Dear Journal Letter # 3 (flour ramblings)

Dear Journal,

My last post was about playdough, which is made partly with flour. I use white flour to make playdough. White flour's labels say that it is "enriched". Enriched means they put back some of the essential vitamins and minerals they took out. They took the germ and the bran out.

Last year I began to grind wheat grain. Can you believe someone would want to grind it? There's enough in life to do besides grind grain. That's why we all buy it at the grocery store, right? Well, I purchased a Whisper Mill (which by the way is a good mill but definitely does not grind quietly), and bought some soft wheat, hard wheat, and even some 7 grain.

You may be wondering what the difference between soft wheat and hard wheat is. Soft wheat is used for pastries, biscuits, pancakes,tortillas..etc. Hard wheat comes in hard red( red has a stronger wheat taste) and hard white grain. It is used to make bread, -the kind that you make sandwiches with. I have used it for cornbread, and even for pancakes, but it doesn't make good tortillas.
Switching over to the grain was a little of an adjustment and an extra step in cooking at times. I find that if I grind enough soft grain for biscuits and anything else I might want to make during the week, and I place the flour in the freezer in a freezer bag, it saves me the extra step.
I put it in the freezer because flour spoils and goes rancid without you being able to tell. So is it worth the trouble? This has been the first year that I can remember where my kids did not get a bad, last forever type of cold. They got colds, sniffled a day or two, and it was gone. Those markings on food products that say "enriched" are very questionable in my mind now.