Ah, banana bread and winter outerwear...

Well, in this case at least, the title of the post pretty much says it all when it comes to my emergency preparedness efforts last week...

First, as promised, comes the banana bread recipe. The time was ripe (pun totally intended) to use the bananas we had, so I looked for the simplest recipes with the most common on-hand ingredients that I could find. It may have been the very first time ever I had made banana bread, because if I had ever made banana bread before, it was apparently long ago and not very memorable. This banana bread was tasty, although not all of my children wanted to actually taste it. And, despite the fact that Idaho is not exactly the place to expect great access to bananas in an emergency situation, in normal circumstances I figure it would be cheaper to make this recipe than buy a loaf somewhere....

And then came later in the week, when I saw in a flyer that one of the major clothing chainstores in the area was having a sale (if I recall correctly, 60-70% off was advertised) on winter outerwear. I was basically looking for coats for next year for my quickly growing children. Apparently I was not alone, because on the first evening of a three-day sale there wasn't that much to choose from on the racks. Then I figured I would check out a few other stores to see if they had things on sale, and they did have some items on clearance racks, or items on sale that were still too expensive for my taste and/or wallet. So not an entirely profitable outing, but I did get some shopping done. I'm just sharing this info because you might have a better selection in your area, and apparently the best time for winter outerwear sales is now. I gather this from the fact that one of the cashiers, when asked if what they had out was all that was available, replied to the effect that what was out was all there was, that now was the time for Spring merchandise, and they already had some Spring items out. One of the (really disappointing) things that I saw in the outerwear selection of items is that many of them didn't seem to offer that much in terms of warmth. Even if the price is right, if the item is not going to accomplish the desired goal of actually keeping you warm, it doesn't really interest me. That kind of criteria can greatly affect your range of selection... :)

Lastly, and really as an aside, has anyone else noticed that the price of tortillas has gone up? I made tortillas last week (the recipe I use is here) but when I saw more recently that a large package was closer to $5.00 than $4.00, I didn't buy them. Mine aren't as pretty as the ones in the store, (or as uniform in shape, quite frankly) but it's hard to rationalize that they're worth that much more....

Easy biscuit recipe

I found this cornmeal buttermilk biscuit recipe over at Liv Life. They were good and disappeared shortly after they were taken out of the oven. Mine didn't come out as fluffy-looking as the ones on the blog, so I'll have to work on that aspect, but hey, my children and husband liked them, and they have been declared a "keeper". I substituted 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice in 1/2 cup of regular milk for the buttermilk.

I found this recipe through a link on the Frugal Antics of a Harried Homemaker website, which I tend to visit a lot. I actually have a few recipes that I'm hoping to get to from that site, such as these Panini all'Olio rolls, or these Spoon Rolls, since we're on the subject of breads. And as an added bonus, I have now told you about the recipes and you don't have to wait until I get around to making them to try them yourselves.... :) Thanks to those over at Liv Life and Frugal Antics of a Harried Homemaker for sharing their recipes!

How many hoops would you go through to get a recipe?

For me, it depends on the ease of the recipe. Oh, yeah, and if I think that I will like what I'll be cooking/baking....

You can almost get a recipe by going here. I say almost because when you go to the linked website, it's actually a children's game about muffin-making. I suppose it is geared to help younger children with coordination, etc., because there are girls decorating muffins on a conveyor belt. Ah, everyone needs a little computer-animated fun, right? Thing is, after you decorate a level of muffins, when they show a rack of finished muffins, when you press on it, your prize is a muffin recipe. There are three levels to play, and each finished rack with different colored ribbon will give you a different recipe. Though I don't remember the order that you win which recipe, the three recipes available at the time of this writing are: corn muffins, applesauce muffins, and chocolate muffins. I can't speak for the other two recipes, but I did make the chocolate muffins on Saturday and they were received well by all. They all use pretty basic ingredients and the chocolate ones were easy to make. Ah. You gotta love easy..... :) And for the buttermilk ingredient in the corn muffins I would just substitute regular milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar in it....

I tried to just link to the recipes, but no luck. So, while it may be a little annoying to have to go through the game to get to the recipes, I hope you find it worth the effort if you do. (Of course, this could be the way to get your children involved in thinking about recipes if you wanted... :) Anyway, I have found that children's books and websites sometimes have useful, easy recipes that could be useful for food storage because the recipes aren't complicated, and the ingredients are basic. So, a little weird to put an almost link in a post, but it does add variety to my bread-type recipes--and I'm always looking for variety in the flour, oil, and salt category...

Adventures with bread dough...

I haven't been posting much, but I did try something new last week and then our internet service became very, very spotty--so spotty, that, for example, I was able to post a comment that someone left, and then unable to post a reply. Hopefully the service will hold up for the duration of this post. Ah, the suspense of it... :)

Anyway, not too long ago I was at a youth activity where they were making "pizza bombs". Basically, they took bread dough that originally looked like rolls, flattened it, spread pizza sauce, added toppings like cheese and pepperoni, and took a second flattened piece of dough to cover it. Then they pinched the edges of the dough together to hold the toppings in, and marked their individual pizza bombs with food coloring so that they would know whose was whose once they emerged from the oven. They turned out well. I asked the person who supplied the dough if it was homemade, and was told that it was Rhodes dough. So I wondered if I could do pizza bombs with my homemade rolls....

Well, the pizza bomb experience took place before Thanksgiving, and at Thanksgiving, I made the roll recipe I now usually use (this one) and asked my best source (Mom) what she thought of using it to make the aforementioned recipe. She pretty much indicated that it would be better if I used a more basic recipe, since those rolls are pretty dense, so I mentioned I might use the bread loaf recipe I usually use, (this one) and let it rise into the loaf, only to tear it apart when it was done rising and make it into a tasty pizza delight....

And that's what I did. As a matter of fact, when I was in the middle of constructing the pizza bombs, I told my husband that I should be taking pictures for this blog...but he was helping and I had spaghetti sauce (our mini pizza sauce of choice) on my hands, and then we were eating them, and then they were gone...and then there was nothing to take a picture of, and so it goes. Sorry. But I will comment on how this experiment went....

---The pizza bombs were a success and were labeled a "keeper", which means that the likelihood that they will be made again is very high.

---Although the dough seemed pretty thin when rolled out and painstakingly pinched together, when it was baked until brown, it was pretty dense. This made it really filling, but so much density kind of made the toppings harder to find.

---Even though I was careful pinching the edges together, there were still at least some cases where the fillings made their way out of the bombs before they were removed from the oven. They still tasted good though, and took less time to bake than the loaf form would have at the same temperature....

Now I will probably try to come up with new fillings so that we can make different kinds of "bombs" in the future. Spaghetti sauce stores easily, as do olives, which we also used. It didn't take much cheese or pepperoni per bomb, and so there are few ingredients to use, and as mentioned, the bread part of it made it filling. I don't consider pepperoni to be a long-term storage item, so it's back to the drawing board to make a more food storage friendly recipe, but variety with your basic bread dough has to be a good thing, right? Maybe something with canned chicken or Spam would work out when I try this again... :)

Why practice is important....oh, and 2 bread recipes

Well, I haven't had that much to write about lately--still working on stocking up and actually just storing what we have properly. Except for the fact that I have been trying to increase my number of food-storage-friendly recipes, and have been concentrating on bread recipes--the mostly flour, oil, salt, etc. variety. I have had mixed results....

So, good news first--I found a "keeper" recipe for fried bread here. Highlights:

--After adjusting the temperature of the oil, the bread just got prettier and prettier--the final pieces were something to behold.... :)

--Even the more "well-done" pieces were readily eaten....

---There were varied levels of enthusiasm, but there were no left-overs, and an agreement that the recipe should be repeated in the future. (Granted, I would not make this too often, but I do think that in the midst of appetite fatigue this might be a welcome exception to the menu....It requires quite a bit of oil, as well as not being at the top of my "most healthy foods" list. But it does taste oh-so-good... :)

Um, yeah, so on to the second bread recipe, which made me realize (again) how vital it can be to try a recipe before an emergency strikes...

I found the following recipe in a family recipe collection, and we got it from a family friend, E.W., many years ago. I don't know if E.W. originally got it somewhere else, but E.W. is our source, so E.W. gets the credit here:

Angel Biscuits

5 cups flour
3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 cup sugar
1 cup shortening
2 tbsp water
2 cups buttermilk
1 package dry yeast

Sift together flour, sugar, soda, salt, and baking powder. Cut shortening into dry ingredients. Dissolve yeast in warm water and add with the buttermilk to the flour. Mix well. Turn out on a floured board. Roll 1/4 inch thick. Cut out. Bake at 400 degrees for 15 minutes.

Ah, pretty straight forward. Except, although I added the phrase, Cut shortening into dry ingredients for your benefit and recipe convenience, it is not included on the recipe card copied into our recipe book. Nowhere to be found. So, I had done everything else, ( I used milk with a tbsp. of lemon juice per cup to substitute for the buttermilk) when right before I was going to turn out the dough onto a floured surface, something in my brain clicked, and I thought, "Didn't it say something about shortening?"

Why, yes. Yes, it did. And I did enough baking when I was a kid (nigh these many years ago :) that my next thought was that I probably should have cut the shortening into the dry ingredients. And here I stood with the sticky mound of dough in my mixing bowl, and cutting anything into it didn't look too promising. A cup of shortening with nowhere to go--my thoughts were that little pockets of shortening would show up in the biscuits like chocolate chips, if I proceeded at all.

The most dominant thought, though, was: "5 cups of flour! I just wasted 5 cups of flour!" So I decided to call my best source (Mom) to see if this little adventure was in any way salvageable. My first inclination was to say no, but there were still enough echoes of "5 cups of flour!!" to make it worth my while to find out.

Except, my best source was not available for comment. By home or cell phone. At least not at first. By about the fourth attempt, contact was made. And she suggested that I try to add the shortening now and see how it worked out. She also pointed out that experienced cooks would know to add the shortening to the dry ingredients, so that it was understood and not added to the directions.

Yeah, not so much understood here. But I decided to continue, and cut the shortening in using two knives (many thanks to whomever included this tip on their blog, because it works really well if you don't happen to have a pastry cutter handy--don't remember for sure where I read it, but the gratitude is there) and the shortening disappeared into the massive mound of dough.

Rolled it out. Cut the biscuits out. And baked them.

The results (surprisingly more positive than the previous information would lead you to believe) :

---Very flat biscuits emerged from the oven, and although they didn't rise very much, they were mostly very well-received.

---No wads of shortening masquerading as "biscuit surprise", for which I was grateful. They were a lot sweeter than I was expecting, but perhaps I should have been expecting it when I remember that the recipe does call for a cup of sugar...that "experienced cook" thing again, I guess.

---They were eaten heartily the first night. They were used to dip in gravy from crockpot chicken the second night. And they were mostly gone the third night. So they are a "keeper". I'll keep looking for a more salty version, partly because I prefer saltier, but also because it's always good to have options and variety....

From what I hear, these biscuits are supposed to rise pretty high, and will do so if not handled too much--if you want them lighter, avoid too much handling/rolling out, etc. (Yeah, I rolled that dough out several times, thus adding to the "flatness" of the final results...)

So it's kind of embarassing to relate how little I knew, but if it encourages anyone to practice their skills before an emergency, it's worth it. I can just imagine how (much more) upset I would be if I wasted that much flour when there was probably no place to replenish it easily. I might have finished the batch anyway, but it was definitely a plus to be able to contact someone with more knowledge (thanks Mom!) when a question arose, and that also might not be an option in an emergency. We might have only those in our household, or just ourselves, to turn to in an emergency situation. Better to get the questions out of the way before an emergency situation--less stress, and hopefully, smoother sailing. Or lighter biscuits. Whatever the case may be.... :)

Flour + water + salt, etc. ...

Ok, you may remember that I have a semi-phobia for killing yeast, among other things, that has greatly hampered my desire to make bread. Then I found this recipe, and it is very good, both in the taste category and the alleviate-my-guilt-for-not-learning-to-make-bread-loaves category. The problem with the roll recipe is that it requires some things that may not be readily available in my food storage supplies, such as butter and eggs, so I decided to get serious and find out what kind of bread that I could make with the really basic ingredients that are staples in my food storage. Today was the day. I headed over to the Hillbilly Housewife website and tried the Beginner's Bread recipe.

One of the things that I heard that made me feel that I could gauge the water temperature so that it wouldn't be too hot, and hence destroy the oh-so-useful yeast, was that you should make the water about the same temperature that you would like to end up with when you are testing a baby's bottle on your wrist. I don't know how anyone else gauges it, but that tip has served me well so far...in fact some of the rising today went a little quicker than the recipe indicated. Of course, I am not the most patient of people, so I made sure that my kitchen was somewhat warmer than it usually is to help the rising process along.

Everything went pretty well through the initial stages--just had to add a couple of teaspoons of water to the dough before letting it rise, and it didn't take too much coaxing to get it to fit in the loaf pan in a reasonable shape. Letting it rise in the pan was really quick, and I didn't let it go an hour before putting it in the oven because it was getting big enough to make me nervous. Once it was in the oven I was afraid that it would hit the upper coils, but all was well. The cooking was kind of quick too, but the top was golden brown, so I took it out. This was when I had the biggest difficulties, because despite the shortened duration of baking time, the loaf had evidently become quite attached to the pan--to the point that it was necessary to help it out around the edges, even though it had been greased really well. Because of this "help", part of the bottom of the loaf was left in the pan. Glass half empty: the bread slices were rather short and squat rather than regulation-size. Glass half full: it was immediately evident that the bread had indeed cooked all the way through, except for a very small strip on one piece that was questionable. Pan all the way empty: the loaf is now almost a memory, except for a couple of slices.

So there's a win in the bread category, really in more ways than one--the bread was edible, and the ingredients--water, yeast, oil, salt, sugar, and flour-- couldn't be more basic. The recipe now resides in my emergency notebook, and is one answer to the question, "Now I have all this basic food storage--what do I do with it?"

Well, upward and onward. Thanks to Hillbilly Housewife for providing the recipe! I'll let you know how it works out when I make bread with flour that I've ground from my wheat storage--yeah, yet to happen. And I've been eyeing some tortilla recipes.... :)