How do you know if you are ancestral enough, and what really qualifies as “doing the thing”? Is there somebody out there with a list of ancestral things you need to be doing so you can “count” as being truly ancestral, or is it just a moving, non-linear line we are constantly progressing along with our intention and heart oriented the right way?
When Alison and I were starting this podcast, she asked who was on my dream list of people to talk to. I said Tara Couture of Slowdown Farmstead and today that is what happened. In an incredibly long and appropriately slow morning we sat down together to talk for the first time and it was like visiting with an old friend I had waited a very long time to see again.
Today I am so excited to introduce you to Grand Teton Ancient Grains! You can find this incredible family business online at www.ancientgrains.com and in this episode I got to sit down with Jade Koyl, the owner of this incredible family farm, and learn more about the way they feed the soil, their crop rotations, grain storage, and how their family uses grains in their everyday diet; as well as why they started growing them in the first place.
In so many of our episodes over the last four years, we have explored how no food we eat is intrinsically ‘bad’. Instead, it’s what we as humans living in a rapidly globalising and industrialising world, have done to that food that causes problems. The topic of today’s episode, cacao, epitomises this.
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 wonderful episode, I got to sit down with Christine Muldoon, who is a friend, the creator of NourishtheLittles.com, a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, a mother and wife, and also a follower of the Weston A Price principles of food. She is also the co-host of the podcast Modern Ancestral Mamas with her amazing co-host, Corey Dunn. I wanted to tap into Christine’s incredible knowledge base and wisdom for post-partum care, and really nourishing mom in the post-partum window of time.
How do you eat ancestrally and seasonally even during winter, when the produce stands maybe are shut down and your garden may be covered over with snow for the season and your body needs a different kind of support than it does during the busy, active days of summer? In this episode Alison and Kathie, who is a longtime listener, supporter and friend of the podcast, got to talk about all of these topics and much more.
Today we got to sit down again with Meredith Leigh, a butcher and author of The Ethical Meat Handbook, and ask her a lot of questions about Confit, Rilette and Terrines. Meredith has a course on these three items – including headcheese, by the way – a course which Alison and I both took, and made use of in our own kitchens, and we loved the tasty results so much we wanted to ask Meredith more and get her on the air so you could hear her talk about these incredible versatile and thrifty preparation and preservation methods of storing meat, fat and scraps that honestly would often otherwise end up in the trash.
There are so many supplements out there that, if we believe the advertising, we should be taking. It’s confusing and even when we have the funds to dip our toes in, it’s challenging to know where to start. Today’s guest, Ben Greenfield, knows a lot about supplements and ancestral living in general. My family has been learning from his work for over a decade. We first heard about the light toxicity of modern devices and the benefits of cold exposure from him.
What does “raw honey” really mean? How do you know if your honey is truly raw – is just the label enough? Are there different benefits to truly raw honey vs heated honey – even low heat temperature honey? And – how do you use truly raw honey? Does it ever go bad? How is it produced?
Rebecca is a good friend and a good influence. She is the creator behind A Humble Place, with a website and an Instagram both by that name, where I first found her when I was looking for Charlotte Mason art studies, and I got many of her beautiful sets. In this episode, though, she is teaching me about her meal planning strategies.
Feeding babies and children a nutrient-dense ancestral diet is something that many moms have questions about. Whether the questions are “how do I start my child off on the right foot” or “I have older kids and we are just coming to this ancestral diet now – help, how do I transition them to this good food!” – these are things that we think about. Here to help us today is Christine Muldoon, from The Modern Ancestral Mamas Podcast.
Meredith Leigh is an ex-vegan now butcher, a butchery teacher, an author, a kitchen experimenter extraordinaire and meat fermenter, co-founder of The Fermentation School and a mum. She has so much to share and this is an intimate and engaging conversation. We cover some really important questions including conscious animal slaughter, Meredith’s transition from veganism to ethical meat, the safety worries around fermenting meat and the one we get so many questions about: nitrates in meat.
If you asked both Andrea and I who’s inspired us the most we’d both put our guest today, Sandor Katz, right up there in our top couple of names. We’ve read his books, underlining phrase after phrase, we’ve taken his advice; we’ve made his ferments, so many of his ferments. He’s inspired, educated, and hand-held us both through our food fermentation journeys.
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.
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.
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.
Hilary Boynton is the creator of the School of Lunch, a week long academy held a few times a year that teaches attendees from around the world how to put together incredible nourishing ancestral traditional food programs that they can use in whatever application they need – in running a school lunch program which is what Hilary does in California, in a business, for retreats or wellness spaces, at home or wherever they wish to implement a meal program. In this episode I got to sit down with Hilary and ask her to give me a peek into what happens at their academy.
