Bread Makes The Meal

And better, I think. See if you agree. Looking back, I don't see that I've ever posted Leslie Bilderback's "Amish White Bread" recipe. Assuming I haven't, here it is, then (unless she tells me to please take it down): Amish White Bread 1 cup warm water ⅓ cup sugar 1¾ teaspoons (1 packet) active dry yeast 1 cup flour 2 tablespoons oil (I usually use olive oil for flavor) ¾ teaspoon salt 2 more cups flour So start off by dissolving the sugar in the warm water (as always, not much warmer than body temperature) and adding the yeast. Stir until the yeast is all mixed in and go read a book or something for ten minutes. When the yeast is all foamed up on the top, add the oil, and then stir in the first cup of flour. When this is well mixed, add the salt, and then the other two cups of flour. Flour your surface, and empty the bowl out. You should have a soft, but fairly cohesive, dough. Knead this for eight or nine minutes. It'...

I got up this morning intending to make bread at some point today. I still am, and I'll report to you tonight! But Herself said, "Can you make chocolate-chip waffles today?" So of course I said, "Yes!" I knew that Everything Bread had some waffle recipes in it, and I thought this would be a great opportunity to get another recipe under my belt. Well, it turns out that there's a recipe for Chocolate Waffles (page 192); but what we both wanted was regular waffles with chocolate chips. So instead, I used the Belgian Waffles recipe a couple of pages earlier, and put chocolate chips into it. With a few modifications :-) We were out of butter, so I had a choice of melted tub margarine or canola oil. I went with the canola oil; melted tub margarine just has this really weird smell to it. Doesn't seem right. And (as I probably said earlier) we don't really have the space for a bunch of different kinds of flour. The recipe called for cake flour; we...

Well, Mobius' suggestion for a cinnamon raisin bread sounded like a great idea. I have a few different recipes. I was going to take the Everything Bread recipe and alter it enough that I could list it out here without worrying about copyright violation. Unfortunately, that was under the assumption that the alterations would keep the recipe decent enough for it to be worth listing. So here's what went down: I didn't have raisins, so I found the "Cinnamon Swirl" recipe rather than the "Cinnamon Raisin" recipe. Not a problem. It called for honey, and Herself was using the honey at work, for her tea, so we didn't have it. Not a problem, I thought, for honey I can just use white sugar, right? I now think that was a mistake. Then, there were instructions to add two eggs with the flour after proofing the yeast. I'm still not sure what eggs do for the dough, but for better or for worse I decided to leave them out. Next, the instructions said to...