Prior to this year, Eric and I were pretty intimidated by cooking most cuts of meat. Our family mostly ate ground meats, with the occasional chicken breast, salmon fillet, or canned fish. While we still cook these things fairly often, we’ve also expanded our repertoire to include more traditional foods with their unique nourishing properties.
There is SO much more I want to learn, but here’s our start!
Meat (On The Bone)
There are plenty of nutrition blogs out there that wax eloquent on the benefits of meat cooked on the bone. I recently finished Deep Nutrition, which explains how cooking meat on the bone releases several important nutrients from the bone into the meat–plus, you’re getting the collagen tissue from between the bone and the muscle.
This year we’ve enjoyed the best pulled pork (although the cooking time is WAY too long–start checking at 90 minutes!!) with Primal Kitchen barbecue sauce. I don’t recommend the sauce in that recipe, unless you really love vinegar. It has a lot of sugar as well. You can use pork shoulder or pork butt, but I prefer the latter. We’ve found pork butt is easier to overcook and it definitely doesn’t take the 5 hours written in the recipe!
We’ve also found our favorite roast chicken recipe. The chicken cooks in the pot with the veggies and creates the most sumptuous lemony broth. It gelatinizes in the fridge when you store leftovers, so you know you’re getting plenty of good gelatin from those chicken bones đŸ™‚
We’ve struck out repeatedly in the beef pot roast department, however, I’m not giving up! This winter I’m hoping to find a go-to recipe.
Supplements
We’ve used Vital Proteins grass-fed collagen in our morning coffee for a while now. Sometimes I put it in hot chocolate for my kids, too. I also love my Fallon’s Table cookbook for ideas of how to include collagen in baked goods.
For the same effect as collagen, I love drinking hot bone broth as a nightcap on an evening. The Kettle & Fire broth is my favorite, although it’s getting pricier every year.
For a long time I’ve wanted to start including liver in our diets, one of the OG traditional foods–but let’s be honest. If you didn’t learn to love the taste of liver as a kid, it’s HARD as an adult. I don’t have the most adventurous taste, so liver pate on my morning toast was not really an option (an option that didn’t make me hate my life, anyways).
We started with a simple chicken liver pate that we froze in an ice cube tray and added one cube per pound of ground meat when cooking. It’s essentially undetectable and a good way to get started. You also don’t get that much liver this way, so I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to desiccated liver instead.
I don’t like swallowing large pills, which is why I picked the powder rather than the capsules. I’ve found that a one scoop in a large smoothie makes it hard to taste. This is my recipe mashup from a few different ones online:
- One banana
- 3/4 cup blueberries
- 3/4 cup greek yogurt
- 1/2 cup water
- 1 scoop desiccated liver
- 1 tbsp. almond butter
It’s quite substantial and makes a nice lunch with a piece of avocado toast. You can also add a spoonful of cacao powder, which helps mask the taste even more. And I definitely notice a positive effect on my sleep and hormones from including liver regularly in my diet.
What’s Next?
Fermented foods! I’ve been eyeing this recipe for fermented carrots for a while.
A good pot roast recipe. Any readers have one to share?
I’m not sure I’m ready to scale the mountain that is maintaining a sourdough starter yet đŸ˜› I think that’s on my 2026 list.
Have you tried any new foods or cooking methods recently–traditional foods or not? What do you want to learn next?
xx Claire
