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Do you love liver like I love liver?
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Or is liver a food you can’t stand?
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I’ve rarely come across such a divisive food. I love it and I know lot of people who do. But I also hear from many @ancestralkitchenpodcast listeners who *really* want to love it, but just can’t.
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If you want to love liver, but aren’t there yet, here are my suggestions:
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1/ Start with chicken liver, it’s the mildest
2/ Make pate (@almostbananas has an amazing beef liver pate recipe that doesn’t taste like beef liver!)
3/ Combine it with muscle meat (I make a burger that is 3:1 ground beef to pork liver – you can also add it (and other offal) to meatloaf and lasagna)
4/ Learn different ways of cooking it (Janine at @offallygoodcooking has a veritable encyclopedia of offal recipes on her website)
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And if all fails, or whilst you’re weaning yourself on (because you want to be weaning yourself on – liver is the most nutrient-dense meat there is) you can opt for liver capsules. @one_earth_health, current sponsors of the podcast, have a 5% discount for listeners – check the show notes of our recent episodes.
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And, before I go, if you’re a liver-lover, how about a raw liver tonic?! @offallygoodcooking makes one and talked about it in the recent two-parter interview she did with @fornutrientssake and @nourishthelittles of @modernancestralmamas. The episodes, a deep dive into all things offal, were so informative – go listen! @farmandhearth and I are hoping we can get Janine to you on Ancestral Kitchen Podcast soon 🙂
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p.s. On the plate: Pig liver from @valledelsasso, home-made spelt sourdough (book coming soon!) spread with home-rendered lard, local salad and, in the espresso cup, 24g of sauerkraut (yes, I measure my sauerkraut…that’s for another post!)

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Rye sourdough breads work so much better if they are made with with a large portion of pre-fermented dough. That means, instead of making a starter with 10% of the flour weight (which is what I do with my spelt breads), I will most often preferment around 30% of the flour.
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Here’s a rye preferment that’s been rising overnight. It’s about to go into a mix with more rye, some salt, some water and a touch of honey.
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Making rye bread like this means the yeasts and bacteria which rise my bread will have a chance to do their job without being degraded by a ‘nasty’ enzyme in rye which can ruin the whole show – the acidic environment created by the large preferent protects them!
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I’ve posted a video in my stories today showing the ready-to-use preferment. It’s a clip from my course at @thefermentationschool Rye Sourdough Bread: Mastering The Basics.
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If you’ve been think of trying your hand at rye sourdough this course is for you. It’ll walk you through creating a wholegrain rye starter, two breads, a cake and pancakes, even if you’re completely new to sourdough baking.

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I first read about Rutherglen Sour Cakes in F. Marian McNeill’s book ‘The Scot’s Kitchen’. Her description was short, but intriguing: There was an ‘elaborate ritual’ around their preparation which was ‘clearly from a pagan source’. When I then saw that they were wild fermented, I knew I had to find out more.
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Rutherglen Sour Cakes were prepared in Rutherglen, close to Glasgow, Scotland, to celebrate St Luke’s day (October 18th). 8-10 days before this, oats and water were mixed up into a dough and left to sour. The eve before the fair, a group of women would gather to prepare the sour cakes. They’d sit in a previously-chalked semi-circle in front of the fire. Sugar and aniseed or caraway would be added to the now fermented dough. Each woman (ceremonially, they were called ‘Maidens’) would hold a wooden board and beater on their lap. A piece of dough would then be passed between them in an east/west direction, each lady batting the oat dough down on their board. By the time the cake got to the end of the semi-circle and was handed to the designated baker, called ”The Queen’, it would be ‘as thin as paper’.
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This ceremony was last witnessed in 1854, as far as I know. And, at least online, no-one has tried to re-make Rutherglen Sour Cakes as an authentic wild ferment.
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This picture is my fourth attempt. I’m getting used to wild souring the dough – it’s easy to tell when it’s ready using your nose. The shaping is best done using a board and a rolling pin. I don’t think I’ve got mine paper-thin yet, but I’m not doing badly!
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Rolling them out, alone in my kitchen, brings so many emotions. This process was once so tied to place, to women, to ritual. I feel the weight of what I, what we, have lost: community, sacredness, ceremony, connection, seasonality. At the same time I feel immense gratitude for the path life has shown me, my family that supports me and the beautiful souls that I have connected with (a lot of them here) that *get* it.
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And I remember food is never solely about feeding ourselves.
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(Check my story for more pics and some historical sources.)

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If you’ve ever asked ‘What fermented drinks can I make?’, today’s @ancestralkitchenpodcast is for you. We cover over 20 fermented drinks – all of which, between us, @farmandhearth and I have made at home. We’ll tell you what they are, where they come from, how they are made and why we love them!
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You’ll come away super-informed and inspired; ready to start fermenting (and loving) your next drink 🙂
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You can subscribe to Ancestral Kitchen Podcast on your app, or stream/download from the link in my profile.

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Making nutrient-dense food for a children’s party can seem like a tall order. Yes, my son will eat virtually all of the ancestral food I make at home, but this is different:
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1 – It’s really special day and I want to mark that by giving him out of the ordinary food, and
2 – There are going to be 15 other kids there who are used to eating ‘normal’ food. I really want them, for my son’s sake, to like the food.
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Here’s the chocolate cake I developed for Gabriel’s 9th birthday. It’s made of spelt flour, has no refined sugar, is risen by the power of sourdough and is egg and dairy free.
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In the tests, my son, Gabriel and husband, Rob, loved it…but I was still nervous on the big day!
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Thankfully, it went down brilliantly. Every little one there finished their piece and I saw some of them come up and raid the plate for stray crumbs!
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Job done. Phew!
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@farmandhearth and I are putting together a spelt sourdough cookbook for @ancestralkitchenpodcast (it’ll be our second cookbook!) and this recipe will go in there 🙂 You don’t have to have a children’s party imminent in order to make it!!

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Does this sound familiar: Get all excited about a cookbook, buy it, then realise that, in order to get the recipes to work with how you eat, you need to change a load of things?!
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I’ve been there many times. To the point where I now consciously check my excitement at a possible book (which feels *so* sad!) as I know I probably won’t want to cook most of the things in it.

So, what a treat it is to have recipes from someone whose kitchen looks like yours! Thank you @farmandhearth for sharing some of your go-to recipes, including this one for Soaked Cream Biscuits, in our @ancestralkitchenpodcast cookbook!
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I am using spelt flour here, but Andrea tells us in the recipe that we can use any type of flour, including gluten-free. I don’t have fresh cream (I’ve not got my own cow as she does!), but I do have access to grass-fed, organic soured cream.
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There are more pictures, including the end result, in my story. You can also see my bashed up baking tray in the story too – and tell me I’m not the only one who uses kitchen equipment until it literally dies?!!
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If you want a cookbook with simple recipes you’ll be totally happy to make, it is $12. There’s a video of it pinned to the top of my feed. And you can find a link to it in my profile 🙂

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I don’t like rice much. So I end up using every other type of grain imaginable to make rice-style dishes! Here we have whole oat groats cooked in stock on the hob for an hour and a half, topped with pork meat balls cooked with the last of the winter vegetables – leeks and broccoli.
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When you cook whole oats like this they give that same creaminess we associate with porridge. So as I taste I’m getting creamy, stock-rich and chewy in the same mouthful.
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Do you cook with whole oat groats?

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I thought the joys of soft-boiled eggs were universal. Then, I started talking to @farmandhearth and realised that not everyone does (or even knows that others do) this to their eggs!
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She asked:
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But don’t you get shell everywhere?
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How do you eat it?
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I’ve been promising I’d share a video showing how ‘us Brits’ get into our soft-boiled eggs, so here’s one I snapped as my morning tummy was rumbling!
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Have I convinced you (or were you already convinced?!)? Soft-boiling is so easy (put egg in water that almost covers it, bring to boil (no lid), turn down to a strong simmer, cook for three minutes). Try it – a runny yolk is amazing with bread dipped in!!
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Are you a soft-boiler?! Aren’t they great?!
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I’m trying to up my morning protein: I’m now often soft-boiling two eggs for breakfast, instead of this one here. Protein at our first meal is so important: if you’d like an email in your inbox next week with 16 ideas on how to get a protein-rich breakfast, you can sign up for my newsletter at ancestralkitchen.com/newsletter (link in profile).

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Healing is hard.
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But, for us, the possibility of achieving it naturally far, far outweighs the ‘sentence’ that you can end up with if you go the standard medical route.
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We embarked on the GAPS protocol as part of our quest to heal our son. All three of us learnt so much in those two years. And it was a platform for more healing, which continues to this day.
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Listen to today’s @ancestralkitchenpodcast to hear a personal take on two years of the GAPS diet. We talk about why we started the protocol, how we organised our kitchen, our practical routines, what we found challenging, what results we experienced, how we transitioned off GAPS and how our healing has moved on since then.
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If you’ve ever thought “perhaps GAPS is for me?” or wondered about the power of healing diets, this is the episode for you.

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Sometimes, leftovers outrank the original dish, right?!
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That’s what we have here with goetta, a Cincinnati dish made from oats, pork and onions. I stuffed all our leftovers in a loaf tin, let them set, then cut slices off. Now I’m frying them in lard. And as I heard @sandorkraut say on a recent @taste podcast, “Everything is better with lard”!
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More pics in my story today. Check my post two back for more goetta details.

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