Ancestral Kitchen

Eggs seem the simplest of foods, right? Why would someone write a book with over 800 egg recipes? We both have this book: "Too Many Eggs", and it has blown our minds with its plethora of recipes, practical tips and fascinating history. So we were very excited to talk to its author, Mimi Smith Dvorak. In this episode, she shares with us the story of this book. We talk about the crazy lengths she we...

Whether it's anticipating busy days between work and school, heavy project days writing or working in the garden or canning, postpartum or surgery recovery period - there are many reasons why having a stocked freezer supplied with ready to go meals and ingredients is an enormous benefit to living an ancestral, locavore style life. For many reasons - financial, ingredient concerns, sourcing concern...

We get lots of questions from supporters and listeners about milling your own flour and thought it was about time we brought them all together a Q&A. This episode is packed with information: We start with troubleshooting bread made with freshly milled flour, including: why your bread might not be rising as much why you might have experienced your bread pancaking and why freshly milled flour br...

What was the last thing you ate? This is the question we always begin our podcast episodes with. The reason is because we always want to know what the other is fixing and cooking! What’s going on in your kitchen these days? What’s fresh and good? One of our earliest episodes recounts everything in our refrigerators at the moment! That was a lot of fun to record. Part of what drives this interest i...

Ancestral Kitchen Podcast is five years old! A birthday that, when we started this adventure in late 2020, we could never have imagined. In this episode we will finally take you inside the podcast. You'll hear what goes on behind mic including plenty of the disasters we've had. We'll share with you three exciting announcements about how you can get more Ancestral Kitchen Podcast in your life, We'l...

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? It is this question, the always-haunting subject of...

Beans, Beans, the magical fruit, the more you eat, the more you absorb valuable minerals and proteins, improve your cardiovascular function and the health of your arterial walls as well as cholesterol and fat absorption, boost your digestion and gut bacteria health, and enjoy an array of bright and colorful foods - but what about that other, turbulent side benefit? In this explosive episode, we wi...

What foods will you find in an ancestral pantry in a modern world kitchen? Today we will share some of the foods we store in our pantries to keep our regional, from-scratch meals on the table on a daily basis, as well as talk about modern tools that help us to turn some inexpensive, bulk raw products into value-added products. We will travel back in time to visit ancient and old pantries and look...

Fat is one of the cornerstones of ancestral eating. But getting hold of good saturated fat is not easy and can be eye-wateringly expensive. Making it at home, as Andrea and I do, you can cut your costs incredibly and also feel sure of the provenance and processing. This episode will talk you through everything you need to know about rendering fat. We'll explain the different types of fats, their n...

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. Tara once shared her life on Inst...

Humans have been eating porridge (of which the American oatmeal is just one example) for, as you’ll hear, at least 32,000 years (that places it comfortably in the ‘paleo diet’ era!) Listen in to hear us cover just some of the history of this word and the comforting dish associated with it, as well as taking a tour of the many, many ways it is made throughout the world. Then we’ll focus in on oats...

Everybody always wants to know - is a nourishing diet an elitist, privileged ideal, inaccessible to people without a huge budget, and only for the super wealthy? In this episode we are going to share five complete meals. Each meal serves a family of five, and each complete meal can be made for about $5USD (£3.71GBP). Balancing these inexpensive meals against the more expensive meals that can turn...

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. We'll give you some fascinating history bites, we'll talk about how the Industrial...

Why eat local? What if it isn’t easy? What if the things I want aren't available? What's the point? Alison and I have both considered these questions for ourselves and factored them into decisions that we’ve made about how we live our everyday lives. We didn’t make the changes overnight, and we don’t even suggest people do so. After the many books we have read, the real-life experiences we have ha...

Back in episode 117, we gave you 26 nuggets of ancestral wisdom. We’ve got more. Another 24 to be precise. And just because these are in this second episode doesn’t mean they are any less important! Over the next hour, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, with cups of tea in our hands we'll be channelling our great-grandma wisdom and bringing you some ancestral truths relating to food, creativity, f...

Khorasan rye, spelt, emmer, millet, quinoa - what do all of these delicious foods have in common? They are considered ancient grains, grasses harking back to a time before industrial development and heavy hybridisation. You are what you eat eats, and that goes for grains as well as anything else. The nutrients your grains are pulling up out of the soil are the ones you will find in your finished p...

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. Originally, in its home, central america, cacao beans were revered and used unsweetened as a drin...

Ancestral food is not just all livers and bone broth! You not only can find amazing treats and desserts in the ancestral food world, but this is where delicious, comforting goodness was invented. The modern and industrial versions of sweet treats are like looking through a glass Pyrex pan darkly, and when you are introduced to the ancestral food world and the amazing ingredients we have available...

As you know, if you’ve been cooking ancestrally for any length of time, the ancestral mindset does not stay in the kitchen! Some of us come to this as part of a health journey, already thinking about our life as a whole…others of us start with food and find the wisdom of our ancestors seeping into the rest of our lives. There are things we just can’t not see any more, things we feel are wrong; thi...

Leftovers again? Oh good, I can’t wait! I love it when half the work is already done. In this episode we talked about leftovers as well as scraps and items that are often discarded in home kitchens. Let’s maximize those precious food dollars and make the meal stretch as far as possible! We went a little bit crazy sharing about all the ways we love using the trash items in our kitchen - including s...

When life is overwhelming or busy, or I don’t know what to cook - What are a few simple meals I can have in my back pocket? As a person new to ancestral cooking, how do I know if my easy meal is ancestral or not? Can I still use my old cookbooks? In this episode, we will share four favorite easy, go-to meals that our families love. You will see how each of these meals evolve with the seasons for u...

Every month we record an entire extra podcast episode which goes up on our private podcast feed, Kitchen Table Chats, for our supporters to enjoy as a benefit of their financial support. In these episodes we chat about what is happening in our kitchens, big revelations or things we are studying or writing about, as well as answer questions sent in by our supporters. Today we are sharing with you a...

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. This fermentation process, called bokashi, can be done in the house, it has no smell and neither does it attract flies. You...

What plant was allegedly first discovered in Ethiopia by a goat, boasts an almost 270billion USD market worldwide, has almost 10,000 shops dedicated to it in the UK and over 35,000 in the US, and you very likely may have partaken of some time already today? That’s right, the elixir of which Benjamin Franklin, the American statesman, author and inventor wrote, “Among the numerous luxuries of the ta...

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. Even thou...