New Moon – Apple (Harvest) Moon Begins

Ontario’s Yummy Season is still in full swing but, at this point, we’re coming down the home stretch of Summer. My fridge is full of golden zucchini, roma tomatoes, huge, round Sicilian eggplants, yellow peppers, new potatoes, rainbow carrots, and chioggia beets, along with the last of the garlic scapes, and the first of the garlic bulbs (not actually in the fridge, but in the garlic basket hanging from my cupboard door). My cupboard is filling fairly rapidly with jar after jar of tomato preserves, along with the odd cup of jelly or fruit butter.
Fruit butter.
Yeah. Right now, I have my slow-cooker set up on my foor, on a bed of old newspapers, cooking down a litre-and-a-half of apricots (plus half a cup of cider vinegar and half a cup of granulated sugar) to what will probably work out to about two cups of apricot butter, if that. We’ll see what the results are when we get it all done some time tonight.
I’m hoping that I’ll be able to snag a few dozen apples off of our various apple-tree-having friends, though Hidden Harvest Ottawa has been pretty good for apple offerings so far and I should be able to get some for no more than the effort that comes from picking them yourself. Apple butter is great as an accompaniment to savoury foods – spread on a grilled cheese sandwich, for example, or thinned out with a little vinegar and used as a glaze for pork, turkey, winter squash, or various root veggies (sweet potato, rutabaga, celeriac, carrots) – as well as a good substitute for both straight-up sugar and eggs when it comes to baked goods (vegans, and friends of vegans take note). Any other fruit butter will do the same thing, though, and my goal this year is to put up more pear butter and pumpkin butter (combined) than apple butter… if I can swing it[1]. The apricot butter currently on the simmer, though, is more of an experiment. I want to see how it tastes, and what it goes with, so that – if/when I can swing buying a house with some yard space attached – I can determine whether or not I want to grow an apricot tree in said yard based on how readily I use the fruit. (This is another situation where putting my dehydrator to use would be a good thing, but I’m dealing with fruit that isn’t readily ripening, so I’m hesitant to put it to use at this time).
 
Also on the to-do-list for today are:
Another 2.5L of bruschetta, this time in pint jars because I’m running out of single-cup options and I still have my various fruit butters to put up.
Bake bread – Made the dough last night and let it chill in the fridge until this morning. It’s rising slowly, possibly because of the cold and possibly because of the high(er) whole wheat flour content… not sure. Some of the dough will be a (single) loaf of bread, the rest will become the crust for tonight’s New Moon Pizza.
Make pizza: Apple Moon pizza, not surprisingly, will feature (last year’s) apple butter as the sauce, apple-and-sage sausage slices from Seed to Sausage, cremini mushroom slices, yellow pepper slices, golden zucchini rounds, smoked eel (in small slivers, like anchovies), and mozzerella cheese.
 
Apple moon starts of it’s 2014 cycle by sliding from Leo into Virgo, making this a creative period that calls us to work, work, work – on creative projects, but also on the heavily-producing (we hope) garden and the ensuing canning marathon that comes with it and, for some of us, the return to school and studying after a summer-long break.
Others of us, of course – parents of school-aged kids, or people like my wife whose busy season happens in the summertime – will be looking at the arrival of apples, pears, and the earliest winter squash with relief because it means that there will be less on their plates. Time to restock, work on more personal projects, catch one’s breath, and maybe even have an evening off every now and then.
 
As far as naming this time of year goes, last year I speculated that maybe I’d be better off calling this cycle “Pear Moon” because of the recent appearance of Ontario pears in the grocery stores. This year’s “Apple Moon” begins almost two weeks before last year’s did, date-wise, but, yes, the pears have just appeared in the produce section. Maybe this should be called Pear Moon. Hm. 🙂
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.
 
 
[1] This is unlikely, as apples are available for free and, failing that, exceedingly cheap, while pears are a bit on the pricey side. None the less, I live in hope.

Q is for Queerness (Otherness, Sexual Deviance, and The Witch) – Pagan Blog Project 2014

So… Miss Sugar has a post on Being The Other as a witch (in the sense of magical-practitioner/spell-crafter rather than in the sense of someone who practices Wicca). This has got me thinking about queerness again and about how “witch” is tied up with “sexually deviant woman” in much the same ways as “slut” and “dyke”. See… I do magic. Sometimes I even do it professionally, as folks who have commissioned jewelry from me will know. I’m a spell-crafter, as well as an arts-and-crafter, if you will. 😉 I’m also a femme dyke and a professional naked person and, as such, I’ve got some personal freedoms tied up with the human rights of (and denial there-of, and the resulting tacit encouragement of violence against) sexworkers. I live in a neighbourhood where multiple people make their living – in an official, “I’ve got signage in my front windows” capacity – as diviners and fortune tellers and umpteen others do so in a more casual/unofficial way (myself included).
 
My neighbourhood is full of (a) racialized and/or immigrant/new-comer people, (b) kinky, poly dykes, (c) broke-ass, working-poor, fixed-income, and otherwise economically-screwed people, (d) sexworkers in various fields & on various career paths, and (e) folks who are some or all of the above at the same time. It’s a neighbourhood that is full of Othered People, is what I’m getting at. If you’ve ever read “Baseball Magic” (or Mama Fortuna’s blog, for that matter), you’ll know that people turn to spell-craft and divination and similar when they can’t control their situation through more mundane means. No surprises, then, that neighbourhoods where marginalized people tend to live also tend to be neighbourhoods where witchcraft flourishes (relatively speaking, at least) as a trade.
It’s also not surprising, being as we live in The Patriarchy, that women who know-damn-well that they possess personal and sexual agency and don’t act like good, little, self-policing Stepford Wives competing for men’s attention, are (a) scary as fuck to said Patriarchy, and (b) Othered all the heck because of it.
 
Witch has always been a word leveled, like a threat, against “sexually deviant” (too pretty, too ugly, too wanted, too wanting, too available, not available enough…) women. So has “dyke”. So have “slut” and “whore”. We are all related.
Glamour is a tool of the vamp, the femme fatale, the witch as beautiful seductress. Femininity is art/artifice/artificial, set up in our cultural narrative as lie in order to make masculinity look “natural” and “honest” next to us.
 
This shows up everywhere from the damn Maleus Malificarum to the fairy tale witch who is set up as “woman gone wrong” with her stealing/eating of children, her house on chicken-legs or made of questionable-yet-alluring materials, her seducing of men away from their wives, her dangerous beauty; to relatively recent pop-culture icons like: the spooky, short-skirt-wearing, self-identified “weirdo” girls in The Craft; Jilly the “bad girl” in Practical Magic – who was totally comfortable using her power to her own advantage and who was also kinky, promiscuous, and generally “wayward”, right alongside her “good girl” sister Sally’s status as a witch being an open secret “she’s… different” whose “coming out” is commented upon by her co-workers – two characters who, in different ways, ping dyke buttons on their own; Willow Rosenberg who, as she grew in her power and her comfort there-with, also came out as a dyke and took a trip down her own “wayward”, stand-in-for-recreational-drug-use, path; and Lisle Von Rhuman (Death Becomes Her), the seductive, sensual, dominant, sorceress who holds the secret to eternal life and perpetual youth.
 
Goddess Spirituality, labrys pendants, and similar iconography have had a few surges in popularity as a means of flagging dyke to women who might want to hook up with you – the late 70s and early/mid 90s being two that I can think of myself. (Starhawk definitely had a hand, intentionally or not, in that one. Morning Glory Zell, too, for that matter – bi, poly, and pagan both of them).
 
Slut, dyke, and witch are all set up as “home-wreckers” in various ways, and thus contrasted to the “home-maker” status of idealized/expected/“respectable” (safe) womanhood.
Whore, Slut, Femme, Dyke… Witch.
Witches are transgressors.
We are Circe, every one of us.

Q is for Quilt – Pagan Blog Project 2014

So, as-you-know-bob, there’s a tonne of stuff out there (relatively speaking, at least) about spinning and yarn as can be used in magic – spinning for trance work in Seide, for example, or using yarn (hand-spun or not) for binding or other knot-magical purposes. But, being as I’ve started sewing more of my own clothes of late, and being as one off-shoot of that is that I’ve got a small (thank goodness) but growing (er…) bag of scrap fabric sitting in my craft cabinet, I’ve started wondering if quilting isn’t somewhere in my near future. To that end, I have started wondering how quilting can be turned to magical purposes.
I mean, there’s the obvious stuff – stitching pieces of people’s old clothes together in the form of patch-work is a way of binding them together, strengthening family ties, and so-on – but I’m wondering what else it can do.
 
Creating quilts as devotional art, for example, by choosing colours and patterns that would appeal or depict your patron deities. Quilting wall-hangings that fit with a given seasonal rite as it pertains to your own bioregion. The act (and final product) of quilting as a multi-layered means of ancestor remembrance/connection – both as a skill-set and with regards to which fabrics get used. Using the pattern of stitches to, say, cursive-write a spell directly into the quilt without “lifting your pencil” (that would actually be really difficult, since quilts are on the big side and needles tend to need re-threading multiple times during the quilting process). Including specific elements/components in the quilt’s stuffing or stitching different stone beads into a quilted wall-hanging might also apply.
 
Right now, the fabric scraps I have are bits of various wedding dresses (mine and my wife’s) plus some scrap fabric from a dress I made for myself, and the odd shirt or two that I’ve tailored. Not a whole lot to work with, spell-wise, but using scraps of my own clothes – stuff I’ve made for myself because I wanted something specific to fit my needs and my desires – could be a great way to quilt a glamour spell for myself, for example, using the quilted fabric (with or without some sort of warming in-between layer) to create a magical dress or skirt for myself – in the same way that I’m creating a Fetish Shawl for myself out of yarn that I’ve hand-spun and then knit into various stripes – and treating it as a means to stitch bits of my empowered, desirous Self back together.
 
Might be worth a shot.
 
Thoughts on quilting magic? Ever tried it? How did it go?
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.

Preserves! Bruschetta In A Jar!

In truth, I suspect this is better classified as either “picked tomatoes” or “diced tomatoes with extra stuff” but either way “bruschetta in a jar” is probably a more evocative description, so we’re going with it.
Yesterday, I finally got around to canning the latest 2.5lb (bulk) bag of roma tomatoes and, in the interest of flavour variety (if not vegetable variety) in our winter diet, I opted to can them as one-cup jars of “bruschetta”.
 
 
Bruschetta in a Jar
 
2.5 lbs roma tomatoes (12-15, roughly), blanched, skinned, cored, and diced
2 large yellow cooking onions, peeled and finely diced
1 bulb (BULB – about 12 cloves) garlic, peeled and roughly chopped
½ C balsamic vinegar
½ C white wine vinegar
¼ C tomato juice
1 tbsp salt
1 tbsp dried rosemary (I would have liked to use basil instead/also but I’m out. Oh well)
 
 
Put everything in a pot and bring to a boil. Allow the liquid to reduce somewhat, if possible[1]
Once everything is boiling and has been mixed together well, ladle it into sterilized jars – I used a slotted spoon to do this – and top up with about 2 tbsp of vinegar-tomato cooking liquid[2].
Cap the jars and process them in a boiling water bath for 10-15 minutes
Remove from water and allow to cool, listening for the “plunk” as each jar seals.
 
Makes about two litres
 
 
One of my jars didn’t seal, so I wound up with seven cups of bruschetta preserved and sitting in my cupboard, plus one clup of bruschetta that I used in last night’s dinner. I poured it, plus the large amount of left-over balsamic-tomato liquid, over a couple of fish fillets and baked the whole shebang. It tasted amazing so I’m confident that the above preserves will serve us well over the winter. 🙂
 
That brings me up to about six litres of tomato products in the cupboard so far. I still have plans to make my annual roasted-garlic-balsamic tomato sauce (and I’ll be using a litre of frozen tomato skins and cores along with whatever other tomatoes I can scrounge to do it), but I can see this bruschetta mix – which is quite similar in terms of ingredients – taking up more and more space in my cupboard. It tastes good, and – while you do need to peel and core the tomatoes – it’s relatively quick as it doesn’t require a night spent in the slow-cooker before it’s ready to can.
Something to think about. 🙂
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden
 
 
[1] This may or may not work. Tomatoes have a lot of liquid in them, so when you first boil them, you’ll actually get more liquid than you started with.
 
[2] The point of this is to keep the Ph level low enough to safely can them in a boiling water bath. The next time I make this, I’m more likely to half the vinegar in the recipe BUT add a tablespoon of balsamic to each jar rather than relying on the tomatoes, onions, and garlic to soak up enough vinegar to be acidic enough “on their own” during the cooking process.

Preserves – Crushed/Diced Tomatoes 2014 (and the saga of the broken jars)

Hey!
So, remember last year when my crushed tomatoes wouldn’t seal, and I decided that I probably wouldn’t do home-canned crushed tomatoes again?
Well, I decided to try canning crushed/diced tomatoes again this year, after all and, while the jars sealed just fine (YAY!), I still wound up learning a Valueable Lesson about canning safety. Yeah, that.

Full Moon – Thunder Moon Crests

It was a super moon (again) last night! 😀
My lovely wife, and one of her GFs, and I went out and sat on a bench on the corner and watched her come up over the buildings, all orange between the branches. Sh was, in fact, quite large even at that height, and quite lovely as always. 🙂
We spent the day away from the house, riding around the country side on the motorbike (I love being a passenger) – the kind of ride where you go for, like, an hour and a half just to get an ice cream cone and come back again – and then eating amazing (left-over) BBQ’d ribs for dinner. Life is good. 🙂
Also, every town in the Lanark Highlands is having their Garlic Festival right now which means Ontario Garlic will be showing up in Ontario Grocery Stores in, like, the next two days (YAY!!!)

P is for Pieces (and Parma) – Pagan Blog Project 2014

So. Long ago, I picked up a copy of T. Thorne Coyle’s Evolutionary Witchcraft, and tried to read it. I never got all the way through, though. I’d always get a bit hung up on the Dances for each of the three Parts/Types Of Soul – at least that’s the big one that comes to mind for what was “stopping me” from reading it all the way through.
That seems to be kind of a thing with me, though – I’ll get a learning text and start it… and then not progress as quickly as I’d like to – for Reasons, of course[1] – and get frustrated (or side-tracked, or both) and put it down again.
The latest one that I’m (hopefully not) doing this with is Gede Parma’s Ecstatic Witchcraft: Magick, Philosophy & Trance in the Shamanic Craft

Drying Peaches and Nectarines – Things I Have Learned

So, as-you-know-bob, I bought myself a dehydrator last week.
Yesterday was its first run, and… it did okay.
 
What I did was take a heap of peaches (enough to fill one tray, so let’s say “8-9”) and a heap of nectarines (roughly twice that number, since they filled two trays), and cut them up in to chunks.
Yeah, that was, I suspect, my first mistake.
 
See, here’s the thing. In a different house – and possibly with a different dehydrator (one that didn’t need to have its trays rotated every 3-4 hours) – leaving your dehydrator to run through the night might be a totally fine thing to do. But I don’t entirely feel like that would be the wisest course of action in our wee, previously-quite-neglected apartment building. So I’m currently only running my dehydrator while I’m awake.
 
Chunks of fruit have a lot of volume to get through before they’re dried all the way through. After 11 hours, even the nectarines weren’t totally done. O.O
 
So, yeah, I turned them off for the night, bagged up the fruit and put it in the fridge. And of course there’s condensation on the bag in the morning, because the fruit isn’t dried all the way through. Which is fine. I’ve basically made Fruit Candy and will throw some of it in with the pork tonight, and probably pack the rest up to be Snack Food for me and my lovely wife when we go on our adventure tomorrow afternoon (I think we’re borrowing someone’s car and picking up extra Bike Parts, but I could be wrong). So no harm done. BUT:
Next time I do this – most likely with tomatoes – I’ll be slicing my fruit/veggies so that they’re no more than one centemetre thick (idelaly closer to half that), and fairly uniform.
That should make things dry both more evenly and a lot faster, even though it’ll also make for a fair bit more clean-up in the long run. My hope is that the learning curve on this will be an easy one, and that I’ll have the hang of it quickly enough to be able to whip up a batch of kale chips for-the-heck-of-it every now and then, and make good (store it at room-temperature good) use of it for tomatoes, peaches, pears, plums (… etc) during harvest season. 🙂

Chocolate-Chili Peanut Butter Cookies

So I spent yesterday cooking and cleaning, like you do (the work room is now actually workable – go me!) and trying out my shiny new dehydrator. I’ll do a separate post about that experience (it was fine, but I learned a few things) shortly. For now, though, I want to post this handy-dandy recipe I came up with yesterday.
 
Note: Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of “healthy cookies” – stuff that, while still chock full of sweet stuff, was made with a mixture of relatively-high-nutrition flours (whole wheat + ground almonds + whole cooked millet, for example) and relatively low-glycemic-index sugars (like fruit butter rather than refined, granulated straight-up-sugar).
Readers, these are not that kind of cookie.
I made them because I’ve been wanting peanut-butter cookies since last week[1] and I finally had the time to sit around and just get them made. 🙂
Here’s the recipe:

Tomato-Peach Salsa 2014

So I may or may not wind up making appliance-dried fruit this year. The dehydrator is larger (read: wider at the base) than I was expecting, and our on-going, building-wide Roach Problem has reminded me (again) that creating a warm, moist, sheltered, fruit-filled environment is maaaaaybe not something I want to be doing right there in my food preparation area.
I sure do miss my balcony right now. Ants I can deal with, if they turn up. But this is just not something I want to encourage.
 
That said, whether I do dried fruit or stick with, say, peach-nectarine butter (which will be its own brand of deliciousness) this summer, I’m going to need to get on it in, oh, the next 24 hours because that fruit is not going to last all that much beyond that.
I think I may have come up with a way to stage the dehydrator that will keep things relatively under control, provided my fruit doesn’t take more than about 12 hours and I can stay int he house during that time (I have a drop-leaf side table that, with the adition of a protective cover – I don’t want to wreck the wood – might serve as an appropriately sized suport, provided I can do some pre-emptive protective work around the base before I turn the thing on.
ANYWAY.
So that’s the saga with the dehydrator. Now that I’ve (possibly) grossed you all out, I’m going to rapidly change the subject to SALSA.