Wild Yeast

I have no bread to share with you today. Instead I am asking you to share, because many people in this world don’t have enough bread.

According to the World Health Organization, 800,000,000 people worldwide suffer from hunger, and more than 6,000,000 children under the age of five die each year from malnutrition.

If you are as overwhelmed and appalled by those numbers as I am, please consider helping in one of the following ways:

1. Donate directly to one of these charities (or one of your own choosing):
   • The Hunger Project: About | Donate
   • America’s Second Harvest: About | Donate
   • Action Against Hunger USA: About | Donate
2. Make a purchase from my store, or buy a product from Amazon.com by clicking on one of the links contained in many of my posts. I pledge to you that 100% of my commissions from these purchases will be donated to hunger-fighting charities.
3. Visit The Hunger Site and click on the “Click Here to Give” button. This costs you nothing, and you can do it once a day. Donations are made by the sponsors whose ads you see when you click.

Thank you for helping fight hunger.

My mother is a fine woman, and I love her to pieces. Often, though, it seems I have the following sort of conversation with her*, and it exasperates the daylights out of me:

Mom: I can’t cook.

Me: Why do you say that?

Mom: I was having people over and I wanted a great dessert. My friend JoAnn makes wonderful rice pudding, so I used her recipe, but it didn’t turn out. And here I was thinking I’d be serving something so tasty and healthy at the same time, but it was terrible.

Me: Umm… rice pudding’s really not all that healthy. Not that I don’t love it.

Mom: Well, I wanted it to be low fat, low calorie, and high fiber. So I substituted nonfat milk for the cream and cut the sugar in half, and instead of white rice I used half brown rice and half quinoa. Oh, and I was out of cinnamon but nutmeg was on sale so I used that instead.

Me: OK then.

(Read more…)

Kevin, Susan, and Beth at A Year in Bread (one of my favorite sites) have called for favorite bread stories. A contest, actually, but I would have written this even if there were no prizes at stake. I don’t know if it’s really my favorite story, or even a good story, but it’s one that means something to me right now.

Bread Cat

We have a cat named Stripes. (This is what happens when you let 4-year-olds name pets.) We adopted her about 12 years ago, when she started hanging around our back porch. We thought she was a stray, but we learned that she had belonged to a neighbor, and when the neighbor got a dog, the cat refused to step foot in the house ever again. (For whatever reason, this did not happen when we got a dog, a few years later.)

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Let’s be clear up front: I really have no credentials, no business writing a blog, much less one that has anything to do with food. I’m not young, hip, witty, artistic, or visionary. I’m not a foodie, a chef, a writer, a critic, or a photographer. I can’t cook, although I sometimes try, but I don’t eat out much either. I’m still trying to wrap my brain around the concept of a “trackback.”

Yes, the sad truth is that I possess a solitary qualification: I bake a lot of bread. (Read more…)