A recipe for challenged moon transits
In "Making the Mundane Magical", a presentation I did for the last Fresh Voices Summit, I mentioned that you should try to go food shopping when the moon is in Cancer or Taurus. Going food shopping when the moon is void, or it's transiting the signs of Scorpio and Capricorn generally can mean the food might go bad quicker, or you just don't use it.
Well then, you might ask, what is good for a Scorpio or Capricorn moon then? When the moon is void?
Prepping ahead before the moon is at those points, using scraps, or preserving.
Learning how to reduce food waste started when I moved to my Saturn line. I would collect all my veggie scraps for the week and make delicious broth, wayyyy better than what I would get at the store. I learned how to restore wilting carrots, and how to correctly wrap up my groceries so they would last longer. This recipe came to be when I realized a delicious baguette I had brought had gotten stale, and I wanted to figure out how to give it new life.
This panzanella is not traditional. This panzanella is made by a mentally-ill astrologer who knows that individual solutions to waste and climate chaos do not fucking work, but cannot bear to have more plastic shit in the house. This is for the people who pick up a baguette because they want nice bread for breakfast but end up having days where a granola bar hits their stomach acid at 2pm - and the bread ends up stale.
A note before embarking on this journey: I really like astringent flavors. Think of this recipe as more of a structure than something you really gotta stick to. Always taste and adjust for flavor, and cater to your palette.
stuff you gotta get:
kosher salt
freshly ground black pepper
dijon mustard
red wine vinegar
1 shallot
2 cloves of garlic
nice tasting olive oil
2 - 3 heirloom tomatoes
some stale bread, cut into 1 inch cubes
1 avocado
some cucumber
chopped basil
optional: a little bit of red onion
1. You're gonna chop the tomatoes and put them in a colander, over a mixing bowl.
Once the tomatoes are in the colander, sprinkle two teaspoons worth of kosher salt on them. Toss them in the colander to coat, and put them to the side. The tomatoes are going to release their juices into the mixing bowl.
2. Turn the oven onto 350ºF.
As it's heating up you're going to dice your stale bread into 1-inch cubes, and coat the bread with ~2 tablespoons of olive oil. Put the coated bread on a baking sheet and heat it up where it's crisp but not deeply toasted. For me, that's 20 minutes, but ovens really vary in temperature accuracy so it might be a little less.
2. Put the tomatoes in a separate bowl, and behold the delicious tomato juice that has dripped out of the colander and into your original mixing bowl. Chop up your shallot and garlic, throw it in the bowl. Add a spoon of dijon and two spoons of red wine vinegar into the bowl. Start whisking and add your olive oil. Pour the dressing over the bread.
3. So you have your bowl of chopped tomatoes. Chop up some cucumbers, chop up your avocado. Chop some basil. I like to add red onion, but there's already raw shallot and raw garlic so... use caution. Add your chopped veggies to the bread and the dressing.
4. You're gonna let everyone get to know each other in the bowl by letting the ingredients sit together for a while. If you're trying to serve soon, wait 30 minutes. I keep this in the fridge overnight. The avocado gets a little mushy but it's still good.
So as the moon currently traverses the sign of Scorpio, and as your capacity wanes and rises, I hope you get some delicious sustenance, and your stale bread gets some new life.
This recipe is adapted from a J Kenji Lopez-Alt video I watched, and you should totally use this recipe if you want to learn from someone who knows what they're doing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHMnQlOPFeI