The Showdown (Bread Recipes)

Once upon a time, there was a small town in Texas. In that small town was a small part of a big Church. This Church asked it's members to love one another and share with one another. This Church also asked its members to store large amounts of wheat, so much wheat, in fact, that the women of the Church decided that they would shun the white flour sold on the shelves of the small town, and use that wheat to grind into flour and make their own bread. From scratch. Like real pioneer Church-lady-type-people. And each of the women made their bread and the people...they were HAPPY.

Then one day, the men decided that they too, could make the bread. One good brother said to another good brother, "Have no fear, Brother, I will show you how to make the bread". And the wives snickered. (No...not really...but it makes for a good story) Each wife, being a good pioneer Church-lady-type-person, armed her husband with her best bread recipe as she kissed him on the cheek and sent him off to war the happy event.

SO the men met and they made the bread. Such grinding of wheat and kneading of dough had not been seen before in the small town, and the Church folk anxiously awaited the outcome. When the loaves emerged, they were golden, aromatic works of art, each moist and delicious, yet different from each other. One brother's bread was simple, rustic, and required few ingredients. The other brother's bread was a symphony of grains and adaptability. As men-folk are wont to do, the two men merrily clapped one another on the back and went out into the garage to discuss how to build a faster Pine-wood Derby car. But the women stayed behind. They poked the bread, they smelled the bread and they politely tasted the bread. Each of the women secretly decided that her husband had indeed baked the better loaf of bread.

From that day forward, the families of the two women baked the bread for the people in the Church. Whenever there was a new member, a sickness, a baby born or a cheering up needed, they would run to their kitchens, and bake their special bread. Then, while the pans were yet warm, they would wrap the loaves up and throw them into their mini-vans (OK, it was a gigantic blue 15 passenger van and a Suburban...it was the 90's...), burn rubber out of their driveways and race to the home of the person in need. When the people tasted the bread, they always asked for the recipe, because they had never tasted such remarkable bread.

To this day, each Sister will declare the wonderful qualities of the other's bread, but she'll ALSO tell you why she loves her own bread better. Through the years, many people have been the recipient of a loaf from each sister, (these sisters really know the meaning of service!) and all agree: Both of the recipe's are wonderful. And no one will admit to using one recipe over the other. So...without any further ado, I give you the two recipe's, made famous by the showdown. (Unfortunately, my own notes are included...since I've long since forgotten where the recipe ends and my notes begin)

***In the interest of full disclosure, I took extreme creative liberty with the story. Sandy's exact words were "I would probably drop over dead if Robert ever made bread, but who knows, maybe if I have 7 more kids..." And if I'm not mistaken, the Payne's bread is a family recipe. Anyhow, it made a good story and no matter what, they both make a dadgum good loaf of bread!***

Payne's Brown Bread

5 1/2 cups hot tap water
1 cup of sugar plus 1/2 cup oil OR
1 cup honey
1 1/2 Tbsp salt
3 Tbsp rapid rise yeast, (she says not to use regular Fleishmans, but I do. I'm sorry Kris)
1 Egg (optional Glen says it makes it brown better)
Approx 5 lbs flour. Half wheat half white or any combination you like.


Combine water, sugar or honey and a bit of flour. Then add yeast and enough flour to make a batter, then mix for 3 min in mixer. Switch to dough hook and begin combining rest of flour, then knead for 8-10 min. Add salt during last few min of kneading. Turn into bowl and let rise in a warm place for about an hour. Punch down, shape into loaves, let rise again for about 40 min. Cook at 325 for 30 min. or until loaf makes a hollow thump when tapped. You may also skip first rise and just shape into loaves, let rise and then cook. They keep the crust nice and soft by buttering while still hot and placing loaves in paper bags.



Sandy Johnson's Bread

6 cups hot water
2 Tbsp yeast
2 Tbsp salt
2 eggs
2/3 cup honey
2/3 cup oil
2/3 cup dry potato flakes
2/3 cup dry milk
1 cup cracked wheat
1 cup oatmeal
1 cup oat bran
8-10 cups flour, white and wheat in some combination.

I also add about 1/2 cup wheat gluten, a handful of flax seed meal, some dry malt and some wheat bran. This recipe is very flexible on what you add for grains. I have never used oat bran in it, I use 10 grain cereal though! The less wheat flour you use, the less the bread will rise. So you need to keep your non-wheat grains around three cups of the total amount of wheat to ensure a good rising bread. Follow basic method above to assemble ingredients. Sandy's cooking directions are to cook at 400 for 15 min and then 350 for 30 min.

Making Your Own Laundry Soap

I've developed a new obsession: soap. I have a few friends that come over on Tuesdays. We let the kids run wild and we make soap while we chat about life and love.

But I'm not going to cover that today.

Lets start easy on you and show you how to make your own laundry soap. This is an INCREDIBLE way to save some money. Here's what you need:



I spent: $3.39 for Borax, $2.49 for Super Washing Soda and $1.19 for Fels Naptha soap. More on that as we progress...

So the first thing I did was grate the soap and add it to 8 cups of water and heated it:



While that was heating I put 3 gallons of hot tap water into each of two five gallon buckets...so 6 gallons of water between two buckets. I did this because I doubled the recipe...I'm still not quite sure WHY I doubled the recipe, but I did...so lets just go with it. OK? OK.

To the three gallons of hot water, I added one cup of washing soda...and stirred it up to disolve it. Since I doubled, I did it twice. Here's what my buckets looked like. The one on the right has some suds because the residue from my last batch was still in there:



To the soap and water mixture on the stove, I added two cups of Borax and stirred. The mixture got slightly thick. Then, I poured off four cups of the Borax/Soap/Water mixture and added four cups to each five gallon bucket and stirred.



That is what it looked like when I finished. Now, because I love, love, love the smell of Tide White Lilac with Baking Soda, I poured about 4 cap fulls into each bucket so I could capture all that yummy smelly-ness in my home made laundry soap...but that step is completely optional. I'm sure this step probably more than doubles the cost of my laundry soap per load, but lets get back to that and see how much my nicely scented soap is really costing me per load:

I spent right around $7 for supplies. Of that, I only used 2 cups each of the Soda and the Borax. Now, just for arguments sake, lets say there is six cups in each the Soda and the Borax boxes, so each 2 cups costs me .57 for the Borax and .42 for the Soda. The Fels Naptha costs $1.19 and I used the whole bar for a double batch. So total, I spent $2.18 to make just over 8 gallons of laundry soap. That translates to approximatly 128 cups of laundry soap. If you divide the $2.18 out over 128 cups, that translates to just under .02 per load...if you use a whole cup instead of the half cup you could probably get by with.

NOW. I spent $3.99 on my Tide using coupons and a sale, and just to make it easy, lets say I used the whole thing in there, ( I didn't) which makes the whole batch cost $6.17. Without adding any additional cups of volume created by adding the detergent, this would mean each load would cost .05. To contrast, the same $3.99 I spent on the Tide, if used alone, would wash 26 loads, which translates to about .15 per load! And remember, I used coupons! If I didn't use coupons and was just lucky enough to find it on sale, it would cost $4.99 which translates to approximately .19 per load!

The whole thing took me about 15 minutes and now I have enough soap to last until the second coming...or until we go camping...all for right around $6. Does it work? You bet. Even the nasty smelly laundry comes out fresh and clean and everything looks at least as good as it did using the commercial stuff at full strength. Give it a try! You'll feel so proud of yourself for being super duper thrifty!

Here's the original recipe:
1 cup Borax
1 Cup Super Washing Soda
1/2 bar Fels Naptha Laundry Bar or 1 bar Ivory soap

Grate soap and add to 4 cups of water you've heated on the stove. Add three gallons of hot tap water to a five gallon bucket. Dissolve 1 cup of Super Washing Soda in the 3 gallons hot tap water. After soap has melted in hot water on stove, add 1 cup Borax and stir to dissolve. Mixture will get thick. Pour thickened Borax/Soap mixture into the soda water and mix to combine. Add whatever fragrance you'd like...or don't. You are supposed to let the finished product sit for 24 hours after mixing...it will thicken some and be more gel like in appearance. I pour mine into my old detergent bottles for easy dispensing.

Homemade Cream of Wheat

Yeah, this little nugget was important enough for me to drag myself off my death bed to share with you.

I've been suffering some insidious sort of illness involving sweats and chills and headaches, body aches, and a sore throat, OH! The sore throat. My favorite all time sick food is Cream of Wheat, easy on the throat, nutritious, warm, goes down easy and heaven-forbid, back up easy if the need arises...all the good things comfort food should be.

So I trudged my way to the pantry this morning in search of some COW goodness since I was going to have to take my vitamins and not eating again was not going to be an option. To my horror, I discovered that my stash was *gone*. Cream of Wheat is not one of those foods that I stock up on regularly. I literally bought a box this past summer to replace the box I brought with us from WY...nearly 7 years ago. *Groan* Why didn't I buy two boxes? I asked myself. Oh yeah, because the stuff costs nearly $5 a box, that's why.

I briefly considered throwing some whole wheat flour in a bowl with some milk and just going for it, but a goopy flour gruel didn't sound like the comfort food I craved. So I turned to my super google skillz and discovered a post on some site, which I can't even remember through the haze of my cold meds, and the woman used hard red wheat and the coarse setting on the Nutra-mill grinder to make homemade Cream of Wheat. So I gave it a whirl. I am here to tell you it works like a charm and I am here to tell you we are in the WRONG business people!!! $5 a box is like HIGHWAY ROBBERY!!! You can make your own homemade Cream of Wheat cereal for pennies. Here's what you do:

Take a few cups of hard red wheat...couldn't tell you how much I used...remember...cold meds.
Dump in the Nutra-mill.
Crank mill setting to the far right...that would be counter clockwise if you too are in a haze and can't read the "coarse" setting.
Take out the grainy floury looking substance and store it.
To prepare the cereal:
Mix 2/3 cup milk, or water, or milk and water with 1/3 cup of the grainy floury stuff, and cook it. Stove top or microwave..your choice. The lady in the post claims she cooked hers for 20 minutes...I could never have cooked mine that long. I did a few minutes on the stove, until it boiled over, made a mess and sent a stench into the air. Then I started over and tried 1:30 in the microwave, gave it a stir and put it back in for a minute more and perfection. I like mine thick, with ice cold milk over the top and white (yes, I know) white sugar on the top.

So there you have it. Homemade Cream of Wheat cereal for just pennies, and so easy a cold medicated sick person can make it. Try it if your kids hate oatmeal!