Come to the Dark Side...of Cocoa

OK, just Chocolatl, really.

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Set up an altar to your favorite chocolate Deities (Tonacatecutli and Calchiutlucue were popular cocoa goddesses of Mezo-America), arrange a make-your-own cocoa bar, and celebrate the bright joy that the darkness of chocolate brings.

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'Shrooming

As part of our Gernesse Celebration, we went 'shrooming.

We got with the Mushroom Man last weekend, and we traded hunting secrets. He showed us where and how to find some really cool mushrooms, and we showed where and how to find some good herbs. Then, we went home and perfected making wild mushroom soup.

The mushroom-hunting was certainly a pleasure. We went into the wooded hills of northeastern Oklahoma. There, we found Satyr’s Beards, Doghairs, Sulfer Shelves, Oysters, and Shaggy Manes. These are some way cool mushrooms, and a delight to cook with. It turns out that under my cedar trees, I have some very nice puffballs growing, and those, too became a part of our cooking experiments. (I couldn’t take pictures because we’d lent the camera out to a friend who was taking a Ghost Tour).

Mushrooms the Mushroom Man expected us to find, but didn’t, were chantrelles and morels. He said it was too early in the season for them, but he’d sometimes found a few this early. But that’s OK, he cultivates them, along with lobster, porcini, oyster, and black trumpet mushrooms. We bought a mixed bag of mushrooms from him, and will continue to do so, as we're not brave enough to ‘shroom on our own.

‘Shrooming is as exacting and interesting as herb hunting. We learned a lot. He gave me this nifty little mushroom knife, and I gave him a small herb sickle. I promised him I would mark the locations of any mushrooms I find in the future when I’m out wildcrafting, and now I have some new places to wildcraft my herbs.

Now, as for the mushroom soup: I have decided I do not like button mushrooms. At all. Not even as the cheap base of a mushroom soup. Others in the House like them, but not me. I will never again buy and use button mushrooms.

Anyway, once we got back with our lovely bags of shrooms and herbs, we set about making what I think is the perfect mushroom soup. We scrubbed and cleaned the shrooms, then divided them up, labeled them, and sliced them for sautéing in ghee.

First, I sautéed a bit of each mushroom and sampled it for flavor. Then I started mixing and matching the shrooms to get what I feel is a good blend – ½ cup at a time.

The first batch of soup used red lobster mushrooms, chantrelles, morels, and doghair mushrooms. Before I added the mushrooms to the hot ghee, I popped some black mustard seed. Then, with the mushrooms, I added some wild garlic. Once they were all soft and/or translucent, I pureed them in that Magic Bullet I bought. (As an aside – for small jobs, this Magic Bullet is a quick and easy to use machine, well worth the investment. If you are a single person, or you cook in small, experimental batches, I recommend it.) When the mushrooms were well pureed, they went back into the pot, along with some of last week’s duck broth, some thyme, parsley, and ground celery seed. I let that heat through, then added full cream – the kind people use for whipping cream. It was – OK. All right, it was far better than the canned stuff. Everyone else loved it, but I still didn’t like it. Fortunately, I only made a half cup.

Next, I used Satyr’s Beard, blue oysters, black trumpets, morels, and the puffballs from my back yard. These were sautéed with a bit less wild garlic, some wild sage, and a dash of juniper berries. Before I pureed this, I removed the juniper berries. Then I returned the pureed mushrooms to the pot with chicken broth, thyme, summer savory, and just the smallest bit of tarragon. To this, I added a bit of full cream and topped with a bit of watercress taken from an Oklahoma stream. Not bad, better than the last batch, but not what I wanted.

The third batch used Satyr’s beard, dogshair, porcini, chantrelles, and black trumpets, seasoned with wild onions, wild carrots, and kudzu. This was pureed, filled with chicken stock, re-seasoned with tarragon, sorrel, and peppergrass, and full cream added and garnished will dillweed. Still better, but not quite there. Ha – you thought third time’s the charm. Nope. Things aren't always that neat and predictable.

So, the next batch was a blend of porcini, Satyr’s Beard, red lobster, blue oyster, black trumpet, and a dash of morel. This was seasoned with wild carrots, wild onions, wild sage, and juniper berries. The berries were removed before I purred them, then it was thinned with my golden vegetable broth, and reseasoned with thyme, summer savory, and parsley. I added the full cream – and viola – a winner! This is a mushroom soup even I will eat – and I hate mushrooms.

This soup was served for the Saturday night feast with yellow fingerling potatoes, flat green beans, and pork chops. Elderberry wine accompanied the meal quite nicely - and I honestly believe elderberry wine is the perfect wine choice for this wild mushroom soup.

Dessert was pumpkin ice cream dressed with cinnamon gaufrettes.

I think, because of the Satyr's Beard mushrooms in it, I'll name the soup The Savory Satyr Soup.

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Gernesse

This is an ancient holiday in Germany. It's also still celebrated in Luxembourg and the name has transmuted over the centuries into "kermesse".

Originally, this was a harvest festival, dedicated to a buried god or goddess (minor details are lost to history) who was dug up to preside over the festival. Peter Paul Rubens painted one such festival (and if I can ever find a print of it, I will buy it) called, naturally enough "Kermesse".

The German name for this festival means "gladly-eat", and it was a festival of food and drink and conviviality - a combination Bacchanalia and harvest festival. Ruben's painting captures the spirit of the festivity very well. The French form of the name -"Kermesse" - means "village fair", and that, too, is a fair enough approximation of the spirit of this festival.

Since the Gernesse was most commonly held in early October, it's highly likely this festival (and possibly many others like it) were forerunners of the modern popular Oktoberfests.

The history is interesting only because the village I grew up in still celebrated it during the years I lived there. I remember the the frauen all gathering to burden the tables with food, and knew in the days after the festival, we'd be canning over hot, wood-burning stoves and firepits, and the men would be slaughtering the pigs and cows (we slaughtered chickens at need - they were the "living pantry" and fresh meat when we grew tired of sausages and smoked hams and cured roasts) and turning them into sausages and smoked or cured hams, steaks, roasts, and cracking the bones we'd use to make beef and pork jellies and canned broths and such. The Gernesse was the last time for a month - a whole month! - before we had another festival (in our village, that was Elften-Elften, which only lasted a day and not a whole week).

We still celebrate Gernesse, Housemates, friends, and family all descend upon our community centers to eat the fall harvest foods - squashes, potatoes, carrots, rutabagas, turnips, apples, pears, plums, cabbages, parsnips, hams, roasts, bread, smallcakes (sort of a cross between a dense cake and a cookie - gingerbreads and honeycakes were the most common) and cookies, and the new beer and wines.

Music and dancing were always a huge part of this festival - homegrown musicians and wandering musicians who'd stop by for food and whatever largesse we could spare. There were some regulars, who traveled the village fair circuit and knew they'd find beds, food, clothes, and more waiting at each village. Cars were still not very popular when I lived there, but we had a bus that stopped in the village going each way twice a day. These musicians usually came by bus, and knew we'd pay their bus fare to the next village festival (which was in Goettengin the week after ours). Nowadays, we depend on CDs for our music, but the spirit remains.

We can't take off the days each of our festivities and Celebrations require, so we do them in the evenings and on weekends, tucked in when and where we can have them. Few of us have huge gardens, so our "harvests" are conducted at the Farmer's Markets and grocery stores. There's little need to can our own harvest for the winter, so we're more likely to bless the pantry that will hold tins of food bought at the grocery store, but we still can a few things of our own.

I like to can fruit butters - cherry, plum, apricot, gooseberry, strawberry, apple, because store bought ones so rarely live up to my expectations. I also make fruit jellies and sometimes, in a fit of nostalgia, I'll make old-fashioned pork and beef jellies and use them to enhance winter soups or to make aspics or sauces from them. I've never pork or beef jelly in the store.

So, beginning today and lasting until the 16th, we celebrate Gernesse.

And after the 16th - canning fruit butters and jellies! The Farmer's Market is overflowing with stone fruits and this season's apples, pears, pumpkins, and more. I like pairing herbs up with them - rosemary in plums, and tarragon in apricots, and basil in pumpkin.

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Eat Local

August is Eat Local Month

We tend to eat local as much as possible anyway, so it doesn't effect us very much. As an act of Divine Connection, we eat seasonal fruits and vegetables, locally raised chicken, buffalo, pig, turkey, and cow, hunt our own quail, deer, rabbit, duck, and goose, buy dairy from local dairy farms, and buy our grain from local mills.

We still manage to eat many things which aren't local, and those we tend to buy fair trade - fair trade being more important to us than organic, although we'll greedily take both when offered.

The list of foods we buy locally is quite long this time of year: sand plums, heirloom tomatoes*, bell peppers*, habaneros*, jalapenos*, blackberries, blueberries*, raspberries*, strawberries*, cherries, corn, watermelons, cantaloupes, honeydews, onions*, carrots*, celery*, potatoes, radishes*, kohlrabis*, beets*, asparagus*+, green beans, sugar pod peas, peas, snap beans, dill weed*, dill seed*, tarragon*, sage*, rosemary*, basil*, oregano*, savory*, thyme*, peppermint*, spearmint*, parsley*, cilantro*, apothecary roses*, nasturtiums*, yellow crookneck squash*, zucchini, pattypan squash*, cucumbers*, grapes, milk, cheeses, butter, sour cream, yogurt, full cream, eggs, scallions*, garlic*, whole wheat flour, wheat flour, cornmeal, lard, rye flour, triticale wheat flour, and more I can't think of right off the top of my head.

The wheat harvests have been coming in for 2 weeks now, so fresh flour abounds.

This weekend is the start of our Neptunalia Celebration, which is a hard one for me in many ways, because from August 1 to August 5, we fast from all grain products. No bread, crackers, puddings thickened with cornstarch, gravies, cereals, cookies, muffins, cakes, cupcakes, or any other grain bearing products. We interpret grain generously: wheat, rye, spelt, triticale, corn, rice, millet, barley, buckwheat, oats, amaranth, quinoa, sesame, wild rice, flaxseed, garbanzo, taro root, potato, acorn, almond, arrowroot, teff, sago, kamut, job's tears, emmer, einkorn, farina, semolina, durum, cassava, yucca, hemp, tapioca, sorghum, kudzu root, channa, and soy.

From sunset August 5th to sunset August 7th, we gorge on grains (except soy - allergies). From sunset August 7th until sunset August 15th, we weight our meals and snacks heavily in grains. From sunset August 12 to sunset August 14th, we conduct games with grain prizes and grain-orients activities: cake walks, cookie tosses, bake-offs, grain-eating contests.

It's a lot of fun, and the more people we can encourage to enjoy with us, the more fun it is.

We like to do this as a big picnic and games the last full weekend before August 15th (this year, it's the 13th and 14th).

Yes, it's hot. In Oklahoma, it can be very hot this time of year, which is why we select very shady parks for our picnic, and we do the heavy games in the early morning and late evening. We end the festivities with a huge feast starting at sunset on August 15th, where we honor our personal numena and divinities, and hand out the earned prizes.

*some of which we grow ourselves at the Community Center
+although it's getting late season for them and we're letting them grow into ferns for a bigger supply next year

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Rites Of Passage Celebrations

Tomorrow, we'll be celebrating a birthday for a House member.

Her special altar will be set up, and the House altar.

We'll also designate the grill as a special hearth, as we'll be grilling pizzas as part of the celebration.

Tonight, we'll make the ice cream - a bavarian cream style, and bake the cake - a dark chocolate gingerbread, dense, moist, and strong enough to handle the layers.

Tomorrow, I decorate the cake by layering it with sour cherries and chocolate mousse, then coat it in three different chocolate ganaches and garnish it with chocolate covered cherries and candied white rose petals (to mimic cherry blossoms). We'll chop and prepare the the toppings for the pizzas and ice cream, fry up the duros, and make the fresh salsa with fresh ripened tomatoes and peppers. We have Sioux reds, Arkansas Travelers, Brandywine Black, and Manyel tomatoes with Bullnose, Chuskya, and Nardella peppers with which to make the salsa, and I know Bat will want to add in some Scotch Bonnet and Thai peppers to one batch because she likes it hot.

We'll put a Cirque du Soleil DVD on for background.

Birthday celebrations are always special to us, both ours and the "birthdays" of our chosen numena>

It should be a fun celebration in spite of the heat - the temperature is supposed to exceed 100º with a heat index much higher than that.

That means buying bags of ice so everyone can have cool drinks.

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Midsummer
Midsummer approaches, and we've already been harvesting heavily among the herbs. The House reeks of lavender, dill, rosemary, mints, roses, sages, clover, and more. Chives have been freeze-dried and stored away with more coming. Edible flowers are being candied and stored away, or made into syrups and canned. A few are being frozen for midwinter delights. We harvested from our blueberry for hte first time, and the raspberry will be ripening very soon along with the mulberry. By Midsummer, the berries will all be ripe and ready to devour.

Soon, very soon, we'll be harvesting the tomatoes, lemons, peppers, and more herbs and things.

Our Midsummer Feast is always a decadent one, starting at dawn and ending at true sunset. The altars are heaped with herbs and flowers and freshly harvested goodies that we plunder for preparing food all day long.

We'll have the fire pit and the grill going all day, with everyone cooking as they please. Bowls of chilled berries will be scattered around. And this year, we invested in an ice cream maker, so we'll have fresh berry ice creams. Beforehand, we'll bake small cookies and cakes to eat with the berries and flowers.

We'll grill flatbreads - pizzas and bruschettas and naan and such to accompany the grilled baby vegetables.

The new gazebo is up, but not yet in it's new location, and we have collected enough tree limbs and branches to form the skeleton of the rustic ritual hut and gazebo that will shelter under the cedars and spicebush out back, so that will begin its building at the Midsummer Feast.

We'll also plot out the new beds for next year. Because the outdoor dogs have hydrophobia for any water that is outside of their water bowl, instead of fencing these beds, we've decided to moat them, with a small pool near the rustic gazebo and a waterfall up near the House to fuel it all, and stock it with koi fish as our "moat monsters".

This will make for a busy and pleasant and filling Midsummer Celebration.

What are you planning for your Midsummer?

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Mother's Day

We grilled chickens, and by the usual method of tossing things we felt held a symbolic significance for the day into a pot, created a yummy side dish.

someone grilled tomatoes as being significant for the blood a mother sheds to birth a child (or an idea), and another grilled new potatoes because they grow underground, nurtured in the dark before they are harvested. And another simmered garlic - 24 cloves! - 12 for the 12 bright months, and 12 for the 12 dark months (each month having a dark half and a bright half).

Then, the grilled tomates and potatoes were tossed into the garlic, with some stock made of chicken drippings and a heavy splash of concord grape wine. Some rosemary from the bush growing by the front foor was tossed in along with a harvesting of cinnamon basil and some sage, and some early nasturtium buds.

This all simmered while the chicken finished cooking, and it was amazingly delicious when it was all done.

This was accompanied by a loaf of Peter Max Bread: swirls of beet, parsnip, tomato, and spinach dough, baked in a round loaf - the inside is a psychedelic swirl of bright colors, and each vegetable dough contributes a unique note to the whole loaf.

How did you spend Mother's Day?

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Mother's Day

I don't particularly care for the crass commercialism of Mother's Day, and so taught my children that the Mother we're honoring on this day isn't the biological mother, but the Archetypal Mother, the force that nurtures and replenishes.

So, we usually prepare yummy foods for this day - comfort foods of all flavors.

My most favorite comfort food is fried potatoes in chicken broth. Potato chips (or potato sticks) in chicken broth is an adequate substitute.

That's followed rapidly by crispy Bavarian style potato pancakes slathered with chilled applesauce, and then with frybread.

Potatoes figure prominently as comfort food for this holiday, and one thing we greatly enjoy doing is a Mashed Potato Bar.

We make up many batches of mashed potatoes - white Kennebec potatoes, purple potatoes, and Yukon Golds. Then we make all kinds of mashed potato toppings: chili, broccoli cheese, caramelized onions, bacon bits, herbed butters, sauteed peppers, sweet corn, different types of gravies, snipped fresh herbs, diced tomatoes, black olives, and more.

We use large martini glasses to scoop the potatoes into, and top them fancifully.

Dorky, kitschy, but fun.

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Cinco de Mayo

I know it's not a significant event in Mexico, but, yanno - any excuse for fun and food!

Especially food.

We experimented with the Tres Leches Cake and discovered that by adding lime zest to the cake itself, and lime juice to the sweetener (so it doesn't curdle the milks), we got a truly marvelous cake.

Adding tequila wasn't such a great idea though.

And we made strawberry tamales.

Strawberry tamales are amazing.

Make the masa as you would for meaty tamales, only substitute strawberry juice for the liquid, and add brown sugar; then fill the tamales with sliced strawberries which have been soaked in tequila and lime juice (and sugar, if all the strawberries you can find are the flavorless ones in most grocery stores). Roll up in corn husks and steam just as you would tamales.

I started with 10 pounds of masala harina, and ended up with 6 dozen tamales. I hope that's enough.

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Beltane & May Wine
I'm an independent practitioner & a bit ecclectic. I don't have a community to draw from, and, I haven't been practicing long enough to have traditions of my own. I will admit, when it comes to food, I've found Cunningham's Wicca in the Kitchen to be a reasonable source. It at least gives me some ideas from which to work. This year, Beltane falls during a point where I'm so busy I can't keep anything straight. Still, I'm working on at least a small ritual for it.

I've found that strawberries, bannocks & dairy foods seem to be fairly traditional (Irish/Scottish) for Beltane. I've also come across may wine (wine flavored with fragrant flowers [typically woodruff or meadowsweet] and/or strawberries).

What foods do you traditionally prepare for Beltane? If you've made may wine, do you have any recipes to share?

Edit: I forgot one thing. On Beltane, I will be visiting a recently engaged couple who are moving across the country. They do not drink, but, I was considering gifting them with a NA "may wine." It would wind up being more of a juice (probably strawberry) flavored with the same flowers I would use for my own may wine. Any thoughts or suggestions regarding this would be appreciated.

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Celebratory Foods

As a Numenist, practically any food can be celebratory, but some are more so than others.

For instance: Stew.

Stew appears at almost all of our Winter Celebrations, a huge pot of it the celebrants dip from as they please. What goes into the Stew depends on the celebration. Pomonalia, for example, is either a hodge podge of all the foods we've eaten the previous year: meats, vegetables, herbs; or a Root Stew: rabbit, turnips, kohlrabi, carrots, potatoes, radishes, cattail roots, peanuts, lily roots, and whatever else grows or lives underground.

When we have a retreat camping weekend, stew is always a part of it. We haul out the huge cast iron cauldron and everyone tosses stuff into the pot and it simmers all weekend long. It gets replenished as the level drops, and serves as snack, as midnight munchy food, as meals. When we're ready to pack up, we eat up whatever's left in the cauldron - our final boost of celebratory energy food!

Bread is also a primary celebratory food. Cerealia is devoted entirely to preparing bread, from collecting the grains to milling them to baking the bread to devouring it fresh from the fires. We shape the bread into wheat sheaves and spirals, and flavor it with sweet or savory herbs like cardamoms, dill, sage, nutmeg.

The preparation as well as the feasting are integral to our celebrations.

What foods are particularly celebratory for you? Do you prepare them a certain way? Is the preparation a part of your ritual or celebration, or do you bring the already cooked food with you? Or do you eat at a specific place afterwards every time?

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Sourdough Babies

I haven't figured out how to post pics to the community, but I if you'll go here you can read about three of my Yeast Beasties.

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The Ides of April

The Ides of April signals the end of Chocolate Season.

This is becuse our religion was founded in southern Texas, and by this time of year, it was too hot to carry chocolate around as a snack. It was also because the last of the Easter chocolates were clearance saled and gone by now.

We always had a celebration on April 15th to mourn the end of Chocolate Season and and on the 16th to celebrate the onset of Fruit Season. The first strawberries and blacberries were ripening in our gardens and available through the Farmer's Market. Cherries were in bloom.

The sequeing of these two edible seasons is very important to us.

I live further north now, and Chocolate Season has been artificiallt extended through Mother's Day, but the real end is the Ides of April.

The beginning is the Nones of October, of course, when chocolate candy goes on sale in bulk for Halloween. The days are getting cold, and we'll be experiencing our first drop in temperatures from the muggy 100ºs down to crisp 40ºs. Chocolate keeps well just sitting out and about.

But I'm not talking about the beginning of Chocolate Season.

Yesterday was the end of it.

In honor of Chocolate Season's Demise, we stuffed ourselves on All Things Chocolate: a lovely Vienna Chocolate Pie [1]( Read more...Collapse ) fudgy brownies, steaming hot drinking chocolates and cocoas,the last of the chocolates from Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine's, and Easter, and any chocolate we could scrounge up that was still on clearance sale yesterday morning. Until midnight, the only food we ate had chocolate in it or was entirely chocolate.

Our altar was heaped with the wrappings and debris of our Chocolate Frenzy. At midnight, we took the burnables outside to the firepit and burned them (the rest was quietly and honorably disposed of in the trash can). We sang our Chocolate Songs and the Chocolate Dirge and recited new Chocolate Odes.

Finished, we returned to Blue Moon Keep and slept off the chocolate high.

Today, we celebrate the start of Fruit Season.

It begins with blueberry and apple pancakes, redbud muffins, and fresh strawberries in creme fraiche, with wild berries collected and juiced with apple juice to stretch it a bit further. And as the day progresses, we will stuff ourselves on All Things Fruit.

Tomorrow, we'll settle back to more normal eating habits. But for these two days, we gorge.

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Diet and the Modern Pagan

It crept in practically unnoticed in the late 70's and by the early 90's, most Pagans assumed all Pagans were vegetarian at the very least, if not more strictly vegan or even the rare breathtarian. Books published about Pagan foods all proclaimed the superiority of a vegetarian diet, how it was ethically and environmentally the only Pagan choice. Still, the books contained recipes for dairy, fish, chicken, and even the occassional cow or pig.

Those Pagans who were tribal, who adhered to the hunter and herder beliefs found themselves the target of well wishing Pagan vegetarians. And they withdrew into themselves. Maybe they were unethical and environmentally incorrect to desire meat, but desire it they did.

Others, who tried a vegetarian diet, discovered it came at a cost to their health. They needed the specific type of iron or protein only meat could provide them.

There is nothing wrong with eating meat.

There is nothing wrong with preferring a vegetarian diet. As an omnivore, I see both sides and find them yummy.

So, here and now, I'd like to create this community so we can share our culinary adventures, our spiritual transports over this divine dish or that. Our rituals, our blessings, our methods that make our food an integral part of our life and our religion.

All ways are right, and all food is yummy.

Except okra.

OK, if you like okra, you can post about it, but I won't participate in those discussions.

And that's what I recommend for anyone who encounters a food one dislikes, be it steak or okra or apples.

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