Empowering Self-Reliance and Sustainable Living & Microbiomes
Empowering Self-Reliance and Sustainable Living & Microbiomes
Articles about transforming fresh ingredients into nourishing foods through cooking, fermenting, drying, sprouting, preserving and traditional kitchen techniques. The kitchen becomes another place where plants, microbes, food and human health meet.
My patio outdoor office and the Project Site is currently a landscape of preparation, drying herbs, working the gardens, jars in their early stages, and piles of herbs and foods (as medicine) being sorted. We are deep in preparation for the Plant & Kitchen Alchemy workshop, November 8–14, and I …
September 23, 2026 | Living Ground Project, Ecuador Whew! What a marathon. My Plant & Kitchen Alchemy book is finally finished, uploaded to Amazon and waiting to be published. After months of writing, experimenting, editing, illustrating and wrestling with page numbers, indexes, formatting and Amazon’s publishing requirements, I can hardly …
I am finishing Plant & Kitchen Alchemy, a book that has grown to more than 550 pages of personal experience, practical knowledge and over 80 kitchen alchemy recipes centered on food as medicine. As I moved through the final edits, I realized I had spent a great deal of time …
Lately I have been doing a lot of sorting, and I do not mean closets, drawers or old papers. I mean sorting through the pieces of my life and the pieces of Living Ground, looking at what still belongs, what is working, what is asking for more attention and what …
I use collagen-rich broth regularly when I am working with microbiome-healing protocols because the gut microbes are only part of the picture. They live against a mucus-covered intestinal lining that has to be hydrated, nourished and continually rebuilt. A good gelatinous broth brings water, minerals and the amino acids from …
I am deep into writing a new book, Plant & Kitchen Alchemy, and it is will become the foundation for the student manual and teaching material for our upcoming Plant & Kitchen Alchemy workshop at Living Ground. The next workshop will be held November 7–13, 2026, here in southern Ecuador, …
After months of thinking, planning, tasting, cooking, and more than a little rearranging, we are excited to finally share our new Living Ground menu. This isn’t simply a new list of meals. It is a completely different way to experience food at Living Ground. Instead of choosing from a list …
I love olive oil, but you will rarely see us cooking with it at Living Ground. We use good extra-virgin olive oil generously on salads, vegetables, herbs, cheeses, fermented foods, soups and finished dishes, but when a pan goes onto the stove, we reach for butter, coconut oil or tallow. …
This is about ancestral food, not as nostalgia, but as pattern recognition. It is also about the future Gratitude Meals we will offer at the Gratitude Cafe, meals that come from lived experience and are anchored in something deeply personal. This article will discuss my Healing Soup , but it …
We have all heard of taking turmeric (curcumin) with black pepper (piperine) to enhance the bioavailability and absorption of curcumin. Piperine, the bioactive compound found in black pepper, has been shown to significantly increase the absorption of curcumin by inhibiting metabolic enzymes that break it down and increasing intestinal permeability. …