Sausages, bacon, crackling – good pork can be heavenly food. But both of us know that, sometimes, in the ancestral food world, pork is viewed as the poorer cousin to grass-fed beef or pastured chicken. That needn’t be the case and this episode will put real pork where it deserves to be – at the centre of our plates.
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.
This episode is for liver lovers and liver haters! We talk about why liver is so important, how often to eat liver, where to start with sourcing, preparing and cooking liver, what types of liver we eat and how we eat it, how to eat liver without realising you’re eating liver, how to get children to eat liver, what to do if you just can’t eat liver and we share our favourite and our patrons favourite liver recipes.
We get a lot of questions about butchering chickens over here on the podcast, and those questions range from “I have a backyard flock and I would like to be able to cull a few hens and some roosters every year,” all the way up to, “We are planning to raise enough meat birds for ourselves and our neighbors and we need to know what tools we need to get started on that.” In this episode, I am going to do my best to get you comfortable with the idea of butchering a few hens on your kitchen counter, and reassure you that you have every tool you need, and it really is a simple and straightforward process – but there is a learning curve, and it is worth learning.
I don’t use butter that often – but sometimes I’m really in a buttery mood and I’ll fry my pancake in ghee. – Alison For several decades, fats were vilified as the source of many health problems and were avoided by many, including Alison – she avoided all fats, completely, for ten years. The distinction…
A whole chicken is one of the most economical meats out there. Listen in to hear Alison and Andrea talk about what you can save through buying a whole bird, what you should look out for when purchasing, along with how they cook whole chickens and how they use the meat and stock.
Alison talks to Naomi, a Canadian in Slovakia, of Almost Bananas about traditional Slovakian pig butchery and all the foods that go along with it!
