What’s cooking?

The rituals centered around food that I’ve developed with my husband Rob and son Gabriel impart so much joy and meaning to my life.
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We walk to our local market on a Thursday, talk to the producers and pick up our vegetables #mercatointransizione
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Every two weeks we walk to meet Flavio and collect the meat, fat and offal from animals he’s cared for in the local hills @valledelsasso
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At the weekend, we grind grains using a hand-crank grinder whilst reading books together.
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Every few days, I prepare bread ingredients and hand them to my son, who’s mixing and kneading skills grow week on week.
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In the morning, I commune with all my ferments – stirring what’s bubbling, sometimes the Scottish sowans, sometimes the Turkish boza, sometimes the ancient beer. They are ready to do their work for another day and so am I.
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And, lastly for this post, as pictured, every 6 weeks or so we render lard. These are my husband’s hands chopping the back fat. It’s his job. I sat by him and chatted as he meditatively worked through the supply. It goes in the slow cooker. For a day our house smells delicious and there are bowls, sieves and containers everywhere. And then, in the evening, we get to eat the crunchy fatty cracklings. My son calls them ‘niblets’.
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I think, not so long ago, our lives revolved around rituals like this. And having immersed myself in them, I can taste and feel in my body just how grounding, gratitude-inducing and joy-giving they are.
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Let me keep going in this direction. It’s a good one.
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I’d love to hear about one of your most enjoyable kitchen rituals…

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When I made wild beer, I don’t just get beer. I use the spent grains in bread and turn the spent ‘crumbs’ into porridge.
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Here’s spent rye crumbs made into a porridge, flavoured with 100% cacao liquor (ground roasted cacao beans, no additions) and topped with home-cracked local hazelnuts and melting ghee. It ain’t half bad as a breakfast!

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All grains, and all ways of cooking grains are not equal.
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Grains have been part of our diet for more than 12,000 years, but it’s only very recently that we’ve eaten them highly-industrialised and outsourced their preparation and cooking to corporations.
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In the past, I’ve avoided grains. Now they are a central part of my kitchen. But how I use and eat them looks nothing like how it did in my Mum’s kitchen. In today’s podcast episode @farmandhearth and I share what grains we eat and how we prepare them. You’ll hear a lot of talk of various forms of fermentation, a discussion on reintroducing grains into your diet and some easy ways for you to unlock the nutritional power of grains in your own kitchen.
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You can download using your podcast app – search for @ancestralkitchenpodcast, or you can stream/download from my site – there’s a link in my profile.

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If you’ve not put sweet potato in a sourdough before, I’d recommend it!
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Here we have two spelt sourdoughs, each with a big blob of mashed sweet potato in the dough. The one on the left I made and flavoured with nigella seeds and tumeric. The one on the right my son made (he even patiently peeled all the sweet potato!) and flavoured with rosemary.
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The bread is naturally sweet, from the potato, and the crumb is so bouncy and soft – it’s a trampoline bread 🙂
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Thank you so much to @elliemarkovitch and @flourambassador for getting me to finally do this. Your Zoom intuitive baking class was such an inspiration.
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Check my story today for a video and a picture of the crumb.
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I’ll be writing up the recipe I used and putting it into my newsletter that goes out later this week. If you’d like to receive it, there’s a link in my profile.

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Dark Italian greens – like the cavolo nero here – are bursting from the stalls at my local farmers’ market, so I’ve got my stew head back on. Here, the slow cooker has done its work on some ossobuco from @valledelsasso, lots of onions and a few carrots.
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I chop everything the night before, put it all on low and then by lunch the next day we have a heart and soul-warming dish. Slice a bit of sourdough and spread it with home-rendered lard and it’s done.
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If you’re in the northern hemisphere, are you getting some good ‘winter’ greens? What are you doing with them?

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This cake it both delicious and fascinating. It’s Castagnaccio: Tuscan Chestnut Cake, made with flour from just-harvested local chestnuts.
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Its flavour is a wonder – rich, deep, sweet, smokey.
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Its history is profound – chestnuts have, at times, been the only sustenance available to the communities in mountainous regions of Italy. So many dishes were creatively concocted by the generations who literally grew-up on chestnuts.
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Cucina povera, and its world-wide equivalents, gift us so much and it feels amazing to continue to honour the seasons, the produce and the simple recipes.
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Many people here with Italian ancestry have contacted me saying they can’t wait for the chestnut flour to appear in their local Italian deli. This is the way to use it!
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I’ll be cooking this live, a week today, Nov 12th at 7am PST/4pm CET, on Zoom with @farmandhearth and our podcast patrons. If you’re interested in cooking along and aren’t a yet a patron, do check @ancestralkitchenpodcast to find out how to come along.

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This sourdough pizza has the last of the garden basil in its pesto topping. I’m so grateful for the beautiful herbs my garden has given me this year – basil, parsley, chives, pineapple sage (which is currently in beautiful flower), mint and tarragon.
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The garden’s slowing down now and I’ve filled four of my containers (I’m a container-only gardener) with #bokashi – fermented kitchen waste. This will, I hope, mean that come January I will have refreshed soil ready for another year of growing.
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The pizza-making, however, continues a-pace. Gabriel, my 7-year old, mixes all the doughs. He is our #pizzaiolo in the making! The recipe for the spelt flour sourdough base is in my profile.

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I’m back on it with the ancestral beer! Here we have three bottles of rye beer made to a 5,000-year old recipe (inspired by @sandorkraut’s process in #wildfermentation) from home-sprouted grain. They are about to go down for a second fermentation which will develop the flavour and give some carbonation.
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Like my previous batches, I’ll be using the spent grain from this process to make bread and porridge. This time however, instead of using the grains straight out of the ferment, I’m going to try dehydrating the larger pieces and then grinding them into flour.
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This is a particularly interesting brew for me as, instead of using sourdough starter to kick the fermentation, I’ve ‘borrowed’ some of the millet starter I use to make Boza (see my story if you want to know what Boza is) and have tried using that. This second starter has a *much* stronger yeast profile (rather than the strong bacteria profile in the sourdough starter) which should mean my beer is far less sour.
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Some videos and more pictures in my story today.

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My days off Instagram have given me the longed-for chance to write more. Here’s the first, of hopefully more, pieces.
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My aim here is to give a simple and clear definition of ancestral food. In my ‘previous life’ (which feels like centuries ago), I used to try and give simple and clear instructions on how to use Microsoft’s software. Gosh how I savour the opportunity to write about this instead.

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