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Being away from home does not mean you have to stop eating good bread.
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Here is an impromptu sourdough spelt pizza topped with leftovers plus my tips for making sourdough bread away from home.
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1 – Feed your starter just before you leave and give it less water than you normally do. This will help it last longer. Refresh it when you get to your destination.
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2 – Take a silicone loaf tin with you for light, flexible bread-making.
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3 – Consider different containers to that which you normally use – I’ve used casserole dishes and foil-covered shallow dishes to bake whilst away.
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4 – If you don’t have access to a set of scales, use this as an opportunity to test your intuitive baking skills – add less water to the dough at the beginning and let your mixing tell you how much more you need.
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5 – Let go of your expectations! Sourdough is good even if it collapses or gets a little burnt. A bread’s worth is not measured by how Instgrammable it is…I promise!
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If you have any sourdough-outside-the-home questions let me know 🙂

The recipe for this pizza is available in my profile.

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My home-made medicinal bitters are ready! Locally-bought herbs plus grappa from the town where I live.
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Check my story for more videos and a link to the list of herbs I used.
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Anyone else make these at home?

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Today, Aug 1st, we will celebrate Lughnasadh (pronounced loo-naa-saa) by eating this home-made spelt sourdough pizza.
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Lughnasadh is a traditional Gaelic festival (that was co-opted into the newer Christianity as ‘Lammas’ or Loaf-Mass Day) that gives thanks for the wheat harvest.
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With food ever present in our lives, it’s so easy to forget that it grows in the ground, there are seasons, it needs to be harvested. Just a few generations ago, these rituals were central to our lives. With industrialisation, they’ve faded, but the importance of nourishing ourselves has not.
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I am so grateful for the energy, satiation and nutrition that grains give me and my family. Properly prepared, they are an amazing food.
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I send you Lughnasadh greetings. If you want to love the grains you have around you and need some inspiration or guidance, you can check out the @ancestralkitchenpodcast episode on grains (#19) or bake up my pizza – the recipe is in my profile.

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Have you made risotto with bone marrow? This is risotto alla Milanese. Most people know the dish for it’s golden saffron colour, but traditionally it was also made with good beef stock and a hefty chunk of bone marrow.
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When @foodofplace opened my eyes to this fact, I knew I wanted to give it a go and got some beef bones especially. The liquid is white wine and home-made beef stock and the fat is butter and bone marrow. I used powdered saffron, some onion and lots of parmesan.
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It is very good. The cheese gives a salty tang, the rice is dreamily creamy and the butter/marrow combo feels to me like saying a deep thank you as I sink into a cushioned arm chair!
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More details in my story today. The recipe is going in the forthcoming @ancestralkitchenpodcast ecookbook that @farmandhearth and I are brewing up. Andrea showed me some cover pages yesterday and I’m all excited about sharing it!

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Fermented oat bake…I knew as soon as I tasted this that I’d got the recipe right this time!
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Oats can be so much more than porridge – this is a savoury bake with eggs, bacon and cheese.
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The oats are fermented which gives their flavour more depth as well as making them more nutritious. Check my profile for a link to a video showing you how to ferment oats if you need guidance.
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And I’ll be sending the recipe out in my email newsletter tomorrow. Sign up via the link in my profile (it’s the first option) if you’d like to receive it.

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Beautiful chard grown in fermented-kitchen-waste-enriched soil in my container garden!

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“For every complex problem, there’s an answer that is clear, simple and wrong”
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Today’s podcast is an interview with an amazing woman – Nicolette Hahn Niman. She’s a mum, an author, a rancher and a lawyer. Her book Defending Beef is such a great tackling of the charge that cows are destroying our planet.
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This is information and a conversation that needs to be heard. We talk about how to create a sustainable food future, the problem with global science reports, Nicolette’s move back to meat after 30 years as a vegetarian and how she balances her farm, her family and her work all whilst being able to prepare and cook real food.
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Thanks to @chelseagreenbooks, we have a copy of Defending Beef to give away! To get your name in the draw, comment below, tagging someone who you think would love to hear this episode. We’ll close out the draw a week today – the 26th, and drop you a note if you’ve won!!
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Book giveaway is US-only, podcast episode is available wherever in the world you live 🙂

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Pesto is not necessarily what you think it is…
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Basil? Yes (well at least if you live in northern Italy, in the south it’s more likely yours would be tomato-dominant). Oil? Yes. Garlic? Yes.
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Butter?? Yes! Butter has been and still is an ingredient of some pesto.
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Cheese? Hmm, maybe, in more recent history. Nuts? Again, perhaps in the post-industrial era.
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And pesto’s not always been a pasta-only condiment. Historically, the job of green pesto was a general condiment and it was most often stirred into soup.
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I’ll post some more surprising details of what pesto has been and is in my story today (and save in my local food highlight).
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Meantime, here’s my traditional pesto. Basil from the garden, olive oil, garlic and salt. I didn’t happen to have any cheese or nuts and I could see my basil was bolting. It’s delicious – I love to eat it on fried eggs.
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Do you make pesto? Have you tried without cheese and nuts? Have you found not pasta-ways to allow it to express its deliciousness?! I’d love to hear!

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It’s super hot here. This rye sourdough discard spice bread usually takes about six hours to ferment, but is ready for baking today in less than three!
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I’ll take 35 minutes of the oven churning out more heat in order to smell and then taste this beauty!
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The recipe is in the “what to do with your sourdough discard” section of my forthcoming @thefermentationschool course Rye Sourdough: Mastering The Basics which will be out in September.

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On Sundays, I like to cook something up that’ll make my life easier over the next few days. Yesterday it was this: a one-dish, cast iron ground pork and vegetable dish.
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I always start off with onion and garlic, but the veg, type of meat and spices vary based on what I have and what I feel like.
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This did Sunday lunch for us, went into my son’s packed lunch that I prepped last night and today I heated up the leftovers, sliced a thick hunk of spelt sourdough, spread it with lard and my own lunch was done in a few minutes!
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The template for this recipe will be going into the @ancestralkitchenpodcast cookbook that @farmandhearth and I are working on…we are so excited about sharing our favourite recipes with you!

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