My Girlfriend Kelly sent me a recipe for basic white bread. In her email she said, “I figured you might be appalled when you realized that the white bread recipe calls for powdered sugar! Not something you would want to serve for everyday meals, but hey, worth a try. I think it tastes great.”

Um, Kelly, dear. The half cup of powdered sugar didn’t faze me, but the quart of half-and-half did! (Though not for very long. I must have a thing for trying out crazy rich food, see “Going Overboard”—I just have to know.)

The recipe is called Basic White Bread, and white it is—white flour, white salt, white milk, white sugar, white half-and-half, almost-white butter. I know it’s not good to eat too many white foods—we’re supposed to have whole grains and colorful veggies and such. But white bread is so good. Grilled cheese, toasted with butter and homemade sour cherry jam, French toast, bread pudding… Must I justify everything I do? Can’t I just enjoy some plain white bread? My conscience kept rearing it’s nagging head, so I stomped on it once and for all and made the bread.

And it was beautiful.

And then I got to thinking, the color white isn’t bad. In fact, white means purity and holiness and heavenly-ness and—angels. Angels! Angels are good, right? At least the ones dressed in white. So maybe, just maybe, if I call it Angel Bread instead of Basic White Bread, everything will be okay. Conscience! Get your teeth out of my ankle!

I’ll still make my brown bread, most of the time, okay?

Angel Bread
Adapted from a recipe that my Girlfriend Kelly sent to me from a book called Beautiful Breads and Fabulous Fillings by Margaux Sky

Despite the rich ingredients, this is really just a very basic white bread recipe, but it’s also very good.

The original recipe said it made four loaves, but you can see from the pictures that they were giant loaves. I’d shape it into five or six loaves, next time. (Ouch! That obstinate conscience of mine has some sharp fangs!)

2 tablespoons yeast
4 cups warm milk
4 cups warm half-and-half
½ cup butter, melted
½ cup powdered sugar
16 cups all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons salt

Dissolve the yeast in the milk and half-and-half, and let sit until the yeast is foamy. Add the butter and powdered sugar.

Add the salt and flour and knead till soft and tender.

Place the dough in a large bowl that has been either dusted with flour or greased with butter, cover with a towel, and let rise until double.

Divide the dough into five or six portions, depending on how big your loaf pans are, shape the dough into loaves, and place them in well-greased pans. Cover the loaves with a cloth and let them rise until almost double. Bake at 400 degrees for 30 or 40 minutes until they are golden brown. Remove the loaves from the pans…

…and let them cool before putting them into plastic bags.

One bite of it toasted, with lots of butter and homemade jam, and you will be transported to the heavenly realms.

Here’s what I cleaned out today:

Moldy cream cheese, soured creme fraiche, half a lime (squeezed the juice in with the ground beef I was frying up to put in a curry), leftover peas and carrots from lunch (also into curry), leftover fried potatoes (yep, they’re curried now), yogurt-cream sauce (into fruit smoothies), fruit cobbler (Mr. Handsome and I ate it for supper), leftover cooked oatmeal (The Baby Nickel and Miss Becca Boo ate it for their supper), leftover baked oatmeal (supper for Sweetsie and Yo-Yo Boy), two partly-used onions (curry), a giant bag of moldy lettuce (chickens).

Now my fridge feels spacious, big enough to easily hold the giant crock pot filled with the Beef Curry With Garden Vegetables that I’ll be taking to the church potluck tomorrow.

This, the fussing, is a perpetual problem. At least in my house.

I usually tell the kids that if they complain when I ask them to do a chore, then they will have to do another chore—they obviously need more practice having a positive attitude. But I don’t always stick to this rule, so they sometimes can get away with a bit of fussing, which means that then they almost always fuss and they only get another chore if I’m in a bad mood, or if they fuss too much, which is a pretty ambiguous thing.

Ideally, this is how our conversation would go:

Me: Child, it’s time for you to do the dishes.
Child: Okay, Mama. I’ll be right there. Would you like me to do all of them?
Me: Yes, please.
Child: Okay.

What really happens:

Me: Child, it’s time for you to do the dishes.
Child: I did the breakfast dishes yesterday! I don’t want to do the breakfast dishes! I want to do the lunch dishes instead! Why do I have to do the dishes? You make us do all the work! Why don’t you do the dishes yourself?
Me: No, The Other Child did the breakfast dishes yesterday. If you would like to save them and do the lunch dishes also, you may. There are not many there right now, and the longer you wait, the more dishes there will be, so that’s your choice. I can use all the help I can get.

Last night, in an effort to nip this bad habit in the bud, once and for all (don’t fall out of your seat laughing—it’s quite unbecoming of you), Mr. Handsome and I called a family meeting. We laid out some rules:

1. When asked to do a job, The Child must say yes, within five seconds.

2. If they have questions or rebuttals, they may politely request to speak, but at that point they also need to say that they will do whatever we say.

3. If there is fussing, a refusal to say okay, whatever, Mr. Handsome and I will do nothing at the moment, but the transgression will be noted on paper along with the consequence (another job—we’re big on practice), which will be meted out after everyone has had time to cool off.

We role played. The kids cried that we were being too mean. We talked about how we are a family, nobody is a king or queen or prince or princess around here (sound familiar, Mom?). We talked about how there are a lot of people in this family and we all need to work together. We talked about how jobs get done so much faster when we have a good attitude. We talked about how we are all so much happier when we have good attitudes and get along, and how we want our children to be happy. We reviewed the consequences, again.

This morning we put the plan into action and … it worked!

I wasn’t born yesterday, and I realize that this was just the first day, but even so, it’s nice to get off to a good start. When things deteriorate, which they will, at least I’ll know what the children are capable of.