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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 and yeah, amazing examples of that in the arthropods-fungi relationships. There's lots of them, but we've been doing it for a long, long time life. Sometimes we partner in a [mutualistic] symbiotic way and other times we simply are the predator of whatever our food is and predator. Isn't just something that eats meat, but the rabbit is the predator of the grass; the wolf is the predator of the rabbit. So it doesn't matter what type of life we're talking about. If you're eating something else, you're it's predator.

Mark: Right. Right.

Yucca: And we all eat at somebody else because we are part of a complex ecosystem.

Mark: Yes.

Yucca: Maybe way back. When life first started on earth, it might've been a simple enough ecosystem that we didn't have those interactions, but that's not the case anymore.

Now we're part of world that the entire surface is just covered in life and not just the surface, but all the way up into the atmosphere, deep down into the ground and the caves and the ice. It's, it's how we are. How we relate to each other.

Mark: And so that ongoing negotiation between, you know, the, the forces that are eating on us and our desire to stay, to maintain integrity in our current form, is this ongoing push pull that happens throughout our lives. And we, we're familiar with certain conditions, for example, where we're starting to lose the war like gangrene, for example.

Well, what that means is that other organisms are eating you a lot faster than you can reproduce cells to reestablish the form that you want to be in. And it's a very serious condition. Various kinds of staph infections and, you know, all those sorts of, opportunistic parasites, right. Ringworm and, various kinds of internal worms

Yucca: intestinal

Mark: Yeah. So, this is, this is the reality. The reality is that we are food sooner or later. And, and in an ongoing sense with skin mites and eyelash mites and all that kind of stuff, there are literally little tiny microscopic creatures that you can't even see that actually have behavior programmed into them, just like we do.

They managed, they managed to eat and excrete and mate and lay eggs and do all that kind of stuff. And they're smaller than you can see with the naked eye.

Yucca: Yeah. Yeah, we are ecosystems. Yes. And those mites are, when you look at the pictures of them with the microscope, they're both terrifying, like monster movie terrifying, and also adorably cute.

Mark: They're really cute.

Yucca: They're just, they're just so cute. And they they're part of us. They are they're commensal with us. They don't make a difference there. They're on us and it doesn't matter. And. And then there's all those folks that are on us, that are helping us that are our defense that are protecting us.

And then they're the ones who are on us, that aren't so good. They're the vast, vast minority though.

Mark: Right.

Yucca: But they're still on us because while we're providing them with food and habitat.

Mark: Sure, sure.

Yucca: When we get rid of them, we get very, very sick. When we get,

Mark: when we get rid of the beneficial ones.

Yucca: Yes.

That does. Yeah. The, the commensal doesn't make a difference to us and getting rid of the pathogenic ones. But, well, maybe when we get into ‘hygiene hypothesis’ with that, but that's a, another question. We're talking about food though. Let's come back to what you're saying. We got onto the microbiome because we are food for others, but we can also address food in terms of our daily relationship with meals. So we were talking about it kind of on this big scale of what is food, but, but what about the food that we purposefully put into our bodies and have such an emotional relationship with?

Mark: Well, I think that, that the first thing that I'd like to say goes back to what we were talking about a second ago, which is about the disconnect.

Both at both ends, we are completely disconnected from our food illness. Our food seems to arrive from nowhere. And then our waste seems to go away somewhere. And none of that is really informative of the fact that we are creatures in a food web. Right? Yeah. The, those connections are not visible to us.

They're blocked off. So one of the things that I try to do, and I've resolved to do a much better job of it this year, and I'm getting better slowly. It's so hard when I'm hungry. I just want to tear in, but I'm getting better at doing, meal acknowledgements. In which I acknowledged the power of the sun on the soil that brings forth the life that I eat.

Whether it's in plant form or whether it's in animal form. And all of the various hands that contributed to bringing that to me, whether it's, you know, the person who tended and pick the crops, the person who drove the truck, the person who loaded it in a grocery store, all of those, all of those workers whose efforts need to be honored because that supply line is what keeps me alive.

And so I try to do that before every meal. And so far it's more miss than hit, but it's much better than it was a couple of months ago. Hm.

Yucca: we, have a freezer, well, two big freezers actually. And so each year we'll get a steer, a hog and a couple of cabritos. And we actually, if the, the rancher we got them from, didn't have a name for them, we actually give them a name and make reference to. So, you know, that's, that's basically more than half of our food.

The more look at our caloric intake. That's more than half of our food for the entire year. And we, we make reference to them by. Those names that it makes it a very personal experience for us. And then we do, we do a lot of growing, but not all of our food. There's a lot of things that I like to eat that are not going to grow very well in my climate.

I do have a banana tree as a houseplant, but it does not make bananas. And I still like bananas. And coffee and chocolate are also on those lists of things that I like. We buy that we don't grow one day maybe, but even then a greenhouse could never grow enough to have more than a few cups. So maybe something very, very valuable to trade when the, the supposed zombie apocalypse comes or whatever.

But that's, that's a big thing for us. The food every day. Trying to be connected with that is, is huge for us, but that trick of giving the name to the animal, because we get, because we're eating the same one, right? It would be a little bit different if we were going and, and buying cuts from the grocery store or something like that.

But that's a, if you do do a freezer, that's a really lovely trick. And then knowing the folks who, who raised those animals and going to, I like to go to the ranch that they're from, because my background actually is I am a agro and range ecologist. So if I go to their ranch, then I have a pretty good sense by just walking onto their land, whether they're doing a good job or not.

And I really it's important to me that they're doing a good job taking care of their soil and their land. And if they're doing that, then I'm pretty sure that they're taking really good care of their animals, too.

Mark: Yeah, we, we buy mostly from a commercial outfit called Harris ranch, which is all grass fed beef. They do grain finish, which is not my favorite, but, they have very good range conservation practices. And that's part of why I'm interested in that. One of the real challenges with food in the modern era is that we are basically strip mining our top soil, the billions of years of accumulated soil.

Are being steadily, depleted and rapidly, especially in, in, in heavily agricultural areas. And we, we try to pour fertilizers into them and all this kind of stuff in order to, increase their

Yucca: productivity. It's the problem.

Mark: Exactly. That's precisely

Yucca: it's yeah. It's, it's killing the soil life, which is what allows plants access to the nutrients in the first place.

Mark: Yes. Yes. So food choices, become really important. And for some people, this is just not, it's not the battle they're going to fight and I have no business telling somebody else that it has to be.

Yucca: Yeah. We're not here to say, eat the way we eat or make the choices we are making, right. Yeah.

Mark: Right. For some people it's a very, what they choose to eat is very important and a part of their identity.

And they are, you know, very clear about the value set that drives them to choose, to eat certain things or not to eat other things. And that's fine as well. Food is so personal to us, you know, we put it in our bodies. It's very, very personal. And so, and we're all genetically different, which means that things taste differently to us. Different things will appeal to different people based on what their genetics and their microbiome are like

Yucca: And our cultural backgrounds too. Yes. Cultural and our regional. That insisting somebody, people in different areas of the world eat the same way as I think is not appropriate to insist that other people eat in a certain way.

Mark: It's not only not appropriate, it doesn't work. I work for a food bank that provides healthy food to people who live with serious illnesses like HIV and COVID-19 and things like that. While they're recovering and, we have learned, we, we have, about a third of our clients now are latinx families and we have to provide them with culturally appropriate food or they simply won't eat.

Yucca: Sure.

Mark: And I mean, it's a very serious problem. It's like, you know, if you give people a bunch of food that is not recognizable as food by the people you give it to, then they're not going to eat and they're not going to get better.

So, You know, there, there are some organizations that are really kind of beating the drum. You know, you must eat the kale, you must eat the kale. And, that's, that's just not realistic about the way people behave.

Yucca: Yeah. That's very much like the suggestion. If you're first starting to grow a garden, one of the biggest pieces of advice that people give us grow the things you like.

Because if you grow a bunch of zucchinis, you'll have a million of them and you don't like them, then you're going to have a million rotting zucchinis. Right. That's just the, if they're not appropriate for you

Mark: and you're going to feel really bad that you wasted all that food. Yeah. Which we've touched on this before as well, feeling bad about pretty much anything is not very helpful.

It doesn't make those you've harmed feel any better and it doesn't help you any either. You know, if you have something to feel bad about take action in order to try to resolve that issue, don't just go around feeling guilty. Yeah.

Yucca: So of course, this is not to say don't try new foods, right? This isn't, we're not trying to say, but, but that, that culturally appropriate personally appropriate that, that food sovereignty is a really, really important issue in terms of culturally appropriate food, but also access to food.

As well.

Mark: Yes, indeed. And there are, there are certain things, for example, that I won't eat either because the cruelty involved in creating them is just unacceptable to me. Or because the industry that has sprung up in order to sell them has been damaging to others. I think of quinoa particularly, quinoa is now expensive and hard to get.

In the areas of Peru that it's native to because it's being exported so much to the US it is a staple food for those Peruvian people living up in those mountains. So to me, I just don't think I personally, I'm not going to eat it out it, and I'm not going to eat it. So

Yucca: we, don't eat seed oils. Because I have yet to come across a seed oil that was - industrial seed oils - that was produced in a way that is not incredibly damaging.

There are some crops that are done that can be done, very damaged and talk about almonds. But I don't care if my neighbor's got a backyard with an almond tree in it. I'd love to eat their almonds. But we have yet to find any industrial seed oils that have been made in a, in a way that I would feel good about.

And I'm not great on the health aspects of those.

Mark: pretty much they aren't so good.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. I'm kind of an olive oil guy. Anyway. I'm, I'll go with olive oil. The,, where was I last, wherever I was.

Yucca: Oh, there you were speaking about quinoa or certain foods that you don't eat because of the, the practices around them.

Mark: Yes. But that said, you know, I, I buy fair trade coffee, for example. Right. Because the people who are being. Subjugated in order to create coffee, actually get the fruit of their labors by fair trade. I don't want to buy those big plantations sort of slavery driven, coffee products, but I don't give up coffee entirely either.

So, and I I want to take sort of a left turn here and acknowledge that individual behavior is not going to solve the challenges that we have in order to come into sustainability and balance with the natural world, the overwhelming majority of energy consumption, the overwhelming majority of pollution waste creation, all that kind of stuff happened through industrial processes. So yes. Do your bit, if you feel called to do so, but let's not kid ourselves that by eating the right diet, we're, we're going to solve everything. We also have to be activists and really push for the destructive practices to end

Yucca: because it's systemic.

Yes, right. We're looking at how to whole systems work. But, but certainly the individual behavior, our behavior is what's going to, in many ways, lead to the ability for us to make those changes. Yes. So it's, you know, it's not, it's not a hopeless thing, but it is important to keep it within context and perspective.

Mark: Sure. I mean climate free or, you know, climate neutral energy was something that ended up becoming a huge movement because consumers wanted it. Consumers didn't want to be. Depending on coal fired power plants and nuclear plants and so forth, you know, they demanded something better and the industry turned around and realized that it could make more money, by using these renewables rather than, you know, with extractive processes.

And that's the transitional moment that we're in right now, but consumer choice had a lot to do with it.

Yucca: Yeah. And on our everyday life, I think it's, it's a place where we can really feel empowered and make really important differences in our daily lives. So feeling good about what you're eating, feeling good in terms of the health of what you're eating, that works with your body and your lifestyle, because that's another aspect we didn't really touch on the nutritional needs of people’s going to be very different based on what are they doing? Someone who works an office job is a totally requires a totally different type of nutrition than your top athlete or your person who's on their feet all day or whatever these out in the sun, all these different things.

Mark: Right, right. Yeah. And. As with all creatures, one size does not fit all. It's true of humans and it's true of every other organism that's out there. We may not be able to detect the subtle differences between two ants, but they're, there, there are very definitely there. And just as that is true, it's true. That has we humans, we all have our own individual dietary needs. And there are no universal prescriptions which will magically solve all problems and, and satisfactorily nourish the whole human population.

Yucca: And they change at different times in our life, at different life stages. And I think that they also change seasonally, especially when you're in an area that has extreme seasons that are very different.

Mark: for sure

Yucca: So that's one of the things that we do that I get a lot of joy from is eating in a seasonal pattern, because that helps me with my sense of the connection with the seasons connection with my land. But it also makes it fun that there are certain foods that I eat certain times of year. And then I don't other times. And I have that to look forward to. It's just, that's when it's available and it's, and it's exciting and it's enriching in that way.

Mark: So, what would we like, would we like to talk about a couple of things that people could make for themselves if they choose to?

Yucca: Sure. Yeah. So. I guess it's sharing.

Well, why don't before we go there, why don't we talk a little bit about food within our own practices? Oh right. Jumped over that a little bit.

We've been talking on this really sort of broad area of let's talk about food of what is it and the importance of it within the grand scheme of things. But, but how about, is it something that plays a role in your ritual practice and your daily life?

Mark: Particularly in group rituals, food and drink do play a significant role in my ritual life.

My, my ritual circle, I mean, we, we laugh about it. We eat so well. You know, everybody kind of goes all out to bring something wonderful when we get together and we haven't been able to do that this year, of course. But, even in our. Even in our Yule ritual, which took place on zoom. We had a segment for when we could drink toasts and eat chocolate or some other kind of, you know, yummy snack, and just, virtually break bread with one another and, you know, visit with one another in that kind of way.

And, I think it's a very humanizing thing and it's, it also makes, Biological sense. Being in ritual space can be very energy consuming. Your brains really whizzing and your brain is what sucks up more calories than anything else in your body. And so if you go through an intensive, ritual, transformational experience of some kind and you then come out of it, the last thing you should be doing is then just totalling off to get in your car and drive somewhere.

It's not healthy. It's not safe. Yeah. It makes a lot more sense for you to have some grounding. Food that will renew replenish the calories that you've lost and can get you more of a sense of having your feet on the ground, before you operate heavy machinery.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: How about you Yucca?

How does food fit in your practice?

Yucca: Yeah, so food. Food is a very daily, I mean, hopefully a very daily thing for me, with my, a lot of my practices around the family experience right now. Providing food, growing food- the, the little ones are getting old enough that they can be involved in that process of the growing and harvesting and preparing it to some extent, with lots of supervision because toddlers at knives are not typically a good combination, but it's important that they do learn to use them respectfully and safely. And so, I think that if it's something's taboo, then they're more likely to, when they do experiment with it to experiment in a less safe way than understanding the rules around it.

So it's very central to the daily experience that we have. Not as big a role in terms of directly with ritual, but that's, I think a big part is because they really just don't do a lot of group ritual and that's been the different places and phases that I've been in my life.

My hope is that when we are on the other side of the virus and the social distancing. Requirements are at a different level and the children are getting a little bit older. My dream is having more of that community around us. We used to do for the, the, for the equinoxes and solstices. We would do feasts with our close family and friends. And that's something I would like to bring back, but on another, a little bit scaled up of a level when that's possible. So that's just one of those dreams for the future then that I would love to do.

Mark: Well, yes. I mean, it sounds as though the circumstances of your life enable you to be much more plugged into the food cycle. Than I certainly am, which is why constantly reminding myself at every meal, you know, that. Where this came from, what it's a product of, who, who got it to me, is so important to me. Because living on a suburban cul-de-sac, a block from a grocery store,

Yucca: what's, what's this, the population of your County,

Mark: about a half a million.

It's a million acres, so it's a big County, but I dunno, relative to, New Mexico, I'm not sure whether that's true. Oh,

Yucca: we’re about 2 million for the state

Mark: 2 million acres.

Yucca: No, 2 million people

Mark: population

Yucca: population for this state. I'm not sure what we are in acres were damn pretty big. Yeah. But yeah,

Mark: so, That's just something that I've come to grips with.

I mean, I've, I, I think as I mentioned before, you have to pick your battles and a lot of where I've really focused my effort to minimize my impact has been around energy consumption and transportation. And that kind of thing. We've talked about this before.

So yeah. Why don't you explain one of those seasonal things that you make for your family?

Yucca: Sure. Well, we are in winter now. This is for us, this, we've just had the solstice. This is First Winter, it's cold, it's dark. And we've really been into broths right now. Stews and broths and those heavier things. And we will do broths in the evening.

A few episodes back we talked about light and darkness and, and all of that. And one of the things I shared was that we have orange colored lights in our home. So when we're getting ready for bed in the evening, we switched the lights over to those red lights instead of our white bright lights. And we'll usually have some broth and it's just this really wonderful- it's warm and a mug, just a very well wonderful little ritual of calming down.

And the way that I cook and the way that I bake too is by, I don't really use recipes. I just kind of look at what do I have and because I've experimented enough, I kind of have a sense of how it'll work. If I get a new ingredient for the first time, I'll look up and I'll go to maybe the first. So you pages on the search engine and read each person's recipe and just kind of get a sense of, Oh, how are people using this ingredient and then experiment with that.

But with the broths, what we do is we save the bones and I'll keep it easy, keep it separate depending on, you know, the bone versus the beef versus lamb or something like that. And I'll do a long, long boil to get a real good bone broth going and then whatever vegetables that we have that we've got the ends of.

So the top of the carrot that we didn't use and, some of the turnip peels and the. Onion peels and garlic peels and all of those, whatever those vegetables are that are more of the wintry style ones at the end. And that last hour will go in. So making the broth at first, and for people who don't eat meat, you can even do a broth just as well by taking all your foods, your vegetable scraps, giving it a nice long simmer and, yeast at the end, right.

At the end, you don't want to put it in at the beginning, but like a nutritional yeast, and that can give it that real nice, kind of mouth texture to it and that umami taste. But we'll do that. And then, usually I'll skim out the, spent vegetables and put those in the compost and then salt, a little pepper.

And it's the most delicious, wonderful sensation to drink at night in the cold of winter with the little flickering lights, and then with cozy little people and fuzzy blankets with stuffed animals. You got to watch out though, they like to spill it on stuffed animals. So that's what we've been doing a lot of right now.

Mark: That's great. Sounds delicious.

Yucca: What about you, Mark?

Mark: Well, yes. I mean, it is, it is midwinter time and it's, you know, the, the souls to season and so forth. So I thought that I would present my recipe for mulled wine or cider. You can make this with, like sparkling apple cider, or actually still Apple cider is fine. It doesn't need to be sparkling, because you're going to, you're going to heat it so it would lose any carbonation.

So, I do work with recipes because otherwise, unfortunate things happen. So, I will just kind of go through this.

What you do is you start either with your, like a gallon of Apple cider, which can be, I prefer the unfiltered kind, the kind that's cloudy, because it's much more, it's just much more robust and has a lot more of the quality of the apple in it.

Yucca: yAnd when you're saying Apple cider, you're talking about, soft for folks with, okay. So you could do this with wine for your alcoholic option, or you could do non alcoholic, apple cider

Mark: Apple juice,

Yucca: Apple juice.

Mark: Okay. What I mean is unfiltered Apple juice. Okay. So, I'll, I'll go through it once for the, non-alcoholic option and then I'll go back.

So in this recipe, you have two cinnamon sticks, two oranges that have been zested and juiced ate whole cloves, six star anise, and then four oranges peeled just for the garnish. You just want the peel. So you combine the, all the ingredients except for the orange peel for the garnish in a large sauce pan, and you bring it to a boil and simmer it low over the heat for 10 minutes.

Then you let it cool. Pour it into mugs and add a twist of orange peel to each one. So you twist the orange peel to spray the orange oil over the top of the, the mug or glass. And it's delicious. It is really good.

Yucca: Did I miss, did you say the volume? What was the volume of

Mark: a gallon?

Yucca: A gallon. Okay.

Mark: Yeah. Now the alcoholic version is pretty much the same stuff, except that you also add a half a cup of honey.

So what you need is a 375 milliliter bottle of red or tawny port wine. And then two bottles to 750 milliliter, regular bottles of red wine. A darker red wine, like Cabernet Sauvignon is really good for this. Don't buy expensive wine to do this. Use the cheap stuff. Trader Joe's two and a half bucks chuck is fine for this. So then you add half a cup of honey to that. What you do is in the process, you combine the red wine, the honey, the cinnamon sticks, zest juice, cloves and star anise, and you bring that to a boil and you simmer it for 10 minutes. And then you add the bottle of port wine afterwards.

And then you pour that into mugs and use the orange peel to garnish each one. And it's delicious. It's really very good.

Yucca: It makes me cozy just thinking about it.

Mark: Yes it's with all those spices, it definitely goes right to, all the parts of you that may make you sort of get sweaty.

I'm very fond of mulled wine. I wrote a poem about it. I really, I just like mulled wine a lot and I only of course do it at this time of year. So it's one of those special foods that I think about.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Leading up to this season.

Yucca: Well, thank you for sharing that with us. Sure. Thank you. I have to listen back to this and write it down.

Mark: Well, I can email it to you. You, you have an inside track

Yucca: to, yes, that's right.

Mark: Actually we could put these recipes in the.

Yucca: Oh, yeah, let's do that. So you all have probably already seen that it's in the show notes, but just click down below and you will find these recipes right there. Great. Oh, wonderful.

Mark: Right. Well, this has been a meandering exploration of food, paganism, science and recipes.

Yucca: Yep. Well, thank you.

Mark: Thank you. Hope you enjoyed it.