Rising from the Ashes

The Pagan Blog Project: Cooking

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

I’m sure that many people see no correlation between cooking & Paganism, but in my world, it’s intrinsic. I cook foods that my family & friends love, and while I’m doing it, I infuse everything with positive energy, love and well-wishes. I have never considered myself much of a kitchen witch, but my kitchen is the one place I feel entirely at home. I know exactly what I’m doing when I’m cooking, exactly how to get the results I’m after and what I need to say & visualize to get the most out of a meal.

On most Sabbats, we have a potluck, with me providing the main course. I try very hard to make it a seasonal item, appropriate to the Sabbat itself. I love to cook for people, I love to nurture them through my talents in the kitchen. If I want to show someone that I love & care for them, I make a meal that is their favorite, made the way they like it the best. While I’m cooking it, I visualize all of the best things happening for them, things I know they’re working towards & needing in their lives. I guess it helps that I’m in Circle with them & we talk a lot about the things we’re needing in our lives.

I “cook” other things, like making the oils we need for certain rites & Sabbats and such. I think it makes it more personal, powerful & effective if I’m in control of what goes into them, intentions included. I hope to one day be able to come up with my own formulas for them, but until then, the web is a vast resource for me.

I never thought, when I started cooking, in my first home, at age 18, that one day I would find spiritual satisfaction in that act. I was so terrible at it when I first began. I admit that it isn’t all my fault, you can only do so much with a tiny bit of food, no experience & someone griping at you that it doesn’t taste good. As the years passed and my pantry grew, I switched partners, none of them, for a long time, enjoying what I cooked. I know the reason was more than likely because I cooked grudgingly and didn’t enjoy it. One partner would only allow me to cook pinto beans or for the children, including baking birthday cakes. It was alright if I cooked with someone else, but I wasn’t to be trusted alone. I’m really not sure the reasoning behind that, if he really just thought I was that terrible at it, or he didn’t trust me, or he thought he was an amazing cook (he wasn’t). I didn’t cook much for almost 4 years.

When we finally split up and I moved in with my current husband (almost 21 years ago), I did pretty much all of the cooking & he loved everything I made. The difference was that I was very loved, very in love & really enjoyed cooking things for him that he loved. I was already Pagan, at the time, but still wandering, trying to find the right path for me. I didn’t realize that I was making magic when I was cooking, I just knew that I tried to put as much love & good feelings into everything I made as possible.

Try it the next time someone in your house is grumpy. Make their favorite meal, imbue it with happiness, positive feelings and love. I’m positive that it will change their mood!

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The Pagan Blog Project: Bats

Friday, January 27th, 2012

I’ve been drawn to & have loved bats for almost as long as I can remember. When I was 7 or so, we moved to
Colorado, and that was the first place I became really familiar with them, to the point of waiting every Spring & Summer evening to watch them start to come out. I was never afraid of them, but knew they would be afraid of me & kept a respectful distance.

I have fought the idea of the bat being one of my totems for quite a long time, never thinking for a minute that these animals I have loved since childhood could have any meaning in my life. I kept with the “totems” a former friend told me were the ones for me, even though they never really felt right to me. I have gradually accepted almost all of the others, but kept on resisting the bat.

Maybe intuitively, I knew I wasn’t ready for the sacrifices that the bat asks of you when you take him as your totem. It’s a little scary when you consider what they are: dying to your ego, loving our enemies as ourselves, touching our own inner demons, exploring the underworlds of reality, and renewing our thoughts & beliefs on a moment-to-moment basis.

I’ve known for sure that he was meant for me this past fall, when I took the picture in this post. That little guy was sleeping in a corner near a women’s bathroom enclosure when we went camping. It was 100 degrees, bright daylight and he stayed there until we had taken his picture & lightly stroked his fur. The next time we checked, he had gone.

I still wasn’t ready to commit to his demands, but with some things that have come up in the past few weeks, with our son being home & me starting a program that pretty much demands the same things the bat does, I know that I am, at long last, ready to accept him. I only hope that I can pass his tests, because this is a pretty scary place to be right now.

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The Pagan Blog Project: Brewing

Friday, January 20th, 2012

This week (and next week) we’re doing posts that start with the letter “B.” I thought I’d talk about one of my favorites hobbies this week and why, to me, it’s very Pagan.

I’m going to talk about brewing, but not like brewing beer (even though I gave that a try, too), more like making mead, hard cider & wine. When we first started being involved in an actual, organized group of Pagans, we met every Saturday, without fail, no matter what was going on. If there was a Sabbat that week or a Full Moon, we celebrated that, otherwise, we had a quick Circle, took care of business, toasted whatever with mead & went on with drumming & singing and so on. We always did the toasting with a bottle or more of Chaucer’s mead, which, around here is about $11 a bottle. That gets expensive pretty fast.

My husband & I looked into maybe starting to make our own mead, having no idea, at all, how long the first batch would take or how hard or expensive it would be to make. We found a very simple recipe on a mead making forum, called “Joe’s Ancient Orange” that looked pretty easy & inexpensive to make & a gallon would make about 4 bottles. We gathered our supplies, including about 4 one gallon glass jugs, rubber stoppers and some airlocks. When we had all of that together, we each made our own first batch.

About 10 weeks later, it looked like it was ready to bottle, so we did & I tried each batch. They were both very strong & sweet, but tasted better than Chaucer’s by a long shot. We knew they’d need to mellow out in the bottles for awhile, but took one with us to the yurt that night & shared it around. We made the mistake of drinking the homemade stuff first, so that when we passed the Chaucer’s around, it really tasted like crap to all of us, but the more important thing was that a lot of other people became very interested in making their own, too.

3 types of mead I made last year.

If you’re interested at all, you can find the recipe here, where I posted it word for word from the original. I can’t find the forum it was located on anymore, so I’ll just give the original recipe, with all of it’s credits.

I got a little more creative on my second batch, and used lime instead of orange, and threw some craisins in there instead of raisins, so we could have a cranberry lime mead for Yule. I switched the spices around a bit, leaving out the clove & using a little more ginger and some cinnamon. My husband got really sick & almost died at around the time I should have been bottling that batch, and in the process, ending up sitting for a long time before I got a chance to bottle it. When I did, it was amazing. You could taste the limes and the cranberry, but neither was overwhelming. It was sweet and mellow & pretty high in the alcohol content, too.

Over time, I rarely make the same type twice, I switch out the fruit, sometimes I used a juice with the water and they all turn out wonderfully. Just make sure you use raisins or a fruit with tannins in it in there somwhere. I just made a pear, plum raspberry this past fall that was a little too strong when I bottled it, so I’ll try it again soon, so that I can see if it’s mellow enough to use in the Circle yet.

This past year, I read an article at Chickens in the Road where she was making her own wine. Well, I figured if I was able to make mead, wine couldn’t possibly be any harder. I already had the gallon jugs, stoppers & airlocks, after all, so all I needed were the actual recipe ingredients. I told my husband what I had in mind & we went & bought what I needed. I made my first batch & immeditely bottled it 3 weeks later, not stopping to think it might take a little while longer. It tasted good, but was still a bit fizzy (a good sign it isn’t done fermenting yet). I took the bottles over to Dawn’s house because I couldn’t keep them here without them being stolen by our daughter. Several of the corks blew in her closet, which was hilarious & encouraged me to wait longer to bottle my second batch. I made my second batch with white grape peach juice concentrate and it was fantastic. It has been my favorite so far, but I do have a batch of raspberry/apple/grape needing to be bottled, too, so we’ll see.

White grape peach wine

My last adventure, ot latest I should probably say, is hard cider. I always thought that you probably just tossed some yeast in it, threw an airlock on it & it did it’s thing. I’m sure you could do it that way, it might not be as sweet though. We have a local apple festival here, where you can buy the best cider I’ve ever had in my life. I bought some last October with the intent to learn to make hard cider, so when we got home, I hit google & found an easy recipe for it. I found Tor’s Hard Cider recipe, got the other ingredients & got started. I used about 4 cups of brown sugar to two cups of white & obviously didn’t use a rubber glove, I used a stopped & an airlock. This was my first experience with “racking” a wine, so I was a little hesitant, but I learned to use our siphon & got the job done. When it was finished it was some of the best hard cider I’ve ever had.

So, it’s plain to see that I really enjoy my own brewing results, but it’s more than that. When I make mead, wine or hard cider, I’m putting myself into it, I’m throwing goodwill, love, peace & positive energy into everything I make, because I know that when it’s used, it will be opened for my Circle, used in the cakes & ale portion of the rite & I need it to be special. I need to know what was used in it & how it was made, I also need it to be affordable, because none of us have a lot of spare money lying about. It’s easy, it’s fairly cheap, you can control every part of the process, from the type of yeast you use to the fruits & juices, so if you need or want a particular flavor for a certain rite. It’s pretty much hit & miss when you go out planning to buy something that specific.

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