Making Votive Offerings I - Suet Balls
Suet Balls Recipe
Basically it’s 1 part fat to 2 parts dry ingredients.
I didn’t keep track of how much of each I put in because I kept having to add more to make it less sticky. You will totally underestimate how much dry ingredients are needed to firm up the fat balls.
Fats:
I used lard and chunky peanut butter. About 3 pounds altogether: 2 of lard, 1 peanut butter.
Dry Ingredients:
cornmeal
quick oats
raisins
bird seed (go for unshelled sunflower seeds) I used a mix called Happy Garden from Urban Nature Store &/or a small-grained Finch mix.
shelled peanuts
mealworms
In The Cailleach Library you can find Tabhartas Bòid; a Celtic Teaching about Votive Offerings, given by Muireann - our Iron Age Celtic Ancestor.
Join the Library for free if you’d like to learn more about the meaning, history and practice of Tabhartas Bòid in pre-Christian Celtic culture.
This is the first of 3 “Making Votive Offerings” posts sharing how I build relationship with Spirit + the Land through Celtic cultural practice on Mishiike Minisi.
Directions:
Mix all the everything in a giant bowl - or melt the fats down in a giant pot and mix in all the dry.
If you use the melt method, you have to pour them into a mold and wait for them to set - a muffin tin works.
Once the balls/molds are firm, roll them in the cornmeal to make a non-sticky outer coating.
Freeze them or put them into a garage or shed during the winter.
The animals LOVED these and I have to ration them or they will eat them all in a day.
I used left over seed pulp from the seed papers. It added unnecesary wetness to the balls, so it’s not ideal - but was a good use of the pulp.
In The Cailleach Library you can find Tabhartas Bòid; a Celtic Teaching about Votive Offerings, given by Muireann - our Iron Age Celtic Ancestor.
Join the free Library if you’d like to learn more about the meaning, history and practice of Tabhartas Bòid in pre-Christian Celtic culture.