What’s cooking?

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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They’re alive! Microbes, doing their job in my ancestral ale, just like they would have done in the kitchens of females in my home country, the UK, five hundred years ago.
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This ale is kitchen-made, grain malted at home, starter culture created here, glass bowls, saucepans and jars used.
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I learn something new with every batch. This time, I’m using the spent grain in three, quite different, sourdough breads. I’ve taken tonnes of video…you can see it all in my story today.

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