Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

I decided that I wanted to use up some leftover dressing from an event at work, along with some leftover turkey I’d roasted and a can of chicken I opened but hadn’t remembered to make lunch or dinner of last week.

I was also in the mood for bread or pizza or something. So, I went for the old standby, a meal-in-a-loaf idea that I got from god knows where. The original idea was to make rye bread and then wrap the ingredients for a Rueben inside. Oh yeah: I just noticed. The recipe is in the back of the Red Star Centennial Bread Sampler published in 1981. I must have ordered it with the upc codes I’d saved from packages of yeast. I’ve been baking bread since I was in elementary school.

We had to pretend to be colonial settlers and demonstrate how they’d lived in the golden olden daze. Being a fool, I convinced my group to live like we really were settlers. The rest of the groups? Well, they had moms who made them fancy hoop skirt dresses. They inevitably also had a girl in the work group who had a huge dollhouse and parents who bought special “colonial” furniture and dolls in colonial clothes to demonstrate how a colonial settler lived — one of a certain class, of course.

I was convinced that settlers weren’t so well off most of the time. so, like a dumb ass, I stayed up for many nights, making our *cabin* out of cardboard, using a drawing in a history book to design it. I remember getting the bright idea to use those little plastic baskets that used to hold dishwashing rinse aid. I was going to make chairs out of them or some shit. All in all, though, I had some crazy idea our group would impress people by our authenticiy, by basing our demo on how, in the books, it said things really were. And I also thought we’d get points for being creative — like with the plastic baskets, like using brown markers to make the cardboard house appear to have wood floors, complete with knots in them.

What a dumbshit. Obviously, the ooooing and ahhhhhhhing happened for the groups with the doll houses and costumes, with parents who had tons of money to wander off and outfit the dollhouse with new furniture, new dolls and their own colonial costumery.

Because I thought it mattered that we were authentic to the lives that a majority of colonial settlers lived, I decided to learn to bake bread. of course, as I point out below, colonial settlers who lived in cabin didn’t make the yeast-based, double rise bread I learned to make so “authentically.”

Still, my experimenting wasn’t for naught. From there on, every year at Christmas, since I was ten or eleven, I have made homemade bread for friends and relatives.

And then I became good enough at it that it could become a regular staple as a young mom.

The baked Rueben idea came much later, and boy it was YUUUUUUMMMMEEEE.

Then I started variations on the theme: tuna cheese melt inside, pizza toppings inside, beef and broccoli melt inside, veggies and cheese inside, ham and cheese, almost a Dagwood inside, ricotta mozzarella garlic hot sausage inside. if you could think of it, i put it inside.

Which reminds me of garbage soup. Recently, I read the anthology, Without A Net, a collection of short stories, essays, and reflections written by women who grew up poor or working class or some combination. Which also reminds me that, reading bfp the other day, she talked about bringing down borders and mentioned that it might be better to do so, so that white women who want to help in organizing can bring their privilege to bear.

huh? White privilege is about race, not necessarily about money and time, which was the list of resources brownfemipower attached to whiteness. verah verah irritating.

When will people get a grip about what white privilege means? For christ sake.

Anyway, in the book, Without A Net, one of the authors mentioned garbage soup. It was one of my mother’s standbys. All leftovers went into a container in the freezer: mashed potatoes, juice from canned vegetables, gravy (no matter what kind), veggies — except tomatoes, leftover meat of any kind — except bacon and bacon grease. There was never bacon leftover anyway, but bacon grease had it’s own uses, as did sausage grease. Those were used to make roux to thicken sauces.

I was so kewlo beano thrilled to read that my family isn’t the only one to have the tradition of Garbage Soup. It was, believe it or not, one of my favorite dinners growing up. My dad, otoh, he requested — i kid you not — shit on a shingle (hamburger gravy over bread) on his birthdays, he loved it so much. Also, dad’s special Daddy Breakfast was fried shredded what. You’d take the big shredded wheat, dunk it in milk, and then fry it up in a pan with butter. Fuckin’ awesome man.

Now there’s some white trash meals for ya.

Anyway, I started the bread making at 1:35 and finished in 20 minutes — except for the rising and the rolling up into a meal-in-a-loaf and baking.

Everything else is done: the dishes are washed, the counters clean, the ingredients put away. My lazy ass probably needs to see if I spilled flour on the flour. But that’s it. The hardest part is done, done, done.

It’s funny, but awhile ago, I read brownfemipower complaining about not being able to bake bread very well, making lots of mistakes, and worrying about proofing. I was kind of flabbergasted about the latter. Proofing? The only place I ever proofed anything seriously was working for restaurants. Right now, I’m proofing. I have bread dough in a large bowl. It’s covered with a clean towel (saran wrap is ok but wasteful) and sitting in this window garden thingy since the sun’s beating on it, making it the warmest area in the house. If it were winter, I’d have turned on the oven to 200 degrees f while preparing, shut if off, then stick the bowl on top of the stove, in the middle, not on a burner.

Sometimes, I might actually time things, but most of the time it’s an eyeball: has it doubled yet? Not exactly doubled, just good enough.

Yes? Punch it down, roll it out, roll it up, throw it in pans or braid it or wrap it up tight and toss ‘em in the freezer. Make cinnamon bread or cinnamon pull apart bread which is awesome.

And that’s making the kind of bread that requires kneading. I have a trick for that, too. When you make yeast bread that requires kneading, put only have the flour you need into the bowl. Add all the dry ingredients, including yeast. Mix it up really good. Add the liquid. Grab the blender and beat slowly till mixed. Crank it up to high and beat the hell out of it for 3 minutes for small batch, 5 minutes for big batch. (I just made a big batch because I’m tossing half of the raw dough into the freezer shortly)

This starts the process for you — the beating. It cuts down on kneading time. After beating, scrape bowl. Beat 1 minute more to thoroughly mix.

Add the rest of the dry ingredients.

Now, here’s a trick. use a big metal bowl — bigger than you really need — probably twice the size. Don’t bother putting dough on counter, keep it in the bowl and knead right there. I came up with that idea once when I had to make such a huge batch of bread, at home, that I used this mammoth bowl an old restaurant employer had given us. I didn’t have enough counter space to knead the sucker AND I didn’t have enough height to work up the strength to knead the sucker.

I put the bowl on the floor — the bowl was 2 foot high — and got on my knees and kneaded that brute.

Anyway, from then on, that’s how i kneaded all bread. it was a lot less messy. No floury, doughy, sticky counters to clean. Just the same bowl you had to clean anyway.

After that, I’d rinse the bowl and scrub down the goo and use same bowl to let the bread dough rise. I’m a total lazy ass. Another hint I realized people might not know: don’t rinse down or wash the bowl with hot water initially. Use cold. Why? Hot water will bake the dough and make it harder to get off.

But breads that need to be kneaded are not what I always used. In fact, if you read up on our history, women never used to make yeasty breads before the invention of steam technologies for grinding grain into the very fine flours we are used to today. Instead, they made quick breads that didn’t use yeast — like corn bread.

But even if you want the yeasty bread, you can still make an entirely too easy and wonderful tasting batter quicky bread that eliminates the kneading altogether. These aren’t so fine-grained as a double rise bread, but they are tasty. You can also make them really hearty: like swiss cheese bread, bacon-onion batter bread, dill bread, a savory herb bread that’s great for sandwiches.

The other thing to do is to double, triple, even quadruple the recipe. You can freeze the dough and just pull it out as you need it. I learned that trick raising four kids. When I was having the garage sale, I came across two books that were staples: How to Organize Yourself and Once A Month Cooking. I should get those out and share the things I’d adapted from those two books.