Make 2025 the year you embark on a journey to better health through traditional foods. By focusing on time-honored ingredients and cooking techniques, you’ll build a nourishing Four Corners Pantry and master essential recipes that will boost your confidence in the kitchen. You’ll learn how to create nutrient-dense meals, helping you cultivate lasting culinary skills and a healthier lifestyle in your traditional foods kitchen.
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Table of Contents
Introducing The Four Corners Pantry
The best way to start your traditional foods journey is by taking inventory of what I call the Four Corners Pantry, which includes:
- Your Working Pantry, where you keep non-perishable foods.
- Your Refrigerator, stocked with fresh ingredients.
- Your Freezer, for storing meats, vegetables, and more.
- Your Extended Pantry (also known as your Prepper Pantry), where you keep backup non-perishable foods to restock your working pantry and also carve out small areas for an Emergency Pantry, a Survival Pantry, and a Healing Pantry.
A well-stocked Extended Pantry is especially important because it ensures you always have the ingredients needed to prepare traditional, nourishing meals to see you through short-term emergencies or long-term challenges. Your Extended Pantry will also keep you well stocked with various healing preparations, whether over-the-counter or homemade, to deal with minor cuts, bruises, colds, and flu.
After you’ve inventoried your items, begin to use up (or discard) any processed food you have and slowly begin to stock your Four Corners Panty with real food that has not been pre-prepared for you. These real foods include canned fish, lentils, fresh fruit and vegetables, eggs, a whole chicken, and more.
Learn More About the Four Corners Pantry
These resources and free downloads will help you learn more and inventory your Four Corners Pantry:
- Prep Like a Pro With the Ultimate Four Corners Pantry System
- Why You Need to Stock Up On These Top 15 Foods NOW for Your Prepper Pantry (Includes the free download, “How to Keep a Well Stocked Four Corners Pantry,” to help you inventory your pantry.)
- Tour My Working Pantry and Pantry Organization Secrets
- What is a Prepper Pantry? And why we all need one!
What Are Traditional Foods?
At its core, traditional cooking is all about preparing real foods while limiting store-bought packaged or processed items. It’s also about making the most of what you have, using every last scrap, and avoiding waste. (Learn more about Traditional Foods.)
For beginners, this might look like:
- Roasting a chicken.
- Saving all the bones and scraps to make chicken bone broth.
- Using that broth, along with any leftover chicken, to create a nourishing, collagen-rich soup.
Building Your Skills
Once you’ve mastered some basic traditional foods recipes, such as roasting a whole chicken and making bone broth, you can begin experimenting with simple cultured dairy products, like:
- Homemade Yogurt
- Milk Kefir
- Cultured cream (Part of making Cultured Butter.)
These recipes are rich in probiotics—those good bacteria that support digestion and overall health.
From there, you can move on to basic ferments. Start with something as simple as fresh cabbage, turning it into homemade sauerkraut. This recipe, too, is rich in probiotics and offers tremendous benefits for gut health. And as scientists tell us, the healthier our gut, the healthier we are!
The Best Place to Start
For someone new to traditional cooking, introducing these three foods into your diet is one of the easiest and most impactful ways to begin:
- Bone Broth
- Cultured Dairy
- Fermented Vegetables
These foods nourish the entire body, from digestion to immunity and beyond.
Beyond the Basics
Once you feel confident, you can try your hand at baking sourdough bread with just four simple ingredients: flour, starter, water, and salt. This creates a highly digestible bread that complements any traditional meal.
Picture a full meal of traditional foods: A warm bowl of chicken bone broth soup, with a dollop of cultured cream or yogurt, and a spoonful of tangy fermented vegetables, plus a thick slice of sourdough bread. This simple yet nourishing meal is a perfect example of a traditional foods kitchen at work—one that heals and nourishes the whole body and leads to better health.
Update: I appeared on KXAN’s Studio 512 program to talk with Rosie Newberry about how to Begin Your Traditional Food Journey In 2025.
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The Modern Pioneer Cookbook
Seasonal ingredients, traditional techniques, and nourishing recipes. Over 85 traditional, from-scratch recipes! Discover for yourself how you can use simple ingredients and traditional techniques to cook the modern pioneer way.
Stay in Touch with Mary’s Nest
- Subscribe to My YouTube Channel for Traditional Foods Videos (Free) - When you subscribe, be sure to click on the notification bell that will let you know each time I upload a new video.
- Subscribe to Mary’s Traditional Foods Newsletter (Free) - Get a free 36-page eBook for signing up: How to Stock Your Essential Traditional Foods Four-Corners Pantry.
- Join the Traditional Foods Kitchen Academy - For more detailed videos and exclusive members-only perks, join my YouTube membership community.
- Order The Modern Pioneer Cookbook - Get a printed book of Mary's nourishing recipes from a Traditional Foods Kitchen. This bestselling cookbook is published by Penguin Random House with their DK imprint.
I look forward to having you join me in my Texas Hill Country Kitchen!
Shop for items used in this blog post or video
Favorite Kitchen Supplies
- Favorite Aprons
- Spice Grinder
- Countertop Burner (On my kitchen island in many recipe videos.)
- Handheld Vacuum Sealing System
- Vacuum Lids
- Whisk
- Silica Gel Packets (Helps keep moisture from building up in your mix)
- Cast Iron Dutch Oven
- 8-Quart Slow-Cooker
- Fat Separator (Clever kitchen device to help you decant bone broth)
- Flour Sack Towels
- pH Strips (Helps you check on the acidity of your vinegar)
Amazon Shop and Shopping Guide
- Visit Mary’s Nest Amazon Shop
- Visit my Shopping Guide page
Get up to 15% off for stocking your Traditional Foods Pantry and equipping your Modern Pioneer Kitchen, including discounts from US Wellness Meats, Farmhouse Teas, Lehman’s, Masontops, Cultures for Health, Survival Garden Seeds, Redmond Real Salt, Plan to Eat, and More!
