The Nourished Kitchen by Jennifer McGruther

I have read the Nourished Kitchen Blog for years, so I was excited when I saw her cookbook, The Nourished Kitchen: Farm-to-Table Recipes for the Traditional Foods Lifestyle Featuring Bone Broths, Fermented Vegetables, Grass-Fed Meats, Wholesome Fats, Raw Dairy, and Kombuchas was available.

The book begins with an introduction to the traditional foods movement, covering Weston Price philosophy and the author’s philosophy.  She combines sustainability, balance, tradition, and community involvement as the basics of her philosophy.  She then discusses the ingredients she uses, from fruits and vegetables, meats, milk, and eggs, to fat and oils and sweeteners.

The rest of the book is broken into the following chapters:  From the Garden, From the Pasture, From the Range, From the Waters, From the Fields, From the Wild, From the Orchard, and From the Larder.

Each chapter begins with an introduction.  For example the “From the Garden” chapter talks about little salads of weeds, leaves and greens and also about how to find a good olive oil.  Throughout the chapter there are little tidbits of information.  In this chapter, she also explains the nutritional benefits of adding a little fat with your vegetables.

I found the “From the Pasture” chapter very informative and interesting, with it’s discussion of milk and cream, raw milk, and cultured and fermented dairy foods.  I all ready make my own  yogurt, but she offers a couple of variations that I haven’t tried.  I will definitely be making her herb-and-oil marinated yogurt cheese!

This book has information and recipes for everything you need to get back to a more traditional kind of cooking.  these are the kind of things a lot of people used to know how to do, from making butter, to making spiced ginger beer, to preserved lemons, to sauerkraut and pickles.  But it’s not all traditional foods, many of the recipes highlight things that are available to us today, that might not have been readily available in the past, like the “Warm Honey-Drizzled Feta with Pine Nuts, Orange and Mint.”

This is a wonderful book, filled with a wealth of knowledge.  One to be read and cooked from.