Author: Alison

In this episode we will share what a Slow Christmas is and why we choose to celebrate our holidays this way. We’ll talk about some specific traditions for meals, gifts and more – both from our homes and from the homes of our community of patrons.

Spelt is a wonderful, economical alternative to wheat. I’ve been baking with it for a decade now and I love its deep, nutty flavour, its flexibility and its digestibility – many people who don’t get on with wheat can enjoy spelt, especially if it’s in a sourdough loaf. Whether you’ve tried spelt or not, this episode will give you everything you need to know to get the most from this grain in your own kitchen.

Piper’s Farm was founded in 1989 by Peter Grieg and his wife, Henri. It’s just north of Exeter in Devon, Britain, and today it is run by their son Will and his partner, Abby, in a multi-generational partnership and succession achievement.

Oats are one of my ultimate comfort foods. Golden, creamy, filling, tasty – what is there not to love? It’s been that way for me for a long time. Long before I realised that huge swathes of my English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish ancestors subsisted on oats, sometimes eating them three times a day for many generations.

Before we read the books that our guest today, Chris Smaje, wrote, we knew we didn’t want a world where fake food, food manufactured in factories was what we ate as a society. We didn’t believe that protein made in stainless steel vats could give our minds, bodies, souls and communities what they need to survive and thrive. But what we didn’t know, is that manufactured protein, fake food or precision fermentation, however you want to term it, literally will not work.

If you’re bringing raw milk into your home, whether it is through a herd share, shopping from a local raw dairy or co-op, or you have a cow on the back pasture, it is inevitable that we start wanting to value-add that milk; both adding nutritional value to it by culturing it in our homes, and adding monetary value by making raw milk into what would be higher priced items from the store. In this episode Robyn who is the creator over at Cheese From Scratch on Instagram is here to teach us about creating your own cheese starter on the counter at home, and producing naturally fermented cheese in your own kitchen.

“I just can’t afford to eat ancestrally” is something that we hear all the time. And we get that, the mainstream, shop-bought side of ancestral eating can sometimes be eye-wateringly expensive. Notwithstanding that we’ve both been eating this way on a very tight budget for over a decade each. We’re going to show you that it is possible!

In a post-industrial world where globally imported subsidized factory food is perceived as the cheaper or only option for a budget, these are questions most of us have had at some point. In this episode Alison and I want to make the case that not only are there ways to eat an ancestral diet and save money, but you can actually save money BY eating an ancestral diet.

Just like the Ancestral Diet is so different from the standard American diet, so the ways our ancestors birthed bears very little relation to how modern industrialised communities bring the next generation into the world. In this intimate episode, originally recorded for patrons of the podcast, Andrea and I share our birthing stories.

Better Broths and Healing Tonics is a book that blew us away when we found it earlier this year. It is so thorough, so accessible and so creative – sharing many ways to make broths, and make them easy, plus incredible healing recipes for broth tonics, infusions, blends and meals. In this episode, Andrea interviews half of the pair that created the book, Jill Sheppard Davenport.

Rebecca Holden looks after a large organic dairy herd in Wales in the United Kingdom and makes raw, cheddar-style cheese from their milk. What made us want to bring Rebecca to you is an article she wrote for the farm’s blog which she called ‘Part of the Herd’ where she talks about the farm being an interconnected community and how she herself communicates with the cows and has become part of the herd.