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Here at the Food on Fridays carnival, any post remotely related to food is welcome—though we love to try new dishes, your post doesn’t have to be a recipe. If you want to talk about the hunk of organic eggplant that lodged between your teeth, that’s great. Posts like that are as welcome as menus and recipes.

When your Food on Fridays contribution is ready, just grab the broccoli button (the big one above or smaller option at the bottom) to paste at the top of your post. It ties us together visually.

Here’s a Mr. Linky tutorial:

Write up a post, publish, then return here and click on Mr. Linky below. A screen will pop up where you can type in your blog name and paste in the url to your own Food on Fridays post (give us the exact link to your Food on Fridays page, not just the link to your blog).

You can also visit other people’s posts by clicking on Mr. Linky and then clicking participants’ names–you should be taken straight to their posts.

Please note: I’ll do my best to update this post by hand. In the meantime, please click on the Mister Linky logo to view the complete list.

Food on Fridays Participants

Food on Fridays with Ann

Charity and I, along with an organic farmer we’re getting to know, decided to put together an Organic Evening. The idea was that we would pitch in a variety of organically prepared dishes, eat together, watch a documentary, talk about it, and pray together about any next steps we felt led or inspired to take.

Charity is already committed to eating organically and the farmer is already growing organic food, so I guess we Kroekers are the most transitional, working toward a more organic diet little by little.

I said I would make homemade bread for the gathering. After I announced that as my menu contribution, I kept thinking I should try to make it as organic as possible, so I decided to head over to Whole Foods in search of organic flour. But before I went shopping, I dreamed a little bigger.

My friend Sonya grinds her own wheat berries and regularly bakes fresh bread for her family. Maybe I could buy some organic wheat berries and have Sonya grind them for me? But Sonya was out of town. I’ve often considered investing in one of those little hand-cranked mills, but there wasn’t time to order one before Organic Evening.

All those thoughts were flitting through my mind on the weekend, when our family went over to a friend’s house. She asked me what I liked to make, and I said that lately I’d been baking some homemade bread.

“I used to make homemade bread all the time,” she said. “I even ground my own flour, believe it or not.”

“No kidding?” I exclaimed. “I was just thinking about that! My friend Sonya grinds hers all the time in an electric mill.”

“We just used a hand mill,” she said.

“I’ve been thinking about ordering one of those,” I said.

“I’ve still got mine. We haven’t used it in years. You want to borrow it?”

And just like that, she reached up into a cabinet, pulled out a little hand mill and handed it to me!

Delighted, I stopped by Whole Foods as soon as we left my friend’s house. The store had organic wheat berries in the bulk foods section.

We bought hard red winter wheat berries:

And, hm, I think these were hard white wheat:

We came home and ground them; well, to be honest, my youngest daughter ground them.

I made a sample loaf, to be sure it would turn out okay.

Mmmm…my family will attest that it turned out just fine.

Then we ground enough for two more Organic Evening loaves. My husband and daughter ground and ground without complaint.

Thanks to their assiduous labor, we ate super-healthy organic whole wheat bread on Organic Evening.

After we sat down and filled our plates, I quickly grabbed a camera, looking for a plate with the best sampling of our menu. The farmer had the most:

• a slice of pizza topped with organically grown eggplant and yellow squash;
  
• a slice of organically grown heirloom tomato topped with a basil leaf and circle of mozzarella;
  
• a slice of Charity’s ‘Mater Pie (visit her site Friday for the recipe);
  
• and one slice of homemade, hand-milled, organic whole wheat bread.

With so much of my focus on freshly ground flour, I forgot to check on the status of butter. We had one tiny scrap left that we rationed out. You’ll see that the farmer ate his slice plain. I did eventually think to bring out some raw honey, which served as a sweet substitute to spread on it.

By the time we finished the food—which included a dessert of rich, chocolate-y zucchini cupcakes that Charity brought—and wound down our conversation, it was too late to start the documentary. So we split up the leftovers and called it a night.

Organic Evening didn’t turn out quite the way I expected, but the company was delightful and the food was delicious.

Next week, all new material will be published on a
self-hosted annkroeker.com.