Wheat berries!

Several years ago Landlady added a grain mill to the capabilities of Ian’s Cave. I used it to gradually grind up the wheat berries that had been sitting around for longer than I’ve lived here, to no purpose. Took a while to settle on the right proportions for my bread recipe, half a cup per loaf, and it was a big improvement.

But wheat berries are, for some reason I’ve never understood, several times as expensive as plain supermarket flour so when those two buckets’ worth were gone, they were gone. Last year a Friend of the Gulch came past, bringing a gift of wheat berries: Not a lot, but enough to eke out my supply for a while.

A few days ago I ground the last of it…

And that was it, baby. Last of the Mohicans. When that’s gone, it’s St. Famine’s Day.

Except, wait a minute. Yeah, I’ve been totally broke for as long as I’ve lived here, and long since adopted a “scrounge or do without” policy that I’ve sometimes struggled to shake off now that I actually have a small-by-conventional-standards income. Specific to this topic, I’m used to thinking of wheat berries like bars of solid gold, precious objects forever out of my price range. But was that necessarily still true?

Turns out, not in the least!

Happy day! This stuff has been an integral part of my diet for so long I was feeling kind of bereft, and I looked upon those two little sacks with the sort of greedy joy I normally reserve for a new gun or pair of good boots.

Those sacks would never do, though. That was just asking for bugs or mice to help themselves. Happily…

I had optimistically never quite brought myself to repurpose one of the original wheat buckets. So it’ll be fine, while it waits to be ground. And yes, I do plan to fill that bucket in the very near future.