2.24.2010

~Week 4~

Last week I dug waaaaay back into a kitchen cupboard and pulled out my bread machine. And then spent a good 30 minutes trying to scrub the thing clean! Jake bought me this bread maker for Christmas about 8 years ago and I think I put it away about 7 years ago. ahem.
The problem was, all of the bread machine recipes I had were sort of cumbersome and made reeeeally dense and frankly, awful tasting bread. But, I recently discovered this great recipe website that has a whole section devoted to bread machine recipes.
So I gave myself an ultimatum: get out the bread machine and use the blasted thing or get rid of it already!
The first recipe I found was perfect! It was simple, used very few and very basic ingredients that I already had on hand. The bread was delicious...light and soft!! And the big bag of yeast that I bought at Costco after Jake gifted me that machine? Still active! What a deal! :)

My machine now has a permanent place on my counter....at least, for the next month. I'm going to try to make all of our bread and not purchase any dough for the next month. This means our Sunday morning cinnamon rolls (I usually use Bridgeford frozen bread dough for this), sandwich bread, muffins, etc. I'm going to make all of it from scratch. Well, I'm going to try!

If you don't have a bread machine, you should try my absolute favorite recipe for beer bread. Talk about easy!
*preheat oven to 350
*mix together:
3 cups of self rising flour (or regular flour with salt and baking soda added)
1 12oz bottle of beer (or a can, if you're really red-neck :))
1/2 c. sugar

*bake for 1 hour; when there's 10 minutes left, pour 2 Tablespoons of melted butter on top

If you devour the entire thing yourself, I promise not to judge you.

1 comment:

Sunny said...

Oh my, you are very ambitious to make all your own bread for a month! I have toyed with the idea of getting a bread machine for a couple of years but my experience with them (like yours) was that the bread is super dense, chewy, and there is a very hard and thick crust. Blech. I wanna try a slice of your homemade bread and see if I now need a machine of my own. :) Does yours bake the bread in the machine? I think that would be nice in the summer when it is too hot to turn on the oven. My mom would make pizza dough in hers which was always nice.

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