On Bread

Out of my two most used Whole-Wheat bread recipes, one tastes good, and one tastes better. One calls for soaking of the flour the night before, one just has you throw it in the mixer. One does not turn my face an allergic cherry red (ohh, so *that's* why I look like I've been out in the snow all day!) and one, unfortunately, does.

Well, since my husband ended up rather disappointed that the yummy bread wakes up my allergies, I wondered how hard it would be to adapt my good recipe into a flour-soaking recipe. This is scary territory for me—I'm great at following recipes, but not so great at tinkering with them or making my own. At least not yet.

Anyways, after basking in the wealth of information provided by Lindsay at Passionate Homemaking, I tried my hand at re-writing the recipe, and now I'm excited to try it out and see what happens!

It's hard to believe that this is the me who got together with her mother at about eight years old and decided to at least *try* to bake some kind of wheat bread for the very first time. We always bought our bread before that, and to both of us the idea of baking our own seemed so incredibly, domestically impressive at the time. Those dinner rolls came out hard as rocks, but they tasted good in the middle, and we kept trying.

My mother almost never buys storebought bread now. In fact, we both grind our own wheat berries. And here I find myself...messing with the recipes. What on earth may happen next?

I tell you this so that you may

a) Laugh at the fact that I think this an impressive progression of events because you can't even remember a woman in your heritage who *didn't* bake bread with their own recipes

or

b) Laugh because you're pleased that there *is* another woman in the home-keeping world whose mother...let alone she herself...did not know how to bake bread, and therefore bought it at the store for her family of seven.

Photo credit: www.morguefile.com