Made the Bread, Bought the Butter, pt.1
I got my hands upon Jennifer Reese's Make the Bread, Buy the Butter: What You Should and Shouldn't Cook from Scratch. This seemed totally up my alley. Here I am trying to live this nouveau home-ec life and here is a kindred spirit in liking to mess around in the kitchen but it rather ended right there. Thankfully, Ms. Reese explained her situation otherwise I would have spent the whole book rolling my eyes at her yummy-mummy lifestyle. She admits that she leads a quite comfortable life and has no need for frugality. Well that explains the duck prosciutto recipe and the ordering of obscure herbs. I am on the edge of needing to be frugal and foresee no duck prosciutto in my future. However, I did work through several of the more approachable recipes in the book and almost all were good to very successful.
I started with Everyday Bread...
Bread not only makes the house smell wonderful while baking but tastes great and has substance as opposed to squishy bread from the store (Yes I find store bread squishy). Plus, you can control the ingredients and work out your aggressions while kneading. This recipe was even better because it was faster. Dump and stir! Which I did one Saturday and let it rise, which it did not. The kitchen was quite cool and even with another hour of rising, not much happened. Well, maybe oven spring will save this bread. It went in to the pan for its second rise and after a while I turned on the oven so it and the pizza stone could preheat. After a while I noticed the oven was not whooshing to life like usual. Opened it up and it was stone cold. I turned dials and possibly even kicked the tires but nothing changed. EcoDaddyO came home and I had to ambush him with the news that the oven done broke. He swung in to action and the oven was fixed a few days later.
But, in the meantime, I found an alternate oven which required some hauling bread dough around while pushing a baby carriage but the bread got baked. It had a crusty exterior and a moist interior that unfortunately looked dirty from the addition of ground flax seeds. It was OK fine but it did inspire me to bake a different loaf when we had a functioning oven. That was a success and has renewed my faith in bread baking.
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