No Perfect Houses

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Somewhere out there hangs a Norman Rockwell painting of the perfect family gathered together at home for the holidays. There’s a mom and a dad, a son and a daughter, a well groomed dog and a perfectly decorated tree. No dishes in the sink or crayons on the walls. I’m sure the leaves are raked and the laundry is folded too. At least that’s how I remember it and for some reason believed it ought to be each year. But it’s not. Not for me or for anyone else really. For years that bothered me, and if any piece of it was missing I ached for the way things “ought” to be. But there are no perfect houses – certainly no perfect families – and we can waste a lot of precious time comparing our actual lives to the fictional ones we see around us this time of year. Instead, I’ve learned a holiday lesson from the gingerbread houses we bake each year. If I try to make them perfect, no one has any fun. It’s okay if the lampposts are different heights and someone ate the other half of the roof. There is no reason you can’t put stripes on the walls or Minions in the living room. There is no such thing as too many M&Ms, and Bugles make the best kind of trees if they don’t all get eaten in the car on the way to grandma’s house. In other words, gingerbread houses can be a bit messy and every one is different. That’s what makes them fun. This year we’re baking gingerbread house kits (cows and minions optional) and delivering them to some of our special young friends to decorate. They won’t be perfect, and we wouldn’t want them to be.

If you’d like to make an imperfect house for someone in your life (or yourself-you’re never too old for gingerbread!), here is our favorite recipe for easy cutting, long lasting, and delicious gingerbread. The whole process is made easy with these great gingerbread house cookie cutters!…

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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!

 

 

Late Summer

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Light splashed this morning 

on the shell pink anemones

swaying on their tall stems;

down blue spiked veronica

light flowing in rivulets 

over the humps of the honeybees;

this morning I saw light kiss

the silk of the roses

in their second flowering,

my late bloomers

flushed with their brandy.

A curious gladness shook me…

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow,

when a new life begins for me,

as it does each day,

as it does each day.

-Stanley Kunitz

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This time of year with it’s gorgeous produce and late blooming flowers seems full of possibility, like a new school notebook full of empty pages waiting for words to come to life. Around here, summer has been full of new learning about bread and bakeries and the people that make them special. I can’t wait to share some of that learning this fall with new classes, new recipes and new ways to help more people eat well in our community.  There are new Flour Boxes sitting on the counter just waiting to be filled, a stack of new recipes to explore, and lots of kids around town excited about baking for themselves and others. So enjoy these last golden days of summer, and check back soon to see what’s blooming.  I can scarcely wait until tomorrow..

July Flour Baskets

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IMG_6669July flour baskets are filled with sourdough baguettes, whole grain seeded baguettes, oatmeal raisin bread for breakfast toast and sandwich rolls made just like the bread we are making in our Kids Baking for Good classes this month.  We’ve already discovered they make the best BLT sandwiches ever, so hit the farmer’s market for your bacon and tomatoes and enjoy! Happy summer everyone!!

Baking for Good!

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IMG_6595We are so thrilled to have the support of King Arthur Flour for a series of summer baking classes at our drop-in center for food insecure youth. The Learn Bake Share program was designed to teach kids to bake and also to share.  Normally kids learn to bake bread at school and then take home a bag of great ingredients and a recipe book courtesy of King Arthur Flour.  At home they bake two loaves of bread, one to share with their family and another to share with a local agency working to meet the needs of food insecure families in the community.  In our case, we will be teaching the baking class at the center and baking the bread there as well.  The kids will eat the fresh bread right out of the oven the afternoon of the class, but will also bake enough to provide the bread for the community meal on Friday afternoon.  Kids baking for kids! The Bake for Good Kids Bread Recipe is healthy and fool proof! We’re making a batch in our kitchen today to make sure we have all our supplies in order, and it smells warm and delicious already.  Stay tuned for details on the classes and recipes, but we wanted to say thanks to our friends at King Arthur for the donation of flour, yeast, books and equipment and also to our Little Flour supporters for donating additional kitchen supplies (and all the meat and cheese to turn that bread into sandwiches on Friday!) to get the program launched this summer!

Update: If you would like to make the bread at home or for kids in your neighborhood, here is the recipe…

Oatmeal Cookie Class!

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We are so pleased to be baking cookies with our local Cooking Matters class this week.  Hurray for all the kids graduating from cooking class! Cooking Matters is a great way for kids to learn how to cook and eat healthy meals at home.  Their cookies looked awfully good too, and were so yummy it was hard to get a picture before they were all gone.  It was easy to get distracted from photography while watching the kids.  It turns out that kids who may not always get enough to eat can teach some real lessons on sharing. Cookie distribution was taken very seriously during this class. There were two cookies per kid, and they were gobbled up as soon as they were declared cool enough for little hands to touch. But there were three extra cookies. Three cookies for a dozen kids. This was a serious dilemma and the options presented were fascinating. The cookies could be quartered and divided evenly (good math skills at work!) but crumbling was going to be an issue and this option was not popular. The kid who discovered the extras on the baking tray briefly suggested a finders keepers approach but was pretty easily persuaded by the others that it would not be a fair solution. After a pause, one little girl perked up and declared that there were three volunteer helpers there and that we could each have a cookie. We helpers were all flattered but did not want to take their last three cookies.  We declined, but the idea of gifting the cookies had taken hold and the spirits of the group of second graders soared as they debated the best recipients for their efforts.  A younger sibling, a hard working mom, and an obviously adored after school caregiver were the lucky winners of those cookies, but those of us working with the kids may have gotten the best gift of all-a reminder of why we do what we do.  It’s fun to cook, but it’s even more fun to feed someone.  And as always, that is the best lesson of all.

Happy Hour!

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IMG_6115“Omit no happy hour that may give furtherance to our expedition.” William Shakespeare

We are so excited to be baking the weekend baguettes for a bake sale at our favorite wine and cheese shop this weekend!  Proceeds fund our baking classes for food insecure youth, so happy hour is even happier this week! Thanks to all our great supporters for making it possible.

April Flour Baskets

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DSC00594We are busy baking this week!  Flour baskets will include the traditional Little Flour Friday Baguettes plus whole grain seeded loaves for weekend toasting, perfect with a smashed avocado and poached egg!  We are also including individual snacking bags of our toasted coconut and dark chocolate chunk cookies for snacking and sharing…stay tuned for a recipe and information about another bake sale + baking class opportunity!