Yesterday morning Kate and I got dressed and headed over to the local farmer’s market early. We got a big flat of strawberries from our local organic farm so I could make strawberry ice cream.
She tasted feta cheese and then we got to visit the petting zoo. They don’t always have a petting zoo — it is a special thing they do for Easter.
We saw an Easter mama sheep and her lambs:
An Easter bunny:
And some chickens. A perfect way to spend Easter! What better way than to see baby animals and visit the farmers at the farmer’s market?
As many of you know, Easter is not just a Christian holiday. It is actually a pagan holiday that goes all the way back to the Babylonians. The eggs and bunnies are symbolic of fertility. (Think about it — Playboy bunnies.)
“The egg was a sacred symbol among the Babylonians. They believed an old fable about an egg of wondrous size which was supposed to have fallen from heaven into the Euphrates River. From this marvelous egg - according to the ancient story - the Goddess Astarte (Easter) [Semiramis], was hatched. And so the egg came to symbolize the Goddess Easter.”
Source
This thing goes all the way back to the Babylonians with the goddess Ishtar (which was pronounced “Easter”).
Ishtar is a goddess of fertility, love, and war. In the Babylonian pantheon, she “was the divine personification of the planet Venus”.
Ishtar was above all associated with sexuality: her cult involved sacred prostitution; her holy city Erech was called the “town of the sacred courtesans”; and she herself was the “courtesan of the gods”. Source
Joseph Campbell, a more recent popularizer of mythology, equates Ishtar, Inanna, and Aphrodite, and he draws a parallel between the violent yet loving Hindu goddess Kali, the Egyptian goddess Isis who nurses Horus, and the Babylonian goddess Ishtar who nurses the god Tammuz. Source
I don’t personally worship the goddess Ishtar. Or any of the others. But I do like to celebrate the arrival of spring.
We bought eggs and onions and potatoes and asparagus and green beans. I really wanted to buy a blood orange tree at Guadalupe’s stall (she sold me my avocado tree two weeks ago) but I ran out of cash. Next week!
We also saw our friends (and neighbors — funny, they are our neighbors but we never see them) Jada and Walter. The bizarre thing is that I never see Jada and Walter except for at these random places. Like at the raw milk store downtown. Haha!
Jada told me all about how she’s making her kombucha and how they’ve been drinking raw milk and eating grass-fed beef, and how much better her health is. She says she has kombucha SCOBYs if anyone needs them. Me, too — need a SCOBY, let me know in the comments. We can mail it to you for the cost of postage.
Anyway, it was a fun morning. When we came home, Kate napped.
After that she and Julianna went with Yensi and Luis (Julianna’s daddy) to the park and the grocery store while Seth and I stayed home and worked.
In the afternoon, Yensi and I cooked up a storm. I made dill pickles (they’re fermenting on the counter now) and coconut water kefir. And for Easter dinner we made:
Garlic Rosemary Lamb Chops
Asparagus with Lemon and Olive Oil
Potatoes au Gratin
Homemade Strawberry Ice Cream (made with raw cream from grass-fed Jersey cows, and sweetened with maple syrup, not sugar)
