HAPPY NEW YEARS + NAVAJO FRY BREAD
I know I'm a bit late with this New Year's wish, but really creating a new blog from scratch with all of your old stuff is so not as straight-forward as you think it would be! So please bear with me on the technical difficulties and bad links (and let me know if they go on for another month!).
In the meantime, I got away right before New Years and visited a ridiculously scenic part of the U.S. called the Four Corners – the only place where four states physically meet (Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado). The area is rich with the culture and the traditions of the local Native Americans, the Navajo, and I wanted to share a few things with you from this trip.
A woman named Ingrid showed me this dish called fry bread. Food always has a history, and the story from Ingrid’s grandmother is that during the “Long Walk of the Navajo” (when they were forcibly relocated from Arizona to eastern New Mexico), bread was a staple based on the rations of flour that they were given. When the dough was accidentally dropped in hot oil, fry bread was born.
Ingrid’s mom used to make it by hand (though our batch came together in a stand mixer), and there is all sorts of lore around the bread. If there’s hole in the bread, it’s often told that you’ll have a bad marriage or be a bad in-law…harsh!
And though it’s typically eaten as a meal with a stew or beans, we had a yummy, sweet version of it with berries, ice cream and honey drizzled all over.
The trip was pretty amazing, and there was an unprecedented amount of snow the first few days I was there. It usually doesn’t snow out there, and people I spoke to said that they hadn’t seen this in 20 years. Either way, the scenery and snow made my photography skills comp to Ansel Adams (not) so I wanted to share some photos I took.