman’s website, but she’s adapted it, as we all do. Again, you don’t have to write this down because you can go to the transcript and get the details if you want to look for episode number 140. So she’s using about one and a half cups of any freshly milled flour. As we know Lizzie very well, she’s got a mock meal and she is freshly milling it. So you could use an ancient grain if you wanted to, but you don’t have to.

Andrea:
You never know what flour she will pop up with.

Alison:
Exactly. It’s a surprise.

Andrea:
It’ll be something you’ve never heard of.

Alison:
So she’s got one and a half cups of flour and then one cup of yellow cornmeal which she’s also milling in her mock meal um two tablespoons of sugar one tablespoon of baking powder a quarter of a teaspoon of salt one and a half cups of buttermilk six tablespoons of salted butter melted two tablespoons of honey and two large eggs, And basically she’s mixing the dry ingredients in one bowl and then she’s mixing together the wet ingredients in another and then combining them, putting them in muffin cups. And she’s saying about half a cup in half size in each muffin hole. And then she’s baking them at 400F until they’re golden brown.

Andrea:
It’s like 200 yours, right?

Alison:
Yeah, 375 is 180. So yeah, it’s about 200. That’s right um yeah she’s baking it until it’s it’s golden and a toothpick comes out without any um bits on it.

Andrea:
It almost sounds like a.

Alison:
17 minutes you.

Andrea:
Know like a little sweet with that sugar and.

Alison:
With the sugar and stuff yeah eggs.

Andrea:
Butter very very delicious and.

Alison:
Rich i think often we think that we you know the the carb accompaniment that we have in the form of bread has to look in a certain way and this is a great example of, a corn muffin which you can just serve with dinner rather than having bread or rather having something else which I wanted to share there’s also another recipe which Lizzie, talked about having in the week that she recorded for us which was a leftover chicken and pasta recipe which I think is is one that she’s kind of made up and depends on what she’s got in her fridge she said to me, I saute any vegetables we have on hand until they’re mostly cooked i dice my leftover chicken and then i add it to the cooked vegetables, then i make a white sauce in a separate pan with some butter flour and milk or non-dairy milk and some parmesan, and then some herbs depending on you know what what type she feels, she then says again separately she cooks whatever type of pasta she’s got on hand mixes in the right white sauce and then adds the veg than the chicken, brings it almost to a bubble, and then she serves it. She says, if I’ve got leftover bits of cheese, I’ll add those to the white sauce.

Alison:
And that felt to me just a wonderful way of just, well, you’ve got a bit of leftover meat and then you open the fridge, you see what vegetables you’ve got, and you cook them together. You put the leftover meat in it. You make a sauce that kind of brings it together. And Lizzie’s given an example here of a white sauce. That could be a tomato sauce. That could be a barbecue sauce. That could be whatever you’ve got the ability to do. And they just mix the whole lot together with some pasta or some rice or some millet and bring it to the table. Absolutely delicious. Really really lovely do you want to add anything andrew shall i move on to jc who’s who’s next.

Andrea:
I want to eat it yeah i want to take that.

Alison:
Exactly you haven’t had breakfast yet so jc, is on page 13 and she had a liver loaf which i thought i wonder what that is that’s on one of her um kind of menu, options for the day and she said to me liver loaf is loosely inspired by the spicy meatloaf recipe and nourishing traditions. I used ground lamb from our sheep, beef liver from our beef. She said would have used sheep’s liver, but it was out in another freezer. So she didn’t, she didn’t want to go out to get it from the other freezer. So she just used what was there and two sheep hearts. So she’s got ground lamb, beef liver, and two sheep hearts. The offal was ground up and mixed with the ground lamb meat. And then she added in eggs, breadcrumbs, which were made from leftover stale sourdough bread, some thyme and an onion, garlic, celery, carrot mixture that she sauteed on the stove for about 10 minutes before adding. Then the meatloaf was baked and eaten with sourdough spelt bread. So another example of a meatloaf, again, like I was saying, you can put anything in a meatloaf and that’s quite awful. And it’s heavy, really. But with the eggs and the breadcrumbs that are staying together and with that wonderful kind of flavour of the onion, garlic, celery, carrot and the herbs, it’s going to bring all those flavours together.

Alison:
So yeah I want to try that one I haven’t ever made a meatloaf with liver in and I want to try that one.

Alison:
Anything you want to add before we go to a break, Andrea? I’ve got more coming up.

Andrea:
No, I think this is great. If anybody else is not drooling.

Alison:
I don’t know. He’s not hungry, he hasn’t eaten. Yeah. Okay.

Andrea:
Let’s talk about more.

Alison:
Let’s go to an ad break and I’ll come back in a minute with some more.

Alison:
Okay, we’re whizzing through these now. Next, I’m going to move on to a supporter who’s in Texas, Yes, Bridget. And she is on page 15. Her menu for the week was on page 15. And she has some really wonderful things. I was like, oh, what’s that? And I wanted to ask her a bit more about them and inspired me. The first one was sheet pan pancakes.

Andrea:
I was completely smitten by that name.

Alison:
Exactly. This is just wonderful. At the end of the description, she basically says, you just make your normal pancakes and you pour them into a pan and you bake them instead of cooking them but actually it’s not that simple because there’s more to it in a in a delicious way so let’s just explain she’s using freshly milled flour about four cups, baking powder one teaspoon baking soda one teaspoon about one teaspoon of salt one teaspoon of sucanut the sugar two eggs a teaspoon of vanilla extract and then one cup of kefir she said that’s because what I had. I guess that could be buttermilk, that could be yoghurt, you know, that could be whey if you wanted instead. She mixes the dry ingredients together, a bit like the corn muffins that Lizzie had, mixes the wet ingredients together, combines the two wet and dry together. She lets them sit for a few minutes. Then she takes a rimmed cookie sheet and puts parchment paper on it. She greases the parchment paper a little bit. Then she pulls that batter onto the pan. And then this is the exciting bit. She adds toppings of choice. So she’s given some examples of blueberries, chocolate chips, nuts. And of course, I’m thinking you could put any food on there, really. You could put any form of…

Andrea:
Well, and I… Okay, Alison, I imagined you could have like the blueberry quadrant.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah.

Andrea:
Like a chocolate quadrant.

Alison:
Yeah. Like a quattro of such a journey pizza. Like the four seasons.

Andrea:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That’s a great idea. Or, you know, Gabriel’s like, I want all the toppings on my corner.

Alison:
We’ve actually done that with pizza. You know, one side have been like, oh, I can’t eat that at the moment. So we just make half of it without my bit on and half of it without what the boys can eat. So that is a great idea.

Andrea:
I’ve done that too.

Alison:
It’s a great idea. You could have each kid, if you had like three kids, you could say to the kids, what do you want to put on this? This is your third. This is your third. This is your third. And they could take whatever they wanted, obviously within reason.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
Not like a whole jar of molasses. They could take whatever they wanted and they could put it on there. And just the engagement in the process of baking and the joy that they’re having.

Andrea:
Yeah, taking possession. Yeah.

Alison:
Exactly, in that meal.

Andrea:
And then when their piece comes out. Wonderful idea. Yeah. I need to eat my piece.

Alison:
It’s just a wonderful idea, isn’t it? And, you know, I’m thinking you could put cacao nibs.

Andrea:
I want to see the pictures.

Alison:
You could put all these different nuts, toasted or not toasted. You could put seeds.

Andrea:
Oh, yeah.

Alison:
All different types of fruit. You could do a savory one. It would just be absolutely wonderful. Anyway, so she’s baking at a 375, which is definitely 180 C. 375F for 18 to 25 minutes let it cool and then cut it into squares and serve with topping of your choice another topping she said she’s using maple syrup, And then after she wrote all that down, she said, I just realized I forgot to add the fat melted butter to this mix and it came out fine. There we go. Really forgiving recipe.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Alison:
Thank you, Bridget. Okay. Delicious. I’ve got another one from Bridget, which is a cooked vegetable dressing. So I think possibly we’ve talked about once before when we did an episode on chicken and she was serving it with a salad. So her salad was lettuce, tomatoes, leftover beets and mozzarella. Already sounds good. And then she made a dressing by taking some cooked vegetables and blending them with olive oil and lemon, vinegar and salt. And she said it’s kind of like adding oil and vinegar to a gravy. And I feel like sometimes dressings can just be a bit repetitive or, you know, if you’re not putting something creamy in them, if you’re perhaps dairy-free, then they can not have the consistency or the texture that is pleasing. You know, sometimes you just want a dressing that’s a bit thicker and a bit more kind of gooey. And I think this is a great example. You know, I can imagine doing this with, roasted butternut squash or roasted sweet potato and some celery.

Andrea:
Perhaps. Oh, yeah. Well, almost beads. I was thinking like kale or even wilted kale.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
You know, something just really meaty.

Alison:
Yeah. It reminds me of Rebecca.

Andrea:
To go with the deep flavor of the beads. Uh i’m sorry anita uh her roast chicken where she takes out of the bottom of the pan yeah she takes the drippings she takes the roasted carrots the roasted onion the.

Alison:
Roasted apples.

Andrea:
Everything just drops it in the blender and blends it up and that is literally the gravy and it is probably the best gravy i’ve ever.

Alison:
Had so that is what we talked about before that’s what i remember i didn’t know whose recipe it was and now you’re telling me it’s anita’s recipe so anita’s a member of the sports community and oh i could take that yeah.

Andrea:
If i have drippings i wouldn’t need to add olive oil.

Alison:
But just.

Andrea:
Add in some lemon you know.

Alison:
And make it a bit thinner yeah yeah yeah that’d be lovely, so yeah i wanted to share that one thank you bridget for those two um molly who’s in georgia page 17 she, talked about in her menu eating a greek emma salad and it made me, want to remember that and to remind listeners that you can cook any grain any ancient grain you’re doing you don’t have to always just cook rice and make salad or pasta and make salad you can cook spouts you can cook rye you can cook einkorn you can cook emma any of them just cook them as they are, here i often we have a black barley which we get from hobma dodds here in the uk which is grown here and i often put it in the instant pot to cook um with either sometimes just with with water sometimes with stock, and then i leave it to cool and i make it into a salad quite regularly so for molly she was using um, emma and she made it into a greek salad so for greek i can imagine you’re adding some perhaps some feta cheese some cucumber perhaps olives some onions which i like to soak in, vinegar for half an hour before i put them into a salad um and just for.

Andrea:
Salads or is that.

Alison:
Yeah, that’s just for salads. That’s if I’m eating onions raw, I find that the flavor is just too harsh. And so if I soak them in vinegar, I think you can do it in lemon juice as well. It’s that kind of acidity of the liquid kind of cooks them just in quotes a little bit and it takes off the edge of them. it’s.

Andrea:
A sort of i don’t know like a camphor kind of a component when you eat like a really strong.

Alison:
Yeah exactly onion yeah and and the boys my boys don’t like it at all so i always yeah soak them for half an hour before i put them in um some fresh herbs and i’m just imagining that salad would just be wonderful i mean i’m such a fan of so good really really wonderful yeah same so we’ve got um, Another Bridget, this is Bridget T, who is in Washington, and her menu is on page 20. And she has a great idea. This is rather like the sheet pan pancakes, skillet pizza. And I was like, what’s skillet pizza? And it is literally sourdough discard poured directly onto the cast iron pan, cooked on both sides. And then she topped it in this instance with marinara, ground beef, green peppers, pineapple, cheddar cheese and she put it under the grill or the broiler until the cheese went gooey.

Andrea:
Genius.

Alison:
She just lift up the whole pan.

Andrea:
Let’s cast iron.

Alison:
Put it under the grill. Bingo. And I just thought that was so simple. You know, we all want recipes for sourdough discard and I made skillet pizza quite a few times but I’ve never just done it with sourdough discard. I’ve always made up a dough and then put it in. I’ve never poured it directly into the cast iron pan. And I thought that was wonderful.

Andrea:
I liked that she cooked it on both sides. It was like a pancake.

Alison:
Yeah.

Andrea:
Like that was a really good idea. And this struck me as the kind of thing that you could just whip up, you know, like I’m thinking, you know, coming home from choir, choir practice night, you know, and you need food really fast. If you have those leftovers in the fridge or those pre-cooked shredded meats and things like that boom yeah exactly no time turn.

Alison:
The pan on get your coat off and.

Andrea:
Everything while it’s.

Alison:
Heating up pull the.

Andrea:
Stuff in salmon and cheese or something that you don’t have to cook yeah yeah wonderful.

Alison:
She also has a really simple idea of a tomato soup that I just, I’ve just never seen a tomato soup so simple and I wanted to share it. So she’s serving this tomato soup with a tuna or sardine sandwiches on sourdough bread. So that’s one part of the meal. And then the tomato soup is literally sauteed onion, a jar of diced tomatoes, blended, and then add a pinch of sugar and salt to taste and then she’s eating seaweed kind of on the side i do it top of the thing i just think that’s amazing it’s literally a jar of diced tomatoes, with a bit of sauteed onion a bit of sugar and salt you can put basil in there if you wanted or oregano, and that’s it that’s soup and i thought gosh again how simple and how quick if you’re coming in and you just want to put a meal on the table in a few minutes you’ve got the bread there, you make the sandwich you put all the soup together warm it up done really really wonderful.

Andrea:
Really good um.

Alison:
Last one from bridget is cheesy broccoli rice which i thought that sounds quite nice cheesy broccoli rice so she’s serving, this in her um menu with swedish meatballs she had it with swedish meatballs that day and the cheesy broccoli rice is rice cooked in broth, garlic powder onion powder nutmeg cream cheddar cheese and the broccoli broccolini bit so she’s using broccolini yum yum yum um and, I feel like that’s such a simple way to have your greens and your grains, but interesting. You know, the garlic powder, the onion powder, the broth, the nutmeg, the cream and the cheese are going to make that a really interesting dish. I have taken to doing something kind of similar with millet in that rather than just serving the millet and the broccoli, for example, I saute a little bit of onion and then I put some spice and warm spices in so maybe some cumin some coriander into the bottom of the pan, and then i’m cooking the millet and i put um a tin of tomatoes a can of tomatoes in or half a can of tomatoes in even and some broth when i’m cooking the millet, and so you actually don’t need much tomato but it just gives, something that’s completely different to eating just millet on its own, you know and i feel like this cheesy broccoli will give you something completely different to just eating rice and broccoli on its own it’s like a hole and as soon.

Andrea:
As you say cheesy all the.

Alison:
Kids are yeah okay yes please in yes please okay um on page 28 hannah um sent us in her menu hannah’s in arizona and she’s got a really simple um steamed apple um, on her menu and i thought that it would be good to share i think all everything we’ve done so far has been savory so here’s something that’s sweet but using fruit. She says she chops up apples, puts them in a saucepan on medium to low heat on the stove. Then she adds in butter, a pinch of salt and as much cinnamon as she wants to. Um she’s on our discord and she is called on discord i smell cinnamon rolls so i can see why she’s putting in as much cinnamon like cinnamon she’s a cinnamon girl, she then covers it with a lid and gives it a stir every now and then stop it you know kind of stick it to the bottom and she said after 25 to 30 minutes it’s done, sometimes her family just eats it as is sometimes they put whipped cream or ice cream and she’s saying since literally they aren’t sweetened there’s no sugar in it they’re a nice option to put with yogurt on top of porridge or with pancakes or with oat cakes and i know she eats them with the staffordshire i would love this on okay the staffordshire oat cakes recipe that you can find on my blog which we will put in the show notes you could have apple on top of that it’d be absolutely wonderful.

Alison:
She also has a soaked brown rice bowl in her menu, which is brown rice that she’s soaked and then cooked. And she serves it with shredded leftover lamb leg, roasted carrots and beets, sauteed beet greens, and gravy that’s made from the stock of the cooked lamb with sauerkraut on the side. And then they had kombucha at the same meal to drink. That feels like such a simple and very, very good. You just imagine the roasted carrots and the beets, they bring such sweetness. And then you’ve got the beet greens, may well have come from even the top of the same beets, of the roasted beets that she’s putting in. So simple. Making a gravy from the stock, from the lamb leg, which is going to be in the fridge because you’ve just cooked the lamb leg because it’s leftovers. And then a bit of sauerkraut on the top. Really, really wonderful.

Andrea:
And the chewiness of the brown rice.

Alison:
Exactly.

Andrea:
The textures would have been off the chain. Exactly.

Alison:
Last one from Hannah, another one, which is something that I kind of wanted to highlight, which is she made a pizza with organs on the top. Andrea, if you put, well, I guess you have put organs on pizza if you’re putting your meat mix on top of pizza. You have.

Andrea:
Yeah, with sausages and stuff. But I haven’t done, I don’t think I’ve done, you know, heart, like pieces of heart. Like chicken hearts or something on top, but that’d be really good.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah. she’s using she’s making a sourdough spelt pizza which, um i’m thinking might be from our book um sourdough spelt every day which is available on our site with pepper jack cheese basil from her little porch garden she’s got there fresh tomatoes from a friend, red onion and crumbled ground beef organ blend so that’s kind of what we talked about she’s got ground beef and she’s got organs in it and she’s putting that on top of a pizza, she then serves that with a kefir ranch dressing and raw snap peas and bell peppers. It just sounds delicious, doesn’t it?

Andrea:
Sounds amazing. Sounds amazing.

Alison:
Okay, I think we’re possibly up to 20 or even more now. I’ve still got a few more for us.

Alison:
Cherry is in the States and she’s on page 23 with her menu. And rather like Hannah’s brown rice bowl that we just talked about, she’s got a Cajun spiced grits bowl, which is an ancestral blend meat. So that’s meat with some sort of organs. Again, a local cornmeal, and then bell pepper and onions the thing I liked about this is that it’s it’s really quite simple she’s just got her cornmeal she’s got her meat mix she’s got pepper and she’s got onions and she’s putting them together in a bowl and then you know the flavor of those peppers and onions are sweet and everything you’ve got the protein in there from the meat and you’ve got a simple cornmeal again really an easy one to kind of bring together, Um, and then the last one from Terry to finish us off was a spelt salad. Again, this is a bit like Molly’s Emma salad. And the thing that I liked about it was that she was using apple. So she’s saying she soaked the spelt and cooked it. Again, you could do that with broth if you wanted to, or not. And then just, you could make a ton of it, leave it in the fridge for the whole week, and then make different salads every day if you wanted. The one that she made that particular a week when she sent us her menu was with apple onion and spinach.

Andrea:
And i.

Alison:
Thought not very often certainly i not very often think about putting apple in salad um but the the.

Andrea:
Idea of.

Alison:
Crunch that crunch of the apple with the kind of creaminess of the spout a bite of the onion and then the depth of earthy depth of that spinach it sounds delicious.

Andrea:
So good oh man it’s.

Alison:
Just amazing don’t you think Andrea all of those.

Andrea:
Ideas and there’s.

Alison:
More there’s more in that document this is the point I.

Andrea:
Just picked out a few yeah there’s so I know you you picked a few and I can already think of so many more that oh this would be fun to talk about and um, you know Rachel’s menu that she had for 12 kids and three adults you know like farm kids eat a lot of food so um, you know the way she was like cranking out food for those for all those kids and um and now you know i have all the new menus that went in, so basically we just made the book longer so there’s all the menus and then we’ve added in more there’s some travel menus um, bethany put even her pack list so multiple times people have asked me you know what do you pack dishes and tools and things for camping or whatever she put her whole packing list there so you can see it hannah sent in another menu um.

Alison:
And there’s recipes in there.

Andrea:
Hannah had some recipes.

Alison:
How many recipes have we got in there? Do you know?

Andrea:
Well, I know I put in at least seven, but there’s a couple more that I’m still putting in that haven’t been added into the document yet.

Alison:
Okay. At the time of recording, there will be by the time the podcast comes out because we’ll have a finished copy, I promise. Yeah.

Andrea:
A few people had posted, you know, they said something in their menu and I asked, could I put the, do you have like the full recipe? Or they posted it in Discord and I just tagged them and said, can I put this in the document? And they said, yes, please do. So that will be handy. Although so much of what you’re reading, you know, just in their description of the menu, you understand exactly how to make it. It’s not even like you would need a recipe.

Alison:
I felt that when I was reading them because, you know, I’m used to cooking this way. But the way that people were describing them, I could go into my kitchen. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to get off the sofa and go into my kitchen and just make them. That’s what I felt like.

Andrea:
Yeah. So you’re right. You can get so much. I wanted to go into their kitchen.

Alison:
Have them make it for me.

Andrea:
Yes, why not? And you also sent me, because you have your carrot salad in your menu that I put into this book. It came up multiple times. So you actually sent me the recipe for that. So I put that in here too. Wonderful. And then your instant pot oats, which I think we get asked for that every day, that recipe. So that’s in here too. A very popular and very convenient recipe that you have for the oats so.

Alison:
Yeah wonderful i wanted to just say another thank you to all the community members who sent in menus for the for the first edit and now for this expanded version is amazing just absolutely amazing to see them all and for other community members to see them too um, do remember that if you would like to um, have a copy if you’re a supporter you’ve already got it if you’re not and you would like to you can get hold of one in return for a donation to the work that we’re doing and you can share and feel inspired go to ancestral kitchen podcast.com forward slash menus, okay um is there anything you want to add to that Andrea before we say goodbye.

Andrea:
Well, I was going to say, if you liked this episode, did you want to mention some of our, we have a couple of past episodes.

Alison:
Yeah, yeah. That were. Let me do it then. Yeah, so you’re right. If you enjoyed this episode, I feel like there are so many other episodes in our catalog now. You know, we’re up to 140 and people come to the podcast every day new. And, you know, when there’s 140 episodes to choose from, it’s kind of overwhelming. Some people do start from the beginning and keep going but that’s a lot of listening and so if you are particularly inspired by this episode and you would like to, know which of our other episodes, talk about really similar things and we’ll inspire you even more on this topic you could go back and listen to 132 which is that week of ancestral meals where Andrea and I talk about what we really ate. And that’s a really good conversation. And then a bit further back, episode 56, we did an episode called preparing nutrient dense meals from scratch every day. And that sort of touches on what it’s like and what it means to cook every day and how we do that in our own kitchen. So that’s 132 episode and 56. I’ll try and put those in the show notes. So if you come back to that later and you want to remember what number those are you can just click on the show notes and find them I shall I shall do that.

Alison:
Okay. Wonderful. It’s just wonderful. Absolutely incredible piece of Ancestral Kitchen documentation that we have now.

Andrea:
And it’s ancestral food literature. This is the kind of thing we wish existed from the 1600s or the 1200s or the 200s. But we’re making it now now people will know what real people in real homes, you know not instagram influencers or you know people at state dinners were eating this is what the actual peasantry we were eating yeah we have documentation now.

Alison:
Thank you ever so much i shall speak to you in the next episode bye bye.