We do a ceremony every New Moon that involves, among many other things, food - a meal consisting of one red food, one white food, and one black food. We decided back when we first started doing this that very dark chocolate counts as black food, so usually black and red are dark chocolate and red wine. This means that someone has to come up with an interesting white food every month.

We missed the actual new moon this month because one of our group is hard at work on a dissertation and has had no time until tonight. My husband called me at work today to let me know that I needed to make a white food tonight. I had a marinated artichoke salad in mind for the Artichoke Battle, but I did a quick revise in my head and told my husband to start soaking some white beans right away.

Marinated Artichoke and White Bean Soup

About two cups of cooked white beans
1 jar marinated artichoke hearts
2 cloves garlic, chopped
Lemon juice
Fresh basil and lemon thyme (very fresh - picked from the containers on the porch)
Pepper
Salt
Grated Parmesan cheese

Drain the liquid from the artichokes into the pan and heat. Add garlic, basil and thyme and let them all do their thing for a little while. Add beans, artichokes and about 2 cups of water. Let it all got hot. No actual cooking has to occur here, but it’s a soup and ought to be hot. Add salt, pepper, lemon juice and cheese and puree with an immersion blender.

It came out looking very creamy and white. I love pureed soups for the variety of flavors you can get all in one bite, and this one was no exception.

Response:

Mr. Nettle said , “Good, but not as good as what you did last night. A little bland” (personally I think his taste buds must be broken to call this “bland’ because it had this nice tart lemony/artichoke thing happening, but there you go)

Friend said: “Nice balance of flavors - the earthiness of the beans balances out the zing of the other ingredients.”

My impression: Agreed that it’s not as good as Round 1, but I’m still quite happy with it. I tried a bite about two hours after the meal and found that it improved with sitting. I think a night in the fridge would really allow the artichoke flavor to soak into the beans.

Your regularly scheduled Druid blog will be back after a brief hiatus. Please enjoy this food blog in the meantime. For some reason, food posts are the only things I am managing right now.

I am involved in an Artichoke Battle with two friends. We decided to do an Iron Chef thing and had a fourth friend pick the ingredient, which for this round is Artichokes. Recipes are allowed, though even when I try I find I can’t follow a recipe - there’s always something that seems like it would be better some other way, or an ingredient I don’t like that I want to substitute, or something. Below is my first entry into the competition. It’s an appetizer that I pretty much made up based on the fact that I had this great horseradish cheddar from the CSA that seemed like it would be beautiful with artichokes.

I am already assuming that kwitchery will win this contest - 1. because she’s an amazing cook, 2. because she is willing to tackle much more elaborate dishes than I am and is actually capable of following a recipe and 3. she takes fabulous food pictures and so will make her food look even better than it already is (which is pretty damn good to begin with). Maebius is also an excellent cook and is very creative. Having already assumed this, and also lacking the gene for competitiveness, my goal is to get original and fun without worrying about perfection. I’m not all that creative or artisanal about cooking, but I am super-functional, so I chose to stick with my strength and make functional, simple dishes mostly from stuff that I already had on hand or could reasonably expect to have around.

Horseradish-Dijon Artichokes

1 clove garlic
A few twists of pepper
A pinch of salt
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
2-3 tablespoons white cooking wine
1 egg
1 can artichokes
Grated horseradish cheddar

Put garlic, pepper, salt, mustard, wine and egg in blender. Blend oil in slowly until sauce gets creamy. Stand artichokes up in deep baking dish (small enough that they all support each other.) Pour sauce over artichokes. Top with cheese. Broil 15 minutes.

It came out all toasty and yummy looking. I gave some to Mr. Nettle for the initial tasting. He said:

“Yum. Unexpectedly creamy texture - I expected something a little chewier from artichokes, but instead it has a melt-in-your-mouth kind of thing. Fabulous sauce - what is this? it’s really good. Very long-lasting, complex flavor. Excellent.” He ate it all and looked happy about it, and then asked for the pan and a spoon so he could eat all the sauce out of it.

The sauce was in fact amazingly good. My opinion is also good, though not as good as his. I thought the texture thing he pointed out could have been brought out more if I had chopped the artichokes - it would have come out more as a dip sort of thing. It would be the Best Thing Ever done that way and served on rice crackers, or chopped even finer and used as a pasta sauce. As an appetizer on its own, it was very, very good but needed some sort of other texture like a cracker for a contrasting texture.

My Druid grove had our Beltaine ceremony today. (For Anne only: it was awful! you missed nothing! no need to read further!) There was a forecast for rain and I fully expected to be doing ceremony in the rain, which is OK, but instead we got a glorious sunny spring day, which is much better than OK. A few of us took a hike to visit our namesake black oak, and as usual I was most interested in saying hi to all the lovely spring weeds coming up. Tons of garlic mustard, naturally - a destructive invasive that is also delicious (I made garlic mustard mashed potatoes last night were delicious - saute garlic mustard leaves in butter, then add to mashed potatoes and bake for 10-15 minutes), wild ginger, false solomon’s seal, jack-in-the-pulpit, mayapples all in bloom - wild plants of the deciduous understory are for some reason some of my favorites. They feel like companions, even the poison ivy.

The ceremony was wonderful as always (shh, don’t tell Anne!) and Muin taught us all to make woven chain:

That’s a woven copper bracelet that I made. Actually, Muin walked me through it like a five-year old in arts and crafts, started and finished it for me, and took over whenever I bungled it too much, but the bulk of the actual weaving was done by me! Me! With some practice I could get good at it.

After we finished I took a walk to an area where I hoped to find some more fun and interesting plants. I found a lovely big patch of my dearest friend, stinging nettle. I wasn’t quite prepared for her as I had no gloves, but she and I have a pretty good understanding and I can pick a fair quantity without getting stung. At the first sting I stopped, and saw that I had enough for a nice pot of soup. So that was dinner tonight - nettle soup. I looked around for something a little different than my usual form of nettle soup and found one here that I made almost to the recipe (very unusual for me - recipes are for inspiration, not instruction, in my world) except I used potato starch instead of flour for a thickener and dried dill rather than fresh. The egg was a really nice touch.

When I started this whole blog thing, I made a solemn promise that I would never write a post that said “Sorry I haven’t been writing much,” because those are just pointless and I’m not really sorry, and this still isn’t one of those posts, but I do want to say that I will get to the duality synchroblog one of these days. It’s a great topic. I have been having vision problems lately that make it hard to look at a computer screen for very long, and since I have to look at a computer screen in order to make a living, I’ve been limiting my non-work computer time. My eye doctor says that a new special expensive pair of glasses will solve the problem, so when those come in I will go back to wasting enormous amounts of time on the interwebby-thingy and writing something besides recipe posts and rambly unedited posts about How My Day Went.

I made carrot peanut soup for lunch. I made it up as I went along. We had too many carrots and way more shelled peanuts than we know what to do with (they were on sale, in bulk, and I cannot resist the lure of cheap protein) so I decided to figure out a way to combine them. It came out so much better than expected that I need to record the recipe here for posterity in case I decide to do it again.

Carrot Peanut Soup
4 carrots
1/2 onion
3 cloves garlic
about 1/2 cup shelled peanuts
About 2 teaspoons of Sriracha sauce (the stuff with the rooster on the bottle)
A generous sprinkle of gomasio
About 1/2 cup soy sauce
A spoonful of sour cream
A few fresh basil leaves

Cut up the onion, garlic and carrot. Saute these in olive oil in the bottom of a large saucepan (it would probably also be good cooked in butter) about 5 minutes until the onions just start to go clear. Add the Sriracha and gomasio, stir, and then add about 3 cups of water. Simmer for 20-25 minutes, until the carrots are tender. Grind the peanuts in a food processor or coffee grinder until they are fine but not pulverized - we’re not making peanut butter here. Add the ground peanuts, soy sauce, basil and sour cream (the sour cream was an afterthought because I used too much sriracha and wanted to tone it down some - probably a sane amount of hot sauce would negate the need for sour cream.) Puree with an immersion blender until smooth. It makes a thick, creamy, and very filling soup - we both felt stuffed after one bowlful, and that was after working in the garden all morning and coming to the table feeling super hungry.

Vulgar language and um, extremely appropriate content warning for the video, Jonathon Coulton singing that great Beltaine song, “First of May.” You don’t want your little kid to hear this and then sing the very catchy refrain in public. Or anywhere else, really, unless your ideas about childrearing are highly unorthodox.

Happy Beltaine. Get out there and enjoy the springtime with someone special.

You know things are bad when the investment advice from the Wall Street Journal is “stock up on food.” Costco is rationing rice, wheat and cooking oil. Oil is on its way to $120/barrel and gas is headed towards $4/gallon and shows no sign of going down. The Federal Reserve is propping up our banking system using drastic measures. The dollar is crashing .  I am not an economist and don’t completely understand the implications of everything that is going on, and if anyone with a firmer grasp on these concepts wants to tell me why it’s not as bad as it looks, please do. I would love to hear it.

I don’t like talking this way or admitting this pessimism. I want to qualify it somehow, to say that it’s all going to be OK. To celebrate human ingenuity and adaptability, to look to the bright days ahead that will come once we figure our way out of this mess. To ask someone to tell me that it’s not as bad as it looks. I am resisting the urge to find a way to say, yes, things look bad, but here’s what we can do! Because I don’t really know what we can do.

I want to think that people will be outraged that 100 million more people are without food than there were six months ago or that children in Haiti are eating mud pies to stave off hunger pangs. (the linked article also mentions that the price of mud has now risen in Haiti as a result.) Then I remember being a poor child that was often hungry, occasionally to the point of malnutrition, and I remember that I noticed perfectly well that nobody cared. I know that I feel outraged in that impotent way I do and I suppose most of my readers do when we see TV pictures of suffering people. But I also know that I live in the city, and almost daily someone approaches me to tell me how their children are hungry and can I just spare a quarter, please? and I usually walk by, just like everyone else. It’s a systemic problem, right? It’s not my fault, I didn’t do it, I’m too powerless to do anything about it and anyway, it’s all I can do to keep my own family fed. Just like everyone else.

I’ve spent most of my adult life with a vague sense of living in a civilization in decline. My earliest memory of political awareness is of hearing the general outrage among my parents’ social circle over the way Reagan demolished both the advances in conservation and alternative energy made in the ’70s and the political will among the American people to do anything about the issue.  We could do better, I heard, but we chose not to.  Environmental degradation marches along, species are wiped out every day, more trees are cut down and there is less and less wild space. Ice is melting. Things in general are sliding downhill.

My response so far has been to plant more of my own food. I buy all I can locally. I don’t drive - I get in a car maybe once every six weeks. I recycle. I compost. I make my home as energy-efficient as possible. I buy almost everything used. I’ve been doing all of this for years, partly out of a sense of social responsibility, partly out of thrift, and partly out of simple habit. I make medicine out of plants I grow myself or that grow wild. I water my garden with cached rainwater. try to make a change every month to make my existence a little lighter on the earth (for this month, I’m changing my wine-buying habits - I like Southern Hemisphere wines from Australia and Chile and such, they are cheap and tasty, but they have to come so far - so from now on, it’s Pennsylvania or New York wines.)

I’m not particularly smug about any of this. I feel like it’s not enough, it’s petty stuff in the face of overwhelming problems in the world. I do it because, really, what else am I going to do? I wouldn’t be happy living any other way. I just wish more people would connect the dots between an hour long commute and little kids eating mud in Haiti. I know, I already know  - you have to drive that far because how else are you going to make money to feed your own family? It’s not your fault that our society is set up this way. You didn’t do it.

But maybe, if you really thought about it and understand the harm it has already caused, maybe you would find a way to do it differently.

“Use your backyards, vacant lots, idle farms, even flower pots, to plant food crops. Go back to the provinces and plant. Don’t look at the government to help you. It won’t. It will help its top officials first. So help yourself.” - Neal Cruz, Asian Journal Online, March 31 2008, in an article on the rice situation in the Philippines.

Last Saturday, Mr. Nettle took a walk up to the local South Asian grocery to pick up yogurt and incense charcoal. I asked him to check in with the grocer about the rice situation in Asia. I read the news and I know things look bad there, but I’m never sure how well that sort of thing is reported. Our grocer runs a small business catering mostly to the local immigrant population. It’s the best place around for buying spices, bulk ingredients like rice flour, potato starch, brown rice, every kind of bean known to mankind, and those tasty instant meals in the foil packs. We usually get rice from them in ten-pound bags, which is enough for about a month for the two of us - less if we’re feeling particularly poor and want to stretch the food budget. Our grocer, as it turns out, is afraid. He’s frightened for his relatives in India and he’s frightened for his business. He believes that India is headed for starvation and that his suppliers will no longer be able to send food out of the country.

The rice situation is just a piece of a larger problem that is looming. Our unsustainable food system is on its way to a breakdown - I don’t want to get into too much detail on it here, since this isn’t really the place and I’m not the person for that sort of analysis, but if this is news to you, here is a place to start. Sharon Astyk’s blog is another great source if you want a little more depth and a lot more practical information.

I don’t think most people believe that we will ever have food shortages in the US. We are so accustomed to plenty. I don’t think I believe it myself. Even when I look at all the factors coming together right now - climate change, the price of oil, financial crisis, the land war in Asia, just to start with - and while I think it looks very bad, I don’t have that gut feeling that true food shortages are possible here. There is this instinctive resistance to thinking “it could happen here” even when I know that it could.

A few years back when gas prices started to go up, I was glad for it. Not because I want people to suffer or because I hate cars (though I do actually hate cars, but that’s beside the point), but because I knew that it was inevitably going to happen and the more gradually it did, the more time people had to get used to it and make accommodations. I thought it would lead to less hardship in the long run because it would get people to wake up. Before that, my concern was that it would go from $1.50 to $4.00 in a few months and leave everyone scrambling. And yet, we’ve had time to see where this is going and everyone is still scrambling. Changes are being made, but it’s happening much too slowly, I think for the same reason - people think that this is a temporary situation, an artifact of market forces that will eventually be reversed and we can all go back to normal. We can’t help but think this way. It hasn’t really sunk in yet that this is the new normal.

So I’ve decided to take the food situation as a warning. Maybe there won’t be a crisis in the food supply this year, or next year, or in the next decade. Maybe not. But it’s clear to me, as it was clear to me with the oil situation, that our current system cannot be sustained and will eventually break down, and anything I do to prepare for that is all to the good, even if the price of rice drops next month and the current crisis is averted.

With this in mind, I’m determined to get more serious about my backyard gardening. I don’t have very much space, but I always try to grow some sort of vegetable every year. Last year it was tomatoes, which came in abundance. I could do so much more, though, even in my limited space. I’ve been treating gardening as a hobby, a way of enjoying the outdoors and getting a little bit of fresh food for fun. I would still like it to be fun but on a bigger scale. I’m going to put in a real, if small, garden this year. We’ve got maybe ten square feet suitable for vegetables. My goal is to grow enough that I have some to put up. This will be a challenge considering the space constraints, but it will be a good exercise and a learning experience even if we don’t hit that goal.

Anyone have any tips for backyard organic gardening in a small space? I’m working with Mel Bartholomew’s “Square Foot Gardening,” but I’m open to helpful suggestions.

addendum: after writing this, I noticed this article at MSNBC.com about rising food costs. It’s a total piece of fluff as an article and I kept wanting to find a really really tiny violin for the people they were interviewing* but it at least shows that the mainstream media is paying some level of attention to this.

Since this is a post about food, I must include a recipe. I made this last night to deal with a surfeit of carrots. I made it up as I went along but it came out really good and Mr. Nettle raved about it, so I’m recording it here to remember it.

Creamy Carrot-Potato Soup

Ingredients:
3 potatoes
4 carrots
2 cups chicken broth (or substitute veggie broth or water to make it veg)
1/2 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons potato starch (you could also use flour or cornstarch - this is just for thickening.)
3 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
Salt
Pepper
Thyme

Chop the potatoes and carrots and bring to a boil in the chicken broth. When they are all mushy, turn the heat way down. Ladle out about half a cup of the broth into a little cup or bowl. Mash or blend (I used my Braun stick blender) until it’s kind of chunky. You don’t have to cream it all the way yet. Whisk the potato starch into the reserved broth until it’s smooth and thick. Add the spices, cheese, sour cream and potato starch mix into the potato/carrot/broth mash. Continue blending as you add everything until it’s all smooth and creamy.

It was very tasty and as I said Mr. Nettle really loved it. Next time I think I’ll use more carrot - it tasted very potato-y, especially with the potato starch in. More carrot would have given a more interesting flavor and a more orange color. I think it would be good with any kind of cheese, not just the parm, and other spices would be tasty. Oregano, maybe, or some fresh rosemary. It would also benefit from some garlic. This was a “I have a bunch of stuff to use up, what would be good?” kind of thing. Other root vegetables, like turnips or beets, would work.

*Warning - snarky commentary ahead: “Eating out is almost a luxury now!” No, eating out is ALWAYS a luxury. It’s just one that you can afford less now. “I have to eat last night’s leftovers for lunch!” What did you do before that? Any answer besides “Eat them later” or “make them an ingredient in another meal” is the wrong one, no matter how much money you have. It’s not a hardship to eat leftovers or go to restaurants less often. These people are complaining about having to follow a budget as though it’s a hardship to endure rather than a normal part of being a responsible adult. “I don’t go the store hungry anymore because that easily adds an extra $100 to the bill,” Here’s a tip: Figure out how much you can spend on food. Do not bring more cash than that with you to the grocery store. Do not use plastic. If you get to the checkout and you have $100 extra on your bill, they won’t let you take it out of the store without paying. You will not go over budget! It’s like magic! You will very quickly learn which items you really need and which you don’t. If you can’t afford to put 2000-3000 calories worth of nutritious food into each member of your family every day, then you have a problem. If you just can’t afford to buy all the treats and convenience foods you want but can otherwise keep your family healthy, then you have no problem. Grow up and get over it.

I’ve been studying Ogham for my divination spiral, but I’m becoming more and more interested in oracle card decks. I avoid tarot because my husband’s the tarot guy - while I enjoy it and am not too bad at doing tarot readings, if I have an issue that I want to work with that way, I go to my resident live-in tarot expert. I started getting interested in non-tarot oracle decks a few years ago with this one:

The Celtic Book of the Dead: A Guide for Your Voyage to the Celtic Otherworld (Cards/Spread-Cloth)

Caitlin Matthews

It’s based on the story of the voyage of Maelduin and has some really wonderful images. Each card is based on one of the islands Maelduin’s crew encounter. As an oracle, it leads to extended dreamlike readings that don’t make a whole lot of sense right away but which over time and with thought become clear. I found this frustrating at first because I felt like I was getting nonsense readings, but with use I got to know how to work with it. I use it for questions having to do with initiations or transitions but not for anything with hard practical edges, because for me that’s how it works best. The art is odd and dreamlike, which is fitting, but not particularly pretty. I don’t use it very often because sadly it’s printed on very flimsy card stock and I fear that once it wears out I won’t be able to get another one.

Druid Animal Oracle Deck

Philip Carr-Gomm

This deck is fast becoming my everyday workhorse of an oracle. I can ask it anything and get a clear, sensible answer. It’s very down-to-earth and practical. The illustrations are rich and gorgeous. I’m looking forward to the companion Druid Plant Oracle, coming out soon. I’m very happy to hear that it will be on the same size card stock as the Animal deck, so the two can be shuffled together. These two together might very well become my divination technique of choice for a long time to come. I also use the cards as altar pieces - each new moon I pick a new card at random to go on my altar to think about over the coming cycle. Right now there are three of them out - the Owl because I’m working with Blodeuwedd at this time, the Seal because Blodeuwedd led me to the Selkie story and I’m working with that as well, and the Hawk because I drew that one at random. They are beautiful enough to stand as little art pieces on their own.

The Faeries’ Oracle

Brian Froud

The Froud Faeries’ Oracle is easily the most beautiful oracle deck I’ve ever seen. I find the book that goes with it not to be very useful but that doesn’t seem to matter at all. The images speak for themselves. I only just got this last month and have not done any very in-depth work with it, but I have been doing some extremely in-depth Faerie work lately and I will probably get to know it much better soon. I don’t see it being as practical for me as Philip Carr-Gomm’s deck, but I suspect that what it lacks in practicality it will make up for in intensity. It seems to be an intense kind of oracle.

The Celtic Tree Oracle: A System of Divination

Colin Murray

The Celtic Tree Oracle is a deck of ogham cards. The artwork is pretty but not particularly interesting, and I’ve been using it as a stand-in for a wood ogham set. I haven’t been able to find or make a wooden set yet (I am sorely tempted by some of these, though) so the Tree Oracle cards have been serving as a sort of study aid. They are wearing out very quickly, but then, I’m using them almost every day as part of my studies.

 Mr. Nettle and I just bought ourselves a present. We got a six-foot wooden fence to go around our backyard. This weekend, we’ll add some trelliswork that will take it up to eight feet, and we’re going to plant vines that will cover it all. This is a wonderful thing for me, because it means I finally have some private space outdoors. Where I live, going outdoors alone late at night is not a good idea unless you have a really big dog, which I don’t. Now I have a place that feels safe and private. It’s not really private, because the neighbors are right there on all sides and have windows that easily look down into the yard, but that’s not so bad. If they’re going out of their way to spy on me, it’s their problem, not mine. I don’t mind being seen as the crazy hippie chick, so long as I’m left alone, and the fence will really help with being left alone.  It’s going to be my own little temple back there, and it will be so well warded and safe that any intruders with ill intent will get mugged by fairies the minute they set foot inside the gate. The locked gate.

We did our first ceremony out there in honor of Alban Eiler. We lit a fire in our little fire pit and I got to wear my spiffy new robe and we did a nice quiet ceremony and ritually sacrificed a chocolate bunny. Dove dark chocolate bunnies are really good. It was mostly a calm and subdued little ritual, just me and the mr., but at the very end just when I was closing the grove, a wind came up and for a moment I felt like this (linked because I don’t know about the copyright on the image and I’m sensitive about that sort of thing.)