Archives for September 2015

Special Orders

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We’re at full capacity for weekly subscriptions right now, but are enjoying working with some of our supporters on special orders for fall events.  For a parent meeting with a farmer’s market theme last week, we turned to the fall issue of SIFT for this great Roasted Apple Pecan Bread and paired it with homemade apple butter and Vermont maple syrup butter.  It was great fun to tailor bread to a special event, and the proceeds paid for all the toppings at a pizza baking class for hungry kids that afternoon.  What a great way to make special orders truly special. Thank you!

IMG_8113And if you are curious about how to make great pizza at home, check out Thursday Night Pizza from Father Dominic Garramone who is a great teacher of both how and why to cook for the people we love! In keeping with our Cooking Matters goal of teaching kids to eat more whole grains, and just because it’s delicious, I’ve been using about a cup and a half of King Arthur’s White Whole Wheat Flour in place of some of the bread flour in each batch.  Give it a try and see what you think…

Gratitude

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This might be the best tasting bread that ever came out of our kitchen. If Peter Reinhart calls it “my all time favorite bread” you know it must be good.  Check out the swirls of cinnamon in that beautiful raisin bread dough. The recipe includes quite a list of grains: polenta, oats, wheat germ, wheat flour, brown rice. And if you read the story of the bread, you know that it was meant to be made for today, September 29, Michaelmas. It is a harvest bread, celebrating the many grains of the harvest. But it celebrates more than that.  The original blessing of the bread starts with this wonderful language “each meal beneath my roof, they will all be mixed together…” That language struck me as I mixed together all of those grains this morning.  Every grain, every meal, every person with whom we break bread-they all get mixed together into the fabric of our loaves and the fabric of our lives.  As I kneaded the dough I was grateful for all of them. As I rolled it out I realized that each grain had its own shape and texture, but they were all necessary to get the perfect dough. It made me think about all the things that make us each unique, and the ways that we are so much better when we come together. So I am grateful tonight. For the smell of cinnamon lingering in my kitchen. For warm bread and butter with my son after school. For the family and friends I break bread with almost every day. For the kids I bake with on Friday afternoons. For the supporters who buy our breads and donate funds to keep our programs running.  They are all part of the Little Flour mix, just like all the grains that go into the Struan. So while the Struan recipe is perfect exactly as written, I think part of what made it taste so good today was the gratitude that went into it. Its another one of those intangible ingredients that make all the difference in baking. Try it yourself and see what you think.

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Why Bread?

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Bread is not fast. Invariably someone will point this out when I talk about baking classes for hungry kids. The ingredients are simple and readily available on almost any budget: flour and water, salt and yeast.  Even the yeast is optional when bread is naturally leavened like the sourdough baguettes we love on weekend nights around here. But bread requires time. And in today’s world time often seems like the costliest ingredient.  You have to mix those few ingredients and then let them rest. This is the critical “autolyse” during which the flour absorbs the water. Then a bit of salt gets added and more time is required for kneading.  Since both hands are required the baker can’t do anything but knead and think about the the dough transforming in her hands. It’s a time to think about the the people that will eat the bread, too, and about the ways they might be nourished and transformed by the meal.  Then the dough rests again. The dough is much better if the baker lets it rest for a while and then folds it gently to develop the gluten. And it’s made better still if she does this several times over the course of the afternoon. That means staying close to the bowl of dough, watching its temperature and feeling the texture change. Rest. Rise. Shape. Wait. More time. More attention. Bread is more than the sum of its simple ingredients, it is a gift of time. A gift of self. There are faster ways to get people fed, but few send the same message.  A loaf of bread made by hand says something powerful. To break that bread and hand it to someone to eat is to hand them a bit of yourself.  It means you cared enough to spend a day thinking about them, that you were willing to spend some time on them, that you want them to be well fed on the journey. And when you bake bread with someone, and break bread with someone, you build a relationship that can only come with time. Those relationships are as nourishing as the bread itself. So yes, we could teach kids to make a faster meal, and in fact we often do, but the weeks when we bake bread together are the weeks that feel special. Time may be a costly ingredient these days, but it’s also the one that changes things.

Baking Classes for Hungry Kids

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All of the money raised by Little Flour bake sales and classes supports baking classes for food insecure kids in St. Louis.  Originally, most of these classes took place on Friday afternoons at the Drop In Center funded by Epworth Children and Family Services. Today that program has expanded well beyond my original baking program, and you might find me baking and teaching in any number of schools around St. Louis as a baking instructor for Operation Food Search’s nutrition education program. Whole grain baking classes are my favorite, with King Arthur Flour’s Kid’s Learn Bake & Share Blueberry Muffin recipe and my own pizza recipe competing in popularity!

But the Drop-In Center always holds a special place in my heart. The Center is located in the Normandy School District where thirty percent of kids are functionally homeless and many are “food insecure,” which means they live in households that lack the means to get enough nutritious food on a regular basis and as a result they struggle with hunger. In this environment it is critical to feed kids, and to feed them well. “Hot Food Friday,” as the program has been lovingly nicknamed by the kids, makes sure that everyone who walks in the door gets a hot, nutritious meal. Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, dairy, protein.  Its all there, and that meal matters, especially on a Friday afternoon when some kids will have even more limited access to food over the weekend. But the program is not just about feeding kids, its about empowering kids to feed themselves and their community-and to do it well. We don’t just feed kids, we teach them about nutrition and cooking and making good decisions about how to nourish themselves as they grow into self sustaining adults. Kids in our cooking classes make the meals for the larger community at the Drop In Center and get to share in the joy of cooking for someone else who is hungry.

One young chef at the Drop In Center told me that the part of the class he loves the most is watching the looks on the faces of the other kids when they see what we made for lunch that day. I’ve heard kids say the same thing over and over again in every environment. There is joy in eating but also in feeding, in being a part of a community and sharing what you’ve made with your own hands.  That’s why I think sharing is the final and most important step of baking, no matter where I am teaching!