Good bread is no accident! While most bread recipes are simple and most bread ingredients are readily available in any grocery store, the fine art of baking great bread takes practice and mindfulness. No written directions can replace the knowledge of a good baker in determining when bread dough is ready. Watching Barbara work her magic in our kitchen is like watching an alchemist turning lead to gold.

As a kid in rural Minnesota, I often stayed at my Grandmother’s house. Each morning I woke to the smell of fresh bread wafting out of her kitchen. Those smells and my pleasure now are found in our kitchen.  I still react like I was 10 years old and can’t wait to eat that first warm slice with butter melting and honey oozing off the edges of the crust.

When Barbara and I were making the transition from a teaching career to homesteading, we began baking our own bread for healthy eating and low cost. We used a bread machine while we were teaching because of time constraints and now use a dough hook on a stand mixer prior to hand kneading. The results are incredible bread at a low cost either way.

While there are countless bread recipes, our default is simple, wholesome bread made from organic whole wheat that requires no exotic ingredients and is easy, especially if you are just learning the art of baking bread.

Basic Whole Wheat Bread Recipe 

Ingredients: 2 teaspoons granulated yeast 
1/2 cup warm water 
6 cups whole wheat flour, if possible stone-ground 
2 1/2 teaspoons table salt 
2 cups warm water 
2 tablespoons canola oil 
2 tablespoons honey 

Procedure: 

1.       Dissolve the yeast in the 1/2 cup warm water in a small bowl; set aside until foamy, about five minutes. 

2.       Meanwhile, measure the flour and salt into a large bowl and mix. 

3.       Measure the 2 cups warm water and add the oil and honey; stir to dissolve honey. 

4.       Make a well in the middle of the flour; pour in the water/oil/honey mixture and the dissolved yeast. Mix well, either with a machine equipped with a dough hook or by hand with a large spoon. 

5.       Knead, either by machine or hand (turn out onto a floured board), until the dough is smooth, pliable and stretchy, about five minutes by machine or up to 20 minutes by hand. 

          
 6.       Form the dough into a smooth ball, return it to the bowl, cover loosely with plastic or a damp towel, and let rise until doubled in volume. This will take from 45 to 90 minutes depending on the temperature of the room. 

        
7.       Deflate the dough, form once again into a smooth ball, and let rise a second time in the bowl until doubled; this second rise will take 30 to 50 minutes. 

          
8.       Divide the dough in half, form into loaves, and place in two greased  4”x8”  loaf pans, and let rise until the dough arches up over the tops of the pans. Meanwhile, heat the oven to 425 degrees. 

9.       Place the loaves into the hot oven. After ten minutes, reduce the temperature to 325 degrees and bake for another 45 minutes, until the loaves are an even golden brown color. 

          
10.   Turn out the loaves onto a rack for cooling. Brush the top crusts with melted butter if you wish while the loaves are still hot. 

Note: This recipe was adapted from The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book, by Laurel Robertson, with Carol Flinders and Bronwen Godfrey. Consult this complete guide for detailed instructions on the art of bread making. For more information on Laurel’s Kitchen food books, see our book reviews at www.grow-cook-eat-beans.com. 

At a time when ONE loaf of bread of comparable quality costs $4.00 or more in most markets, these TWO loaves of bread found their way to our kitchen table for just a bit over two dollars, a little time, and some skill in baking. Great, healthy food that is easy on the budget.

If you are still working full time, you can get excellent bread with a bread machine with about five minutes of prep time. If you are like  Barbara, who thrives on cooking “hands-on”, you can use a stand-up mixer or a big bowl and stirring spoon for the first mix and knead by hand. Whichever method you choose, I wish you joy in baking and eating your own fresh bread.

Happy Baking!!! 

Here at the Bear Cave, we like our food spicy. During the summer and early fall, we love to overdo on fresh peppers in spicy salsa, pimento and cheese sandwiches, stuffed bell peppers and many other pepper dishes. Once in a while, when the poblanos are big enough, Barbara treats us to a great dish of chili relleno, peppers stuffed with a great cheese, breaded, and fried in hot neutral oil. I can’t resist them and have to say it’s a good thing she makes them on special occasions only.

By the way, anchos and poblanos are the same pepper.  Down here in the southwest, we refer to the Capsicum annuum as a poblano when it’s fresh and an ancho when its dried.

We've grown four kinds of peppers this year at the Bear Cave: bells, jalapenos, anchos/poblanos, and pimentos. We find that the sweet, heavy bells and pimentos are delicious if we allow them to ripen, then roast and pickle them. Many cooks recommend roasting peppers under the broiler or over the direct flame of a gas range in the kitchen, but around here it's still WAY too hot for that. We prefer to keep the heat outside by using the gas barbecue. The peppers acquire a rich, smoky flavor and the kitchen stays cool.

So it's pepper harvest and time to crank up the barbecue and roast those babies! Some peppers, especially pimentos and red bells, are perfect candidates for this treatment. They are thick-walled and sturdy, which makes them easy to peel once they're roasted. Besides being much easier to peel prior to pickling when roasted, we enjoy the flavor of a smoky pepper.

The process is simple. Turn all the bbq's burners on high (Our unit has three, and we roast up to a dozen peppers at a time.) and place the whole peppers over the hottest part of the grill. Protect your hands from the heat with oven mitts or heavy gloves, and use long bbq tongs to turn the peppers from time to time as they char. You want to end up with the peppers black all over, the skin completely charred.

Once the peppers are well blackened, they are put in a sealed container. We use an oven-proof casserole dish with a lid and place the peppers directly in the sealed container to steam after roasting. Peeling is a breeze. We then pickle the roasted peppers in the same way we pickle fresh jalapenos which we describe below.

Jalapeno peppers are easy to preserve. Just rinse, halve, and remove the stems and seeds. Wear gloves to protect your hands from the hot pepper juice, which can sting skin.

Note: Do not handle these peppers with your bare hands and then rub your eyes or any other sensitive part of your body. Some serious discomfort will be the consequence. But with some care, the very chemical, capsaicin, that can sting will make a great eating experience.

Barbara is very good about removing the seeds and inner tissue from the peppers. They are milder and still very flavorful with the seeds removed. I admit that when making salsa or pico de gallo, I leave the seeds in the mix. I enjoy the contrast between muchopicante jalapenos and the garlicky frijoles that I make up in a cast iron skillet and then roll in a tortilla with my HOT jalapeno salsa.

Note: If you are experimenting with these fresh peppers and feel like your mouth is on fire, have some milk handy. It is the best fire extinguisher I know for a picante capsaicin overload.

Because we preserve smaller batches of peppers, we don’t use our big canning kettle. Any covered kettle will serve for canning as long as you place an insert of some kind in the bottom to prevent the jar bottoms from contacting the bottom of the kettle. We use the insert from our pressure cooker.
 

Pack the pepper halves into clean pint-size canning jars which have been heated in boiling water. Then cover them with a mixture of 2 cups distilled vinegar, 1 cup water, and 1 teaspoon salt, heated to boiling. Leave 1/4 inch between the top of the liquid and the rim of the jar, apply the lids, and process in a boiling water bath for 20 minutes. More detailed information is on our web site, www.grow-cook-eat-beans.com. Check the drying and pickling pages.

The pickling process is nearly the same for pimentos or other roasted peppers. Roast them according to the process we've described above, remove the stems and seeds, peel and pack them into clean, heated pint jars, fill with the pickling mixture to within 1/4 inch of the rim of the jar, and process for 15 minutes.

Pickled jalapenos can add zip to spaghetti sauce, chili, or salsa. Pickled roasted peppers are marvelous on sandwiches or in dips. We hope you enjoy these ways of preserving the bounty of your summer garden!

Barbara and I chose to homestead on a piece of ground not easy to garden. We live on a bajada, a rocky alluvialfan. Rocks have been washed down from the nearby mountains for centuries, lying in wait just below the silty surface to defy digging a garden. Besides being rocky, our land is covered with scrub mesquite, rabbit brush, and cat claw. Once a rolling and grassy savannah, the cattle boom of the late 1800s brought a level of overgrazing that altered the face of the valley forever.

Despite rocks, scrub trees, and brush, we knew that we were going to have a garden. We also knew that my back was not up to digging up the root systems of the many mesquite trees on our chosen garden site. With mesquites, there is a great deal more “tree” underground than above, or at least it seems so when digging them out.  So out came the baby backhoe aka Dave’s Tonka Toy. On one of the days of early garden prep, my son, Brent, and grandson, Lydon, were visiting. Nothing makes a boy smile (or a grandpa) like the first time on a machine.

After all the large rocks and trees were removed with the Tonka Toy, I hauled over about 20 loads of old horse manure from our neighbors pile and spread it on the garden site with the front loader. Two days worth of work with a front-tine garden tiller turned in the first application of fertilizer. Then we staked out and installed our fence, the first line of defense against jackrabbits, deer, and javelin.

In the desert, water is key to any attempt at gardening. As we wanted to control our water use, we ran a system of drip irrigation and installed valves at the head of each bed. This method saves water and gives us a lot of control over the amount of water to our garden beds.

After the irrigation lines were in, we put in raised beds of landscape timbers. Our garden naturally slopes and the raised beds enabled us to have a level bed to control water distribution. We built the beds 36” across inside dimension to make it easy to reach the middle of the bed from the aisles.

Before the planting began, we dug each bed one more time with a round-nose shovel and screened the soil through a framed screen of 1/4" mesh hardware cloth into a wheelbarrow. The rockless soil was then replaced in the bed. A heavy layer of manure, screened in the same way, was then added to the bed. We put four wheelbarrows of screened manure in a 15’ bed. Then out came the rototiller for a final turn and mix of manure and soil.

The emerging plants look pretty delicious to our crop of quail and other birds, so we built tents of hardware cloth and boxes covered in poultry netting to keep the birds from our new plants.

Over the past couple years, we have experimented with different methods of supporting tomatoes in an area of serious wind and intense sun. A simple rail fence is our newest method and one that we’ll keep. It is easy to install and provides easy access to our great tomato crop. Last year we ate fresh tomatoes until December and then switched to the bags of frozen tomatoes in the freezer.

One of life’s real pleasures is watching Barbara in the garden as she works her magic with the plants. Most of our meals consist of a very high percentage of produce from our garden and orchard. Inexpensive, healthy, and incredibly tasty eating has become a consistent part of our lives.

To look out over our garden during harvest time and then to look beyond the garden to the brushy and rocky desert offers a contrast that is hard to believe. Over the past few years, we have continued to enrich our beds with compost and each season brings more exuberant crops. With love and hard work, a lush garden in the middle of the desert can be a reality. For more information on desert gardening, I invite you to visit our site at www.grow-cook-eat-beans.com.