Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at [email protected]!

 

Mark’s Mulled Wine

1 (375-ml) bottle of red or tawny port wine

2 (750-ml) bottle red wine, such as Cabernet Sauvignon (cheap! Don’t do this to the good stuff!)

1/2 cup honey

2 cinnamon sticks

2 oranges, zested and juiced

8 whole cloves

6 star anise

4 oranges, peeled, for garnish

 

Combine the red wine (not the port), honey, cinnamon sticks, zest, juice, cloves and star anise in a large saucepan, bring to a boil and simmer over low heat for 10 minutes. Add port wine. Pour into mugs, add an orange peel to each and serve. Serves 8.

 

Yucca’s Winter Broth

Short version: Simmer bones in a big pot (or slowcooker, instantpot etc) for 12 to 48 hours. Add vegetable scraps for the last hour. Strain into mugs and enjoy. 

 

Detailed version: Save the bones from your other meals in the freezer. Once you have several pounds of one kind of bone saved up, add them to a big pot of water or large slow cooker. Add a dash of something acidic like apple cider vinegar or wine. If you have small bones break them open to release more marrow-ey goodness. 

Bring pot to a boil, then lower heat and simmer for 12+ hours. The longer, the better. Check water level periodically and add extra water if it gets low.  

About an hour before your broth is done add in vegetable scraps. If you are going to add herbs, wait until the last half hour to add. 

Strain the broth directly into mugs to enjoy or into glass containers if you plan to save it for later. 

Do not be surprised to see your broth gel up if it cools. But be aware that if you simmer it for a long time the collagen may break down into its constituent amino acids and not gel, and that’s still perfectly fine and delicious! 

 

 

S2E01 TRANSCRIPT:  

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Mark: Welcome back to The Wonder: Science-Based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark

Yucca: and I'm Yucca.

Mark: And today we're going to talk about, about food. Big topic really important for all of us. Nobody gets out of here alive without food. Of course, nobody gets out of here alive at all, but, there are a lot of things to say about our relationship with food and what it is and how it fits into our spiritual practice.

And then we'll round out the podcast with a couple of, recipes for you for the winter holiday season. Yep.

Yucca: What we're doing right now and moving into 2021.

Mark: Oh, Oh

Yucca: Haha

Mark: Thankfully.

Yucca: Okay. Well, the first thing I want to say with food is that we are all part of the food web. That's just the reality of being part of this earth being alive is that we are eating and we are being eaten.

And we don't typically think of ourselves as being eaten, but we are, and eventually we'll be completely eaten. But at the moment, the skin that you are shedding the hair, our waste. That's all somebody else's food. And even though we may be currently in the history of humans, we're apex predators, there's still plenty of folks eating us and we're eating plenty of other folks.

No matter what your dietary strategy is, we're eating living things to be alive.

Mark: Yes. Yes. We talked about this a little bit. In the Solstice Episode and the episode about darkness, we are, we are by our very natures, the takers on of the component parts of what has died to reconstruct ourselves.

And we don't necessarily wait around for those things to die. We kill them. We cultivate them to kill them. And we have been doing that as humans for, at least, well, in the case of animal husbandry, at least 9,000 years. And in the case of agriculture, probably seven-ish something like that. So relatively recent in recently in human experience.

Yucca: We aren't the first, I'd like to note, that agriculture came about- it has been around for hundreds of millions of years. It just hasn't always been humans. There's a lot of ant species who are farmers, both with crops, if you consider fungi in the realm of crops and with livestock, with their aphids an