Ancestral Kitchen

Megan is a podcast listener, turned podcast patron, turned podcast admin! She is now working for the Ancestral Kitchen Podcast and it has been so wonderful having her helping Alison and I out. This is a very special episode that we recorded just for patrons of the podcast, and it went up on a private podcast feed where we have over 80+ episodes that are just special bonuses for patrons of the podc...

So many of us come to ancestral foods because of our own or our family’s health. We’ve tried what the mainstream medical model has to offer and we’re done with it. We want to look for and work with alternatives. And that journey can be a lonely and fraught one. The world doesn’t provide much support for taking this road less travelled and yet, when doing hard things and making tough decisions we s...

In this podcast we celebrate and share ancestral food…the things that our great grandmothers, and their great grandmothers used to do. The wisdom we can gather listening to and reading the stories of their work has the power to change our modern day food world. In this episode Andrea and I will put out  a call for you to send us your own ancestral stories  and we’ll also celebrate people...

What about cooking and eating ancestrally when you're in times of turmoil, or busy chaotic times - like having a new baby, or when people are sick, or when you're moving across countries! In this episode Alison and I are going to talk about all of these things because we are going through all of them. We will share some of our strategies and plans for using up food stores before a move, or prepari...

Welcome to June! It's a wild month for both Alison and Andrea - Andrea is having a baby, and Alison is moving back from Italy to the UK! To celebrate all the big changes and upheaval in our lives we wanted to have something special for all our listeners. We are offering a 16% discount - that is the maximum Patreon would allow us to give - on our annual Patreon supporter memberships. Sign up to be...

Liver: do you love it or hate it? Which ever side of the fence you're on, we're betting you know that liver is a true superfood; one of the most nutrient dense foods we can include in our diet. But for many it's also a 'problem' food – we know because both of us regularly get questions on including liver in an ancestral diet. This episode is for liver lovers and liver haters! We talk about why liv...

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. I am now using her method and it is revolutionizing everything tha...

I know milling my own flour is better and I want to do it, but where do I start? Home milling can be such a joy and we’re here in this episode to guide you through all the hows. We’ll talk the multiple benefits of milling at home and fill any gaps in knowledge you might have. We’ll explain how you can grind a grain, what mills are available for your kitchen and the benefits of each one, then I’ll...

Do you cook with millet? I do and I love this ancient grain for the fact that it is super sustainable, very economical and, being gluten and lectin free, really easy to digest. In this episode we dive in to the ancestral grain millet. We will talk about what it is, why you'd want to include it in your diet, how to cook it and I then I will go on to share in detail my seven favourite ways to use mi...

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 Th...

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 t...

We asked for your questions on bone broth. And man, did you send them in! Today's episode is dedicated to answering all the questions we received about the wonder that is bone broth. We will cover sourcing your bones, what types of bones to use, cooking broth – including equipment, timings, add-ins, how to make your broth thicker, thinner, stronger and weaker, the myriad of ways you can drink and...

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...

The world of essential oils is an ancient and ancestral one. From the Mesopotamian valley where the Sumerians, Akkadians and ancient Hebrew tribes were distilling, trading and using oils to the apothecaries and wisdom of the ancient Chinese; from the dusty tombs of Egyptian Pharaohs like Tutankhamun to the Silk Road and spice merchants guiding camels burdened with precious ointments, oils, resins...

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. Coming up is a fascinating and informat...

All of us have tried to change our food habits at some stage, most of us multiple times. Maybe, as you’re listening to this, you want to. It sounds simple - I’ll just stop eating this and start eating that. But it’s never that easy, is it?! Today, we’ll take a deep dive into food habits and offer you 14 Tips for Changing yours. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The organ suppleme...

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. If you're a patron of the podcast, check your email for a link to our 2023 Christmas gift to you! * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * The...

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...

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. Peter Grieg worked for his father’s farm and shop business and saw the factory farm model brought from the US to the UK, by his father, post-WWII; and he watched...

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. Today we'll focus on the oat, and fermenting oats. Finally Andrea let me out of m...

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 precis...

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 ep...

"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 this second part, we'll complete our list of 50 ways to sa...

"I would love to eat an ancestral diet but I can’t afford it, what can I do?" "I want to shop from small farms around me, how can I make this happen with a limited budget?" "Food costs are rising dramatically where I live and the budget that once worked for us isn’t cutting it anymore, help!" In a post-industrial world where globally imported subsidized factory food is perceived as the cheaper or...

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. We've got four births between us and we came to them with very...