Beltane 2019

Last Wednesday (1st May) was Beltane. (Or Tuesday 30th April if you celebrate then). As I mentioned in the April Update + Beltane Inspiration post, I normally celebrate by making food and drink. The past few years I've made guacamole using a recipe from The Kitchen Witch book by Soraya. This Beltane I thought I'd try a different recipe from Don't Waste the Crumbs. Here's the link: https://dontwastethecrumbs.com/2018/03/simple-guacamole-recipe/

It was quite nice.  It's a bit different to The Kitchen Witch one which uses cream cheese and juice from a lemon. This one has no cream cheese and uses juice from a lime, cumin and garlic (I didn't add any cumin though). It's good to try new recipes and I like them both. :)

I also made Kachumbari, a Kenyan tomato and onion salad. The recipe is from the website Precious Core: https://www.preciouscore.com/kachumbari/

When I first found the site I was excited because Precious is originally from Cameroon and my dad was Cameroonian, so I thought I'd have a go at making some of the recipes. This is actually the first recipe I've made from there! lol. Never mind, I will try some Cameroonian ones in future. :)

The salad was nice too. I usually make tomato and onion salad (another Kitchen Witch recipe) for Litha, so it made a change to have some at Beltane instead. And it was cool to add an African twist to it. Precious says that Kachumbari is mainly made with tomatoes and onion but she added cucumber and avocado to hers. I did too and they went well together. The recipe contains red onion but you could use brown (also called yellow) or white if you prefer. :) I had both salads with a chicken leg and potato salad (from Tesco) for lunch. Here's a pic:

And I had some Fentiman's Gently Sparkling Elderflower to drink. I had bigger slices of tomato in this guacamole, I think before I blended it better because of the cream cheese. It still tasted good. :)

Another thing I like to do on or around sabbats is take sunset pictures. I go for a walk in the park once a week and was planning to go around sunset on Beltane, but thought there wasn't going to be much of one that day, so went earlier. However, after I left Hove Park, the sky started to turn a bit more pinky. So I stopped at another park on the way home to take a couple of pictures!

Sunset in Buckingham Park, Shoreham-by-sea.

I've worn green on Beltane before since green is one of the colours associated with the festival. This year I wore red, inspired by Mickie Mueller's Portable Magic chapter in the Llewellyn's 2019 Sabbats Almanac. In the evening I lit a white candle. (Also lit tealights the night before because you can celebrate sundown to sundown). Here's a photo, it's quite dim but I chose it because I like the effect:

I kept hoping there would be a good sunset but the weather was quite dull over the past week. Yesterday it turned brighter though, so I went to Lancing Beach for a little walk and took some photos. It was really cold on the beach and I had to put my gloves on! Beautiful sunset though. :)

So now we're in mid-spring moving towards summer, although it doesn't feel very spring like at the moment! I'm looking forward to when the weather warms up (eventually, lol). Seems weird that we're already almost halfway through the year! The next sabbat will be Litha/the Summer Solstice and the start of summer.

Hope you had a good Beltane (or Samhain!). :)