I'm going to rewind back seven years to our trip to the Grand Canyon because that's when it all started..... We were staying on the south side and drove around to the North rim. Somewhere in the middle we decided to take what looked like a short-cut on the map through the Navajo reservation out around Tuba City. That's where we met Lee.
Lee was sitting in front of his house selling grapes and chatting with a friend. We stopped, got some grapes, started talking and ended up getting a tour of the area. We saw all the traditional housing, sweat lodges, dutch ovens, outdoor sleeping, and the sheep. I loved the sheep. Lee's mom was an artist, but all her weavings were locked up because she was out of town at a wedding. Lee explaining this was hilarious. We are always so lucky meeting the coolest people on our trips. Later he told us about some petroglyphs up the road which sounded interesting. So we three hopped in the car and headed out to see those. They were in the middle of no where! We ended up off roding (sorry rental car company) across some sand, up to some rocks and on the back side, there they were. Crazy. We left Lee and continued on, stopped for some lunch and that's when I had Navajo fry bread for the first time---a fluffy, not particularly low-fat (seize the day, already!), deep fried bread.
Two times, I ate it on that trip. Dipped in honey, it was love at first bite. I've thought about it off and on for the last five years and then it dawned on me to Google a recipe for it. Duh. I've since learned that fry bread is a magical concoction of milk, flour and baking powder, rolled out and deep fried. Seemed simple enough. A month ago I attempted to make it, but it came out hard as biscuits. Edible, but not so enjoyable. I later learned I had over worked the dough, thanks to some comments and this YouTube video. Does it excite anyone else all the indie cooking shows on YouTube? When I tried again on Sunday at my friend's house, I messed up yet another batch of dough---too dry. So we, re-watched the video, did a huddle, broke and as they say, third time's a charm. We did it! And it took ALL of us! Lord, it was funny.
Like flipping through a photo album, eating this bread brings back many memories of that happy trip.
Here's a link to the history of fry bread and some recipes.
