You Can Bake Steamed Breads... right on your stove top!

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Where fruit is called for, feel free to substitute. A windfall of most any kind of fruit can be incorporated in the recipes that follow, and since it will all be cut up, it needn't be blemish-free.

Be resourceful . . . use whatever's most abundant and/or least expensive. If dates skyrocket in price over the holidays, wait till winter's over and grocers have marked the fruit down to half price. (Shelled nuts, too, plummet in price after they've been on the shelves a certain length of time.) In the meantime, use raisins or pitted prunes . . . and if raisins are high this month, leave 'em out of the recipe altogether! The resulting bread will be good, just a little bit smaller in size.

For the biggest money savings of all, buy your ingredients in bulk. You should have very little trouble obtaining staple foods—grains, flours, honey, dried fruit—at half price (or even less) this way.

You say you have no place to put 25-pound sacks of whole wheat and brown rice? No problem. Store them in plain view! We bought some 30-pound-capacity olive containers from the local delicatessen for 50¢ apiece, and the terra-cotta-colored tubs—filled with flour, rice, and whatnot—look right at home in our living room.

A WORD ABOUT CANS AND MOLDS

You don't have to cook your steamed breads in one-pound coffee cans. Any size container you think would make a good-looking loaf will work. (Remember, though, that batter baked in smaller cans does cook faster.) If you steam your loaves in several different sized containers, you can stack them in tiers, wedding cake style. (Those round containers that fruitcakes and cookies come in are ideal for making the bottom layers.) And, if you really get hooked on steam baking, you'll soon find yourself—like me—hunting down fancy molds at garage sales.

For everyday use, however, I prefer ordinary one-pound coffee cans—the kind that come with plastic lids—because their tops can be used to hold heat inside the containers as the baking takes place. The only disadvantage to the plastic lids is, that after a steaming or two, they warp or split . . . at which point you must either scrounge up some more coffee tins with lids, or begin to seal the containers with aluminum foil. (And the foil, of course, can be reused many times.)

By the way, if your cans are—like most coffee containers—ridged along the inside, don't worry about your luscious nut loaves getting stuck and not coming out when they're done. Surprisingly, what happens is that the loaves actually shrink away from the can's sides as they cook, making it a simple task—when they're finished—to turn them out to cool.

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