What’s cooking?

My 6-year-old son made 100% cacao bean-to-bar chocolate. His favourite bit was after roasting when he used a hairdryer to blow away the shells from the cacao nibs!
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His flavour choices are unmarred by my ‘grown-up’ ideas of combining. These are mint (from the garden) with orange zest. The mint hits your palette straight away and then disperses and you are left with the chocolate orange warmth.
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Meanwhile, we (as a family) are progressing with reading the 700-page ‘The Secret Life of Chocolate’. At the moment, we’re learning about physical, chemical and psychological addiction – on what level is chocolate actually addictive? I’m fascinated by this, seeing that, as an adolescent, I used to down kg bars of white chocolate regularly.
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It’s like the journey I’m taking now – to learn how cacao was originally, and can most powerfully be consumed – is healing the part of me that spent a obesity-filled childhood overeating on it.

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A boza line up. Or for those that haven’t seen me post about this fine fermented drink before, a traditionally-lacto-fermented grain drink hailing from the land around the Turkey that’s been dated by archaeologists as having been made as early as the 9th century BCE.
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Here’s it being made by an English family, in my modern Italian kitchen 😉
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Furthest away from you is fermented millet, honey and vanilla. The one in the middle is fermented millet and super-dark whole cane sugar (aka ‘Guinness’ boza!). And the one closest is fermented sorghum with golden cane sugar.
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Check out my story today (saved to Boza highlight) to watch me filming my hubby doing a taste test of all three and see which is his favourite!

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Lectin-free bread doesn’t have to a lot of ingredients with names your Grandma wouldn’t recognise in.
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It won’t feel like wheat bread does. But it’ll be good food.
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It’s so easy for us to cling to food having to be a certain way. Let’s give our taste buds and our senses the space to experience something differently.
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This loaf is millet, sorghum, salt and water. All Italian ingredients. It’s denser than the one I’ve been making with added psyllium husk. But it’s taste is better and it’s less hassle.
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Some more pics about to go in my stories (under the highlight lectin-free).

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Usually I’m a good girl and let my breads fully cool before eating. I couldn’t with this one. I just about got a photo done before I cut through that crust and plopped some butter (which promptly melted!) and scrambled eggs on a thick slice.
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It’s a spelt sourdough with a swats porridge included in the dough. Swats is a traditional Scottish ferment that I make regularly (check my story highlight for more details).
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I’m hoping to get a little course out later in the year explaining how to make Swats. And I want to include a few ways of using the results – one of which is this loaf.

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I’ve always been a ‘too much’ kinda girl.
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But as we cooks know, too much food, skillfully channelled, gives one leftovers for days.
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This is a saucepan full to the brim with a millet/sorghum/farro sourdough porridge. It’ll do us breakfast, and the leftovers will be packed into a loaf tin and left to cool. Then, I’ll be able to slice it and provide fermented polenta ‘bread’ for packed lunches and easy supper for days.
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I’d love to know one of your go-to °too much’ dishes 🙂

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Have you heard of Zombie Probiotics?! Crazy thought, right…but they are real. Seriously, there are dead but undead probiotics in many ancestral foods – sourdough bread, sauerkraut in stews, even the sourdough discard soup I posted last week.
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And, so scientists are proving, these zombie probiotics do us good. How damn cool is that?
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The technical term for these compounds isn’t zombie probiotics (shame) it’s actually paraprobiotics and postbiotics. Along with probiotics and prebiotics that’s quite a lot for a non-sciency head to hold. So I had to read about it a lot!! And then, of course, as it’s soooo cool, I wanted to share. Click on the link in my profile to read the short article explaining what these things are and how they do us good.
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If you were to read it whilst eating a slice of sourdough, I’d consider my work done 🙂

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Home-fermented olives gifted by @thelandofmint.
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These are the best olives I have ever tasted. They are soft, giving when you bite into them, bitter and at the same time sweet. There is salt too, and herbs and a delicate tang of orange zest.
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(And not a drop of omega 6 heavy sunflower oil in sight – yes!)
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I am super-excited about fermenting olives. I was too late this year – all the ones around me had gone to the frantoio (olive mill) before I could get to it. Next year they won’t escape me!

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After fermenting a whole cabbage for #sarmale at Christmas, I had some leaves left over. I loved wrapping using them, and also love the Italian ‘fegatelli’, liver parcelled up and cooked with bay and fennel seeds.
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So was born this experiment: Fermented cabbage-wrapped local pig’s liver, to be baked with onions and shredded sauerkraut in sauerkraut juice.
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My 6-year old son made some of the parcels. It was the first time he’d worked with raw liver and he was enamoured (it’s kinda like slime!)
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Check my story today (saved as the nose-to-tail highlight if you’re coming at this later) for photos of the prep and how we ate it.

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I regularly make the glorious Turkish fermented drink ‘Boza’. I mix cooked millet with a home-made starter and golden cane sugar. After 5 days in the warm it has transformed into a lacto-fermented, fizzy-on-the-tongue, sour, sweet-edged, probiotic-rich drink.
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Having got the basics under my belt, I’m starting to experiment. Here’s the latest two batches both using alternative sweeteners – the first with local, raw honey from @thecreatorscastle as the second using seriously dark unrefined cane sugar. My son’s looking forward to trying the results!

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