Author: Alison Kay

I have just started reading a book by the (as I am finding out, amazing) Stephen Harrod Buhner called Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers.
.
Who’d put the words ‘healing’ and ‘beer’ together? Not me, certainly, until just a few months ago. The beer I grew up with, as I am learning, is *so* far removed from beer as it was just a few centuries ago.
.
Then it was made at home, mostly by women.
.
Then it was the drink of both kings and paupers.
.
Then it was made from local grains.
.
Then, very often, the leftovers were used to make bread (you can see mine here in the background).
.
Then, herbs were expertly added, knowledge of just what healing they could bring bound up in the blood and bones of the communities who made it.
.
And now? Would anyone in the mainstream even imagine that this used to be the norm?
.
I can feel another mission coming on!

… Read More

Cold roast pork belly from @valledelsasso. We’ve been to the farm where these animals live and I’m proud to support Flavio in the work that he does.
.
Sourdough bread made from left-over spelt grain that I previously used to ferment beer. It’s spread with the onion-scented fat/dripping mix from the bottom of the roast pork pan.
.
Salad from leaves bought at our local farmers’ market, jazzed up with herbs from the garden: Mint, parsley, tarragon, wild fennel, oregano and pineapple sage (I’m nurturing quite a collection!).
.
Off camera: small glass of spelt beer (made to a 5,000-year old process)
.
Behind the camera: a very grateful and contented Mumma.

… Read More

I did it! I made my first authentic mesoamerican ancestral cacao drink, from scratch!
.
This is Pozol. It’s corn that I nixtamalised and ground, then fermented for 2 days. I mixed that with cacao that I sourced from a family-run co-operative in Ecuador.
.
My husband, who tries all my experiments truly loved this. He described it as ‘fantastic’. The corn lends it sweetness, a floral taste and thickness; the cacao such depth, bitterness and kick.
.
The mesoamerican original cultivators and worshippers of these two amazing plants – corn and cacao – knew what they were doing with this drink!
.
So grateful for the rabbit-hole that the 700-page ‘The Secret Life of Chocolate’ has sent me down. Leaning about how indigenous new world communities interacted with corn and cacao is enriching my life greatly.
.
If you want to know more about the book, I talk about it on the latest @ancestralkitchenpodcast with @farmandhearth. And I’m thinking we need a whole episode dedicated to chocolate in the future!
.
There will be some more pictures of my process in my story today – saved to my Chocolate highlight if you’re here later.

… Read More

Yesterday was my birthday. Not quite sure how I got to 46. I’m still 20 something in my head…and in the kitchen. Anyone else feel like that?
.
For the fun of it, I decided to cook something I’d never cooked before: calzone, folded pizza.
.
I used the sourdough spelt pizza recipe that you can find in my profile. I filled it with sausage from @valledelsasso, onions, mushrooms and sage from the garden.
.
Check my story for Gabriel’s reaction and a steamy pic of the inside!
.
Rest of the food day was just as tasty. Super-soured oat porridge for breakfast which fizzed – I love it with miso, linseed and zingy olive oil. And supper was lectin-free millet and sorghum sourdough with eggs from @valdisieveintransizione market scrambled in lard (again from Flavio’s pigs).
.
Coincidentally (or maybe not so, syncronicities abound in my world beliefs) we made a big decision yesterday about our future. It was and is scary. My hubby said *all* things worth anything are scary. I think of all my changes – losing weight, leaving corporate, choosing to try for a baby naturally despite doctor’s tell me I’d never get pregnant, moving countries and I agree.
.
I can’t get rid of the fear, but I can sit down at the table with the two people I love most in the world and eat pizza 🙂

… Read More

Where I get my food from is extremely important to me. That translates to effort on my part to find things that I can feel good about in my kitchen.
.
What you see here is the result of my latest bout of research. The cacao beans at the bottom are organic and come from a co-operative of farmers in Nicaragua. The solid-looking stuff at the top is cacao liquor (fermented, roasted and ground nibs) from family-run farms in Ecuador.
.
It’s not been easy for me to find ‘transparent’ cacao; cacao where I can see the growers, the makers, the co-operatives. I am just little me in my apartment kitchen, I’m not an expert and I can’t buy 75kg bags of beans (the normal size of a bag of cacao!). But I care about it *greatly*.
.
What’s most exciting about these two cacao options (which I’ll use to make ancestral drinks and 100% cacao chocolate for my family) is that I can buy them in smaller packages (yes!) and also the top one, the liquor, was processed in country, not by a company in the US or Amsterdam. The more value-added processes that can be done by the communities who grow the produce, the more wealth stays where it should; with the experts and the ones who work hard to produce the product.
.
I’d love for everyone to buy their chocolate like this.

… Read More

What do books mean to you and your kitchen creativity?
.
For me they are *such* joy. To have in my hands someone else’s passion. To witness the words they’ve crafted; the journey they’ve been on. And to let that permeate and inspire me.
.
In today’s podcast, I talk about three that are inspiring me right now:
.
The Secret Life of Chocolate by @nocturnalherbalist
Wild Fermentation by @sandorkraut
Naturally Fermented Bread by @morgancarsandbread
.
And then Andrea talks about three of her all-time favourites.
.
You can listen by finding Ancestral Kitchen Podcast on your podcast provider, or you can stream from my site – the link’s in my profile.
.
We want to record more episodes on books. Let me know what you’re reading, what you love having on your shelf and what’s your go-to. I’d love to natter about it 🙂

… Read More

The grain that makes up this bread has had another life the last 5 days. It’s been making beer.
.
Well, I say beer, but the liquid I make from it doesn’t resemble commercial beer much. Firstly, it’s only got one ingredient – spelt. Secondly, it’s created following a super-low-tech 5,000-year-old process, one part of which is using partially-baked bread. Thirdly, it’s unpasteurised and probiotic.
.
It’s much lower in alcohol than what we think of as beer today. It tastes different too – it’s sharp.
.
Once the ‘beer’ has been made, I collect all the spent grain and use it to make bread. The bread is, I imagine, slightly less carby than ‘normal’ bread as some of the spent grain in it has previously been malted (i.e. turned from complex to simple sugar). The flavour is more sour than my sourdoughs. The texture is chewy – like that of sprouted bread (if you’ve ever eaten that, you’ll know what I mean).
.
It is *really* good.
.
And it feels like I made it from nothing as we have beer too!
.
Such a satisfying process.

… Read More

This is Cal. Or Hydrated Lime. Or Pickling Lime. Or Calcium Hydroxide. Or Slaked Lime.
.
It looks pretty inconsequential, but this powder has an incredible story to tell.
.
Cal (or its predecessor wood ash) is used by Mexicans in the processing their staple food, corn. Cooking corn with cal (called nixtamalisation) means the vitamin B3 in it becomes available. If your staple is corn, that’s super important as vitamin B3 deficiency is pretty horrible.
.
When corn started to be taken up by populations outside of Mexico as a food source, the ancestral processing method was *not* taken up with it. And because of this, in the early 1900s the B3 deficiency disease pellagra was at epidemic levels in Northern Italy.
.
Because corn was cheap it become a monocrop, completely displacing the traditional carbohydrate sources (beans, wheat, spelt, millet, rye, barley and buckwheat) of the locals. And because they were eating unprocessed corn all day, every day, pellagra, and its horrible symptoms, were widespread. For many years no-one knew why.
.
This page of history has *so* much to teach us. The twin pieces of wisdom that we ignore at our peril are that monocropping is not a desirable thing and not listening to traditional wisdom is perilous.
.
I started sharing my kitchen, values and processing techniques here because I believe that indigenous wisdom has much to teach us, and that we need to harken to its message; to follow its models, in order to thrive (let alone survive) as a species. Cal and corn are such a clear example of this.
.
I’m nixtamilising corn today for the first time. As I work, I feel an immense respect for the deep wisdom of our ancestral heritage.

… Read More

I am trying to take plastic completely out of my kitchen. The freezer is its last hiding place. Finally, ridding it from there has made its way to the top of my to-do list.
.
We pick up meat from our farmer every 2 weeks. On returning home from this pick up I’m ready with the wax-covered paper and string.
.
What do you think of my handy work?
.
These will go in the freezer and I’ll be using them over the next 2 weeks. I’ll report back on whether it works.

… Read More