I was having yet another What To Make For Dinner conversation with a friendly acquaintance when I mentioned that I really wanted to make biscuits to go with that night's chili but didn't have time so I'd probably make beer bread instead. At this she looked at me as if I had just told her I would feed my kids braised glass for dinner.

"You make beer bread?" she asked, "How? Isn't that worse than making biscuits?" She shuddered and added a comment on her devotion to whack-'em tubes of crescent rolls.

There may well be a hard way to make beer bread but if there is I don't know about it. The way my mom taught me is crazy easy (strangely, although she gave me the recipe and method I use - which Google shows as the most common - I have no memory of her ever making a loaf). Once I told my pal how to do it, her eyes brightened and she said she'd make some just as soon as she could get her hands on some self-rising flour, that not being the kind of thing that many of us keep around. Seems she got the idea after having some beer bread fondue at a local pub that it was hard to make, required lots of tedious kneading and resting as so many breads do and that the process is just generally harder than whacking a tube of prefab rolls.

Not so. Beer bread is more of a quick bread than anything else, and there's no kneading required. In fact, I'd venture to say that in a reasonably well-ordered kitchen, whipping up a loaf of beer bread might well be just as fast or even more so than whacking and separating refigerator rolls.

For crazy easy beer bread, preheat your oven to 375 degrees. Mix well three cups of self-rising flour, three tablespoons of white sugar and 12 oz. of beer (canned or bottled, whatever type you like - cheap beer makes just as good a bread as expensive, but every beer adds a distinct flavor, we prefer lighter beers for bread). Pat the sticky dough into an oiled or sprayed loaf pan and bake for one hour. Allow to cool a spell before cutting. You can use regular flour, too, but add three teaspoons baking powder and a teaspoon and a half of salt - things that self-rising flour already includes. Since a five pound bag of self-rising is fairly inexpensive and makes several loaves, I don't bother with the more complicated version. As always, your mileage may vary, blah, blah, blah.

Sure, the bread must bake for an hour but that's an hour when you can be off doing something else and not standing by the stove or watching the clock for kneading intervals. Since not being subject to any kind of drudgery is a key to enjoying the cooking process, I don't think the ability to ignore the bread for a whole hour can be over-regarded. If you have leftover, let it harden over night and crunch it up to make breadcrumbs to coat tomorrow night's chicken breasts (which you'll put out to thaw tonight) and there is another evening's dinner already planned and ready to go.