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.

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).

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.