Hello, all! I'm Gabriel Mathews, the member of the Food Justice House who is reportedly "good at some things". Well, one of those things is now writing a recurring column on our House's trials and tribulations when it comes to being just, food-wise. If you like this column, be sure to check back for more!
In today's installment, Making Breadcrumbs!
Sometime last week, someone in the House (who shall remain unnamed simply because I don't know who it was, not because I wouldn't love to out them) purchased a fairly high quality baguette. Now, anyone who's ever consumed a baguette probably knows that you've gotta eat that sucker within about a day or two, or it's going to go so stale you could use it as a croquet mallet.
And guess what?
We didn't eat it.
But, as they say, when life hands you lemons, make lemonade. Except, replace "lemons" with "stale baguette" and "lemonade" with "breadcrumbs". For those of you who might be unaware, breadcrumbs are one of the handiest things to have in a kitchen. They can be used in many a baked good, as well as for the purpose of breading chicken, turkey, fish, or just about anything you'd ever think of breading. Pretty great stuff.
So, Jordan "Chicken Judge" Faires and I decided to take that useless excuse for a loaf of bread and turn it into a source of deliciousness to be consumed for eternity.
How did we do this, you ask? Well, the question puzzled us for a while, too. Our initial thought was that it would probably be best to break the baguette up into little pieces. So we took the thing outside, still wrapped in it's paper/plastic sheath, and started whacking it brutally against our picnic table.
This method did not prove to do very much. So Jordan, noting that we should probably acquire a mallet for situations like these, went and grabbed the hammer.
We brutalized that loaf for a while, using the butt end of the hammer for fear of doing serious damage to our table or each other with the head. Once we'd broken it down into a bunch of reasonable small pieces, it was time to bust out the blender.
Clarissa "Kerouac" Boyajian generously donated a pretty snazzy blender to the House, bringing it all the way down from her remote island home in Washington State. This thing looked big and mean, and the Chicken Judge and I figured it'd be well suited to the task of turning our baguette chunks into dust.
We were wrong. After only a few seconds at work, the blender started emitting smoke of a plastic-smelling variety, and we decided to reconsider our options. Luckily for us, this House has around five blenders in it, left here by previous inhabitants who apparently fled in a hurry, judging by the amount of stuff they left around. Jordan and I grabbed the one that looked most like a Cuisinart (following my vague memories of my dad using this method of bread crumbing), and found that it worked like gangbusters! Slowly feeding more chunks into the slicer-dicer, we soon had that baguette down to nothing but powder and tasty breadcrumbs. [UPDATE: This radtastic blender was also donated by the Island Queen Clarissa.]
Fay "Evita" Walker used them that very night to make some delicious breaded chicken, and we have the rest in a pretty little jar on our kitchen counter, to supplement more deliciousity in future meals.
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