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Have you ever eaten off a table? I mean literally the food served directly on the table and no plates? I am totally in love with this ‘Polenta on the Table’ recipe from a @chef_valentina cookbook I picked up in a charity shop in the UK. The image she creates of everyone digging in and then forks chinking together at the end has me bouncing up and down wanting to cook and serve it.
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How would you feel eating food like this? Seriously….do you think I’m bonkers?!
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I have a thing about tables. Ours is chestnut wood. We bought it second-hand from an Italian lady – it was made my her husband. I love what Valentina says about tables:
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“The best kind of table is one that is much battle-scarred and imbued with flavours of a thousand and one meals prepared and eaten on it with love and care.”
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Sigh…

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All rose petals are edible. Water kefir on a second ferment is a great place for them. They give a delicate floral flavour to the bubbles and make it look a shade like pink champagne.

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Is a pizza a pizza if it doesn’t have tomato or cheese? Perhaps it’s a focaccia (or as they are called in Tuscany, schiacciata)? This was supposed to be a Fitascetta, but it’s not as I couldn’t find red onions in the groovy local shop that I have fallen in love with since lockdown.
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Arghh…you know what (she says quietly considering she lives in Tuscany), I don’t really care what it is. Or if it breaks the ‘rules’. What I know that it tastes d.i.v.i.n.e. 🙂
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Sourdough spelt dough, mixed by my 6-year old, topped with lard-fried onions, olives, olive oil, garlic and oregano from the garden. Every ingredients is organic. It took 5 minutes in our oven – that’s the quickest I’ve ever got a pizza done. It makes such a difference to the base and dough.
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We’ve got a huge wooden table in our kitchen. There’s extra space. I wish you could come and share…

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Are you cooking along with me this month?! The recipe is nutritionally-dense soda bread. You can cook it you way – choose your flour, choose your liquid, choose what yummies you add. And you can choose to do these scones – I added lemon zest and raisins to the dough. They are good. Proper good 🙂
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All the details in the link on my bio.
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Give it a read, cook it up, eat it (the best bit) and then show and tell me what you’ve done.

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The best pizza dough maker in the house. Seriously, the dough he makes is far better than mine. I think it’s because he takes a loooong time over it so it gets super-worked.
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Looking forward to eating this tomorrow – it will go in the fridge tonight to long ferment. I think I’m going to make a Fitascetta, which is a dough (in this case wholegrain sourdough spelt) topped with an enormous quantity of fried red onions.

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Chicken stock. Today I am coming to the end of a fast. I love food and am a grumpy faster. But I appreciate what it brings me and very much believe it has an important place in the routine of our days and weeks.
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Eating is not just about fuel. And fasting brings with it much mental and emotional challenge. To not base my life around food. To see how much I do use it as an escape, despite years of self-work. To rest, truly rest – man, how hard is that?
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We fast as a family, together makes so much difference. Up till recently, it’s been ad-hoc, whenever a health challenge presented itself. But more and more we plan to work it into our weekly routine. The grumpy me doesn’t like that. but all the other parts of me think it’s a brilliant step.

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Want to bake bread with me? This month’s @ancestralcookup is bread. Gorgeous, dense, cakey soda bread…but with a twist – made ancestrally so that it’s as nutrient-dense as it possibly can be.
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I’ve written up a template recipe that you can take and adapt to your kitchen, your supplies, your preferences. I’ve even included a method to make soda scones – trust me, they are delicious!
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Here’s how:
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Click the link in my profile.
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Adapt the recipe to suit you.
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Bake it sometime this month (or two or three times this month!).
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Share it here and tag me.
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Enjoy it! Fresh. Toasted. With stew. With butter. With cheese. In you PJs. However you like 🙂

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Don’t you just love soda bread? It’s density, its moreishness, its cakiness, its simplicity. The only downside, in the past, for me, was that the flour wasn’t pre-fermented or pre-soaked, and I know that means less nutrients available for my … Read More

We’ve an organic farm a few miles uphill from our place. Last time my husband ran there he came back with an absolutely huge piece of beef fat. We used the slow cooker to render this – tallow.
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Tallow is good for a lot of reasons. It’s a saturated fat with naturally-occurring A, D, E and K. The reason I love it so much though is that it’s very stable at high temperatures, which means I can use it in my super-hot cast iron pan for frying without worrying.
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We got this beef fat for literally pennies (they throw it away) and from it have rendered bowls of tallow that, with the other fats I use (lard, olive oil and coconut oil) will last us several months.

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I cleaned the shelf where I hide my ferments. They looked so splendid on the table I’d thought I’d take a photo. And I remembered you haven’t seen me for a while 😉
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From left to right:
banana skin vinegar – fermented garlic – bread kvass 1st ferment – ginger carrots – sauerkraut – water kefir 1st ferment – another water kefir 1st ferment – water kefir 2nd ferment with lemon and ginger – bread kvass 2nd ferment with mint (almost gone!) – water kefir 2nd ferment with strawberry (almost gone too!).
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And off camera there’s a sourdough starter, some blended fermenting millet and some blended fermenting farro.
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There are a lot of bubbles in my small kitchen.

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