BREAD TALES

Hello dear friends!  Hope you are all doing well.  The other day I was making some flatbread because we were out of tortillas and I had no desire to go to the store, when it occurred to me how important bread is to a thrifty budget.  Way, way back in the 70s when my husband and I were literally starving students we used to buy store brand meat pies at 4/$1.  They were basically a crust and gravy with a few pieces of gristle and maybe a tablespoon of veggies, but boy we looked forward to them!  Obviously, they were not very filling so we sopped up every drop of gravy with bread.  Back in the day,  there were bakery outlets on almost every city block  you could buy a grocery bag full of bread for a couple of dollars. That bread was a real life saver for us.  It kept us full.  Toast with a cheap jar of store brand jam was our snack in the evening (I think you can still buy a pretty good sized jar of jam at the dollar store), it was our breakfast , it stretched our meager dinners.  I will always be grateful for those outlet stores.  I don't know if these outlets exists any longer, but it would be worth checking out.

Later, when we had a bit more money, we began to bake our own bread.  Bread baking duties quickly became my husbands area, as he made a much superior loaf to mine.  He's a chemist and he loves to do everything precisely, I'm more of a free spirit and like to wing it when it comes to baking, resulted in varied results.  So for over forty years, he's been the chief bread baker in our household.  As a result, I am not all that practiced upon it, and as many things in life,  practice makes perfect.  It takes time to learn what is just the right texture, just the right amount of liquids, etc.  So all this to say in a long-winded way , is that even though you can't bake a decent loaf of bread to save your life, there's plenty of easy ways to get thrifty bread on the table.

Biscuits

Biscuits are quick and easy.  When all you can afford is vegetable soup, a biscuit makes it a meal.  Here's the recipe I use:

2C. flour
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. baking powder
1/4 C. shortening
1 C. buttermilk

Combine dry ingredients. Quickly cut in shortening. Mix in buttermilk just enough to make a soft dough. .Pat dough on a lightly floured surface to 3/4 inch thickness.  Cut into rounds. Place on an ungreased cookie sheet and bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes or until a light golden brown.

Now, here's where being a lazy baker comes in handy.  When baking biscuits you want to do everything quickly and lightly.  When cutting in the shortening, you want to do just enough to make pea-sized crumbs. It's the layers of shortening and flour that make them flaky (ditto for piecrusts).  You don't want to play with dough any more than you need to, so don't roll with a rolling pin, just pat the dough. And  pat the dough out as few as times as possible, each rerolling makes the dough tougher.  I once watching a lady on YouTube knead her dough (yikes!) they came out looking like hockey pucks.  When cutting the rounds don't twist the cutter, just one motion up and down.  Place the biscuits on the cookie sheets close together so that they rise high.  In other words, the less you do the flakier and more tender your biscuits will be. This applies to piecrusts too, everyone always ask for my secret crust recipe, but it isn't the recipe that makes the flaky crusts, it's the lazy technique.

A note on buttermilk:  If you don't have buttermilk you can substitute for it by adding a splash of lemon juice or vinegar to your measuring cup before adding the milk.  I use buttermilk in almost all my baking because it makes a tender crumb. Buttermilk costs more than regular milk, so here's what I do, once my quart or buttermilk gets down to about a half of pint, I add regular milk to the quart and shake it.  Refrigerate for a couple of days and you have  another quart of buttermilk.  Like cheese, buttermilk is a cultured food and it regenerates, if you keep it up.  I only buy a new quart about every six months, although I use buttermilk several times a week.

Scones

1 1/2 C. flour
1/2 C oatmeal
1/3 C. sugar
1 tbsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/3 C. melted butter
1 egg
1/3 C. milk

Combine the dry ingredients.  Stir in the melted butter, egg and milk.  Again, using the instructions for biscuits, work the dough quickly and lightly.  Pat into a 8 inch circle about 1/2 inch thick.  Cut the dough halfway through into wedges.  Gently spread 1 tbsp. butter over top and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar.  Transfer rounds onto ungreased cookie sheet and bake at 375 degrees for 15 minutes or until the top is lightly browned.

Scones make a wonderful breakfast or a snack for fikka.  One tradition our little family of three adults keeps is to fikka everyday around three.  We get together and have a cup of coffee and a snack such as these scones.  We talk about our day and play a board game.  It's a lovely, relaxing tradition, that is so makes life so pleasurable.  We eat our main meal at noon and do not eat in the evening so  sometimes the guys will eat leftovers during this time.  There are no hard and fast rules. Which is another reason our grocery bills are so low, we do not eat three meals a day.  Breakfast and one substantial meal should suffice for most people unless you are really working hard as a manual laborer.  Plus most people eat snacks too.  If you make your evening snack something healthy, you might discover you do not need that meal at six in the evening.

Anyway, that's my thoughts for the day.  I hope that you all will have a blessed and joyful Resurrection Day!