With today being our first day off since arriving on St. George, I wanted to carry on my winter’s traditional activity for my free time: baking! I couldn’t decide between honey whole wheat bread, my Grandma’s refrigerator rolls, bagels (first time experiment), or the bread recipe posted on the fridge. That didn’t even include the whole realm of dessert options in my mind, so I think it’s safe to say I have a baking problem.

Eventually decisive Steph chose to just jump in with honey whole wheat bread, but it didn’t take long for me to determine that our whole wheat flour and honey were in one of the few boxes that hadn’t arrived yet. Scratch idea #1.

Thinking I could easily freeze some rolls to go with soup later in the week, I pulled up my Grandma’s recipe and started pulling out the water, yeast, flour, sugar, butter, salt, and egg. I combined the hot water with the sugar, butter, and salt; then the warm water and the yeast. The ^1st mixture joined the 2nd mixture, and then the egg and 2.5 cups of flour joined the concoction. Except I had one problem: I only had ~2 1/3 cups of flour left in one bag, and the large bag of flour I’d seen in the boxes of extra food was actually a large bag of sugar. Our house was out of flour, and I’d put less than half of the required amount in the bowl.

You’d think that after realizing I didn’t have the ingredients for the first recipe, I would have thought to check on my available ingredients before committing to baking. With it being Sunday, the store wasn’t open. I ventured up to the house where my boss is staying to see if I could take any flour from there, but it was locked. My baking attempt seemed hosed.

Not wanting to waste the ingredients I’d already combined, I asked the others if they had any words of wisdom for how to save my baking venture. With rye flour, oatmeal, and cornmeal in the cabinet, I could try adding some combination and leaving the mixture to rise. I ended up adding just a half a cup each of rye flour and oatmeal as I slightly imitated my recipe for rieska, a tasty Finnish bread.

Into the raingear drying closet went the bowl of God-knows-what ratio of bread ingredients. As an aside, this closet is one of my favorite parts of St. George. Our raingear, hats, gloves, boots, backpacks, etc. get put in the closet at the end of wet days. Twisting a dial turns the heater in the bottom on, and voila! Everything dries in a rather timely period. Last year’s crew let us know it’s a great place to let dough rise, so I decided to test it out. To be honest, my expectations for my dough were very, very low.

As the afternoon rolled on, I let my thoughts drift away from the likely-to-be disappointing dough. Of course, that’s when the unexpected happened. “Did you hear the news?” Jason asked me. “Our packages made it on the cargo flight! Sharon (at the post office) will call to let us know when we can come pick them up.”

When you’re living in remote places and have virtually no chance to pick up certain items you forgot or didn’t know you’d want, hearing you have packages equates to Christmas. It doesn’t matter if you yourself packed the boxes just a couple weeks ago; picking up the packages and then delighting as you unpack to find what’s inside is always exciting.

Today the news was particularly great because that meant we wouldn’t have a completely baking-free 2 day weekend. Usually we work for roughly 6 days and then take just 1 day off – although many field jobs don’t necessarily even allot that – but the government says we shouldn’t work tomorrow. While the flour’s arrival might have been too late to save today’s rolls, tomorrow’s brunch and dessert can happen!

After picking up the packages and unpacking them to find what I’d been missing, I decided to peek at the dough. Surprisingly it had grown some. Seeing as I had nothing to lose, I gradually mixed roughly 2 cups of flour into the dough and then kneaded the product. It actually had the springiness of dough, so my hope for the project grew a little more. Back inside the closet went the ball of dough.

I checked on it periodically as I worked on the chana mesala dinner, and again I was happy to see the dough rising. After maybe 1.5 hours I decided to pull it out, punch the dough down, and separate it out into rolls before maybe letting it rise again. These ‘maybes’ are the key to my mystery bread, since I really had no idea what I was creating. I’d already messed around with the ingredients and quantities, and my Grandma’s recipe already boggles my mind because it calls for refrigerating the kneaded dough. Exactly how does the rising happen when there’s no warm place? Letting my creation rise in a warm place for a 3^rd time somehow felt right, so I just went with it.

While the rolls rose in the closet, the oven preheated. By this point I had a gut feeling that somehow everything had worked out. With some luck I’d managed to keep the yeast happy, and the yeast was going to reciprocate to make me happy. 2 pans of sufficiently risen dough entered the oven…

… and 2 pans of beautiful looking and tasting rolls came out! With multiple compliments from the crew, I’d say I’ve never been more proud of a baking adventure! How I pulled off that save is beyond me, but I’m starting to think my Grandma’s roll recipe should be renamed along the lines of her “Never Fail Pie Crust.”

Over the winter I summed up my cooking and baking interests to Kelsey in the following manner:

I wish I could just have people come over to my (non-existent) house to eat whatever I feel like trying to make. They could either bring ingredients or chip in some money to finance my hobby. There wouldn’t be a set menu, and I’d often try recipes I’ve never made before. People would come with no expectations, and because I enjoy cooking without the pressure of time, they wouldn’t care how long it takes me to cook.

Kelsey’s response: So, basically you want to run a soup kitchen!

Or as my boss Marc pointed out, I want to cook for field workers who will eat anything. 🙂 Yes, that sounds about right.