Apron Strings

This Apron Strings post was sub­mit­ted By Mike Schreiner, Leader of the Green Party of Ontario. He’s also well known for his lead­er­ship in co-founding the award-winning orga­ni­za­tion Local Food Plus.

Also, please keep send­ing in your own sto­ries and recipes. This project will con­tinue long past Mother’s Day.

Wheat har­vest on my parent’s farm was a time of hot, hard work and cel­e­bra­tion.  Our extended fam­ily helped dur­ing those tense days of har­vest­ing, hop­ing to get the crop in before a storm wreaked havoc on our hard work and income.

Most of our wheat was loaded onto one of my dad’s eigh­teen wheel­ers and shipped directly to the local co-op to be trans­ported by train to dis­tant mar­kets.  Unlike his corn and soy­beans, which dad sold to local feed mills for cat­tle, our wheat trav­elled far from home.

The one excep­tion was the annual rit­ual of col­lect­ing bins of wheat berries for my Grandma Boyd, my mom’s mother.  Idabelle, my ten year old daugh­ter Isabelle’s name­sake, col­lected wheat each year from our har­vest, in order to grind it into fresh flour for her famous breads, buns, and cin­na­mon rolls.  Thanksgiving and Christmas, in par­tic­u­lar, would not be com­plete with­out a large assort­ment of her fresh baked goods cel­e­brat­ing the bounty of our harvest.

Grandma Boyd’s deli­cious baked goods were a stark con­trast to the spongy loafs of bread in our small town gro­cery store.  It seemed absurd to me, grow­ing up on the prairie with abun­dant fields of grain for a far as the eye could see, that the only bread avail­able in the local store was taste­less and made hun­dreds of miles away in a factory.

Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, I was one of the few lucky kids who had some­one in the fam­ily with the time and desire to grind their own flour and hand roll dough.  As bread con­nois­seurs know, flour is a lot like cof­fee, it begins the process of going ran­cid the minute the grain is ground into flour.  For bread, there is lit­tle com­par­i­son between fresh ground, fresh baked loafs and those you find wrapped in plas­tic on a shelf.

One of my favourite meals as a kid was a ham­burger made with ground beef from our farm and grandma’s whole wheat ham­burger buns.  My mom’s hand cut home­made fries com­pleted the meal.  Not bad for a kid who grew up where the near­est fast food restau­rant was miles away.

I can’t describe the exact moment when my advo­cacy for local food and farm­ers started.  It’s sim­ply been part of my life.  I do, how­ever, recall long hours on the com­bine or trac­tor think­ing about how idi­otic it was to work so hard grow­ing wheat for a low price, ship­ping it away, hav­ing it shipped back and spend­ing what seemed like a lot of money on a taste­less sponge.

It was prob­a­bly those thought­ful hours dri­ving in around our fam­ily farm com­bined with the joy of those buns on hol­i­days, birth­days and fam­ily din­ners that led me down a path to pro­mot­ing local food and farm­ers.  For me, food is a con­nec­tor – a con­nec­tor of friends, fam­ily, and mem­o­ries, as well as econ­omy, com­mu­nity and health.

Ultimately, it con­nects me to the earth and life itself.

On Mother’s Day I want to thank, cel­e­brate and hon­our my mother, grand­mother and wife for the won­der­ful moments and mem­o­ries of grow­ing, mak­ing and break­ing bread with them.

Grandma Boyd’s Hamburger Buns

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup warm water (105 degrees — 115)
• 2 pkgs yeast
• 3/4 cup warm milk
• 2 tsp. sea salt
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 3 Tablespoons butter
• 1 1/2 TBs onion powder
• 4 3/4 — 5 1/4 cups fresh ground all pur­pose flour
• 3 eggs
• poppy seeds, onion flakes, or sesame seeds

Directions

Put warm water in a bowl and sprin­kle yeast in water and stir till dis­solved.  Add warm milk. Add sugar, salt, but­ter, onion flakes, and 2 cups flour and blend well.

Stir in 2 eggs and rest of flour to make a soft dough.  Knead on lightly floured sur­face until smooth and elas­tic (about 4 — 6 min­utes)  Place dough in a greased bowl, cover and let rise in a warm draft– free place.  (about 30 — 45 minutes)

Punch dough down and remove to a lightly floured sur­face.  Divide dough into 8 equal pieces.  Form each piece into a small ball on a greased bak­ing sheet.  Flatten balls into 4 inch rounds. Cover and let rise in a warm draft-free place until dou­ble in size.

Lightly beat remain­ing egg, brush on rolls and if desired sprin­kle seeds on top.  Bake 400 degrees F.  10 — 15 min. or until done.

Remove from bak­ing sheet and let cool on a wire rack.