Month: April 2022

I’ve just started reading ‘A Strangeness in my Mind’, a novel that centers around a boza-seller who works the streets of Istanbul. It is deepening my understanding and appreciation of this drink, boza, that I make every week in my kitchen.
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It’s fermented. It’s probiotic. It’s gluten-free and dairy-free. It’s ever-so-slightly alcoholic (a by-product of the yeast fermentation). It’s bubbly. It’s sweet. It’s sour.
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And it has a very long and rich history in Turkey and beyond. Men and boys used to wander the streets of Istanbul every evening with jugs of this hanging off milkmaid-style planks over their shoulders. They called out “boooozzaaa” to let people know they were there and very often people living on the 3rd/4th floors would lower a basket on a piece of string from their windows to receive their drink.
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There aren’t many boza-sellers left in Istanbul now (stronger, industrially-produced drinks have taken over), although there are still some historic boza bars were people can buy this drink.
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Two years ago I went on a quest to figure out how to make this drink at home, using wild fermentation (i.e. no store-bought yeast). Now, learning more about its provenance, I feel privileged to be able to recreate an historic, much-loved beverage in my kitchen and feed it to my family.
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If you’d like to bring this drink to life in your own home, check the link halfway down my linktr.ee page that’ll take you to the course I have created.

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New recipe up! If you like cake and you like sourdough (I’m imagining lots of hands up now), this is a simple, tasty sourdough cake with a light and tender crumb.
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It doesn’t use eggs and there’s no dairy or refined sugar either. The rising power comes form the sourdough starter, the sweetness comes from carrot and honey and the tender crumb is helped immensely by the inclusion of lard.
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Seriously, I tried baking this with olive oil (which you can do if you like) and then with lard instead. It’s softer with the lard. I haven’t tried butter (let me know if you do), but I bet that’d be good too.
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There’s a link to the recipe at the very top of my linktr.ee.

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It costs twice as much, by weight, to buy plastic-wrapped chicken breasts than it does to purchase a whole chicken. And yet they fly off the supermarket shelves, bringing with them their additional packaging and transportation and leaving us poorer both financially and nutritionally.
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Buying a whole chicken from your local farmer is a whole different game. Knowing what it has been fed and how it has lived. Cooking it up in one go and allowing the leftovers to make your life easier. Boiling up the bones and getting the nutritional powerhouse that is stock.
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Today’s podcast episode is dedicated to whole chickens. @farmandhearth rears her own and has much to say about how they live and eat. We both use whole birds often and talk about how we chop, cook and eat them. There are some surprises in there – like what broth Andrea uses to make hot chocolate with stock and just how much the broth from a whole chicken would cost you to buy in the store.
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And we’ve got a bonus for patrons of the podcast: Andrea sharing a way of cutting up a whole chicken that you won’t find on YouTube that divides the meat and bones equally between the portions.
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Listen by finding Ancestral Kitchen Podcast in your app or by clicking on the link in my linktr.ee. And if you’d like to support the podcast and become a receiver of our goodies you can go to www.patreon.com/ancestralkitchenpodcast

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If you struggle with liver, make pate. And not just any pate; this pate. Thank you @almostbananas for sharing the joy you get from cooking ancestrally, including your live pate recipe, with the world!
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I used 1kg of pig liver (pigs loved during life by @valledelsasso), half lard/half butter as the fat and followed Naomi’s spicing instructions to the letter. A quick blend in the food processor and I now have a *lot* of pate (half of which I have frozen).
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So far, we’ve eaten in spread on sourdough (a great protein-rich snack option, straight from the fridge), as the filling for sourdough pancakes (along with lettuce and grated carrot) and, my favourite, scooped up in large amounts by crunchy oven-roasted pork skin!
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Check out my story for more pictures. I’ve linked to Naomi’s recipe there so you can cook this up in your kitchen. And if you want to hear more from Naomi, check out episode #23 of @ancestralkitchenpodcast where you can hear me interviewing her!

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Another sourdough carrot and spelt cake about to go into the oven.
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I’ve been recipe testing and covering my camera in flour and fat most of this week. Here’s what I’ve been making:
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Rye breads for my upcoming course at @thefermentationschool (I filmed the “what to do with sourdough discard” section yesterday).
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Pig skin crunchies. I filmed each step for a potential YouTube video and gave a bag of the finished goods to my son to take on his first ever cinema trip (who needs popcorn when you’ve got pig skin?!)
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Lard. The fridge is full of the white stuff and we have cracklings which I made into crackling bread (a recipe I’m testing to accompany an upcoming article I’m writing for the Weston A. Price journal)
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Liver pate using @almostbananas recipe. Delicious! Photos of that to come next week.
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And lastly, more of this delicious egg and dairy free sourdough cake. I will write up the recipe soon and share.
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Meantime, this weekend, I’m taking a rest 🙂 I’m getting better at coming off SM completely for two whole days. Some Sundays I don’t even pick up a computer. We’ll see whether I manage that this weekend.
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What have you been creating this week?

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This is what excited oats look like! I came into the kitchen this morning to find this jar of oats and water had fermented it’s way up, and almost out, of the jar.
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There is no starter here; the mix is just oats and water. The power of natural yeasts and bacteria never fails to astound me!
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I stirred this jar, re-mixing the solids, then re-covered it and put it back to continue doing its thing. In a few days time from this I’ll have ‘sowans’ porridge and ‘swats’ probiotic drink. Both are traditional Scottish ferments.
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This is my favourite way to ferment oats. I shared it in my video course over at @thefermentationschool. There’s a link to it in my story today if you want to take a look.

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I spent most of the long weekend on my feet in the kitchen (doing lots of things with pork fat and liver, pictures to follow!) so I wanted a quick and easy breakfast this morning.

This took about 5 minutes: I cracked the goose egg (it was huge – check my story today!) in the pan. Whilst it was cooking, I spooned out some previously-cooked millet and heated up an (off camera) cup of pork stock.
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Mid-morning I had a snack of pig skin crunchies (I filmed a video on how to make them which will go up soon) and some spelt sourdough and then for lunch I had spiced lentils cooked in stock with broccoli and lard-spread buckwheat sourdough.
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This’ll all keep me going whilst I talk transatlantic to @farmandhearth this afternoon. We are excited to watch the community growing around @ancestralkitchenpodcast and want to create space where we can all go deeper, talk longer, share and learn more. Got to get ourselves organised to build what we want to see…I’m doing it lard, stock, egg and lentil fuelled 🙂

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Joy-led kitchen creativity has consistently been the thing that keeps me going. It’s got me through the toughest times of my life.
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When I started doing ‘weird things’ with food, I could barely see over the kitchen counter. Early in my life that passion gave itself to serving my sugar addiction (I was 240lbs/20 stone at 20 years old), but creativity also helped me lose the weight I’d piled on; I spent hours concocting ‘alternative’ dishes as I shed half my body weight.
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Creating in the kitchen was what led me into eating vegan, and then raw vegan for two years (I wanted to make all the amazing-looking raw food deserts!). And then fermentation led me onwards to an ancestral diet which healed my 5-year-lack-of-a-cycle, enabling me to conceive naturally.
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Now, 10 years into eating ancestrally, I couldn’t do my life any other way. I get so much joy from working with ingredients from people who care about what they are growing/raising and I love alchemising them in my tiny kitchen into fizzy ferments, yummy bread or simple, delicious meals.
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And so, when I see that same passion in others I am magnetised to it. I love the life, enthusiasm and care that I see in their eyes and taste in their food. @ladivinapizzafirenze is a place that I get. Their pizza is sourdough and their ingredients locally-sourced. The deliciousness, the welcome, the pride and the joy – it is catching (as you can see from my smile!).
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The slice in my hands is tomato, red onions previously cooked in chianti and gorgonzola. My other favourite was a pizza filled with slices of Tuscan soppressata (head cheese) which I really want to try and recreate here at home.
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Thank you @ladivinapizzafirenze for having a restaurant that I am *really* happy to patronise. And for making the day of my 8 year old son (there are more pictures, including his huge pizza, in my story today).

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