The Italian hillside landscape had well and truly engraved itself on my heart. I checked out books on Tuscany from the local library and before I knew it my soul had wrapped itself around the dream of owning an Italian farmhouse on the top of a hill: Waking up, pushing back the shutters to reveal piercing blue skies and looking out over the olive fields and terracotta roofs. One day, I thought, that’ll be me. And it will feel amazing. I remember the deep breath with which my body responded at the thought.

It remained a dream. I had other ‘important’ stuff to do: the things that society had baked into my psyche. Obviously I had to climb the career ladder, amass stuff and settle down. There was literally never any question of this in my mind.

In addition, my upbringing had infected me with idea that I wasn’t the sort of person who did ‘crazy’ things. This notion delayed (and made more painful) all the big changes of my early life: “I’m not the sort of person who quits Microsoft”, “I’m not the sort person who leaves her husband”, “I’m not the sort of person who throws it all up in the air and moves to Italy”.

I had to hit rock bottom for that to change; aged 32, back living at my parents house with a neck problem. I was unable to move my head, wearing a soft collar and confined to my bed for half of my waking hours. Unsure whether I’d ever get better, that dream returned. It whispered to me in the early hours, “Alison, why are you not going to Italy, you know that’s what you want to do.”

So in the depths of one of those sleepless nights, I made a pact with myself: if I can just recover from this, I’ll do it; I’ll get myself to Italy. A year of dedicated physiotherapeutic work and an English teaching qualification later, I was heading to a town near Florence, my new boyfriend, Rob in tow. We’d started courting a year before, and he’d, knowing that I was intent on leaving the UK, supported me all the way.

Despite the fact that Rob couldn’t be with me all the time, I loved it. I cycled in the sun, I sat in the squares eating local plums, I wore linen, I perused markets…immersing my soul in Italian culture felt so good.

15 years, one marriage, one child, several businesses and a lot of experience later I still love this country. I don’t have the Tuscan farmhouse – I live in a one-bedroom apartment in a small town, but I see cypress trees and hills from my window, my son goes to school in Florence and I shop for and eat the produce that this sun-soaked soil brings forth.

And yet in three months time I will say goodbye to all of this and return to live in the UK. It won’t be a temporary thing, I’m pretty sure this is for good. I’ll leave my residency behind and, since Brexit has meant that UK citizens can no longer easily live in another European country, it means that I won’t be able to come back here easily. Ever.

Ever: Oh how something in me despairs at that word. And so you may wonder, why am I doing it?

To answer that question, I need to appreciate how we are changed both by our experiences and by the people we love and acknowledge how each of us, me included, has competing dreams and desires, which can often be seemingly pulling in very different directions.

Last summer my husband, Rob, told me that he wasn’t happy here. He misses the English weather (yes, I know!!), the air that signifies home to him, and the clouds that dominate the British skyline.

But his desire for greyness (which I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand) was just the beginning. It opened a door for both of us to look with realistic eyes at the practicalities of our situation here: Italy is renowned for its bureaucracy, and that bureaucracy takes twice as much energy when you’re not a native family. In my 20s and 30s I had endless energy; approaching 50 I no longer have those reserves. Yet I’m driven, a girl with a mission and how I use the resources I have is a vital question for me everyday. In addition, the taxes that both Rob and I have paid the last decade would literally make your eyes water. To say that the fabric of the country does not support people trying to do their own thing (in the areas Rob and I are) would be an understatement; Rob’s summation of what we’ve earned, and would earn if we stayed whilst moving forward with our creative dreams (me, a book, him, a living from music) makes me weep.

Knitted into my desire to have that Tuscan farmhouse is a deep yearning to make a home. Rob and I have moved around an incredible amount of times. With each new home, I’ve brought forth things that express that inherent desire to home-make; I’ve created art for the walls, I’ve tended a garden, I’ve chosen rugs and made cushions. Then, inevitably, we’ve moved on and I’ve watched myself dismantle it all. It hurts. I want to find a place where I can settle; where I can plant young trees and be there when they give fruit, where I can welcome a cat knowing it can call that space it’s home, where I can slowly make the kitchen perfect for all the beautiful, crazy food things I do.

And what’s most important is that I want that space with my husband and son. I am no longer the girl who decided in 2009 that she was going to move to Italy even if it meant splitting up with her then boyfriend, Rob. I’m no longer just me; I am a wife, I am a mother. I am part of a whole and I feel deeply the emotions of the two people I love most in the world.

So when Rob told me seven months ago that he didn’t think he could stay here any longer, my gut knew immediately that, no matter how much my soul sings in this country, I want a home, and I cannot make that without my boys. I knew that we had to return to the UK.

And so, it’s with sadness, trepidation, fear, hope, and groundedness that I face the fact that dreams are, life is, complex and that sometimes we have to close the door on something we love in order that something else we love may come to pass.

We are leaving Italy at the beginning of June. We took a trip to Wales earlier this year to see whether it might be the right place for us; it wasn’t. As it stands we do not know where we are going to live in the UK. I’m thankful that Rob’s mum is willing to make space for us in her small home in Kent while we figure it out, and I’m looking forward to seeing Gabriel spending time with his grandma!

Thanks to the wonders of technology, I’m able to take you with me – both here and on the podcast (where Andrea, my co-host is due to give birth to baby number four the very same week we move!). I hope to continue to share the joys of ancestral food throughout the summer as the world around me shifts and changes.

I did not come from a family of home-birthers. The only births I’d seen were on television (and they are always so great, aren’t they!). But with my husband Rob, I worked hard to try to make Gabriel’s birth as natural as possible. It was a beautiful experience.

Patrons of my podcast can hear my co-host, Andrea, and I talk about our birth stories here, in an exclusive podcast episode. You can also hear a bit about the story of how I regained my fertility after 5 years without a cycle here.

The Mother magazine published Gabriel’s birth story. Here’s a link to download the article.

For more details on how to become a supporter and patron of Ancestral Kitchen Podcast, click here.

I was recently interviewed as a guest on The Storied Recipe Podcast. It was a frank, compelling discussion that covered ancestral eating and a whole lot more! Becky, the host, said this about our interview:

Alison of Ancestral Kitchen speaks to us today from a tiny little flat outside Florence, Italy, that overlooks the land that grows and sustains her food. From there, she cooks for her family and develops resources for the rest of us on how to eat  ancestrally.

For Alison, food has been the catalyst for just about everything in her life. As a child, she turned to food when she felt, deep in her soul, that she was not home. In her very early years as an adult, she lost half her body weight in a bid to take charge of her own life and prove to herself that she could do hard things. And with that proof in hand, she made one massive change in her life after another – changes that defied expectations, aligned with her convictions, and have given her a life that feels meaningful, abundant, and joyful. She made choices like leaving a successful job for a lifestyle that she imagined, moving her family from England to Italy, and curing herself of PCOS, at least to the extent that she could resume cycles and have a child.

In this episode, we dive deep into what ancestral eating means, the benefits of eating this way, and how busy people can eat  in an intentional & healthful way. Alison is a calm and intentional person, and this conversation will bring the same to your life – oh, it will also bring you the most delicious Spelt Sourdough Pizza recipe and lots of solid, practical tips on cooking with sourdough too. For a comforting, cozy listen in the middle of your busy life, I bring you Alison!

You can find the episode on Apple Podcasts here, on Spotify here, or you can listen from The Storied Recipe’s website (plus look at the amazing pictures) here.

The recipe that I share in this interview is my Sourdough Wholegrain Spelt Pizza. If you’d like to see Becky’s amazing pictures of it and hear her experience of making it in her own kitchen, you can read her post here.

It’s a 40-minute interview and includes me talking through my overweight childhood to eating raw vegan to losing my menstrual cycle to finding ancestral foods.

You can find it, and Jane’s fabulous podcast on Apple:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/living-ancestrally-in-a-modern-world-alison-kay/id1540200066?i=1000577768137

Or on Spotify:

It’s finding ancestral foods a decade ago and embracing eating them that’s healed me. I no longer have to worry about my weight and have the son I longed for.

I talk about this, and more, on my interview with Ximena at The Functional Force. Here’s the You Tube version:

Below, aged 13, with my paternal grandfather, at Christmas. I wore out-sized clothes made for adults.

Below, aged 18, with my sister and my maternal grandmother.

The picture below was taken at age 19, a few months before I ‘decided’ I was going to lose weight.

This is me in my mid-twenties, having lost 140lbs (10 stone, 65kg). I’d pretty much swapped food for cigarettes, alcohol and partying. At this point I was climbing the corporate ladder, working for Microsoft.

Below, aged 33, I’d quit corporate and moved to Italy, was working as an English teacher near Florence and was eating raw vegan.

A year and a half after giving birth to my son, Gabriel, eating an ancestral diet, aged 41.

Celebrating my 50th birthday with my husband, Rob, and our son, Gabriel.

My 140lb+ (65kg+) weight loss.

Regaining my menstrual cycle naturally, after 5 years without a period.

My struggle with breastfeeding that led to turning to the WAPF home-made baby formula and being threatened with the child protection agency for doing so.

My son’s life-saving bowel operation aged one and a half.

The healing journey we’ve been on with him since his discharge, including the GAPS protocol.

It’s a packed listen – I have no idea how Emma managed to get it all out of me in thirty minutes!

We often go for a walk on a Sunday morning. It’s the same route we take to get supplies from our local farm.

It’s uphill for almost an hour. Vines, olives, cypresses and wildflowers flank the small road. And then, your legs are given a little break, it flattens and this view opens up:

Farmhouses and agriturismi dot the landscape.

I’m so grateful to call this area home and to the people who farm its land well, producing tasty, nutritious food that I can prepare and bring to my table with joy and love.

It’s my life and I’m honoured to share it with you.

We start off with a young girl sticking out her tongue. She always does it when she’s concentrating. In her hands she’s gingerly holding the edge of a sheet of chocolate sponge. It’s smothered in a rich brown buttercream. Holding her breath, she rolls, rolls, rolls the layer up, saying a silent prayer that it won’t break. A few cracks are OK – those could be covered up with the yet more buttercream – but if it breaks her chocolate log will be ruined.

Chocolate logs, marble cakes, easter egg cornflake nests, brownies, flapjacks… her early kitchen creativity is all about the cake. Underneath the ‘ta-dah’ of presenting a beautiful creation is the fact that it’s really all about sugar. Too young to understand what is happening to her, she has become well and truly addicted to the comfort, escape and pleasure it offers. Sugar in the cakes and biscuits, sugar in the sweets and chocolate, heck, even heaps of the white stuff stirred into yogurt.

Then, one day, aged 20 and over 20 stone (280lb), she comes to a fork in the road. She looks ahead to see the next decade of her life. She knows what she wants; fun, laughter, dressing beautifully. She also knows that to stand a chance of getting these she has to choose differently. So, that day as a packet of chocolate treats is offered to her, she says one of the hardest ‘no’s of her life. She is no longer going to be the ‘fat’ girl.

A few months later we see a very different-looking girl, clothes baggy from the weight she’s spriting away, back at work creating with food. Like a flower pushing through the crack in a pavement, without sugar, her creativity finds another way. She’s there crunching slabs of crispbread into a pizza-base. Toppings come straight out of the 1980s-aligned, ‘fat-be-the-enemy’ diet: a popular low calorie brand of ‘cheese’, plenty of tomato paste along with onions and mushrooms. Other ‘highlights’ of this time include packets of dried ‘Slim-a-Soup’, lashings of cottage cheese, meringues, brandy snaps and boil-in-the-bag, less the 500 calorie, meals. None of this seems to phase her, the empowerment she is living by watching weight fall off is enough of a high. She’s never known anything other than being fat; seeing a beautiful new girl emerging is breath-taking.

Now we need to do some scene-changing. It’s 5 years later. You see her, half her previous size, in a kitchen of her own, wedding ring on her finger. His name is Paul and he loves the good things in life. Early dates saw shellfish, champagne and steak. Unfamiliar with the joys of sensuality, she longed to feel and revelled in it. And so you see her enthusiasm, setting a table for friends, oysters, steak and Verve Cliquot. You see her smelling, tasting, loving the delights her upwardly-mobile life is allowing her to choose. She travels, scooping noodles out of bowls with locals at plastic table-clothed restaurants in Hong Kong and eating freshly made-for-her smoothies for breakfast on the beach in Jamaica.

But there’s something missing. This life indulges her Dionysian longings but is far away from the simple, homely cook that lives in her heart. After living it for a few years, she’s desperate to break out – out of this life of money, to step off of the corporate ladder she is successfully climbing, to get away from the marriage she thought was for keeps. Such hard work – but she does it.

Now imagine her at another table – this one is in a remote Russian family’s garden. It’s a warm evening. There are locals all around her and a a jaw-dropping feast before her eyes: Pork fat cut into cubes, home-made flavoured vodka in plastic bottles, ceramic bowls overflowing with tiny, dark berries. She’s passed a dish with fist-sized golden bread rolls and bites into one to find that marinated mushrooms dance on her tongue. There’s Kraut, preserved tomatoes, potato salads and dark rye bread. Her hosts have grown, foraged or caught everything that carpets her vision – nose to tail and seed-in-the-garden to vegetable-on-the-plate, fresh, marinated, cooked, fermented. She’s never seen anything like it. It blows her mind seeing how these joyful, healthful people live and love.

Returning from what has been three months travelling, she can’t believe how impoverished ‘advanced’ western culture seems compared to the life she’s seen; how much has been lost in our ‘moving forward’. She visits the supermarket and is paralysed, unable to process the sea of polystyrene-wrapped cuts of meat and Kenyan-grown vegetables. She wants to go back; back to the place where there was sense, joy, where everything was precious, where food matters.

Cemented inside her is the knowledge that she can no longer continue working a job that leaves her feeling dead inside. Passion-filled moments and people exist in the world and she has to do something she loves.

So, a 50% pay cut and a brave jump to a junior job for a music charity and we find her next kitchen on the second floor of a drafty Victorian terrace house in south London. There’s a sash window you can prop open using a bit of thick card. The sun comes round about 3pm and if it’s a good day you might even want to scramble out of the window onto the roof which covers the extension of the flat below. This kitchen sees many beautiful creations. If you are there at 7am on a Saturday you’ll be irresistibly drawn by the scent of freshly baking bread, from her new machine. It is here she learns how to grow and juice wheatgrass, how to sprout nuts and seeds; here she discovers couscous and buckwheat whilst rediscovering the blessed joyful economy of a steaming bowl of oatmeal. She works the other side of the river Thames and, every morning, she makes her packed lunch: huge doorstops of the fresh bread layered with oily, salty tuna and crisp green lettuce, couscous salads with sprouts and creamy dressing, wraps with home-made hummus. And there is chocolate again, dark, with orange oil – her daily 10 mile commute across London on her beloved bicycle means it vaporises in a cloud of pedal power.

The leap in the dark to this new life seemed to be going to plan, but there is something deeper inside her growing, watching and waiting. What she will learn is that it is no good just being brave once and thinking it is done. Being brave opens things up, pushes you on, requires you to be even braver.

From this little renaissance, her life leads her on to heart-break and illness. She pieces herself back together, with the help of a long trip to Italy to study Yoga. Here, she falls in love with all things Italian, feeling more herself in the Mediterranean world than her native UK. Back home, another serious bout of illness finds her back at her childhood home, virtually unable to leave her bed for 6 months. In this period of deep fear and uncertainty comes an unwavering commitment from somewhere deep in her gut that says, “if I can just get better, I’ll move to Italy, that’s what I really want to do.”

Now there’s another man. This one is called Rob. And, standing in front of a spiraliser with a sweet potato in his hand, he has already proved himself. She’d told him back in the UK, when he was falling for her, that she wanted out of the country, and, knowing it might mean the end of their relationship he did everything he could to help her. Their courtship has been full of words, music, dreams and food. They do everything together, including eating first vegetarian, then vegan, then, just after the move to Italy, raw vegan – hence the spiraliser and the poised sweet potato. Turning the handle, ribbons of orange flesh pour out. Rob catches them in a bowl. She riffs, adding red peppers, ripened by the Italian sun, sliced mushrooms, fresh coriander and then coats it all in a unctuous dressing made of tahini, dates, garlic, dried coriander and a touch of smoked paprika. It is creamy, sweet, crunchy, gloopy and fresh and is something she always includes when feeding curious Italians a raw vegan dinner.

In between teaching English classes she meets Rob in the sunny squares of her adopted home and they share smoothies with banana, celery and spinach, salads of sprouted chickpeas and crunchy apple, whilst back home she dehydrates sprouted buckwheat to make raw pizza and juices copious amounts of fresh produce every day.

Two hours on a train south from this kitchen and you’d be on the shores of a vast, piercingly blue, lake. One that sits nestled in the smooth green hills that form the border between Tuscany and Umbria. She finds a new kitchen here and in it discovers chestnut flour. Mixed with sweet potato, she bakes it into muffins and now sits opposite Rob, at the beautiful chestnut-wood table that is the heart of the kitchen. The muffins, having filled the room with nutty, sweet smells, steam as they break, and she watches as a river of butter melts its way down the cakey inside before scooping the mix onto her tongue. Rob licks his fingers. At 35 she can’t deny that, finally, her body is asking for a child. That yearning, and 5 years without a menstrual cycle, has pushed her on, and she’s looking for answers in food, answers that’ll show that the doctor who told her she wouldn’t be able to conceive without drugs that they were wrong, Answers that would, in the end, give her the baby she wanted, naturally.

Researching traditional cultures’ fertility foods has led her back to animal produce and cooking food. Around her now you’ll find raw milk fermenting into kefir and cabbage transforming slowly into sauerkraut. There’s also soaking whole oats, millet, buckwheat and pulses that will be blended, fermented and cooked into a myriad of different breads and pancakes. As always, these foods signal hope; belief that the future can hold the things dreamt of. Each meal becomes a celebration of the possible; a way to be with the things she dares to dream about, but isn’t able to say out loud too often for fear that they’ll not come to pass.

A year and a half later we look down on a round wooden table. Light falls across it from a wooden-framed window that leads the eye onto rolling green, English hills. There’s a baby boy, in a bouncer. nearby. On the table an array of bottles and packets surround a blender. She carefully portions out measurements into the jug, then takes a large container of raw goat’s milk from the fridge. She met the farmer before she gave birth, he delivers pints of it that fill up her freezer.

There have been a lot of shocks since the Italian kitchen on the lake. The shock of realising she and Rob needed to leave Italy in order to secure the best possibility of a natural birth. The shock of living back in England with Rob’s Mum. The shock of becoming a first-time Mum herself, aged almost 40. The shock of not being able to easily feed her baby with her own milk. The shock of so little sleep, pumping milk all through the night. All this had seen her cracking at the seams. Finally she has to admit that breast-feeing isn’t working and find another way.

The blender is the other way: the Weston Price Foundation baby formula made with unpasteurised milk. Making this fresh every day is her lifeline; the thing she can still do for her son, Gabriel, even if she can no longer supply the milk he needs herself. And the same blender continues to earn its keep as the months roll on. She cooks chicken and mackerel, blending them with unpasteurised jersey cream. She bakes sweet potato and carrot; whizzes them with raw butter. Collected apples from the laden tree in the front garden are stewed them and mixed with more cream for the little man’s delight.

From the gentle garden-of-England hills, we now move to a kitchen surrounded by salt spray, wind and the racous caw of seagulls. And let’s swap the blender for two slow cookers. And now watch her as she works the slow cookers just as hard as that blender, the world of the Gut and Psychology Syndrome diet pushing her kitchen creativity in a new direction. Because there was one more shock before she left her mother-in-law’s home: a terrifying ride in an ambulance to St Thomas’ hospital in London, where one-and-a-half-year-old Gabriel had emergency bowel surgery. Modern science saved her son’s life and then delivered him, and his exhausted parents, home to try and pick a way to recovery. They have started a new life on the coast of Cornwall, south-west England. A family decision to embark on the meat-focused, complex-carb-free, GAPS diet (which they will do for nearly 2 years) sees bone broth, meat stock and imaginative stews the central part of her creating.

The local farmers’ market staff love playing with Gabriel as she and Rob stuff the buggy and Rob’s 60-litre rucksack with local produce, preparing themselves for the, invariably rainy, seaside walk home. Once there, and dried off, she sets one slow cooker to work on stock from the bones of chickens raised on Louise’s farm, overlooking the rough Cornish waves, whilst the other one awaits scrubbed local vegetables, along with long-cook cuts of beef raised at Ian’s small-holding just a few miles north.

Sauerkraut, kefirs in abundance, sour cream; they are all still regulars on her work surfaces. On Sundays there’s often roast rare-breed pork, lard rendering and her son’s favourite, squash pancakes – a mammoth affair, where even two cast iron pans on the go at the same time can’t make dinner in less than 2 hours. And the cast iron sees a surprise ‘meatza’, with a convincingly sturdy base made from beef mince, to celebrate her and Rob’s first wedding anniversary.

Between this and when we next see her wares, a new kitchen is created. A kitchen pieced together consciously, more out of love than any she has inhabited yet. She and Rob buy a house and for the first time ever get to work out their own cooking space. At its heart is a table. A table she fell in love with when she first spied it, in pieces, in a garage housing second-hand furniture. Rob had seen it too, and they were soon finding a local carpenter to piece it back together and fashion some wooden benches so they could sit. This table will make their kitchen and their home. It is the thing she will most cry over when, unbeknownst to her now, she closes the front door of their home for the last time, 18 months hence, when Rob and her, hastened on by Brexit, finally let go into her yearning to be back in Italy and move their family to Tuscany.

But before that, there is much more food adventure to tell. Because now comes the sourdough. It’s like it has been waiting for her her whole life. At first, they just flirt – a book from the library, a few online searches. And then, slowly but ever so deeply she feels herself unstoppably heading towards it, and before she knows it she is wrist-deep in flours, starters and fermenting dough. She reads, she bakes, she steams the oven, she slashes the dough. She finds an online mentor, an experienced baker, who tempers her frustration at imperfect loaves, telling her that new bakers don’t usually dive straight into sourdough, let alone the 100% wholegrain, UK flour loaves she’s set her heart on. Practise, practise, practise – as time goes on the happy moments where she catches her breath in surprise at the beautiful loaves start to outweigh the flat pancakes.

She cultivates this magic, this alchemy, this joy. This simple creation. She feels Hesta, the Greek God of the hearth, with her in her kitchen; quiet, always sustaining, always there at the stove, the centre of the home.

Two months before she’ll say goodbye to her family home, you see her looking down at a shared meal she’s created for friends spread on the beautiful table’s well-loved wood. Three loaves of 100% whole-grain sourdough breads. Each made, to a recipe she honed, using UK grown organic flour. The first, wheat, made into a boule and cooked on a terracotta stone, is deep, crusty and filling. The second, spelt, fermented solely using raw goat’s milk kefir has a delicate, sweet, creamy taste. The third, a Russian-style Borodinsky rye, is dark and soft, full of roasted caraway seeds and toasted malt. Next to these loaves, you’ll also see fermented cabbage and a fermented pear chutney, a local salad with specks of purple viola flowers she’s been growing, spicy sausage from the farm of one of the guests, avocado and local cheese. To the side there’s water kefir, fermented with rose water and petals or ginger, cardamom and lemon.

Finally, she’s starting to see that what she does, what she’s done in every kitchen she’s lived, isn’t ‘nothing special’. Finally, she’s starting to see that cooking is creativity. Finally she’s witnessing how fundamentally she feels about local, honest, real food.

With these new perspectives, and her sourdough starter in a jar in her hand luggage, she, Rob and Gabriel say goodbye to their life and their home in the UK and get on a plane to Italy.

And here she is. Here I am. With you. At my new Italian table. I’ll be cooking and sharing what I create as I and my family navigate a fresh start in this county. An education and friends for Gabriel, a legal business structure and new music career for Rob and hopefully some good food and a bit of sun through the kitchen window for me.

You might also like:

Letting Go of A Dream…I’m Leaving Italy – this, written 5 years after the above, shares openly my thoughts on leaving the the land I love.

50 Things an Ancestral Lifestyle has Taught Me – At 50 years old, I have written a piece sharing some of the lessons of my life.

Alison’s 140lb weight loss – The Ancestral Kitchen Podcast episode where I share this part of my journey.