Hello, Readers! I suppose most of You who are kind enough to take Your time and read Kitchen Witchcraft, like trees. It’s a reasonable assumption to make about us Witches, isn’t it? And I suppose many among You might also like broccoli, since it’s a pretty neat vegetable. Well, flower, actually, although we should not get all botanical on the matter, because strictly botanically speaking, there is no such thing as “vegetables” – there are flowers and leaves and roots and fruit and tubers and rhizomes, all doing their best to be delicious. And I don’t think we have had even one recipe with broccoli here on KW, a problem which I will attempt to rectify as soon as I get any decent ideas*. In the meantime, You can admire (or shake Your head in exasperation at) the fruits of my lazy Saturday afternoon on this here picture. Because I think that maybe at least some of You like LEGO, and I suppose most of You were, at some point in Your life, amazed at the miniature tree that a broccoli flower actually is.

Oh, and blessings for the coming spring, too.

* There is a vegetarian bar in my city which does absolutely perfect lasagne with broccoli and blue cheese. I have tried, time and again, to reproduce it at home, but was unsuccessful.

Of course, none of this is final, obligatory wisdom carved into some stone tablets somewhere. Ultimately, it’s all about Your preferences and tastes, but this might come in very handy for all of You modern Witches with not enough time to spare for oenology education. So, santé!

Anyway, if You can get Your hands on some ready-made pastry of sensible quality, You can make those easily. If not, well… I know of people who are actually able to make it, out of raw components, I’ve seen them do it even (mostly in France, as it comes from there, they call it pâte feuilletée, while we call it “french pastry.” Original, I know), but it still looks like sorcery to me. Or worse, because I have some understanding of magic
It’s easy to make and can actually impress some people, even if You don’t pretend it’s all Your work, because these things are rarely done at home. So, if You have guests coming and want to treat them to something less usual, these are a good idea. Plus, You can always make bats and other witchy patterns on them, Magrat-style.

Ingredients

• Package of puff pastry
• Green olives, shallots or leek – something green and strong-tasting (broccoli or cabbage don’t work)
• Feta cheese or plain quark if feta is too salty for you – something white and cheesy
• Onion
• Garlic
• Olive oil
• Spices : I put rosemary and thyme because I had them, allspice is also good, but not too much of it. Basil, oregano, pepper, but go easy on the salt because cheeses have lots of it already. Generally, depending on the vegetables and cheese You choose the filling will need stronger or milder seasoning.

Preparation

Heat up olive oil on a frying pan. Dice, or slice, all the vegetables and cheese. Fry all the stuffing ingredients on the pan for just enough time  to melt the cheese – it’s going in the oven anyway so there’s no sense in doing the same work twice.  I usually dice the ingredients really small because I like a more homogeneous filling, but I know of people who like big, distinguishable bits of various vegetables, too.

Once You have something resembling a mass, take it off the fire. Spread the dough on a clean, flat surface, and cut it in rectangles. This can be done in several ways – You can cut squares, put the filling on their center, and fold the corners inwards. You can cut squares, match them in pairs and only put the filling on every second square, then mold them together. You can cut oblongs and place the filling on one half, then fold them over to cover it.

For this case I took the second method, and on the picture here you can see half of my dough with filling. When using puff pastry for pies with filling, it’s a popular way to leave parts of the filling uncovered, but for this one I don’t recommend it. You need to make more filling if you want it to show and it dries up too much.
So, mold your pastries however you choose, and put them in the oven over medium-ish to small heat. For this kind of dough (and, well, generally) it’s always better to under-do than to overdo, because if it’s not done yet you can always keep it in the oven a little longer, but once it’s burned, you can’t un-burn it.

A good rule of thumb for this kind of pastry is – if you can smell it from the oven, it’s nearing completion. Take them out when their colour satisfies you, but be warned – letting it past honey-amber colour is a bad idea. Filling will be very hot, so watch out.

New Year has come and went, without much (positive) impact on my life, and I’ve been so wallowing in self-pity that even the Winter Solstice didn’t help. What did help, was an Unexpected Journey.
Yes, I mean “The Hobbit” film. It’s been a bit late to this part of the world, and I’ve been a bit late to the cinema, but there was something in that brief shift to the Middle Earth that made me think, I want adventure, dammit! Where’s my excitement? Where’s everything?

Well, actual adventure does not come knocking just like that – not unless Your last name is Baggins – but I guess something can be done about that. We’ll see.
And in the meantime, I think You should definitely see this - one Englishwoman’s astonishing scale model of Bag End, complete with, well, everything. Since we are all Kitchen Witches here, I will only show you the stove, with its boiling pots, and let You discover the rest.

Note the… and the… and everything.

I have some recipes incoming, although picture quality will probably be rather sub-par. I still don’t have a sensible camera to take them. Yes I do know how pathetic this sounds.

Herba millefolii

You have probably seen this plant thousands of times, because – on the Northern Hemisphere – it grows pretty much everywhere. It’s a modest, unassuming plant, though the deep green colour is rather nice. The small, white flowers aren’t decorative enough to make bouquets of them, and the smell is sharp, a bit “medicinal”. No wonder, really – it’s a very valuable medicinal plant, and one worth keeping.

You can easily recognize yarrow for its leaves : slim and feathery, with a mass of tiny strands (the Latin ‘millefolium’ translates to ‘thousand-leaf’, which is actually one of its common names). The stem is tough and stiff, so if you’re planning on harvesting some, don’t even try to break it by hand. The right way to harvest yarrow is to take a very sharp knife and cut the blossoming stem roughly in the middle – taking half away and leaving half to grow. Yarrow grows back very quickly, which is why it is prized as a pasture plant, said t o “grow back right under the beast’s teeth.”

• Medicinal uses
  

  Close-up of the characteristic leaf

Yarrow’s most interesting qualities are those of a medicinal plant. Fresh or dried plant (millefolii herba) can be used –  in decoctions or macerates – both internally and externally. Drinking yarrow infusions is generally advised in gastrointestinal trouble, as its healing properties can alleviate inflammations and cramp pains (although with serious cramps, fennel is a better choice.) Externally, yarrow preparations can be used in compresses and poultices to speed the mending of wounds, in which task it is very effective. This property is so well known that most yarrow names deal, in one way or another, with healing wounds : nosebleed plant, herba militaris, sanguinary, soldier’s woundwort… and not just in English, either. I have come across one extreme case – a solitary person wounded in the wild – who found yarrow growing nearby, chewed it into a pulp in his mouth and put the resulting mass over a cleaned wound. This was very smart of her, I must say. Even if it didn’t miraculously close the wound in seconds, it was still the best thing she could have done.

• Culinary uses

Yarrow has a bittersweet taste, and a strong, sharp smell. It does not come to mind as the best foodstuff when you pass it by in the park, but it used to be quite a popular vegetable, used similarly to raw sorrel – in soups, and salads of boiled leaves. Nowadays, we have more interesting vegetables and yarrow is hardly ever consumed, but it’s still worth you attention from time to time. Especially if you have any kind of skin trouble – acne or suchlike – you will often hear how it can be treated with zinc pills and drugs, many of them quite expensive. Whereas yarrow leaves, and especially flowers, contain a large concentration of this valuable mineral which can be ingested when eating the plant. Tea-like infusion is one good choice, but seasoning a salad with the small, white flowers is even better, because you get a medicinal, cosmetic, gastronomic and aesthetic effect all at once. Yarrow leaves can also be chopped and added to quark cheese with tasty results.

• Magic uses

Due to its healing properties, yarrow in herbal magic is best used to symbolise just that – healing, mending and closing of wounds. Herbal talismans containing yarrow are often made to help with hurt feelings and aid in moving on with one’s life after a traumatic event, searching for closure. Dried flowers are the best choice for these purposes, due to their sharp smell and pleasing appearance.

The cheese didn’t make it to the picture… sorry about that.

So, this was going to be a french dessert made of peaches, but I’m waiting for a sunnier day to take pictures of that. What we have here right now qualifies for Summer the same way I qualify for a “happy young woman”. You know it could be it, but somehow, it never is. And, of course, when in doubt I tend to turn to pasta, which is all very well and delicious, but it does put those additional kilograms here and there. But, to hell with that – there has to be some pleasure in this life, otherwise what’s the point? Might as well take a big swig of hemlock right now if I’m going to deny myself even that.

This is a genuinely my recipe –  I’ve invented it. Of course, hundreds of people have probably invented it too, because it doesn’t take some huge leaps of imagination, but it’s good and easy and that’s what counts. I  call it Penne Primavera, because I like faux-italian names and alliteration, but it works just as well with tagliatelle, fettuccine or spaghetti. Actually, pretty much every pasta in existence (with the possible exception of orzo and other minute pasta, because they get lost in the sauce).

The only actual difficulty with this recipe is the timing, because the sauce is based on melted cheese so it sets if you take it off the heat. Which means you’ve got to time it with boiling the pasta so that you have both ready at roughly the same time. It’s generally better to have pasta waiting for the sauce than the other way around, because if you have the sauce ready, you either have to leave it on the stove, in which case it burns or gets too thick and dry, or take it off, in which case it sets and doesn’t spread like it should. But it’s nothing difficult, really.
Oh, and it’s probably the only pasta recipe in the world that doesn’t really benefit from being sprinkled with grated cheese. No, really – it won’t ruin the dish, but it adds… nothing very much. So leave that Parmesan for Aglio e Olio, Primavera doesn’t need it.

Ingredients

• Shallots (whole) – one to start with and say half per additional person
• Tomatoes – one fresh tomato per person
• Feta cheese – about 80-100 g per person
• Olive oil
• Garlic
• Spices – the good old mixture of pasta spices, as usual

Preparation

Shallots and un-melted Feta cheese

Start with putting on a pot for boiling pasta. Then, chop the whole shallots thinly, down to the last green strand. If you end up with a mountain of greenery, don’t worry – it’ll shrink in cooking. Pour olive oil into a frying pan and fry the shallots on mild heat, stirring from time to time. When they get supple and nicely warm (the colour doesn’t change much), slice the cheese into thin slices and put them on the pan. Thin slices mean it’ll melt faster, but still you should keep the fire small and cover the pan for a while – that way the cheese will melt and not fry.

In the meantime, peel the tomatoes with aid from some boiling water (I usually use the pasta water for that, since it should be boiling now ; if it is, put pasta in) and chop them into small bits – the smaller, the better.
Now check on the cheese – there should be a white-ish, grainy mass with bits of green in the pan. Put in the tomatoes and all the juice that might have spilled during chopping. Mix it all up, add chopped garlic and spices, and cook on mild heat until surplus water evaporates and you’re left with a thick, golden mass. It will stick to the spoon, it will stick to the pan, so frequent stirring is in order.

Once your pasta is ready, you can pour the sauce over it and serve.

Serving

With a cameo by Great-Grandma’s China Plate ™

This is a dish of distinct flavor, and a colorful, jolly appearance – hence the name. It is also quite full of calories, as pastas generally are, so accompany it with a salad at most, and not a fried-chicken-and-cheddar salad, either. Chilled white wine will suit it very nicely, but so will most pink wines and  some lighter types of red. There are no unpleasant odors involved so it’s a good dish for an elegant or romantic occasion.

It feels strange to be back here. Just a few months ago I was complaining about having a partner that was easy to please ; which is one complaint I shan’t be making again anytime soon. It almost seems like a cycle of some sort – a vicious cycle. Another year, another solar festival, another  heartbreak. I’m so tired of crying and yet Life always supplies me that one more reason to do so.
So what do you do? What do you do when love dies – suddenly, strangely, in mysterious circumstances – in one heart, but lives in the other? Of course, there isn’t one determined thing that “you do”, unless we count “trying not to go crazy as everything and everyone everywhere reminds you constantly of the huge, gaping wound in your heart.” The last time this happened to me, I turned to alcohol, which is one mistake I’m determined not to repeat. So this time, I’ve turned to Fire.

Of all the Elements, Fire is the most extreme : the most dynamic, the most transforming, the most uncontrollable and destructive. But not always. Sometimes, its extreme ability to change things with its tiniest touch can be very liberating. This is something we all feel. It’s an universal impulse to burn the photos or letters of unfaithful lovers – don’t pretend you never felt like it. Watching the flames consume those symbols of your pain can and does relieve the pain itself, if only for a moment. Practically all religions incorporate some form of Fire worship, and many – some scholars say that all – of them have started as a Fire cult. Because Fire is strange, wild, it can save you or it can kill you. Of course, this is true of all Elements, but what puts Fire at the top is the scale : you need a lot of water for it to hurt you, but you only need a tiny flame to feel its menace.

So, as I offered my love to the flames (symbolically, of course), with a little help from sage oil to make it burn easily, I felt much better and I strongly advise you, if you get these incendiary urges, to go through with them. With proper care and precautions, of course. These little rituals can speak to your subconscious much better than many therapists and “reasonable” advice you get from your family or friends**. Which is why I feel confident that I will finally get things going in here – there will be posts! There will be recipes! (just as soon as I stop alternating between my two favourite types of pasta, because, seriously, I’ve gotten way too fat from of all this.) And there will be a new book, since I’m working on a story that is partially inspired by The Person Concerned. So wish me luck, and stay tuned.

* This is not an exact quote, and I’m not telling you where it comes from because I don’t want you to know what a huge nerd I am. Suffice it to say that it was written by someone whose talent I truly admire.

** Alejandro Jodorovski said that one must address one’s subconscious “in its own language”, i. e. by simple, instinctive, sometimes irrational actions.

So, until I discover some way to make photos, I’m afraid updates will be rather rare, as I can’t imagine a wall of text would be a pleasant way to spend Your precious minutes on. However, I still feel obliged to give you the customary Beltaine blessings, and hope You’ve had a glorious celebration. Mine was… well, there wasn’t any this year, but that’s not important right now. Neither is the strange thing I’ve come to think of as a “relationsheepish anti-agreement”, so I’m not going to mention it. See? No mention at all.

Anyway, (who said that?) there’s this little pest I want to write You about, and I don’t mean the guy. I mean the Red Spider Mite. It’s a very common pest that can be very dangerous to Your plants, as a friend of mine has recently discovered. Following my advice, he bought a small mint plant in a grocery store and potted it for kitchen use. The plant did not do well, the leaves yellowed and changes in watering regimen did not help. Of course, it was infected with the red spider mites.
Now I’m not generally in favour of interfering with the natural order of these things, but keeping plants in pots at home is already quite far away from what’s natural, and actually it is for this reason that the red spider mite is much more dangerous for Your indoor, potted plants than for those that grow outdoors. Besides, there’s not much point in letting Your herbs die, and that’s exactly what will happen if You don’t take action against the damn things. I’ve lost a lovely lavender bush to them once, and it was a gift from my mother, too…

The worst thing is that these insects (or, more specifically, arachnida) are unnoticeable at first glance, and chances are You’ll only start to suspect something once Your plants are very far gone. The mites are tiny, barely visible red specs and keep to the underside of the leaves, constantly draining the sap. If You’re not specifically looking for them, You’ll probably only notice the thin web they weave under the leaves or close to the stem, and by then it’s usually too late. They also migrate from one plant to others nearby, so they can really be a pest. What’s more, practically all fresh herbs I’ve bought in a grocery store had at least a few of them, probably because the manufacturers’ sell them shortly after growth and don’t care if they die after You’ve bought them (or actually hope for just that).
Ironically, once You  know they’ve affected Your plant, the red spider mites are fought by the simple means of clean water. That’s right, no need for chemical stuff or complicated nettle and garlic macerates : just rinse the plant thoroughly under a cold shower (in extreme cases, You can use a sponge to wash it using water and soap, I’m not kidding), and then, spray the whole plant with clean water at least once a day. Just make sure You’ve not stopped too soon or the mites’ll breed back.

I’m writing all this now because I bought a second basil plant recently, after a prolonged inspection in the shop, since every plant was infected – finally I had to choose the one that had the least of them and fight the damn things at home. The salesman was very upset by this, probably on general principles since I wasn’t picking leaves or messing up the plants in any other way. When he finally cracked and asked me whether I “hoped to find a husband in there” (strange, I know) I said, “I don’t need a husband. And I don’t need tetranychus urticae, either.” Neither do Your home plants, so check up on them periodically, and blessed be.

Oh, and here’s the customary celebration music.

Such is the fate of artists, I’m told, and a dreary one it is. I remember my father, for example, never muttering even a word of approval whatever Mother did, and actually deriding my brother for offering that which he knew she needed. Then again, no need to worry my readers about that kind of jerkassitude. Today, I’m facing a different problem. My new S.O. likes everything, will eat everything and be happy about it. Really.
And how’s  Kitchen Witch with cooking ambitions supposed to do? I mean, I can compose an exquisite symphony for a cheese quartet, and he’ll eat it and say, “It’s good, thank you” and then promptly give me a peck on the cheek and go to sleep. Or, I can bash some random vegetables into a pot, boil them yellow with a generous helping of groat, then proceed to add way too much salt, thus achieving something horrible and unfit for animals, because of the salt. And he’ll eat it and say, “It’s good, thank you”. And I know he means it, it’s not like he pretends so I won’t be hurt. It’s not really a problem, but it kind of demotivates me when it comes to cooking. In the end I just disregard him and do whatever I want, but feel bad about it.
All right, enough rambling. In spite of this terrible tragedy that is a partner easy to please, I have recently tried out a new recipe. It’s a pasta recipe and it’s got a faux-italian name,  so you can see everything is still normal around here.
Cannelloni is a type of pasta used for baking and not boiling. It’s made into tube shapes, not very long and with a large enough diameter (which varies) to allow stuffing. You can put pretty much anything in it, and here’s an idea.

Ingredients

• Cannelloni pasta – you can buy it, it’s not that rare. The actual amount depends on how much can you fit in a baking dish.
• Cheese – go with quark cheese if you want the spinach taste to come out. Feta cheese will get you a spicier, but still balanced dish (or you can mix those two). Choose camembert for a strong, piquant taste, though it will dominate.
• Spinach – in 1:1 proportion with cheese
• Leek (optional)
• Onion – in 1:1 proportion with leek and 2:1 with spinach and cheese
• Garlic
• Olive oil
• Sour cream
• Herbal spices : rosemary, laurel leaf, black pepper, thyme, basil, tarragon and juniper are all good choices.

Spinach, onions, garlic and leek.

Preparation

Chop the onions and fry them on olive oil over medium heat. Add the spinach and garlic and  fry for a while (if you’re using frozen spinach, make sure you evaporate the water surplus). When you’ve got a nice, warm and not too runny green mass, add the cheese and leek. Simmer over medium heat to melt the cheese. At this point it will look utterly horrible, so you can frighten your kids with it. If you don’t want to, make sure they don’t see it as the sight will make them refuse to eat anything.

Once the unspeakable eldritch horror on your frying pan achieves a thick, smooth form, use a knife, a spoon, a kitchen baster or sheer force of will to stuff it into the raw pasta tubes. I repeat, just in case – you do not boil the pasta. If you do, it goes soft and you won’t be able to stuff it with anything. The stuffed tubes are then placed in a casserole (oil it up a little) and the surface covered in sour cream. This is important – if you bake them bare, the pasta will dry up even more and you’ll get hard, splintering shells. You need to keep the water in with a layer of cream. Some grated cheese can go on the surface, too. if you like.

Place it all in the oven and bake in medium heat – too much and it’ll just dry up to the point of in-edibility. It needs 30 to 40 minutes, when in doubt you can poke a pasta tube and see if it’s hard or softening.

This sounds a bit complicated, I know, but it’s actually a fairly simple recipe and useful if you want to create an illusion of haute cuisine without too much work. However, it has proven impossible for me to take a reasonable picture of the actual dish, so I’m sorry to say you’d have to take my word for it.
Serve with wine, depending on the contents (stuffing possibilities are endless). If there’s no meat in it, or it’s chicken, serve medium-dry white wine, as is the case with mine.

Hi everyone. Remember me? I’m the Kitchen Witch who keeps on promising and hardly ever delivers. Unfortunately, this got still a little harder since my camera got even worse, and I’m reduced to pictures I took while it was still being cooperative, which isn’t much. And, to tell you the truth, between my relationship that straddles two cities 300 kilometers apart, (and has just acquired a few cracks in the surface even though it’s hardly even begun yet) my struggle to finally make it as a freelancer and stop worrying about jobs and a(nother) family crisis, my strength is pretty sapped, I must say. I know what you’re thinking – blah blah, another excuse for not posting, blah. And you’re right.

But spring has begun and there are some small beacons of hope on the horizon. Well, maybe not beacons – more like sparks. Small sparks that go out when you look at them, but which are definitely there. For a while. Yeah. And spring means fresh vegetables, sun, rain and all these things that make you feel better regardless of any other aspect of your life. Or me, at least.
So, I won’t promise you more updates, but I’m trying to get better about this and actually plan ahead, for once. Whether this works or not remains to be seen, but I’ll be making the effort.  Just as soon as I find a working camera.