The Flour Story

Several months ago my family decided to switch from store bought bread to homemade. Why? Well, because the really yummy bread from stores is pretty expensive, and homemade bread is yummier and cheaper! It's easy to make, especially with my handy dandy stand mixer, so it just became our habit.

We started with loaf bread and then expanded from there. I found a delicious recipe for hamburger and hot dog buns, and then we started making our own flour tortillas as well. We began experimenting with cinnamon rolls. Finally, I even managed to conquer the elusive art of making a pie crust that would actually stay together long enough to get it into the pie plate.

Making all of these things required a lot of flour. So, when we found a huge sack of flour at Sam's, we naturally thought it was a great idea to buy in bulk. We buy so many other items in bulk to save money, why not flour? And, it worked beautifully, especially with a little sifting!

About a month ago, we were headed to the Capitol for Home School Day. We were supposed to make a dessert for our representatives, and I knew that chocolate chip cookie bars would be the perfect solution. Easy, reliable, and all ingredients on hand. Besides, I had been making chocolate chip cookies for twenty years. What could go wrong?

Somehow, everything went wrong! I've overcooked cookies, undercooked cookies, and ended up with a texture that was not exactly what I wanted. But never in my life can I remember ruining a batch of chocolate chip cookies. But, that is exactly what happened. The whole batch was completely ruined - totally inedible!

All I could think was that I'd made some type of mistake with the recipe. I couldn't figure out what the mistake might have been, but that had to be the solution. We whipped up a batch of fudge and took that instead.

A couple of weeks later, I decided to try cookies again for a church activity. Again, they were ruined. Inedible. How could that have happened? On our way to the activity we stopped at Wal-Mart for a bag of Chips Ahoy. How heartbreaking!

After analyzing and re-analyzing we decided that the only thing we could imagine was that the flour was somehow wrong. Cheap flour wouldn't work for chocolate chip cookies. When an easy biscuit mix had the same problem this morning, our suspicions were confirmed. What worked for bread wouldn't work for cookies or biscuits.

Naturally quite a few spiritual applications have been flooding my mind related to this whole experience. And I will share them...in future posts! Yep, you have to come back!

In the meantime, keep these thoughts in mind...

• Know your source.
• Know the composition and intention of your tools.
  
• Don't assume that you are incapable simply because something you do fails.