Lammas

I should probably write a bit about my Lammas celebration, before it's all gone out of my head.

I wanted to make bread for Lammas, so I dug out an old recipe that I'd used successfully before. Unfortunately, it didn't really turn out this time, and I'm not a hundred percent sure why. I'm guessing either because the yeast was old, or because I didn't get the water temperature in the right range.

I ended up making some barley biscuits instead, and they came out better - although I'm still tweaking that recipe a bit.

After making the biscuits, I went out to try to make a fire. Everything was wet from all the rain we'd been having, so even though I had some dry logs from under the porch, there wasn't a lot of tinder left under there, and anything else was soaked. The fire pit bricks were also soaked. I managed to get a small fire going for a little while, and I offered two of the biscuits into the fire for Demeter and Hestia (both of whom have ties to bread making, and of course Demeter is also a goddess of grain and the harvest). During the ritual I promised both that they would receive a proper loaf of bread (that I would bake) before the next Lammas.

A year might seem like a long time to make a simple loaf of bread, but I don't want to just rush something out, or do it just because the deadline is coming up, you know? It's something I want to take my time with, and do when I actually have the time and can get into the right frame of mind to actually do it properly. Right now I'm thinking sometime in November I can set aside a day for this... The rest of August has it's own obligations, I'll be out of town for September and part of October, and then the end of October brings Samhain which has it's own activities.

Anyway, after the ritual I made a nice dinner with lots of fresh, seasonal foods... breaded fried fish, baby potatoes roasted in olive oil and herbs, roasted zucchini and summer squash, and beet greens cooked with a bit of salt pork.

Later that night after everyone had gone to sleep, I took some blessed water and sprinkled it around the house to purify it. This is not a normal part of my Lammas workings, but it felt like it was necessary to include this time around.