Lammas 2009 revisited

My niece Nicole, who was my good right hand during the Lammas dinner, somehow also found time to shoot a lot of photos. I think some of these can give you an idea of what we do every year at the end of July to celebrate Lammas (the feast also known as Lughnasadh).

As I've probably said before, I'm the daughter and granddaughter of wheat farmers, so the idea of celebrating the grain harvest as one of our Pagan world's eight great holidays makes perfect sense to me. Every year when I invite people to my home for the Lammas dinner, I decorate Lammas candles for everyone to bring home and keep the Lammas spirit  of gratefulness for the earth's abundance alive at their dinner tables.

This year we honored the farm families who grow our food, and in their memory, I decorated the candles with the my family's immigration passport photo from when they came over from Norway in 1922. We lost the last two members of my family's immigrant generation in the past year--both of whom worked incredibly hard in the wheat fields--so it seemed appropriate to me that we remember them this way.
 
  

My garden was at its seasonal best, but Nicole and I decided we needed more flowers, so we made an early morning trip to the Oakland Flower Market. Every time I buy flowers there, no matter how profligate I am in my selections, I am always shocked at how little money I end up spending. Trust me, this place is one of the all-time great East Bay bargains.  Here's my garden and then you can see some of the selections at the market.

 

And here's a photo of Nicole with her arms filled with the flowers we bought. It's one of my all-time favorite photos of her. She's my artist niece, so it makes sense for her to be photographed amid a riot of color. I think I probably reminded her she's my favorite niece when I shot the photo, hence the big grin.

 

There are some dishes that we have to have at the Lammas dinner no matter what. I cook a lot of Norwegian-heritage foods--particularly hundreds of Norwegian meatballs--and of course make home-made bread. But for my family, no sacred occasion is truly blessed without the presence of a salmon. This year it's a wild silver salmon the folks at Seattle's Pike Place Fish Market sent me. (And yes, these are the guys who got into trouble with PETA for tossing salmon around at the market and I am NOT making this up.. As my friend Macha would say, hnf!).

I always poach the salmon in the dishwasher (no Cascade, of course). I've done this for so many years that I can't even remember when I learned how. Most people think this is a rather radical notion but hey, fish poachers are about $400, and I already have a $400 appliance that does a perfectly fine job, and washes dishes to boot (albeit, not at the same time).

When I was back teaching a workshop at the Sacred Harvest Festival in Minnesota one year, I mentioned to a clutch of Minnesota Pagans that this is how I cook fish, thinking they'd never heard of this method. Oh no, this is how they cook all those weird fish they catch when they're out ice fishing in the winter. Who knew? So maybe dishwasher poaching is a Scandiloopian thing.

Here's the salmon as it came from the airplane, and the second shot is of it poached, lightly coated with a mixture of chopped dill and sour cream, and decorated with English cucumber ``scales.''

 

Nicole prepared the heirloom tomatoes, topping each slice with one basil leaf. Then she lightly salted and peppered them, and gave them a sprinkling of olive oil and some very old and rare balsamic vinegar. One of the other dishes was an hors d'ouvre: fresh figs stuffed with Pt. Reyes blue cheese, wrapped in prosciutto and baked until the cheese melts. You can see some cookie sheets topped with the figs in the background of the next photo.

 

Lammas is, of course, about the bread. Nicole and I baked two kinds: a limpa rye flavored with grated orange peel, and a basic white bread. Here I am mugging when the bread came out of the oven, and next is a plate with some of the bread freshly sliced for the dinner.

 

Besides Nicole, my coven sister Meg was one of the stalwart members of the kitchen crew. She's making a last-minute check of the table to see that everything we need was there. Ironically, we forgot and left both the green salad and three dozen deviled eggs in the refrigerator. Another of the sisters is deep into the refrigerator in this photo. In the second photo Meg's putting one of the bouquets on our coven's special table. Sometime I'll write about that table in another blog posting.

 

Before we started the meal, we had the blessing of the bread. We don't bless the bread per se, but are--it seems to me--blessed by the earth's abundance that makes it possible for us to have bread. I'm always reminded of the Eucharistic prayer from my Catholic past that speaks of bread:``which earth has given and human hands have made.''

So we pass the plate with the bread from person to person, and everyone has a chance to express gratitude to the earth and make Lammas wishes for the coming year. This year one of the guests, who is a Pagan with Jewish roots, also made a bracha over the bread, which seemed just fine and appropriate.

Here's the beginning of the blessing of the bread. Nicole was standing by my side holding one of the Lammas candles. The only other thing I can say about this photo is that it looked like my grandmother showed up uninvited and donned my apron. That's  OK because she was one of my favorite people in the world and she did teach me to bake bread, so I don't really mind looking so much like her.

 

One of the things I love about the Lammas dinner is that friends from a variety of backgrounds show up, and they're not all Pagans. One of my friends who is a Buddhist priest came, as did some of my new friends I see every day on the Alameda ferry boat. And it's particularly cool to me that now we have little kids in our Pagan family, and even a well-behaved dog showed up for the festivities. It feels like the great family feast and celebration that Lammas is supposed to be. So here you will see Aradia, Alex and then Maddie, the red Australian Sheepdog, who is playing her part as The Appealing Dog.

Here are some of the horde descending on the table, and then a few of the people who chose to eat dinner indoors. It was one of those semi-chilly Bay Area summer evenings with fog sneaking back in after the sun began to set. I'm sorry to say the photo at the left represents the last day in the life of the black Oaxacan pot holding Palouse wheat in the middle of the table. I accidentally knocked it off the table the next morning and it almost exploded when it hit the concrete slab floor.I had carried that pot on my lap back from my trip to Oaxaca with John many years ago, so am very sad to lose it. But it was truly shattered beyond any hope of repair.

 

After dinner Beltaine's Fire performed out on the patio. They play, according to their Web site, ``revolutionary hip-hop Celtic fusion.'' They're a very smart, literate, politically-oriented and very talented bunch of young musicians, and I love their music. 

 

And now the wheel has turned and Mabon (the Autumn equinox) is looming ahead. This is the one Pagan holiday I actively dislike, for I hate saying farewell to Persephone and getting ready to move into the dark half of the year. So it's a good thing I'm fortified for the journey by a wonderful Lammas evening with friends, family, good food, music and celebration.

Comments

[Macha]

Mm-mm, were those tomatoes and basil delish!

[Lyon Mercaeant]

What a beautiful and cozy post! You set a gorgeous table. The photos gave me such a warm fuzzy I had to comment. Absolutely wonderful.

[Linda Smith]

What a lovely celebration of the season. I enjoyed reading about it. I have never heard of poaching fish with a dishwasher, so can you offer more details about that? Thanks.

[Max Dashu]

Wow, what a gorgeous spread, Sorry to have missed this! Next year in Oakland... Cute pix of you too.

[Hollyheartfree]

Great post, great pix. Here I celebrate Lughnassad with only food I've grown or raised myself. That really keeps me grounded. That tomato/basil salad was surely eye candy!

[Lea Elisabeth]

oh wow, you really looked like you enjoyed yourself. Those flowers are beautiful and that food looked really yummy.

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=782178578]

Great idea to poach the fish in the dishwasher. But just how do you do it? do you actuality run a wash cycle? What about the Dry cycle? How do you know how long? So curious. I am so glad you are blogging.