Variety in the bread thing

For some reason when I was talking to a couple of friends recently, the subject of fry bread came up. I had fry bread with chili a long, long, time ago, but it was so good that I remember it still....so I was interested in knowing how to make it. What I learned from this conversation was that you could just take regular bread dough, after it has risen, and instead of baking it in a loaf, just pull off balls of it, stretch them thin, and deep fry it. If I were to do this, I would be using this recipe, which I would give very high ratings for ease and success of outcome.

Ok, there are at least two problems (for me) with this. One, I am of the mind that if it ain't broke, don't fix it, so why would I want to potentially mess up a perfectly good loaf that is ready to go into the oven for an experiment that may or may not work out? And two, I had never deep-fried anything in my recollection. So the possibility of it not working out was actually pretty high.

So I went to a cookbook and found a recipe specifically for this sort of adventure. Powdered milk was involved (yay, dairy group!) and other non-yeast items that would be available in a food-storage only scenario. No rising, no waiting. So I heated the oil.

The plus side was that nothing caught on fire. The not so plus side is that I do not have a natural talent for making fry bread. The bread came out edible (and at least once in pieces) and was served with chili. Mixed reviews, but pre--ttty sure they would have been higher if the bread had come out lighter and less grease-laden. Practice, practice, practice, as they say. And since this was first attempted in a non-food-storage-only situation, we had some chips on hand as a backup. (Canned chili is one of our 3-month storage items (that we still need to get more of) and sometimes we just put it on top of corn chips with cheese and olives for a main dish. Since I made the frybread, the chips are on hand for another day....)

Gotta love a bread adventure that doesn't burst into flames and leaves tortilla chips in its wake. :) Hey, if you have any tips, would love to hear them--recipes and information are always welcome...

1 for 5--So far

You may recall that at the end of July (the very end) we planted our first late season crop. The seeds that I was able to get my eager little hands on were of the lettuce, onion, radish, pea, and carrot varieties. I was not expecting too much, because we did plant at the end of the season even for some of these varieties, and for some reason, I forget the cause, soon after we planted them I got the idea that they had probably all been washed away. Since we had started so late, and because we had used nearly all of the seeds, we figured we would try again next year.So imagine my surprise when I went out to the garden earlier this week and saw something of interest besides the pumpkin and rhubarb leaves:




Of course, you can see far more in this picture than I could originally see--I just saw the leaves, but I was thinking, "Is that radishes?" And said as much to my husband. By now I was very excited, but did not know if they were ready for harvest, so I waited a few more days, and took this picture before actually pulling one out:

And then, of course, I had to try one, so check it out:


Of course, I washed it off before I ate it, and it was delicious. We will have to do more harvesting soon. Maybe I'll find something else thriving in the kingdom of the pumpkins (aka my garden) but even if I don't, I'll consider this a success in my quest for being better at food storage. If I learn how/when to grow my food, and become more and more proficient at it, I will be effectively perpetuating my food storage--finding room to store seeds is often a lot easier than finding room to store the final product (though I recommend storing both if you have the means. :)

Why should you care about my radishes? It makes me think of this:

You don't have to know everything to try something.

If you have been reading my blog for very long, than you will notice that I have a lot of skills to work on. But I am trying to work on them. Some of these skills (like canning) require more equipment and knowledge than I currently possess, and those are on the wish list. I'm working on other ones, though, and gardening is an example. 1 for 5 is not a fantastic ratio (I'm still hoping for the onions, especially), but it's 1 more than I would have had had I not tried at all. Try gardening--you might like it. You may be really proficient at gardening and/or canning and/ or cooking with staples and/or name a skill, but if there is something that would improve your food storage that you would like to learn, go ahead and try it. Even if you have a miserable success ratio (oh, say like 1 for 5) you will still have more than what you started out with. And if you only end up with knowledge of how to do something better the next time, you still end up with something in the gain column.

Now, I really hope that my children will like radishes... :)