Memories from Colorado
Last night I woke up to the wonderful smell of baking bread in our house. Earlier this week, because of the Texas 2021 Winter Arctic Outbreak, all the stores and businesses in our area had closed down, and we had run out of bread. So I started a loaf in our bread machine before I went to bed last night, and when I awoke in the middle of the night, the aroma wafting into our bedroom brought back memories of my teenage years.
Bread after church
When I was a kid between the ages of 10 and 16, every Sunday we used to drive from the farm to attend to Sunday School and Church at the Congregational Church in Flagler, Colorado. On our way home, we would stop at the home of an elderly lady, Mrs. Reid, and pick up some wonderful fresh bread that she had baked for us that very morning. (My mom would always call in an order a couple of days earlier.)
On these excursions, our family of six would be packed into our green Chrysler Newport sedan. Daddy would be driving, with Mommy in the front seat beside him. I would usually be sitting behind Daddy, since he was the tallest parent and I was the tallest kid, so it was easiest for me to see past him. Kenny sat behind Mommy, and our little brothers, Rod and Bruce, always giggling and goofing off, sat between us. (This was in the pre-seatbelt days. Child restraining seats had certainly not been even considered yet.)
When the morning church services and the Sunday School classes were over, and all of the adults had finally finished their conversations, our family would pack itself into the car again and drive a few blocks to pick up our weekly order of bread from Mrs. Reid, the baker lady. When we neared her house, a wonderful scent filled the air. It was heavenly. Occasionally, there would be someone waiting ahead of us, and we would be almost tortured by the delicious scents and the anticipation of eating the lovely warm bread (or maybe some cinnamon rolls, if we were lucky).
Kenny and I usually went in together to get the bread. It would take two of us to pay Mrs. Reid and to carry the fresh bread back to the car. On special occasions, my mom might order cinnamon rolls, or maybe some other treat, but I remember that our favorite was always the wonderful sticky, sweet block of cinnamon rolls. And sometimes we would get a bottle of Mrs. Reid’s homemade strawberry or apricot preserves to spread on our bread. That was almost as special as the cinnamon rolls.
As soon as the car pulled away from the baker lady’s house, everyone would be snacking on the warm goodness. If there were cinnamon rolls, they would all be gone by the time we got home, half an hour later. Oh, they were so good, and we boys were so sticky by the time we got home. It was hard to keep our “Sunday Best” clothes clean.
Stop at bakery
On other occasions, in the years before the Flagler Dam was completed, when my parents used to go to the nearby town of Limon, Colorado, to shop, Kenny and I would go swimming in the Limon Municipal Swimming Pool. Usually our parents would be waiting for us at the pool when we had finished, but on rare occasions, they were not. So Kenny and I would have to go find them. About two blocks from the pool, along the path to downtown Limon, was a nice little bakery shop. We always stopped there, to get what was locally called a “cow chip” for each of us. The “cow chip” was an enormous and delicious apple fritter, covered with white frosting. Boy, it tasted good after several hours of swimming, racing, diving, watching girls, and soaking up too much sun at the Limon Municipal Swimming Pool.
This Past Year in Texas
Here in Texas, eating in restaurants became just about impossible a year ago, because of the COVID-19 crisis. Our favorite nearby restaurant and bakery, called Easy Tiger, started to offer a delivery/curbside service. We could order food delivered to our house, or delivered to our car (parked in a numbered space outside the restaurant). Since it is our favorite restaurant, we have often ordered food from them as this crisis has continued. Last spring, I noticed an interesting item on their menu: a package of sourdough starter with instructions on using it. I ordered it because I had been interested in sourdough since an office mate of mine, Mike Orr (whom I knew at Overwatch Systems) had started growing it several years before I retired. He would proudly show me pictures of the sourdough starter in bottles and would bring me samples of the bread that he made.
When I became the owner of some Easy Tiger sourdough starter, I had to figure out how to use it. Actually, it seemed that I was not the only one with this idea. There were lots of recipes, some recent and some traditional, on the Internet and a bunch of videos on YouTube about making all sorts of things with sourdough. And of course there was also a lot of paraphernalia that I needed, such as bottles for growing the starter and a dutch oven for baking it. The Internet was great for getting everything I needed when I was quarantining at home. Soon we were eating about two loaves of bread a week of my very own sourdough bread.
One of the good things about making sourdough bread is that it takes me about three days to make a loaf, so it gives me something to do with my time. Day one is activating the starter, which means feeding it a lot before I go to bed so that it can grow overnight. This requires about 15 minutes of work from me. Day two is mixing all the ingredients together and working them into a dough that will make a good bread. This requires a couple of hours, spread through the day. Day three requires a little more time, getting the dough just right, and then popping it into the oven. This work is spread over several hours, with large intervals of reading or watching T.V., so it is a perfect job for me.
At the time of the historic Texas 2021 Winter Arctic Outbreak power outage in our neighborhood, which started on February 15, 2021, I had been at the very first step, creating an active starter, when the power went off. In the no-electricity darkness, I had put my starter into the refrigerator. The conditions did not seem favorable for making bread. It was dark and cold without electricity, and for awhile there was no water.
When the water came back, it needed to be boiled before it was safe to use. So that starter had remained in the refrigerator for five days. Today I decided that I needed to rescue it and try to bring it bring back to life, so things could get back to a little more normal.
I make bread using a bread machine
But for now the bread machine is doing the job of making standard bread, and I can wake up in the middle of the night to smell the lovely aroma of the bread baking.
Having freshly made bread and baked goods in the house has always been a joy to me. In my early days, when I was helping to raise wheat on the farm on the high plains of eastern Colorado, I was working to put bread on the table for many others across the world. Now I am just tending to a crop of of microbes in the sourdough starter in my kitchen in central Texas, but I am still working to put bread on the table, for myself and my wife.
