Cheap, Easy Bread (30 cents a loaf; preparation takes 15 minutes max, baking about 30)

You'd think that a post with the title "Cheap, Easy" and "Bread" -- well, it would inspire me with my most risque content, my most glittery, tube-toppy, lucite heeled (with a slot for tips!), dominatrix-centered prose.

Yeah, okay, it did. I am now picturing Denzel Washington in drag on the Vegas strip, leaning over in a mini-skirt, his stockings just run enough so that we know he's cheap (as if the tawdry pink tube top and multiple gold necklaces, and well -- those SHOES -- didn't already say that loud and clear) -- leaning over, I say, at the window of a long, dark BMW or Lincoln, and the window snicks down, and Denzel says, not even trying to disguise his voice, "So, you want a date?"

And the man in the car says: "Sure. If you're really Denzel."

Denzel flashes his actor's union card or something, looking over his bare shoulder for cops. Oh, and he's chewing gum. Blue gum. He also cracks it.

The guy in the car says: "I'm all for a date, so long as you're easy and cheap."

Denzel, with his long, fake fingernails, each one with the American flag painted on it, reaches in and pops open the door with one hand. He's carrying a clearly knock-off Gucci from the 1990s. He slides onto the seat, the window snicks up, the car drives away somewhere where the most hideous lights reflect off the back window.

Cheap. Easy. You knew I'd go there. You just didn't know I'd take Denzel down with me.

You won't underestimate me again, will you?

So. To the point: when, exactly, did bread become difficult?

That is, when did we start letting people make our bread for us, and then letting them jack the price up on us until, at my local Publix, a loaf of palatable fresh bread costs $3.00--10 times more than it costs to make it at home? "Good" bread is now about $5.00 a pound. Ridiculous. Ridiculous!

All you need is fifteen minutes every two weeks to mix up a batch of this; a pizza stone (find one at a garage sale); an oven; some water; and the bottom of a broiling pan.

For ingredients: whole wheat flour, white flour, vital wheat gluten, water, salt, yeast, spray grease.

You will not be required to knead.

Yes, you heard that right.

Here's how it goes. In a bucket that holds at least five quarts and that you can cover LOOSELY (since yeast breathes) -- I got a big plastic container at Valdemart and cut a hole in the top -- mix the following:

(NOTE: To measure use single cup cup measures so you don't get too much flour. Pack the cups loosely.)

4 c whole wheat flour, packed LOOSELY in the cup measure.

3 1/2 c bread flour, packed LOOSELY in the cup measure.

1 1/2 TBSP (2 packets) of yeast

1 1/2 TBSP salt (kosher or sea is better, but any will do)

1/4 c vital wheat gluten

When these are mixed together, add:

4 cups of water at about 100 degrees. I get this by nuking my winter tap water for about 30 secs. Until you get a feel for how hot this is (it barely registers as warm when you touch it), you might want to use a thermometer.

Mix with your hands or a large wooden spoon. It should be very sticky, but not runny and not dry. Mix until all the flour's been taken up into the dough. Since my bin is clear, I can see this pretty well, but before I had that, I used a big bowl and just lifted the dough with my hands to make sure there was no loose flour underneath where it likes to hide.

Cover loosely and stand in a corner somewhere you can forget it. Forget it for at least three-four hours.

When you get back to remembering about it, don't touch it, punch it down, nothing. NOTHING. Just cover it loosely and put it in the fridge. You want it tightly enough covered that it won't dry, but loosely enough that the yeast can breathe. Again, I just cut a slit in the top of my bin here, and it works beautifully. Leave it alone for about 24 hours or more.

When you're ready to bake:

Sometime in the next two weeks, after at least 24 hours in the fridge, get out a cookie sheet and grease it lightly. Take the container of dough out of the fridge, dust your hands with flour, grab a long, sharp knife, and quickly pull up on the dough. Try not to compress it--the air in it is the air it will have, so if you compress it, it gets REALLY dense. Cut off about a third of it (a little more than about a grapefruit size hunk).

QUICKLY shape the dough into a loaf by tucking under the ends. Don't handle it too much -- this should take no more than 30 seconds. It won't look perfect, but that's okay.

Put it on the cookie sheet, and using the knife, cut three slashes in it, then cover it completely with plastic. Close the bin back up and return it to the fridge. Forget about the bread.

Come back in about an hour and a half. The dough will have warmed up some and look a little more grey and flaccid and unpalatable. That's exactly right.

In the oven, set two racks, one on the lowest rung (closest to the element), one high enough above that so that the bottom of the roasting pan slides on the bottom rack easily. Put the pizza stone on the top rack and turn the oven on to preheat to 450 degrees.

When the oven's hot, measure out a cup of water. Take the plastic off the dough and slide the cookie sheet and dough on top of the stone. Poor the water in the hot roasting pan, shutting the door quickly to keep as much of the steam as possible in the oven.

Set the timer for about 11 minutes.

When it rings, open the oven and shake the cookie sheet a little to free the bread from it, then slide the loaf onto the sheet to finish the baking. Close the oven door. Set the timer for 11 minutes.

When it rings, take the bread out of the oven. Wait until it's cool to cut it. It should be yummy, heavier than your normal loaf, and without the dramatic rise, but solid and good for you.

When you've used up all your dough, DON'T wash your bin. Just make another batch right over the scraps. In two or three batches, your dough will begin to acquire a subtle tang that will be the taste of fermented dough and your local yeast: otherwise known as sourdough, but again, much subtler than the stuff you buy at the store.

It's the staff of life, folks. Make some.

There you go.

Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite Toast ($3 or less, fifteen minutes)

This is not a picture of food. It is, instead, a painting by Delacroix, called "Liberty Leading the People," or more correctly (sans accents) "La Liberte guidant le peuple."

See, what's really funny in a not-pleasant way about all the franco-hysteria of 2003 and/or -- oh, now -- in which legions of people were introduced to sliced, deep-fried potatoes as "freedom fries" and battered, pan-fried bread as "freedom toast" is that freedom is what the French were all about. Might even be currently all about. The Statue of Liberty? Made in France. Our freedom as a country from the British Empire? Assisted by France (via Lafayette [he looks like he likes a stinky cheese, don't he?], among others). Freedom from undergarments like corsets and to show one's breasts, as in the painting above, while killing aristos? You know it: FRANCE.

Thus this is VERY FRENCH TOAST.

Which itself is an irony, since no decent French person would touch the stuff, I'm sure. It's pure American.

Ironies upon ironies abound.

This is why Tea-baggers are idiots (does this sign even make sense?), largely -- okay, one of the reasons. Zero ability to sense irony.

For le pain faux-francais, what you need is some stale bread (not moldy! just stale!). Also milk, a couple of eggs, a little sugar, a little cinnamon, and a hot, greased pan.

In a bowl -- here I feature the beautiful gift bowl I got last week from the Brickman-Curzons -- beat a couple of eggs with about a 1/3 c milk for every pound of bread. You might need more or less, but that's the beauty [use your mute button freely at this link] of this recipe. The freedom of it, you might say.

Sprinkle on about 1/2 tsp sugar and a 1/4 tsp cinnamon. Mix this all up well. You can see I waited to beat my eggs until I'd added the other stuff. That's okay too.

Heat the pan with a little oil, until when you shake a wet hand over it, the water pops or dances immediately.

Take a slice of bread and briefly dip it, both sides, in the bowl of eggy-cinnamon-milky-sugar stuff. DO NOT SOAK the bread. You want just to coat it.

Drop it in the pan. If the pan's big enough, do several.

Here I've used my own bread (a recipe I'll post later) -- it's a very dense whole wheat which is good to keep the batter on the outside. White bread will absorb more, more quickly, so keep in mind that you want to be quick in the batter with Wonderbread sorts of breads.

You'll be able to smell this as it cooks and see the edges browning. Lift up each slice to check underneath to see if it's the right color -- brown colored. Like French toast colored. When it's that color, flip and cook the other side.

Set the oven on warm and set an oven-safe plate inside. Put each slice on the plate as it's done, to keep it warm.

Meanwhile, heat a little REAL maple syrup (the other stuff is gaggy and people tend to use too much of it trying to get it to taste like something. So dish out for the real, and use only a little.). I just put the glass bottle next to the pan, not touching, and it's warm enough by the time I'm done.

When it's all cooked, take the slices you want out of the oven and butter and drizzle with maple syrup. Then chow. Or, powder with confectioner's sugar if you need to -- though since this has some cinnamon and sugar in the batter, you might find that's overkill. Fry a runny egg and put it on top, if you don't value plaque-free arteries. Use it as sandwich bread for a thick bacon or slab-o-ham sandwich. Have at it. Do whatever. You have that freedom.

There you go.

Note: Here is a picture of what Chuck made of the batter leftovers. He says to say, however terrible it looks, it was mighty tasty. He simply turned the batter into the hot pan, shoved it around until it cooked, sprinkled it with grated cheddar and jalapeno paste (cinnamon and jalapeno??) and ate it.

In no other country would this be legal. I swear.

Sweet Potatoes ala Davidson sort of (less than a dollar, a little more than half an hour)

Danielle Davidson was one of the finest students I've ever had the privilege to teach.

No, she's not dead. She just graduated and got a job. What were you thinking?

Anyway, she wrote me a while ago with a recipe, which like a terrible self-replicating virus (not the kind I was envisioning, but oh well), I read, punctured the membrane of, wrote my genetic code into, and began merrily to change. I'm sorry, Danielle. Never trust me to pass on anything directly. I just can't. It's not in my nature.

Now, when I think of Gone with the Wind (1939), I tend to remember a couple of key scenes. The dead and dying at the station. The red dressing gown. But mostly: "As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again!" [Music rises.] I tend, however, to forget that the food she's found is radishes. RADISHES.

Not what in my mind even starving people relish. Radishes. So when I remember the scene, I unconsciously replace the radishes with a better tasting, creamy delish food, a yummy, non-radishy substance.

Sweet potatoes. Ummmm.

I don't remember sweet potatoes much in my childhood; in fact, though I knew what they were, mostly I remember the baked variety that my ex-mother-in-law took to my husband's grandmother in the nursing home/hospital: a single, caramelized baked potato, cold and in its skin. A kind of gift.

So for me, sweet potatoes are a newish thing. I originally treated them like white potatoes: mashed, butter and salt, etc. They were okay like this, nothing special. Then I tried treating them like squash, baked, butter and cinnamon. They were like dessert like this: very sweet.

This was not satisfying. Then I started making fudge, not with sweet potatoes, but with chocolate of course: to which I started adding chili powder. Then I got Danielle's recipe. Then I started thinking.

And THEN I bought this crazy stuff: chipotle powder (Jesus God, its own website!). Dekalb Farmer's Market is a wonder, the tenth or whatever wonder of the world. Who knew you could powder chipotles?

So: this is the simplification and perversion of Danielle's sweet potatoes.

You need about two pounds of sweet potatoes, salt, oil, chipotle powder. And an oven. That's it.

Preheat oven to 350.

Peel and dice the sweet potatoes into about 1 1/2" pieces.

Lightly oil a heavy, oven-proof dish.

Dump in the diced sweet potatoes and stir to coat them with the oil.

Sprinkle with about a tsp of salt.

Then, depending on how spicy you like things, sprinkle a pinch (not very spicy) or two (spicy) or three (you better have some milk [for Lucy] near) over the sweet potato.

Bake until they're soft, about half an hour.

Stir them half way through to distribute the spices.

Eat. It's yummy stuff. And good for you!

There you go.

Grits (Geez, I don't know: 50 cents?; about half an hour)

Technically, these are jalapeno cheese grits (milled locally).

And what about those pasty white crap grits you might find at, oh, Waffle House, that were made about 4 in the morning in a huge vat and have been cooking now for about ten hours -- if, by cooking, you mean "sitting over a moderate heat and stirred when one of the toothless but nice waitresses remembers they're there" -- into something resembling plastinated paper pulp that can only be swallowed with lakes, and I mean LAKES, of butter and about six fistfuls of salt -- or, otherwise, have to be stirred onto runny eggs, filled with bacon bits, decorated with cheese, and sopped up with white toast, and then still are less palatable than used TP?

What about them? Pig food, I say. Worse. They should be used for gluing pasta to construction paper in kindergarten classrooms.

Look, Elmer's glue, though edible, is disgusting. Waffle House grits, like the insta-grits you buy at the store, is disgusting. Unless you were starving to death, why would you eat that? It's an act of political solidarity to refuse them, I think, because grits is something the know-nothings north of here hold against us. Grits, they say, snorting. Who would eat something like THAT? Then they sit down to a bowlful of cream of wheat -- or worse, lutefisk on whipped potatoes -- and see no irony at all.

Then they set up companies like Quaker Oats (a division of PepsiCo.! Now you know they're both evil and not from around here) to sell us "instant" grits in little packets, flavored like "artificial butter" or, God forfend, sweetened with sugar. GAH. It's Reconstruction all over again, the repulsive Quaker Co. carpetbaggers and their incomprehension. They should all get yellow fever is what I say, take it home with them, and come back only when they can appreciate grits.

But first we have to make good grits available and banish the bad grits.

[Are you thinking of My Cousin Vinny (the best I could find)? Because I am. Or wait: "The grits is cold" -- Bette Davis (6:30-6:50). The Little Foxes. Lillian Helman was a genius, and so was good old Bette.]

Now, I know you're thinking: with that lead in, how could this be anything you'd want to make? I think you ask this reasonably. But you remember that I started the stuffed mushrooms with visions of fungusy toenails, and pulled THAT one out of the fire. Have faith, little ones, I can do this.

I will be assisted in this task by my beautiful new bowl, a birthChristdaymas prezzie from the Brickman-Curzons. The bowl was handmade in Tuscaloosa by Neely Portera -- it has a sea-green wash inside, a brownish purple (fig-colored, I think) wash around the outside. Perfect.

The thing you want to do is start with good grits. By which I mean, non-factory grits, grits not imposed on you by the evil machinations of post-Sherman infiltrators.

If you can get them locally, more the better. We use stone-ground grits from Logan Turnpike Mill, which isn't far from where we live (it's in Blairsville). They're extremely coarse-ground and yellow. I prefer yellow because of the color, which isn't just yellow, but a complex mix of everything from deep brown to caramel to sunshine to golden.

Coarse-ground grits are actually better, since they don't dissolve into craptitude when they're cooked. They have actual substance. Which, you know, you probably want in food.

Grits cook at a 3:1 ratio; here, for two of us for breakfast, I've got 1 1/2 c water to 1/2 c grits. It's important to add salt to the boiling water, since for some reason salting grits after you cook them is really difficult to get right. I think I've got a scant tsp. of salt here.

In addition, you'll need some cheese, probably about a 1/4 c shredded (I've used jalapeno jack in the grits and a couple of spoonfuls of shredded cheddar for garnish) and a little jalapeno mash.

Here's how you do this:

1. Put the water and salt in a pan on high heat. Bring to a boil.

2. Dump in the grits. Stir. Turn the heat to medium so they don't pop all over the place. Keep it simmering, though, so don't turn it down too much.

3. Simmer for about 15-20 minutes, stirring every once in a while, until thickened.

4. Stir in cheese and jalapeno mash.

5. Eat.

See, like biscuits, which people think of as difficult, grits is easy. REALLY easy. Which makes it such an offense against God and nature that good ones are so hard to find.

Oh, and just in case you're in Carrollton, Millers grits --- VERY good. They use cream cheese and a lot of butter as the grits cook. That's another way to do it. They serve theirs with shrimp. Which of course for me ruins the whole thing, but that just makes me weird, I suppose.

There you go (with French toast, my birthday breakfast).

Okay, Yes, Technically it's Fried (under one dollar; about fifteen minutes)

Fried okra.

My first marriage didn't work out. However, I learned some things about cooking in the eight years of that relationship. Banana pudding. Beans and peas. Cornbread.

Fried okra.

Right now it's dark outside, raining in spits and volleys, and about, oh, forty degrees. If that. I'm in flannel and a sweatshirt, shivering uncontrollable, though the furnace is going full blast and I'm indoors. I haven't seen the sun in a couple of days. I feel sort of like either getting in bed and coming out in May, or slitting my wrists and ending it now.

I need summer food. I need bright tastes. I need to be reminded that the earth is now (as it is past the solstice) moving or tipping or whatever it does ever closer to that elusive yellow ball in the sky I've been told is the sun and is up there somewhere, warming something somewhere, where the lucky people are -- where they're probably harvesting the coffee I don't drink or picking the tea leaves (okay, this is just beautiful) I won't use, or chewing the cacao leaves I wouldn't know what do to with while they harvest the chocolate I swore off back when the sun shone in May as solidarity with Chuck's quitting smoking.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah. Fried okra. Summer food. Almost as good as a perfect tomato, warm and heavy and just off the vine.

Sigh. Sigh. Can it be May already? Please?

Well, anyway -- the trick with fried okra done the way my mother-in-law taught me is never to stir. NEVER. Always flip. Stir=musciligenous mess. Flip=crisp goodness. Remember these equations. They'll be on the next test.

Here's how you do it.

Get some okra, a small onion, and a potato. You'll also need salt and pepper, oil, corn meal and flour.

In a heavy frying pan, pour about an eighth of an inch of oil. Not too much since, as I was told, you aren't deep-frying the stuff.

Slice the onion, thinly, into a bowl.

Slice the potato, thinly (just shy of chipping it), into the same bowl.

Slice the okra, thinly (say, in quarter inch rounds), into the same bowl.

Throw in a couple of big spoons of corn meal, and a spoon of flour. Add some salt and pepper. You can always add more, so go a little lightly. Stir it up so everything's got a little flour and cornmeal sticking to it.

Heat the oil on medium high. When it shimmers, or when it pops when you drop one drop of water in it, dump the contents of the bowl into the oil.

Shake the pan so that you have one layer. Press down lightly with a spatula.

Let this sit until it starts smelling like popcorn and gets lightly browned on the edges.

Then, with a spatula, flip it in pieces. I do this in thirds: right side flip over, left side flip over, middle flip over. It's okay if you only flip parts or some of it doesn't quite make it all the way over. It'll be fine.

Shake the pan to distribute in a single layer. Wait some more and repeat until the whole mess is golden brown and crispy. The potatoes take the longest to cook, so if a fork goes through one easily and everything looks golden, you're done.

Lift and drain on a plate or in a bowl lined with paper towels.

Eat.

Think of summer. Which I wish it were, right dang now.

There you go.