Stumbling upon the simple

I don't know why I didn't think of this years ago:  I can make my own coin rolls. 

My husband piles his loose change on my dresser, and I keep the quarters and dimes for yard-sale season.  The pennies and nickels go into their own jars, and eventually we take them to the bank or put then in coin counting machines.  Or something.  Except that recently I realized I could count out the pennies and nickels --- and dimes, too, because honestly I'm not doing nearly as much yard sale-ing now that my kids are grown and the house has had 20 years of being furnished up.  And then I could use my own paper to create rolls.


To roll the coins, I folded one end of the paper up to create a kind of a base, rolled the paper just a little around this base, and tucked a few coins into the "corner" I'd made.  If you think about surfers in a wave, with one end of the wave open and the other end holding the coins, that's sort of the idea.  I kept adding coins and tightening the roll as I went along. 

I taped these rolls shut with the little extra sticky pieces that come at the edge of sheets of stamps, so I didn't even have the expense of tape.   I wrote on the outside of the roll what was inside.  And then I plopped these babies in my Tuesday Market backpack, and used them to help pay for my milk and yogurt.  I got rid of 350 pennies this past Tuesday at the dairy stand.  Woo-hoo!

Okay, this isn't exactly a huge, life style revelation.  But it cleared out a bunch of coin clutter in my drawers, and it made me feel a little sheepish that I'd never even considered putting my do-it-yourself skills to work on this task before.

Which leads me to a different kind of dough:  in particular, bread.  I've mentioned once or twice that I've been really enjoying a local gardening club that I'm getting into.  Unlike me, these people don't kill half their plants every summer, and they actually know the names of the stuff that comes out of the ground in their yards.  I come as a supplicant to worship at the altar of their horticultural knowledge, and they cheerfully tolerate me and even offer me good advice.  Last week, there was a pot luck dinner, and of course I went.  I forgot to make a dish, so at the last minute I grabbed most of a loaf of bread I'd pulled out the bread maker earlier that day, plus a jar of applesauce that I'd tossed in the fridge when it didn't seal in my recent canning session.

Hah.  I thought I'd totally wimped out, but I was the Belle of the Ball.  The other gardeners were incredulous:  You MADE your own bread?  They told stories of trying years ago and failing; the recipes were so tricky.  (You have to warm the bowl!  And the bread came out like a brick -- I discovered later I'd killed the yeast).  I could have understood their reaction if I'd been at a gathering of, say, the Mall Walkers.  But gardeners thinking of bread making as requiring advanced expertise?

Sheesh.  Here's how you make bread:  you get some water close to body temperature.  You add some yeast and flour.  You probably add some salt also, and maybe also other stuff because you're getting fancy (spices, or raisins, or even oil, sugar, or powdered milk because of the texture).  You mix it together until you get something that forms a ball and doesn't quite stick to the bowl or your hands, especially if your hands are floured.  You cover the ball with oil or a damp cloth and let the ball rise somewhere between and hour and a day.  Maybe you punch it down and let it rise again, maybe not.  And then you stick it in the oven.  That's it.  Bread.

So next month, when our Garden Club isn't having a garden meeting (because, November), I'm going to hold a bread-making session for the gardeners.  Making bread is not hard . . . unless you've never done it, in which case it seems impossible because it's so unfamiliar.  Sort of like rolling coins in your own pieces of paper.   But much, much yummier.