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The question Andrew and I receive the most is, how do you do it?How do you cook three meals a day, 365 days a year for you and your families?We thought it was about time we tackled this question head on.
And I really wanted to do it in a practical way.So in this episode, you will hear two real life examples of how we took one cooking session and let it guide the food we served and ate for a whole week.
If you've ever thought or felt that you don't have enough time, if you've ever wondered how we come up with the goods at every mealtime, if you've opened the fridge and felt that sinking feeling, what today?This episode will help.
There are a lot of recipes and dishes mentioned.We've put all of them into a downloadable, printable PDF, which is available to patrons of the show.Check out the show notes if you'd like your copy.
Welcome to the Ancestral Kitchen podcast.
I'm Alison, a European town dweller living in England.
And I'm Andrea, living on a family farm in Northwest Washington State, USA.
Pull up a chair at the table and join us as we talk about eating, cooking, and living with ancestral food wisdom in a modern world kitchen.
Good afternoon, Alison.Good morning.
That feels weird saying it.And it's obviously afternoon my side, but good morning to you.I know.Good morning to you.
It does feel weird saying good afternoon.And also I should say, coming up on fall here, end of summer, winding down the season.Yeah.
Yeah.Yep.This is the perfect time for the conversation we're about to have.
Oh, I think it is because, you know, we all like to enjoy hearty meals as the autumn, as I would say, this side of the pond kicks in, especially leading into that kind of period where kids potentially are back at school.
So we're busy, but also we want something hearty, heartier than perhaps we want it in the summer.Yeah.
Yeah, great point.Well, speaking of what we ate, what did you eat before we started?
We had some pork belly, which was cut into strips, and then I chopped it up into kind of smaller kind of chunky bits of pork belly in the cast iron pan with fennel and celery and leeks.
Really yummy combination that I just, I've loved this year, those three things together.And I had mine with basmati rice, which was just yummy, yummy, yummy, really tasty and simple because the rice, simple to cook.I don't even need to look at it.
And the cast iron pan just kind of looked after itself with a few stirs.So how about you?
It's as it should be.And I love the pairing of fennel with pork.Yeah.
If you haven't got fennel, just use the seeds and it's the same thing.Yeah.
Exactly. Actually, I was going to tell you what I had for dinner last night because it was something delicious that I feel like would be useful, especially going into this busy season you alluded to.
And this is a meal that we make about every other week right now.And I absolutely love it.I started it because I would make it in the morning before I left for my midwife appointments in the
like the early spring and it could just simmer on the stove until I got back and it was perfect.So it's the beef stew recipe from the Nourishing Traditions for Children cookbook.
And we started off of that and then, you know, we've sort of evolved it into the spinoff that works for our family and the things that we have available.
And we don't, if you're looking at the recipe in the book, which I actually linked it in the show notes, Alison, because it's in our bookstore.
And I really love and I really recommend this book because even children who can't read can cook out of it because everything is drawn in pictures.It's really gorgeous.
And I actually think also if somebody wants to start with nourishing traditions and they're super overwhelmed, just start with the children's book because she breaks it down and makes everything very simple.
But if you're looking at the recipe, we don't actually have to soak the beef ahead of time in the apple cider vinegar the way she does because of the way Gary trimmed and cut when we butchered our cow.But it is so delicious.
And then the other thing that I do significantly different is I add in the tempered sourdough that I learned from you out of our cookbook. Which I'll also link in the show notes.
But in your soup recipe in there, you explained how to thicken your soup with sourdough starter without getting like globs. And that has changed my life in so many ways.
And it's incredible because you can have a thick, really rich, hearty stew without getting out another pan and toasting butter and toasting flour and everything is soaked and just ready to go and you can use up, discard if you have it, blah blah.
So that's what we had and it was delicious.
So, let's dive into today's topic because we've got a lot to talk about.The question that we are answering today is something that we both get all the time.
And, you know, sometimes I ask myself the same question, which is, how do I cook three meals a day, seven days a week, four weeks a month, 12 days a year? I think our answer is the trick is not to.
And we've had lots of kind of questions from listeners saying, can you give me an example of how you do that?
You know, so if you're not cooking every day, but you're still providing hearty, fresh meals to your family every day, how are you doing that?
And so we are here in this episode with an example from both of us of how we feed our families every day with home-cooked food and yet we don't cook every day.
And as a bonus for everyone who is supporting us here at the podcast, we've put all of the recipes that we will talk about today, which are our own recipes, in an e-book that you can download.
Before we dive in to the topic, I wanted to explain about our community here, which is where you can get hold of that ebook if you want to.So we have a community around the podcast and we administer that through Patreon.
That's sometimes why you hear us talking about Patreon or our patrons here on the podcast.And some of the people join us because they just wanna support what we're doing.
and they believe in what we're doing just like we believe in it, yeah, and thank you.
And then other people join us because they want a community and that's part of the reason, you know, I wanted to start this podcast because I felt a lack of community.
You know, they want more, they want more of us and they want also to meet other people who are living this way to feel supported and that community has lots of benefits.
associated with it that Andrew and I, we both make every month and we're thinking about the patrons all the time.And we have a monthly extra podcast that we record for patrons, which is private in a separate feed.
which you can get on the same app that you listen to this podcast on.
We have a monthly live chat where we meet up, you can have video on or video off, and we just get together and talk about what's going on in our lives, ask questions, answer questions, talk about books.That's such fun, that chat.
We have Aftershows, which you often hear us talking about in these episodes, and Extras.
And this e-book that I just mentioned as an example of one of those, that's going to be in our library of extras, which has a lot of documents in there, recipes, how-to guides, helpful hints that you can download.
We have a forum, which is what we refer to as Discord on the podcast.So if you've heard us talking about Discord and you don't know what it is, it's easy to use.There are no adverts in it.
So it's not like Facebook or Instagram where you're scrolling a feed and you see things that other people want you to see.You just see our patrons chatting and talking.It is so wonderful.And that's our forum where we're
on there asking questions, sharing stuff, talking about books, talking about recipes, sharing photos, talking about animals, talking about pregnancy, talking about all the things that are associated with this lifestyle.
There are four different levels which you can join our Patreon community at and each level has different benefits.We do have our top level is the mentorship level, which if you want one-on-one time with Andrea or I, that's included in that top level.
So you can go and check that out.And if you want to join, get hold of this PDF.Andrea, you have something that we wanted to read, which is the words of one of the patrons.Do you want to go ahead and share that?
Yeah, this is from Nicole, who is one of our
amazing patrons, and she is in the Discord chat and always contributing amazing, amazing things to the conversation.She said, when I first stumbled across the ancestral food approach, I was so taken by the concept.
It just seemed like common sense, and it was so very much in line with my beliefs and values.So I wanted to do all the things right away. I soon realized that that's just not possible.
There is so much skill and learning involved, not to mention the formation of new habits and ways of doing things. Although the podcast continues to be a source of information and inspiration for me, Discord has really given me a sense of community.
And it's that deeper connection and the fun and learning and growing that goes along with that, that has been so helpful as I continue to strive towards a more ancestral kitchen and lifestyle.
Wow.You make such a great point with the habits thing.That's such a big part of it.
Exactly, to move into this way of cooking and living.It's taken both of us many, many years to do that.It's not something that has happened overnight and we're both still learning and making new habits and so having that community is so important.
Yep. Okay.So, let's dive into today's topic.Just to recap, we do not cook three meals a day, seven days a week.I think I would go mad if I had to do that.And I know that everyone is saying… Yeah, we just sort of family starve.Yeah, exactly.
You want to eat?Okay, get into the kitchen. We know that all of our listeners have other things to do other than just be in the kitchen, no matter how much we love it.And you know, I do love it on most days, on a good day, I really love it.
And we have work, we have a household to look after, we have children, our children get sick, maybe we homeschool, we've got families, we've got gardens, and we're people as well, we've got to look after ourselves.
And we want to grow and learn and read and that kind of thing. So the trick is to wisely use leftovers.And by that, I mean plan your leftovers, intentionally use leftovers.Make more so you can have leftovers.
There's an interesting discussion on Discord a while back that is, is leftover actually a leftover if you intentionally make it?And I think that's fun to think about.
Leftovers are such a part of both of our kitchens and they are the things that keep us sane.We do it all the time. So in this episode, we're going to give you two really, really practical examples of a week's worth of meals.
One of them is based on a slow-cooked beef heart, which I know a lot of listeners have cooked.The other one is based on the Chuckanut Hills roast bird and gravy.
Now, both of those base recipes are in our first cookbook, Meals at the Ancestral Hearth, which you can get hold of by going to ancestralkitchenpodcast.com forward slash shop.
So, we'll be talking about those recipes and then how we can use those recipes to feed our family for seven days.
We've got some delicious additional original recipes throughout this episode and we will talk about them but as we mentioned earlier we've written them out and we've also included in the document that's part of this episode a whole kind of two-week plan
for how you can use these recipes to take you forward and to feed your families.It's all been put in a beautiful document by Megan who's doing some admin work for us and that's available to download for patrons.
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Okay, so the first of the two base recipes we were going to talk about and explain how we use it for a week is the slow-cooked beef heart, which is in Meals at the Ancestral Hearth.And there's kind of two ways I wanted to talk about this recipe.
The first one is to explain how we just use the leftovers in very, very simple ways.And the second way is to explain about two kind of new recipes. So first of all, just some basics about the beef heart.
Now, beef hearts vary in size, and I always cook mine in the slow cooker.That's why the recipe is slow-cooked beef heart.If you don't have a slow cooker, you can put it on the stove down very, very low.
But the size of your heart... Oh, do you not have the slow cooker?Oh, you don't use it, do you?Because it takes a bit more electricity.Is that right? But your recipe works exactly on the stove, as you said, when I use my Dutch oven.Great, okay.
So how long your heart will last depends on how big your heart is, obviously.So for us, the one that I tested out for this last kind of round of the recipes, the beef heart weighed one and a half kilograms, which is three and a third pounds.
It was a big one, but not as big as some of the ones that I've had, actually.
That fed us for five days, plus it gave us two and a half litres, which is about two and a half quarts of beef stock, plus it gave us some fat as well, which sat at the top of the beef stock once I'd cooled it.
Now, there are three of us, and one of us is a 10-year-old.So, if you've got a bigger family, like, you know, for you, Andrea, or if you want your heart to last longer, you'd need a bigger heart.
So for you, probably that one and a half kilogram wouldn't last as long as five days.But some of the beef hearts I've had have been up to two and a half kilos.And that may well last you five days, if not more.
My own slow cooker can take a heart that's up to two and a half kilograms.So that's not a problem.Sometimes I have to kind of push the lid down a bit, but it works. The great thing about heart cooked this way is that it lasts.
So you can leave it in the fridge for at least five days, often seven.It freezes really well though.So sometimes even though I could leave it in the fridge, I'll cut the heart and I'll freeze it in chunks.
You can also slice it beforehand and then freeze it.
I know that one of the patrons, once they've cooked their heart, they slice it and then they pop it in the fridge on a tray with the slices separate until they've started, you know, until they've gone hard and they've frozen.
And then they take them out they put all those slices into a freezer bag and then they can just pull them out really quickly.And so you imagine a really thinly sliced piece of beef heart is going to defrost really quickly.
So if you just want one as a kind of a quick protein snack or a sandwich filler, you can.Or if you then wanted to pull out like six slices and feed your family. could as well.They really quickly reheat on the stove.
I know you fried those slices in garlic butter quite a bit, Andrea, haven't you?And I think that's, I haven't done it yet, but it sounds lovely.
So you've got the option of, once it's cooked and cooled, putting it in the fridge and or cutting some up and leaving it in the freezer.So as an example, this beef heart that I cooked that weighed three and a quarter,
pounds, three and a third pounds.The way that we ate that beef heart was on the first day we ate it warm, really, really lovely with broccoli, bread and lard.That was day one.Then I had some on day two in sourdough bread sandwiches with mustard.
Mustard goes really, really well with beef heart.Horseradish works really nicely too. Day three, I cooked the heart with a creamy mushroom and mustard sauce, which we'll talk about.
Day four, I fried the heart in lard, and then I served it with Staffordshire oat pancakes, which is another recipe that's in our book. And then day five, I made beef heart bolognese.Now that's just five days.
If you've got more heart, you could double one of those recipes and make it last for longer, or you could have the heart in sourdough sandwiches just for one day, or, you know, anything, any way that you would use leftover meat, you can use heart.
You can mince it up, you can slice it, any way.Okay. So let's talk, yeah, go on.
Well, I was just going to ask if you, are you going to talk about the, because some of that, if you say I fried it in lard and served it, you know, it's not so much a recipe, but the mushroom and the mustard sauce, which everybody's been drooling over in discord.
So, and the bolognese, I was wondering if you were going to talk about those specifically.
Yeah, I wanted to because, you know, when you have leftovers for an extended period of time that are the same, like, you know, if you've got a beef heart that lasts five days or a beef heart that lasts seven days, it's quite easy to become bored with how you're serving it.
You know, there's only so many times I think you can have sliced beef heart between two bits of bread, no matter how nice the bread is and how nice the heart is and how nice the mustard is, without thinking, oh, I've got this again.
And particularly family saying that to you, you know, even if you love it.So that's why I wanted to, exactly, no, just eat it. I wanted to share two kind of ways to jazz up
the beef heart in other recipes because it's such a wonderful food to have around and because it's awful and no one eats it, I absolutely love that, you know, and lots of people have made it and love the taste.
But to make it more exciting and more exciting for your family and also to play with it as a meat that people don't expect necessarily to be in other recipes because they're expecting muscle meat to be in these recipes.
Whereas, as we know, the heart is a muscle, but they're not expecting heart.So that's a long way of saying yes, I'm going to talk about the recipes.So the first one... Yeah, yeah, exactly.That's my version of yes.
The first one is a mushroom and mustard sauce, which is really creamy.The recipe is in the PDF, which patrons have access to.So as I said earlier on, mustard is really good with beef heart.
And when I realized that, I thought, well, let's play with that idea and see how I can mix that up and make another dish with mustard because I think that would go really well.And I love mushroom with mustard.
And when you put mushroom and mustard together, you've got to put cream in it.And I thought, okay, let's play with this idea.And so that's where this leftover beef heart with creamy mushroom and mustard sauce came in.And it's really quite simple.
You just melt butter in a cast iron pan. then chop some garlic into it and cook that garlic for a little while gently so it doesn't burn.Add some stock and boil that down until it's reduced to half which is putting so much extra flavour in there.
You can use the stock that came from the beef heart cooking originally in the slow cooker.And then you add cream, and you add mustard.Stir it really well.Slice up your mushrooms and put them in.And then leave it on medium-ish heat.
Stir it every now and again until it thickens slightly.It won't thicken much but it will thicken slightly.And then get your heart out.Chop it up into, I usually do kind of cubes for this.Stir it through the sauce and that's it.Literally.You serve it.
We've eaten it many, many ways.I had rice for lunch and I love putting this sauce over rice and you can cook that rice in the beef stock as well.So you're getting a kind of double whammy of stock and the flavor.
It's really nice on pasta because it's so creamy.It's kind of, it reminds you a bit of carbonara because all the cream goes over the pasta.It's really nice on toast, kind of the crunchy,
texture of the toast with the kind of creamy, mushroomy topping that kind of melds into the toast a little bit.It's really, really yummy. sometimes serve it with millet and again I'll use the beef stock to cook the millet in.
One of our patrons who's in Australia, hi there Francine, put the mix, after she made this she loved it, and she put the mix into pastry and made a pie with it.Oh my gosh.I know, exactly.
I think that would be wonderful because just the decadence of pastry.So good. and then the creamy kind of mushroomy, mustardy yumminess inside.I think that would be wonderful.
There is a recipe for spelt sourdough pastry in the second podcast cookbook, which is called Sourdough Spelt Every Day. So that's the first recipe, and that is Patreon-tested.And they loved it.They really, really loved it.
Megan actually, who did the book, she also made it, and she wrote what we'll call a recipe review.Do you want me to read it?Yeah, go, go. Okay, she said, this meal is absolutely delicious, decadent, flavor, nourishing.
My family of three cleaned our plates.My almost nine-year-old is an organ meat skeptic, but he likes this.That's good to know.Wow.
So the fact that it... That's the good thing about heart.I think organ meat skeptics can eat it.And it's not like liver.It's not like kidneys.It's got... a delicate flavor and a texture that is like meat that people who don't like offal prefer.
And when you put it in that sauce with the creamy mushroom and mustard, it just, it's just the meat in it.It doesn't, for me, it doesn't feel like it's offal.
It just, it's a beautiful sauce with wonderful flavors and the meat's really deeply flavored and nourishing.So I'm imagining that.
Adriana, who's another one of our patrons, and she lives in the South, she always posts these really good pictures of how she cooks up greens and stuff.So I'm imagining she would serve this with a side of
Oh man, you could even put the collard greens cooked like in this under the sauce.That'd be so good.
And I would probably serve it, if I was making it for a fast sort of a, you know, leftover use up type night, I'd probably make polenta in broth and have that because you could either put the polenta in a bowl and then put it on top.
Or if you make a really firm polenta, you can actually cut off wedges
You could even make the polenta ahead, which we've done too.
Yeah, exactly.I think the greens under it would be really nice.I'm kind of thinking, you know, if you had spinach on the bottom of the plate and you poured this all over, all the cream would kind of go in the spinach as well.
That would be really tasty. It's so flexible, that recipe.And that's really the idea behind the next, the second kind of extension of beef heart recipe that I came up with, which is leftover beef heart bolognese.And this one, I
I mean, when you make the bolognese with beef heart, you just, a bit like the mushroom, you just can't tell it's beef heart.It's just a meaty flavor in there that goes so well with the flavors of bolognese.And bolognese is such a
I mean, I'm sure if you go to Bologna, you have to follow exactly the way that the Bolognese do it.And if you don't, then you're probably sacrilegious.
But really, Bolognese has been taken and adapted by every single household in the world slightly differently, I think.And that's the wonder of it, in my opinion, that You know, you can do it however you want.
So, the recipe I came up with is the way I did it in preparation for this PDF that we made and trying out, but sometimes I do it differently.And so, I'm saying just take your bolognese and make it however your family love it.
Perhaps you'd like more garlic than me or you want carrots in it or you want peas. maybe you even as well as the beef heart you want to put some liver in it which is something that I've done in the past.
The way that I like to do it is I use bacon as well as beef heart and so I'll fry that first of all, put extra lard in if I need to and then I'll put in diced onions and cook them really gently and then some garlic, again make sure you don't burn the garlic, then I'll add carrots and I usually leave those to cook
for like 10 minutes or so to make sure they've softened.And then I'll put in mushrooms and stock from the beef heart, from when it was originally cooked, and then tomato paste.And then just cook that until the mushrooms have kind of reduced.
At the end, I often like to put red pepper in.I prefer it put in at the end rather than just kind of disintegrated during the whole cooking. and then I use oregano and I've got that in the garden so I just put that in.
Obviously you can use whatever herbs you want to, basil, rosemary, whatever you fancy.And then at the end of that I will dice up my heart just like I did for the mushroom recipe and mix it in, warm it and again
This classic could be on pasta, but it's great on rice, it's great with cooked spelt, it's good with potatoes, jacket potatoes, with it on the top with some cheese, sourdough bread, all of it just is absolutely delicious.
And, you know, your family kind of won't know there's heart in it and you'll be the winner, even though you actually cooked the heart five days before.Obviously, you can make... You can make more of these as well.
If you want to have exciting heart leftover recipes, you could make double of the mushroom and double of the bolognese and mix them up throughout the week.
So you'll have it one, perhaps you have one day the bolognese on potato, and the next day you have the mushroom and mustard sauce on sourdough.
The next day, perhaps you've got polenta with the bolognese, and then maybe you do the pie and pastry thing with the mushroom one.Yeah.Towards the end everybody says,
How do you do it?How do you have the time?Yeah, yeah.And you're like, I'm a genius.And then do you tell them that you just make it all ahead, or do you just not say?
I think I would just say, oh, I don't know, it's the mood I was in.I would just say, I'm super organized.Yeah, get with it, guys.Get with the program.Exactly.Exactly.Amelia.I wouldn't sell them.Go on.
Amelia is one of our patrons who lives in Wales, and she also made this recipe.I mean, I know you saw her pictures.And everybody was hungry.Amen.And she says of this recipe, so, so good.We are definitely heart converts.
Thanks for giving me the push and courage to cook it. Oh, that's a nice thing to hear from Amelia.Once you start cooking hard, there's just no going back.
Yeah, I agree.Just for the ease of it as well, you know, it is an easy thing to cook and have again and again.
And I've seen Amelia's pictures, she posts pictures in Discord of beef heart and, you know, sometimes she has it straight sometimes and she made this bolognese and loved it.
And also she's paired it with the Staffordshire oatcakes that I talked about earlier, which are also available in our cookbook. Bring to mind your kitchen.Now imagine it full of expert women fermenters ready to teach you everything they know.
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Go check out their courses via the link in the show notes.I'm betting there's something there that's going to get you really excited.Happy fermenting.Okay, Andrea, let's move on to chicken as another option for seven meals in one day.And
I'm interested to hear this from your perspective because, you know, I've got just the three of us here.You have a bigger family and a lot of our listeners have bigger families too.
And I want to hear if you can make it work in the same way with what you're cooking.
Yeah, well, we do.And I would say that it's rarely do we have a meal that just starts and ends in that moment.My brain doesn't really work that way.Usually all of our meals are linked somehow from another meal.
I prefer, and some people say things like, oh, I don't like leftovers.So I've had the joy of getting to work in several different restaurant kitchens, and I like to think of it as prepping the way a restaurant does.
So, you know, your job working in the kitchen might be to cook up a bunch of chicken and shred it, put it in a container, because it's on the schedule for the next day.
There needs to be, you know, five pounds of shredded chicken in the fridge or something, or whatever chef wants.And so think of your fridge as a restaurant fridge, where you've got your prepped items in there, or your freezer.
Of course, we don't have walk-ins, we wish, but then you don't have to call it leftovers.You can just call it you're prepped the meals that your staff.
Yeah, I love that idea.And I think, you know, when I open my fridge and look in my fridge, that's often how it looks, you know?Yes.And I've never really thought of it like that, but I like that.
It is pieces that are kind of prepared or cooked or fermented or chopped.And I had a friend that taught me this and I've used it when somebody comes over to help and they say, what can I do?If you kind of know what you're making,
not just that day, but maybe that day or maybe throughout the week, you can say, yeah, I need three onions diced and in a container and I need a pound of cheese shredded.And, you know, there could be tasks that are done ahead of time.
And this is kind of one of those.So in our cookbook, I have the roast bird recipe, which is really simple.And we usually do two birds at a time.So, so you can
We do versions of this either with the roasted chicken or with a spatchcock chicken, kind of depends on the weather.If the barbecue is up and running, I'll sometimes do it outside or sometimes spatchcock it in the kitchen.And for this particular
day, the week that all this happened, I had spatchcocked and roasted two of our smaller birds that were three pounds each.So not as much meat as you would expect, typically, from a chicken.
And I spatchcocked them by cutting out the backbone and then flattening them.If you just Google spatchcocked chicken, you'll find it.Also sometimes called butterflied.
You don't have to take out the backbone, but in this instance, I did, and that played into my week.So I cooked both those chickens, and then what we ended up doing, and again, this wasn't really planned.
I don't know how your beef heart week was, Allison, but I didn't really plan this.It just kind of happened because these were the resources I had, and so I turned them into the meals we ate. Yeah.If that makes sense.
That's usually the way round that my kitchen works.I open the fridge and I look at what's in there.Yeah.And then I decide what I'm going to do.
So I think with the mushroom recipe, I just had mushrooms and with the bolognese, I have most of those things in my kitchen, in my fridge all the time.So yeah, I work similar to you.
It depends on what's in my fridge and I'll open it and I'll look at it and I'll think, right, how can I take this leftover and use what's in my fridge and come up with something that I fancy that I know my boys will eat?Yeah.
And sometimes you loosely know, you know, on Tuesday I want to have tacos for everybody, but what exactly goes into tacos might not be known until you look in the fridge and say, oh, we do have mushrooms.Very good.
You know, then that would help you decide what goes into it.So the first meal we had off these chickens was I cut up pieces of chicken and we had roasted potatoes.And I put the recipe for those roasted potatoes in the ebook.And, um,
that was just a simple, probably made, I don't remember, but I probably made like polenta or rice or some kind of a grain to go with that. And that was the first meal.
And that night I also started a batch of backbone broth because I had those two pieces that I took off of the birds right away.And I put that recipe in the ebook as well.
So just a simple broth that's really, it's not a huge pot, but it makes enough for what I wanted to use it for.
I think I made like two quarts of broth off of that.
Then the next day we had, so after you cook the broth and I had also thrown in scraps of fat kind of that I trimmed off as I was getting the birds ready to roast because I knew that the fat would render down in the broth pan and I wanted that.
So the schmaltz from the chicken, the fat that we had rendered off, we used it to make our breakfast the next day.So you just heat the schmaltz in the pan.People ask me all the time, what do you do with schmaltz?And I'm like, ah, it's so good.
Slather it on myself. Yeah, it's all herby and flavorful from simmering and being soaked with herbs and everything like that, and I strain it out so there's no chunks in it.
And so then I just basically heat it in the pan, put on a thin slice of bread and crack an egg with it, or do it in the middle if you want.You know, the toad in a hole, or what do you guys call it?
Something like... I don't know, I don't do that.So I don't know what you call it.It's not toad in a hole.Well then I guess you call it toad in a hole.No we don't, no we don't. And that was our breakfast.That's like a thing with bolognese.
You can't say it's toad in the hole in England if it's not toad in the hole.
They'll get on you.Yeah.So that used the schmaltz and that was a really good breakfast.And then I made the, this was lunch.I made the chicken broth risotto.So it was basically following your recipe in the cookbook.
I put in kind of adjusted version that I made, but you have in the cookbook a risotto recipe where you make it with the beef marrow and the beef broth.And so I basically followed that, except for the chicken.
But I put that kind of modified version into the ebook, the one that comes with this episode. see that.And that's a nice way to get protein for everybody because of the broth.
And it's an easy one dish sort of a school lunch, which I think is what we had it for was school lunch. So then the next day, I remember we were all working outside and we had our griddle outside on the deck and we made chicken tacos.
So we were getting down low on chicken, obviously, because we had eaten whole pieces as kind of a decadent, you know, eating whole pieces of chicken for dinner is kind of like a luxurious sort of a thing, but that's what we had chosen to do the first day.
So we didn't have loads and loads of meat, but I had taken any leftover pieces And I had shredded all the meat off, all the meat that we didn't eat, I shredded off into one container and just set that in the fridge.
And then I had thrown all the bones into broth, as one does, and made another batch of broth.So we basically got two batches of broth off of this chicken.And the broth I made, I just used as, drinking broth.
So the recipe, if you want to call it that, it's so hard to write recipes for this because like, I don't know, is this a really good recipe?But I wrote down how I made the broth.
And so it says in the recipe that I didn't, I literally just put the bones, nothing else with them because they'd already been roasted with seasonings and herbs and stuff.So I still had some seasonings with them.
and I just put the bones into a small pot, covered it with water, simmered it overnight, then I strained it out, skimmed off any schmaltz if there was any, and then salted the broth, and then we used that as a school snack.
So you've got a cup of broth, lots of protein, don't have to do anything to it.And then the chicken tacos, I put this recipe in too.
Again, I just want to say about the... shredding the chicken before I forget, that I love the way that, you know, you're having more chicken at the beginning and we do that with the heart as well.
We're eating lots of meat up front when it's kind of fresh.It feels like a luxury.But as the time goes on, you're putting perhaps a bit less, you know, so if you were making
something later in the week like your tacos that you're just going to talk about or the bolognese for example then you're putting more vegetables in maybe or some other things in but I like the fact that you shred it all up front and I've never done that with the heart you know I could literally
take that heart and I could just chop it all into chunks and put those chunks in the fridge.Maybe I could freeze half of them.
And then when I'm making that bolognese, I literally get that container out, take some handfuls of the chunks and throw them in, which I presume is what you're going to say now for the tacos, I'm going to listen.
But having that ready, it's like that prepped fridge thing again, you know, that those ingredients are there and then it makes it so easy if you've been out all day or you've been working,
or you've been with the kids until really late and they're really hungry, you literally can just grab that and go with it.So I wanted to just talk about, I wanted to raise that before you go into the tacos.You can talk about tacos now.
Yeah. I think that's exactly it.It's kind of the percentage of meat in the meal sort of dwindles as you get towards the end, and then you cook another chunk of meat, you know, and start the process over.
But over the course of the time, you're getting the broth and maybe some of the organs as well.So yeah.So for the tacos, We just took that shredded meat and I just laid it on a board and used a big flat knife and diced it really, really, really fine.
Then we had gotten to pick.One of our friends has a cornfield and right before they turned it under, they let us come out and pick and glean the leftover corn from it.So we had corn on the cob, which
we don't usually have on hand, but what we did was we toasted that corn on the side with butter and salt and then just sort of shredded the corn off and mixed it with the meat. And then we cooked corn tortillas on one side of the big griddle.
And then Gary and I like to put cilantro or diced raw onion or lime juice, or if you have avocados, which we pretty much never do, but if you did, this would be a great place to use them, or some kind of a fermented hot sauce, or just plain diced tomatoes.
Depends on what season you're making this in.We'll just pile on, you know, look at the fridge. but sounds good.What goes with chicken?Everything.
So yeah, just pile that onto your tacos and it takes... Tacos are a great, great way to use if you have a very small amount of meat because it takes a very small amount of filling to make a taco.
And so you can kind of turn out a whole bunch of tacos with just a little bit of shredded beef or something.And then the next day, that mixture I had made of the shredded meat and the corn, we had a little bit left and it wasn't very much.
So what I did in the morning was
I fried potatoes and lard, I scrambled a bunch of eggs, and then I threw the potatoes, the eggs, the taco meat, any more shredded corn on the cob, all into one container and stirred it, and then I rolled it into burritos.
So it was a breakfast scramble, and then rolled up into burritos, and then we put in...
we had at this time we had kefir cheese but you could use sour cream or just kefir if you wanted whisk with a little lime or some shredded cheese if that sounded good to you or again you if you had you know lime or pico left over from the night before you could dump that in it's another one of those things that just
can be as variable as the contents of your fridge.And you can use up lots of little bits.
I imagine you could bake that into a kind of a sort of frittata style baked breakfast as well if you wanted to.
Yeah.Yep.If you wanted to use a whole bunch of eggs, then you're trying to use them up, you could do it.So that was the meals that came off of the chicken.And it's surprising how much you can get out of a bird.
So that was seven days of meals for you, was it?
It was seven meals.Some was breakfast, some was lunch, some was dinner, if that makes sense.So you're using over seven days.
Yeah.Yeah.Yeah.Okay.And that's for your bigger family and you still managed to stretch it to last over seven days.Yeah.
And if you had a, you know, if your kids were all, 18-year-old boys or something, obviously.
Like Hilary, Hilary Boynton, our friend of the podcast, who has just really lots of very hungry boys to feed every single day.
Our heart goes out to you. that is a beautiful thing.And you can actually still do the same versions of this, you know, as your kids get bigger, it might not.
You know, it might not make seven meals, but you might actually get still the principle being, I intentionally roasted more chicken than I knew we would eat in one day.
And then I started right away making every resource I could out of those chickens so that it would last and stretch as far as it could.
I guess we didn't even count that.
all the leftover scraps from making broths and things like that we mix into our dog food and so we made dog meals too.
Yeah.Wow.The dogs are involved as well.Extra extended family.So all of those recipes you've put into that e-cookbook that is available for patrons associated with this episode.And my two recipes are in there as well.
So there's actually seven recipes in that little PDF, it's not so little, and also details of how we made that, those two meals last, those two cooking sessions last through the week, like a plan.
So yeah, do go and download that if you're a patron from our treasure trove and get cooking.Is there anything else you want to add, Andrea, before we wrap up?
I think the wrap-up actually goes really well with what Nicole said about developing new habits and routines in the kitchen.So making it habitual that you're
you know, you're making the little bit of broth, even if you don't exactly know what it's for, or maybe you do, and then the next day you have broth for making risotto and you can have a protein-rich lunch, you know, but just always, always thinking in the mindset of making a little bit ahead.
I think with these two dishes, with the roast bird and with the heart, it's good training ground for helping you to develop those habits because they're big pieces of meat.
If you've got two small chickens or one large chicken and you've got one beef heart, the big meat.And so you're going to be left after you've cooked it with way more than you need.And there's nothing you can do about that.
So you have to think, right, okay, well, let's just be practical in this moment.Am I going to freeze it or am I going to put it in the fridge?And then the next day you're going to look at it and go, well, how do I fancy that?
Do I want it really simply in a salad or do I want to put it in a sandwich?Do I want to make tacos?
And if you do that three or four times over a couple of months, then by the end of that period, you will have dishes that you know you love and you know your family love and you can turn to them much more easily than before you even started.
So yeah, you're right.It's about creating those habits and by doing it once,
and then repeat, repeat, repeat, rinse and repeat as we say, then it becomes part of your life and then you don't really have to even think about it and you can put your mind to the next thing that you want to make a reality in your kitchen, which is a wonderful kind of example of
how habits build on themselves and good habits can take us very, very far.
So yeah, I think you're right.And if you listen to that episode with Rebecca on meal planning earlier in the spring, then things can become rhythmic like that.Like, oh, we're having heart tonight.
Ah, I know tomorrow's mustard and mushroom sauce with heart.Like it's already done. The dopamine has been spared.The decision need not be made.
The habit is in play.You're right.
And we need to be able to make fewer decisions because as parents and cooks and living in this world that we live in, decisions, there are too many of them and any of them we can take away and make easier for people who listen to us.
that means that in the end they're going to eat better food and enjoy it more and have more fun, then that's a good thing, I think.I agree.Decision fatigue be gone.
Lovely.Thank you very much, Andrea.I am.Bye for now.
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