Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Frybread Flapping

Well now that I am feeling better, (bald man went to work anyway, even though he still isn't feeling too hot) I thought, oh cool, I have a lunch date with two different friends this week, a quilt to finish, my needle felting to poke at and the regular running around to do, (dang my family thinks they need to eat everyday, sometimes more than once a day!) But last night, my dreams for the rest of my week came crashing down. I forgot I promised to go flap frybread at the local college for a fundraiser.
Let me explain frybread. Made from white flour, baking soda or yeast, powdered milk, sugar sometimes and FRIED in oil or lard, it is NOT good for you.
Once upon a time, Native Americans certainly had none of those ingredients, so the origin of this now ubiquitous "Indian" food has much more recent beginnings. With the treaties a hundred years ago, the loss of the typical way the locals fed themselves long gone, the treaties included food stuffs to feed the brown people, resulting in what has now become commodities or "comods" in local parlance. Some of the more basic things given to the brown people were things like flour, lard, powdered milk and being the creative souls we are, fry bread was born. While it is NOT good for you, man oh man does it taste good!
Well, it does if you eat it right.
I live in Utah, by far and away the most numerous of the local tribes is the Navajo. And boy oh boy they are weird! The RIGHT way to eat frybread is with honey and butter on it, HOT of course. Those Navajo, (shaking head slowly back and forth) put SALT, that is right folks, salt on theirs. Weirdos.
And this leads me to the title of today's post. Back home,on the Dakota plains, our people, (the Lakota, or our white-given name, Sioux) use rolling pins to roll out our frybread, and we never ever put salt on it. But because I am helping out locally, I will be forced to flap frybread back and forth like a Navajo for the rest of the week, and then the entire day on Saturday for the pow wow too. Sigh. Hopefully none of the folks from home will see me. And they can NOT make me eat it with salt on it, I won't, I won't! Flapped or not, it tastes like a bit of heaven, and if you come by, I promise to make you yours to order!

2 Kids Who Want To Play:

Granny said...

I used to make something similar only I dropped little balls of dough into hot oil - like hushpuppies only made with flour instead of corn meal.

They were good - I'll have to give yours a try.

Ann

achromic said...

now that sounds good. I remember going to a.... I donno what to call it ... maybe a Native American get together.... any ways I got not a drop of it in me and it would have been something I would have been to shy to go to by myself but a friend of mine was half of some tribe back east and off we go. I had good frybread and alligator meat (brought up from FL) they put powder suger on it like you would do with I forget the name of it bread at canerivls. It was very very good. And it was a fabulous experance with a whole dance rotine done to the dropping sun where they went up into the air and spun about AND the release of a bald eagel to the wild (who really wasn't that intersted in going LOL). I always remember going over seas and the french being horrified that I was putting salt and butter on my popcorn.... they put suger and sometimes carmel.