Incense and a Birthday
My apprentice came over today and we made incense based on the recipes she had to come up with for homework. Incense is one of my favourite tools as it can be used for many purposes: invocation, offering, ritual, spellwork, blessing, exorcising/banishing, divination… and so on. She came up with simple recipes for spirit invoking, spirit food, sun magic, moon magic, and a basic ritual blend. Then I taught her an ancient Greek incense recipe used to invoke Hecate that I’d found in an awesome book: Witchcraft Medicine. They all turned out looking good and smelling good – the Hekate recipe was very pungent with Rue. My favourite of her recipes is the sun magic blend shown below – it smells so fragrant and looks so pretty with flecks of calendula flowers throughout it. I made a cheese and cracker lunch for my hard-working apprentice and then she went off to a whiskey tasting (slightly envious, slightly).
I had the flu last week and wasn’t able to post the pics of Mojo‘s birthday feast, so here they are now. He loves shepherd’s pie, but I don’t usually make it, so I made an old school one for his birthday favourite slathered in mashed potatoes whipped with sour cream, butter, sea salt and freshly cracked pepper. The filling is ground beef with carrots, onions, broccoli, peas, spices, and gravy. You don’t really need a recipe for it, you just kind of throw in what veggies you have in the fridge with some ground beef and gravy and then spread some yummy mashed potatoes on top – and ta da – Shepherd’s Pie. I’ve even had leftover Thanksgiving Turkey Shepherd’s Pie.
It should be served with copious amounts of ketchup. Mojo was only sad there was no jalapeños in it. I served it with a salad and we had chocolate cake from scratch with homemade icing made from melted chocolate, butter, and vanilla with two layers of homemade raspberry sauce using frozen raspberries. It was really good!
