623: Amish Friendship Bread

Don’t do it. It’s a trap.

Over the course of my life, I have gotten from several acquaintances a container of Amish Friendship Bread starter. For those of you who have not been so blessed, it is a sourdough (sweetened) fermented dough, used as a leavening agent in a future bread product – in this case, a loaf of Amish Friendship Bread. Whether this has anything to do with the Amish, I haven’t a clue, but it does impose on your friends, hence the Friendship part of the name. See, when you get this container of starter, you have to stir it daily, and feed it in about a week, and stir it daily for another week until it is ready to bake; at which point you feed it again, divide it into three new containers, leaving you with enough starter to bake one recipe loaf of the bread, and one starter for the next loaf (plus three), in another two weeks – after the stir and feed routine. You are supposed to give the three starter containers to three of your friends, who are then obligated to do the same, like a kitchen coffee klatch-style pyramid scheme. I can foresee the stuff taking over the world.

There is a Facebook post that I have seen several times, and it goes something like this: If you send me a messenger post that tells me to copy and paste, and repost to 10 of my friends (TEN!!!! Like, who has ten friends?): know this, dear post sharer: my inbox is where your messages come to die. I do not repost. I do not share.

I have learned similar lessons about the Amish Friendship Bread. I accept the container of starter, of course – who wants to be labeled a non-friend for refusing? I stir and feed it for the requisite two weeks, and when it is ready for dividing, sharing, and baking, I simply kill all of it by mixing up and baking four loaves of bread at once. Problem solved. No friends involved. I will take the finished loaves of bread to work to share with friends as it does make a tasty coffee cake and such is usually received with delighted gratitude and disappears with alacrity whenever anyone is moved to donate.

Just in case you are intrigued, poor hapless soul who has no IDEA what you are starting: here is the recipe.

To make the starter, in a glass or plastic jar (with a lid) or a gallon zipper plastic bag, mix one cup of milk (any fat level), one cup of sugar and one cup of plain flour. Do not refrigerate it. Stir it (mash the bag) daily for five days. You should see it begin to ferment (bubble) during this process. On day five, feed your starter with one cup each again of milk, sugar, and flour. Stir or mash well.

Day 6-10, stir/mash once daily. On day ten, you are ready to bake your one loaf and abuse/addict your friends. Feed the starter again (1 cup each milk, sugar and flour). By now, you may have to move up up a mixing bowl. Put three cups of the starter into three new containers (1 cup each), and give one container to three of your friends that you don’t care for overly much. They will each think of you repeatedly over the next two weeks, believe me.

You will also have a cup of starter for yourself, to return to your original, cleaned container to start your own feed and stir routine for the next two weeks, on your way to your next loaf (and next three friends, because the first three will delicately avoid you when they see you coming). That will leave you with one measure of starter with which to mix up your long-awaited loaf of Amish Friendship Bread.

To that last measure of starter, add the following:

1 cup oil (vegetable-based, your choice), 1 cup sugar, 3 large eggs, 1/2 cup of milk, 2 cups flour, 5 oz box of instant pudding (any flavor you like), 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 1 teaspoon vanilla flavoring, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Optional: chopped nuts, raisins, chocolate chips, applesauce, craisins, etc. It’s a pretty loose recipe. Mix well.

Grease two loaf pans, and dust them with a sugar/cinnamon mix. It should take a teaspoon of cinnamon to a 1/2 cup of sugar to dust both greased loaf pans. Fill each pan with half of your batter, and bake 45-60 minutes at 325 until done – test with a toothpick in the center. Let them stand 10 minutes in their cooling pans before you loosen and tip them out to completely cool.

Or, forego the three new containers of friendship starter, and mix up four loaves’ worth of bread batter and bake the whole shebang yourself, and spare your friends. It is a pretty tasty coffee loaf, it freezes well, and it’s difficult to screw up the recipe, pretty much regardless of the extra ingredients you add. So, maybe you will want to share the starter for the first few batches – but nobody lasts longer than three months, trust me. Eventually the whole thing will sour on you – and I don’t mean the sourdough starter, either.

If someone ever tries to give you a container of starter – you are now forewarned and forearmed. You are welcome.

454: Teacher Respect

I got into a Facebook discussion (fight) that started with someone’s insensitive comments about police officers being despicable, power-hungry racists (which a few of them are) and which MOST of them are emphatically not. My comment in support of police and the sacrifices they make trying to help ensure that the world is a better place caused a person to brag about her Master’s degree and her teaching job, all with execrable grammar.

This, people, is one of the reasons teachers are held in such low esteem. We are supposed to be educated, and we are supposed to write and speak (most of the time, anyway) as if we paid some attention in class. Particularly in English class, since that is the medium of instruction. You don’t want your child in class with a teacher who writes more poorly than your child, now, do you? When a self-proclaimed teacher can’t distinguish between homophones (to, too, and two),  and misuses articles (an crop), among other egregious errors, it embarrasses all teachers. And this person supposedly has a Master’s degree. Yeah, right. From which online college did you buy that worthless piece of paper, honey-child?

The more this person replied to my comments, the worse it got. Finally, as a teaching professional, I was just embarrassed on her behalf, and she seriously, honestly, never got a clue. Thank God I am fairly close to retirement, and do not have to school the new crop of educators, because honey-child, it isn’t pretty. I quote:

I never personal attacker her she is rude go back and read what she wrote as a teacher I am saddened by her … Like seriously .. I would be ashamed .. You can delete me if you like … But I refuse to be belittled by someone who does not even know me ..

The Grammar Nazi in me is freaking out (quietly) right now. Thank you, Jesus, that my children are graduated and no longer in school.

 

440: Put your neck right here….

…while I choke the ever-loving dog crap out of you.

I was working on my last surviving nerve, and you just stomped all over it.

BITE ME.

Take yourself back into your rotten office

and amuse yourself again today (during working hours) on Facebook

and save the rest of us the aggravation

of you actually attempting to accomplish anything of note or worth mention,

because all of us here would just as soon

that you entertain yourself mindlessly (again today) and

let the rest of us do our jobs unmolested,

you prime example of a POS.

There.

I feel better.

Back to work, after this much-needed, therapeutic catharsis.

388: FB

I have a Facebook account. I am not proud of that fact.

I joined up four years ago, when I sold all my belongings and left the USA to live and work abroad. It was the easiest way I could think of to share photos with family and friends in the USA. That’s how it all started.

If I could have managed to just post photos, everything might have been different. If. IF.

However. Once I began to actually read what people were writing, the snit hit the fan, and splattered everywhere. It’s a little like Ron White on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour: I had the right to remain silent, I just did not have the ability.

Facebook allows people to express their views, which is a good thing, except when I read them. Then it is not a good thing. I am a teacher by profession. Teachers teach, it is what we do. So, when someone makes an error, I teach. Dammit.

I don’t have TIME for Facebook!

 

 

367: Intelligence gone awry

I got into an exchange of words with a liberal on FB. Nothing particularly unusual about that. What is unusual about this time is that the person is actually fairly intelligent, and is still a raving liberal. This is a conundrum.

Matter of fact, many of the teachers I know (most of them, in fact), are liberals, and they together form a fairly large segment of the educated and fairly intelligent population, and yet, they are still liberals. How can this be? I suspect that being teachers pre-selects them for being caring, giving  individuals who are more concerned with making a difference and helping people than they are concerned about money. This is, I believe, a fatal flaw.

It is not a problem to want to help others. This is a good thing. Teachers are usually among the group of people who want to help others as a major driving force in their lives. Nobody goes into teaching for the  money, that is for darn sure. This is not a bad thing, per se, wanting to help others.

It is a problem, however, when you care more about helping others than you do about having the available money to help others…oh, wait!! I can solve this problem easily: help others with OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY. There you have it, the liberal manifesto.

It never seems to occur to these otherwise fairly intelligent people that you cannot help others (individuals OR countries) when you are BROKE. The USA is BROKE. We don’t have the money to bail out countries, police other countries, pay for our numerous and over-subscribed to social programs at home, or even to fund our own citizen’s paid-for-in-advance benefits like Social Security, and military veteran’s benefits. Economics of countries is, indeed, more complicated than personal individual finances, but countless examples of other nations spending themselves into financial ruin prove that the principles are not too far dissimilar. You can’t run up massive debt, and then try to pay it back with bogus money you print up, willy-nilly, in the basement reserve. Your debtors consider that cheating…somewhat. They tend to call you on it.

When they call you on it, you have massive inflation and economic disaster – and there are many examples of this process in history. Brazil in the 1980’s is one. There are others more recent.

Nobody said helping others is a bad thing in principle. I will say it is a bad thing when the program designed to help others is mismanaged, and creates generational poverty-stricken, dependent recipients, and massive fraud and cheating to obtain benefits by people who are otherwise perfectly able to work, and choose not to. Still, helping others is good – as long as there is money to do it. When you are broke, you can’t do it. And if you keep doing it anyway, printing up the readies to do it with, the snit is going to hit the fan, and all of us will not be smelling pretty.

How is it that is so very, very difficult to understand for what are otherwise at least moderately intelligent people? THAT’S the part *I* don’t understand.

330: Oh, My Holy God

This morning, I accessed my Facebook account before I went to my normal morning duty post, because I wanted to check on my husband, who is still in Morocco, tidying up details left over from our three-year life there. Because of the five-hour time difference, he has usually already posted a message for me by the time I arrive at work to start the day with whatever he needs me to do, or to update me on his progress (or lack thereof). So, when my Facebook page opens, there on my friend newsfeed, is this picture.

My friend is an animal lover, too, but she loves dogs and cats equally well – I am partial to kitties (I tolerate dogs compassionately, but I don’t love them). This picture absolutely wrung my heart out to dry. I burst into tears at this image, similar to my reaction when I see those awful, horrifying, gut-wrenching photographs of the piles of broken humans taken after the Holocaust death camps were liberated. I sobbed.

We as humans will have this to answer for, too, on that day when a holy God brings us one-by-one to the throne of judgement. I know I cannot save them all. I know that. I understand why animal shelters, staffed with people who care for and love animals as much as, or even more, than I do have to do what they have to do. There HAS to be a better way. And people, these broken, wonderful, beautiful, loving creatures are “”just”” cats.

I know that on this planet we live on, right now, this very day, somewhere, there is a pile of broken children and adults that looks just like this neat and tidy pile of euthanized kitty people. I call my babies “”fur children,”” and “”kitty people,”” because they ARE. Anyone who has shared their life with a dog, cat, bird, etc. KNOWS that there is a tiny, thinking, responding, loving entity inside that little furry or feathered body. WE are responsible for this Holocaust of life-snuffing that still is going on, across nations (and across species). Life is life, and all of it is infinitely precious. God help us.

246: Friends – or not.

I have a person I have known for years who was until just recently a friend on Facebook, too. This person I like rather a lot, and yes, I do know that this person is homosexual, or in today’s parlance, gay. That did not keep me from liking the person that he is. It also, however, did not mean that I agree with all of his viewpoints, especially on issues related to his chosen lifestyle – and yes, sex is a choice, in exactly the same way that no sex is a choice. We choose to have sex or not, and we choose who to conduct that particular act with. You are not born in a bed having sex with a person of the same gender, any more than I was born having sex with a person of the opposite gender. Those are learned behaviors.

Regardless. I thought quite a bit about this person, who is working very hard at being a Christian while conducting his chosen lifestyle. I believe this is something between him and God, not something between me and him. I have never taxed him with my own beliefs, and he had not, until recently, taxed me with his, while also making no effort to hide who he is.

However. Recently, he posted that he had deleted a friend who did not support gay marriage – an issue that is pretty hot right now in the US. I commented on the thread to him that just because someone does not agree with you on every issue does not mean that they do not value you as a person. You would have thought I had pissed on the rainbow flag in making this comment. Half a dozen of his associates flamed my comment in the most prejudiced, racist, anti-Christian (and he’s supposed to BE one??), bigoted, sexist and every other -ist way possible. I thought I had spoken the truth – that I don’t have to agree with you, lockstep, on every issue to still think you are a human being of worth. Apparently that is no longer true in this universe we are inhabiting. I was fairly well shocked at the virulence. And I promptly unfriended him.

If you cannot be truthful enough to admit that someone can still value you as a person and disagree with you on an issue, then there truly IS no basis for any sort of friendship – even a fake Facebook one.

88: Facebook

I was a VERY late comer to social networks. It’s just not my thing. However, when my husband and I sold our possessions and moved to Morocco to live and work, we needed an easy way to share pictures with friends from home. Facebook provided that solution. The problem is, Facebook also engendered another whole host of other problems.

First, Facebook can eat up enormous amounts of time that is desperately needed for other things. I work a part-time job online, and it has suffered somewhat from Facebook time. Plus, I am a teacher, so I routinely have papers to take home and score. Facebook is MUCH preferable to grading papers. Except that I NEED to be grading papers, I do not NEED to be surfing Facebook.

Secondly, it is amazing what some people will post. I never knew there were so many Obama-lovers out there, and a lot of them were people I USED to think were reasonably intelligent. At least, the majority of them I can pass off as urban city-dwellers, who obviously have no common sense due to the fact that they have no clue what real life is like, or they are just idjits. Still, what they post would piss off a saint, and a saint I am NOT. Then, there are those who post totally inappropriate things I’d just rather not read, ya know?

All in all, it has been positive, but then, in this imperfect world, I guess it was too much to hope that there would be no drawbacks.