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.

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.

Bread Made with Bananas (maybe $5, about an hour and forty-five minutes including baking)

When your bananas look like this, it's time either for the Banana Angel to descend, wrap your bananas in a cloud of glory, sing hosannas, and lift them miraculously into banana heaven where they hang, forever green, under the dancing, fat green leaves of their mama tree (which is actually apparently a grass, but well, what does it matter in the banana afterlife?), dreaming of uncorrupted sweetness and sucking eternally at the nectar of banana-mama's sap.

Or it's time they were mashed with a fork and scraped into a batter, poured into a loaf pan, baked at hellish temperatures and incorporated into your mortal cell structure with the accompaniment of much butter.

I wonder if the latter bananas are bad bananas. Is banana bread a kind of fruit hell? Or could we think of it as a kind of limited immortality, a sort of banana limbo, given they get to walk around as you for a while?

Maybe eating banana bread is sort of like allowing banana possession?

This, by the way, is why I'm not in seminary.

Well, it's among SEVERAL reasons I'm not in seminary.

Okay, so when your bananas look like this, and you've consigned them to the hell/limbo that is Banana Bread (after having waited, in vain, for the angels), this is how you do that.

I'm pretty sure this recipe is my maternal grandmother's. I'm absolutely sure this is my mother's recipe. I mean I sort of stole it from her, so yeah, I can be absolutely sure. Probably one or the other of them got it from a magazine.

What you need

• 3 VERY ripe bananas, mashed (should yield about 1 c)
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1/3 c butter, melted and cooled
• 2 eggs
• 3 TBSP sour milk (milk plus a splash of vinegar)
• 2 c white flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup chopped nuts

Grease and flour a loaf pan.

In a separate bowl, combine flour, soda, powder and salt.

In a large bowl, mix sugar, butter, eggs by hand until combined. Stir in milk and bananas until combined. Add flour mixture and combine. Add nuts and combine.

See? EASY.

Pour the whole lot quickly into the loaf pan, and let sit for twenty minutes. Preheat the oven to 350 and bake for about 60 minutes. The loaf is done when a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean. Remove from pan when it's cool enough to handle.

You eat this in slices, slathered with butter.

You'll hear angels singing (not like this, or these guys), I promise.

There you go.

Cream Puffs are Not for Every Day (maybe $3, about 45 minutes)

The danger here is that you will eat them all.

I know, having womanfully tried to resist. Then halved the recipe, having failed. Then quartered it, having failed again.

Now I just make these for VERY special occasions, and say: oh, what the hell. Better to die relatively quickly of a heart attack with the taste of cream puffs on my tongue than cream-puff-less, shriveled, incontinent, and telling lewd stories from what I can remember of my past to no one, lying in some vomit-colored vinyl recliner in a nursing home where no one really cares about me because I've outlived all my lovers who died, sated on my cream puffs, of heart attacks. Like we all should.

The recipe, like all good recipes, calls for real butter and actual eggs. Don't substitute. Live instead.

I tend to fill these with flavored custard, but traditionally they're filled with whipped cream. Great gobs of REAL whipped cream. Not Cool-Whip, not that shit that comes in a can and if you suck it right, can make you high. What is that? Jet-whip? [No, it's Reddi-wip. GAH. Their website burned my retina! And what is that SOUND??] I think it's made of recycled plastic. Anyway, buy heavy cream, add a little sugar, whip it with an electric mixer until it's stiff. When you bite these, you should have whipped cream all over your face.

Which is, incidentally, why Chuck eats his with a fork.

Another note: fill these only minutes before serving. Don't fill beforehand. They get soggy fast.

What you need:

1 c water

1 stick of UNSALTED butter

1/2 tsp salt

1 c white flour

4 eggs

In a saucepan, melt butter with water, and bring to a boil.

Remove from heat and add salt and flour, stirring quickly. This will thicken immediately into a weird, doughy paste.

That's exactly right. Return to heat and, stirring constantly, cook for one minute. If you don't, your CPs won't taste right.

Cool completely to room temperature (so you don't cook the eggs when you add them).

Using an electric mixer, or upper arm strength equivalent to four hefty dudes who work construction (trust me on this one), beat each of the eggs into the dough, one at a time. They should be completely incorporated, and the dough should be consistently shiny.

Spoon into about a dozen mounds onto a greased cookie sheet. [Note: these EXPAND, so use two sheets if you have to.] I use two spoons to drop these, like doing cookie dough, then slop them into piles. The dough should be sort of worrisomely slick and loose. It's okay. Keep going.

Bake at 450 degrees for 15 minutes. Turn heat down to 350 degrees and prop the oven slightly open for a few seconds to help it cool. Close the oven and bake at 350 for another 20-25 minutes, until the puffs are golden all over.

Cool completely and halve, giving yourself a top and bottom (not a right and left). Remove any soft bits inside. Eat these greedily, since they are extremely tasty; or, be holier than thou and give them to the dog, who will love you forever after, more ardently than before.

Fill with custard, whipped cream, icing, whatever; put the top back on and shake some confectioner's sugar over the top, if you like overkill. Try not to eat all of them. Let me know how that works.

There you go.

Chicken, Peas, White Sauce (under $10; about 15 minutes)

This is not really Chicken ala King. I've looked it up. That dish is way harder. This you can do in your sleep almost. So if you want ACTUAL Chicken ala King, sorry.

I made a big pot of this stuff for a grieving friend recently, called it "chicken in white sauce with peas and biscuits." She said, "Oh, you mean Chicken ala King." I nodded. Um, okay. If you say so.

That may be the first time I heard anyone call it that. I never called it anything, just fixed it, served it, and let it talk for itself. So yeah. Chicken ala King. Whatev.

I don't know where I first ate it or how to cook it. It must have come in a dream. Like this dream where I make a basic white sauce, add some cooked chicken and peas, and drape it over some biscuits. That dream.

Here's what you need:

4 TBSP oil or melted butter

4 TBSP flour

milk

about a pound of cooked chicken, diced into bite-sized pieces (I shred mine)

some frozen peas, maybe a cup

biscuits

thyme, a couple of bay leaves, and a little nutmeg. Or you could use a little sage, I guess. I tend to like thyme.

Pour out about six cups of milk so that it's ready when you need it.

In a large stockpot, heat oil with flour over medium for 2 minutes (this is called making a roux).

Add milk all at once. I use a whisk at this stage to get the roux to break up smoothly in the milk. Otherwise I tend to get sauce with mini-dumplings.

Whisk smooth. Add the bay leaves when you start cooking the milk so they have time to flavor the sauce. Cook over medium to medium-high heat, stirring with a regular spoon very often (otherwise you'll burn the milk and have to start over) until it bubbles and thickens.

NOTE: if it doesn't thicken after it starts boiling, take another TBSP of flour in a container you can close and shake. Add 1/2 c water and about 1/4 c of the hot liquid to the flour. Shake until smooth, add to the boiling milk. Bring to a boil again and wait five minutes at boiling. If that doesn't work, do it again. Usually, however, one time works fine.

Once it's thickened, you can add flour to make it thicker using the method above, or add a little more milk to thin it out if you like your sauce thinner.

Add about a TBSP of thyme, and sprinkle some nutmeg over the top and stir in. I tend to just lightly sprinkle the surface with nutmeg. You should taste now, and add salt and pepper if necessary. If you like yours weaponized, now is the time to add jalapeno mash.

Add peas and chicken. Stir and warm them.

Serve over halved biscuits. There's a biscuit recipe on this site -- I think in December 2009 somewhere. Should be easy to find.

There you go.

Cornbread (about $2; 40 minutes)

I was reading something the other day -- don't ask me what -- and someone was complaining that she couldn't make cornbread because there wasn't any buttermilk. That got me to wondering what the heck she was talking about. I guess you could use buttermilk. I'd never used it. But I guess you could.

And anyway, the chemistry of using buttermilk in baking is easy enough that you can substitute spoiled milk (or sweet milk curded with a little vinegar) for buttermilk, in a pinch.

People get their panties in a wad for the weirdest of reasons.

Witness: the sugar issue (this person's actually pretty mild in her disapprobation; she only kicks you off the website). Apparently -- I'm really outside this debate (here's another random sampling), too, so can't be trusted to represent it at all well -- if you add sugar to your cornbread you are [insert nasty regional epithet here]. "True" cornbread, the food of [benevolent regional description]ers, is sugar-free.

I don't know. You could take out the sugar I guess, just add a little less milk, and see how it does. All depends on whether or not you want to be a [nasty region]ist, or if (heresy, I suppose) the matter of sugar really does mark you as a [nasty region]ist.

Alright: here's the recipe. I make this in a cast iron skillet, and make 1 and a half of this recipe to fill it. As written below, this will fill a loaf pan.

You'll need:

1 c self-rising cornmeal (buy local!)

1/2 c white flour

1/4 c white sugar

1 egg (what I want for my birthday)

milk

corn or a very small can of creamed corn (6 oz?)

Oven at 350.

Grease the skillet or loaf pan generously.

In a bowl, mix meals and sugar. If you're using corn niblets, add them to the meal/flour mixture. I put about a handful in mine -- so maybe 1/4 c?

In a large measuring cup, beat the egg with creamed corn if you're not using niblets. Don't do both or you won't have bread so much as corn pudding. Which is delicious, but won't really sop much.

Add enough milk to the measuring cup to make about a cup and a half of liquid. Keep the milk out since you may need a little more wet.

Mix the wet materials into the dry materials all at once. Add enough milk that the consistency of the batter is like very loose pancake batter. You should be able to pour it. Mix just until everything's incorporated, then immediately pour into your greased pan.

Bake about 30 minutes. Eat hot with lots of butter. Sop up soup if you want.

NOTE: I use this for stuffing at the holidays, only I make it hot and spiced. I double the recipe, add garlic, red pepper flakes, oregano, sage, basil and thyme. Cook in a large skillet. Leave out overnight, then crumble with regular bread for your stuffing. It's my secret. Shhhhh.

There you go.

Biscuits. Just Biscuits.

I grew up on Bisquick biscuits. In hindsight, I think there should be a law against them. I graduated to Grands (canned biscuits by Pillsbury) I think sometime in the 90s. My brother still uses them. Grands leave nasty grease marks on the cookie sheet and dissolve in your mouth. You could eat 63 of them and not feel full, which is probably the point, right? And they're comparatively expensive.

Making your own biscuits isn't hard. Just remember: people who couldn't read or write or add and subtract -- who could hardly talk credibly -- got up and made biscuits without fancy stoves or Danish butter every morning of their lives. Really. And, in parts of the country where it's still 1957, or 1937 even -- like where I live -- they still do.

So here we go.

All you need is:

2 cups flour (I use King Arthur unbleached white bread flour )

1TBSP baking powder

1 tsp salt

6 TBSP softened butter, Crisco, or any solid fat EXCEPT spreadable margarines

1 cup, more or less, buttermilk, spoiled milk, plain milk (milk of any sort)

Utensils: Oven, big bowl, measuring cups and spoons, knife, hands.

Measure out the milk into a measuring cup. Set aside. Pour about 1/4 cup flour on the surface you'll use to knead and cut out the biscuits.

In the big bowl, mix flour, salt, and baking powder. Do yourself a favor and ONLY use Rumford or other non-aluminum-based powders. There may possibly be a link between the ingestion of aluminum and Alzheimer's, and many baking powders are aluminum-based.

With your hands, rub the fat into the dry materials. Don't overdo this. When you look at the flour, you should still be able to see some pieces: not chunks, but pieces. In the picture, here, you can see what that should look like.

Add the milk all at once and mix with your hands until all the flour is incorporated and the dough forms a ball. If the dough sticks to your hands, dust with a little flour until the dough forms up. If the dough is dry and won't pick up all the flour in the bowl, splash in a little extra milk. Just a little at a time.

On the floured surface, knead (only the kneading part of this video) the dough just two or three times. To knead, press the dough with the heels of your hands, rotate 90 degrees, fold top down over, do it again, rotate, fold, etc.

Pat the dough out into an even, flat disk or amoeba shape. Doesn't matter if the edges are regular since you're cutting those off anyway. The thickness of the dough is up to you; the thicker the dough, the fewer -- but the taller -- the biscuits. Biscuits should about double in thickness when they're cooked.

You can wash your hands now.

Lightly grease (spray-grease or pass over it with a little butter or Crisco) a cookie sheet or pizza stone. I use the latter because I have a Neanderthal oven and using the stone means the bottoms of the biscuits don't burn. It also evens out the temp in the oven. But a cookie sheet is just fine.

Square off your dough by removing the edge strips with a knife and cut in even-ish squares. Place the biscuits on the cookie sheet.

Collect the edges into a ball, pat out, square off, cut up, and repeat until you don't have enough of the edges to make a biscuit. Roll this into a ball and place on the cookie sheet.

Now, pre-heat the oven to 425. Don't do it before now, since this allows the biscuits to rest and rise a little before being cooked. Anyway, that's what I imagine is happening in their tender little bodies.

When the oven's heated, bake the biscuits. Set the timer for 11 minutes, and then keep checking. The biscuits are done when the tops are golden brown -- you know the color a biscuit should be: that color.

Sometimes I dust the top of the cooked biscuits with salt. Other people rub the tops with butter. Whatever works. Serve with more butter and jam. This is my own peach jam, which tastes awesome because this year's peaches tasted better than any year I can remember.

There you go.