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Show Food storage is great if you don't eat it (the &dMnr9s By MARC HADDOCK Thanksgiving at our house was great this year - plenty of good food, the pleasant company of family members, a lazy afternoon drowsing on the couch while a football game droned on the television and finally a rousing game of Risk (I won). It was unpretentious, relaxed and thoroughly enjoyable - everything a holiday ought to be. And maybe I enjoyed the holiday just a little more this year because it wasn't all that good not too long ago. That turkey dinner with all the trimmings is particularly good when contrasted with our meals during the year I was beating the streets looking for a job and Trying 1 to make a living as a freelance writer with writer's block. Thanks to family members, the holidays were okay, but it's amazing the things people will eat when there's nothing in the house but food storage. We even got so desperate, we ate the food storage. That was the year I learned to make bread. (I'm good at it, too). It was the year we learned to do innovative things with pinto beans. (So much so that when I went to the survival fair and was offered a pinto-bean brownie, I had to decline. The cook swore it tasted our family a long time. Ksk , in the strangest places. Hit floating in our soup, hife meager hamburgers ' masquerading as (heaven - , meat. I ate it, simply because I b so much of that dough go do. drain making the obnouw that I hated to see mores!;: waste. But the kids were ma-They ma-They were not to be fooled. "Ooh! Gluton again!" n , household cry, and the slid; would go untouched. We've held over some ; things we learned during i long months. Our pancakes r made with whole wheat fl:: are most of our other bat.;'; And our food storage, : though it may be, has morr ; to it. But we've never made : again - and if I have up i never will. There is one advantage, !( As I sit down to my fourth r. 1 leftover turkey in fourdsji : look back to those days whe;.' would lie on the plate, i greatful that the meal onto: . monotonous as it may be, is I thing and not that poor imp And that's something ti -give thanks about. more like brownie than bean, but just looking at it made me gag.) And it was the year we learned to make and hate that wonder of food storage gluton. I remember grinding up about 10 cups of the turkey red wheat my parents had given us six years before as we embarked on our great gluton adventure. It took some time to make the stuff, but for a writer with writer's block, time means little. We mixed, the flour with water, aTld kneaded and kneaded and kneaded the mixture until it was holding together quite well. Then I lifted this huge ball of dough to the sink and began rinsing it off under warm water, washing away the starch and fiber until only the gluton was left. It was amazing how quickly that big ball of dough became a small ball of gluton -- and still the starch washed away. For a while I was afraid that everything would just wash down the sink, but finally I was left with a small ball of sponge-like material that would not wash any more. It felt like I was holding the largest ball of silly putty in the world. But what I held in my hand was a ball of gluton - the protein in bread that holds the loaf together. Now the things we had read about gluton were marvelous. Here was this fabulous source of protein that could be prepared in any of one million ways and supplement a diet when not much meat was available. With a lot of time on our hands, and not much meat, it sounded too good to be true. And it was. Because no matter what we did to the gluton, it still looked like gluton, felt like gluton and tasted like gluton - and that's bad. To put it simply, eating gluton is like eating an old, wet sponge that's been soaked in lukewarm dirty dishwater for about a week. And when you start out with that kind of combination, nothing you do to it ever is going to make it better. That small ball of gluton lasted |