Navajo Fry Bread Kid Meal~from the Fair

Fry Bread ~A New Mexico Fair and Festival Staple

Night of the Great Fry Bread Feed

     Fry Bread is a traditional Navajo dish that can be served as a main dish with meat or beans. You can sneak in some nice veggies too! Fry Bread may also be served as a dessert with cinnamon, powdered sugar, or honey. It is a rich and fulfilling dish.

     Other tribes besides the Navajo make and serve fry bread as well. However, I have mostly seen it at fairs and open air markets in both Arizona and New Mexico.

     My first introduction to Fry Bread was at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. The Heard Museum is the world’s premiere Native American Museum. Every spring there is a wonderful Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair. This is where I first had Fry Bread and also a thin light sheet of blue bread called piki bread.

     For more information on the HeardMuseum, here is the web site:

http://heard.org/about/index.html

     There is traditional loaf bread that is that made in a horno. A horno is an adobe structure that sits outside of many traditional native homes in New Mexico. The bread is often sold from the home and is a fine treat. But that is another article!

     Fry Bread is also the South DakotaState Bread. This was news to me and I am married to a guy from South Dakota. I asked him why he didn’t tell me this and he said that he didn’t know this either.

     The traditional fry bread involves nearly a whole loaf of bread dough that is flattened and fried in a deep fat fryer. It is very popular at festivals here in the Southwest. It appears to be spreading to other areas too.

     Frankly, that much bread and such makes me feel logy just typing it, so, here is my version. I keep all the good fixings but bring the bread down to a single serving size without deep frying.

Ingredients:

One canister of those pop-out biscuits

These are the items that need setting up for use the minute the bread is cooked. Nearly all of these ingredients may be made from scratch. These ingredients are also found prepared and sold in your local grocery. So, you can make it yourself or make it easy on yourself and use the canned or jarred prepared ingredients.

· refried beans heated

· chili heated (as in chili on pre-cooked ground meat)

· enchilada/everything sauce heated

· salsa

· chopped green chilé

· Mexican cheese blend, shredded

· chopped onions

· Chopped lettuce

Instructions:

Pop open the biscuits, separate them, and then flatten and gently pull each of the biscuits to make a palm size piece of bread.

½ C. oil heated in a fry pan You can use a non-stick pan but these are better in a cast iron skillet and some canola-type oil. It is FRY bread after all.

Fry those stretched/pulled biscuits until crisp on both sides and cooked in the middle

Now top with all of your favorite ingredients from above. Select to your own tastes. Make a couple and try different variations.

This is mostly a kid night meal at our home. When we say that ‘it is for the kids’ we can justify having fry bread too. The kids love creating their own version.

The easy-peasey part is that for a cook that works outside the home, he/she can stop at the market and purchase everything ready made!

Or you can make several of the ingredients ahead of time and store in the fridge for the night of the Great Fry Bread Feed.

Tomorrow, let's do another easy pull-together meal, Corn Chip Taco Pie.

Hey, what’s the movie tonight?