Author: Alison

Today we are sharing with you an episode that launched on the private podcast feed in March, and we answered a number of interesting questions from listeners including a very sticky one we frequently have been asked, and had to deal with in very personal ways before – what to do when people are critical or downright rude to you about the ways you choose to eat, or make snide remarks about ancestral or non-industrial foods.

Today, we’re bringing you an episode of the podcast that originally went out in 2022. It’s about fermenting, but fermenting with a twist – fermenting your kitchen waste to make microbe-rich compost that, as we know from personal experience, will transform the plants you grow.

In this episode, return guest Rob, Alison’s husband, shares with us some of the history and processing of coffee. Types of coffee plants even before the roasting process, sourcing and of course, favorite brewing methods. Top up your cup of bean juice and maybe add a little raw cream, and let’s get rolling.

Hands down the question we receive the most is: How do you have enough time to cook this way? Children, work, families, friends, community commitments, earning money, doing life’s admin. It all adds up, and before we realise the time we need and want in the kitchen has just disappeared. If you have ever thought, I just don’t have enough time to do this, the next 90 minutes will help you.

Traveling and vacation is so much fun until you get the bill for all the meals you ate out, and you get a tummy ache for all those weird ingredients your body just didn’t like. If you have allergies and food sensitivities it’s even more difficult, finding somewhere safe to eat is just about impossible. We have both found that when we travel we just do better if we bring a lot of our own food with us. In this episode we are going to talk about our best tips for preparing, what kinds of food we bring, how to pack tools and what tools to bring, how to keep food cold on the trip, and just some of the things we have learned traveling over the years – traveling with kids, and with food and with special diet considerations.

What pan should I use to bake my bread? Metal, ceramic, glass, dutch oven…there are so many out there. What are the differences? What about non-stick? What temperatures can I use for each one? How can I stop my dough from sticking? How can I work out how much dough my pan will take? And what about pizza? How can I make the best one at home?

We have some exciting news! We are pleased to announce that we’ve left the Patreon platform behind and are now hosting our membership system on our website.

In this episode I got to sit down with Meagan Francis, a supporter and friend of Ancestral Kitchen and veteran podcaster herself. She is the host of The Kettle with Meagan Francis, which is a lovely podcast, and author of “The Last Parenting Book You’ll Ever Read” which just came out this spring. Meagan also owns a tea and variety shop and in this episode she shared with me some surprising and interesting tidbits on the history of tea and how it was introduced to Western civilization, some of the finer points of sourcing and brewing, where some of our familiar tea traditions came from and what High Tea really means.

In this episode we will deal head-on with histamine and how it interacts with an ancestral diet. We’ll explain what histamine is and the problems it can cause. We’ll explore which staple ancestral foods are high in histamine and discuss alternatives that we can turn to if histamine is an issue for us.

It’s almost May, the month which the early medieval Anglo-Saxons called thrymilce, because according to the Venerable St Bede, “in that month cattle were milked three times a day.” We don’t know if you’re milking your cow three times a day, but ‘tis the season for lots of fresh and available milk. What to do with all that milk? – and if you don’t have a cow, what to do if you have access to raw milk and want to make staple value-added dairy products in your home, like cottage cheese, sour cream and yoghurt?

Combining gluten-free eating with ancestral eating need not be daunting. Today I talk with Rebecca Zipp, a beloved podcast guest and supporter. She’s been gluten-free for the last 16 years – bringing her husband and her children along with her. In addition, for most of last year I ate gluten-free. Between the two of us we’ve a lot to talk about!

What are some traditional foods we can eat for breakfast, and do we have examples of ancestral breakfasts in history? In this episode Alison and I got together to talk about what we eat to start the day.

Alison has just released a free 30-page guide to baking with ancient grains and this companion podcast episode will give you everything you need to know to bring the world of ancient grain baking into your own kitchen. We’ll define an ancient grain, we’ll talk about why they’re different to modern wheat and how that change happened, Alison will share why she believes ancient grains are so important in our modern world and then talk about how you can bring them into your own baking.

The cost of eating an ancestral, nourishing diet, vs the cost of eating a conventional, supermarket diet: people are already stretched to the limit on their grocery budgets, so how can we ask them to spend even more on buying more nutritious or local food? Even if it’s important to them, what if the dollars literally do not exist? How are we to eat? These were the questions burning in my mind when I sat down with the Nourishing Traditions cookbook to make a list of ten easy, favorite recipes.