I’m not an Amish Friendship Bread kinda girl.
Which means, if you give me some sort of yeasty mix that was handed down from someone’s great-great-grandmother 30 years ago, from a secret recipe, and you want me to ferment it, or add stuff to it, or maybe, I don’t know, watch porn with it, and then pass some of it along to five more people with handwritten instructions for how they have to do the same thing…
…oh, and then make some sort of unleavened bread which maybe Michael will eat one piece of just to be polite, then will go all moldy until someone throws it away…
…but then also KEEP some of the dough so I can hang onto it and continue to add to it and take it to out to lunch every so often and trim its toenails and clean out its closets until I DIE….
(BTW: I HAVE CHILDREN. AND A HUSBAND. AND DOGS. AND A VERY SMALL BLADDER).
Yeah.
I’m not an Amish Friendship Bread kinda girl. Which means if you give me that goddamned brownish crap in a Ziplock?
I’m throwing it out, and I’m not gonna feel bad about it.
Let me say that I have nothing against the Amish, Friendship, or Bread. Don’t know a whole lot about the first except (1) what I saw in “Witness,” (2) they have a bad reputation in Pennsylvania for operating puppy mills; and (3) I once had to do research about what happens when one of their horse-buggies gets involved in a motor vehicle accident, but I forget what that is.
I love friendship, and I love my friends.
And bread. Gosh, how I love bread.
But I hate any “tradition” that requires me to prove the depth of my feeling and commitment through meaningless gestures (see my numerous posts as to my thoughts about Mother’s Day), and for the life of me, I see nothing “friendly” about giving someone a bag of goo that smells like feet (and, I can assure you, no Amish person ever made and called “bread”) and asking me to push it off on five other people, much like a chain letter, only more like mucous.
I know, I know. It’s meant to be fun, and to connect people to an everlasting network of those who all ate a baked good that derived from the same original batch of ingredients, thereby uniting us, young and old, black and white, Christian or Muslim or Jew, those who think Carol Baskin killed her first husband and those who think he escaped to Costa Rica to live with a much younger woman.
I’m just saying, there are ways to be friendly and connect with people that are a lot less demanding.
And that’s what pisses me off. I don’t like people telling me how to be their friend, or insisting that I prove it, because although I probably really love them a lot, maybe the day I’m supposed to add the flour to the bread or or repost whatever you put on FB today (you know, that thing that only a TRUE friend will read and repost) is the day my dog crapped all over my kitchen floor, or work was crazy, or one of my kids needed me, or my husband said, “let’s go for a walk.”
So, no Amish Friendship Bread for me. I do, however, accept donuts, cinnamon rolls, chocolate chip cookies, brownies, cake, ice cream sandwiches, sea salt caramels, and of course, Dark Chocolate Milanos.
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