Guess What I Did

So, yesterday mid-afternoon, like a moron, I started making bread. Why is that so bad? Because I had a wedding to go to downtown at 5:00... which meant I had to leave the house at 4:15 at the latest. I completely forgot about it (the bread, not the wedding) until I was running around my house, dressed and made up, shutting lights off. I looked into my kitchen, and there on the counter was a lump of dough, way more than doubled in size, bone dry on the outside. AUGH. I scraped it into a bowl, chucked it into the fridge, threw a wet towel over the top of it, and ran out the door.

This morning I pulled the bowl out of the fridge and peeked at the dough with no small amount of trepidation. Whew! Slightly risen, which is just what I wanted to see. I tipped it back out onto the counter, cut it in half, and let it come to a manageable temperature for an hour or so. I shaped the loaves and let them rise for, like, three hours, which is how long it took for them to rise to an inch above the pans. Yow.

Anyway, disaster averted, which was awesome, because if there's anything in the world I HATE, it's throwing away food. Not the prettiest bread I ever made, but it worked, and it's still darn tasty if I do say so myself.

So now you know. You can rescue bread even if you forget about it, leave it out uncovered so it gets all dessicated and cracked, and end up having to leave it until the next day.

Frugal frugal frugal

When I was growing up, we lived on a pastor's salary while my mom stayed home. So... you do the math and figure out if we were the kind of family that ate out three or four times a week. Hint: no.

We had a garden. We bought ingredients instead of prepared food and cooked all our meals from scratch. We bought beef once a year from a local rancher. We didn't waste food, ever.

For my mother, it wasn't such a stretch. She, like many in my parents' generation, was raised by folks who grew up during the depression, whose frugality wasn't an affectation, but a characteristic learned by bitter necessity. But somewhere in the prosperity of the last thirty years, my parents' generation struggled to pass the skills of frugal living and frugal eating along to my generation. And for many people my age, we had little motivation to learn those skills. In times of unparalleled economic growth and national wealth, it seemed unnecessary to many of us to learn how to bake our own bread, how to plant a garden, how to make a roast chicken stretch into three meals, how to can and preserve food.

But I'm blessed to have a stubborn mother whose dad was the youngest of eleven and grew up on a farm. Gardening, baking, canning, and generally saving money were second nature to her. I basically grew up in her kitchen. And now that we seem to be in for a long haul with this recession, I'm more glad than ever for that fact. I can bake bread (and I do!). I can make delicious meals with frugal ingredients. I can home-can produce and beans. And these skills are saving me money.

I was talking with my awesome, gorgeous sister-in-law last night and, on the topic of stretching grocery budgets and feeding ourselves and our loved ones with less meat and more love, I said, "By golly, if our grandmothers could do it, so can we!"

Too often what hinders people (especially women) in my generation from really mastering domestic frugality is just plain fear: fear that it's too hard, that it's not worth it, that we really can't do it even if we try. But that's just not true! We can do everything our grandmothers did to steward our finances and care for our families. We truly can.