Feeling better. Baking bread helps.

I'm just starting to feel better, but it has been a rough couple weeks. I've done some cooking, mostly because the other people who live here have to eat, but I haven't gotten too fancy. We've been eating a lot of homemade bread, and then enjoying the things we can make from our homemade bread.

Just about everyone I know thinks making bread is hard. And over the last couple weeks I've had people tell me that they can't believe I can make bread when I should be resting, as if it really that time consuming and difficult.

The truth is, I have an old recipe I used to use out of my dad's cookbook (an old 70's copy of The Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook). For years after I moved out of the house I thought the recipe was gone. Every time I went over to visit, he would hide the cookbook so I couldn't take it (I only wanted the 1 recipe Dad!!). But around Christmas time I got desperate and started looking online. SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE had to have the same recipe! and I found it! on Pinterest of all places!

It really is the most simple recipe ever. It starts out with half a cup of warm water (I'm lucky enough to have one of those water dispensers that has hot and cold, so I just measure out a quarter cup of both to get my warm water) and 2 tablespoons of yeast. I mix that together and set it aside.

In a large mixing bowl, I then add 2 cups of HOT water, 3 tablespoons of raw sugar (mostly because that's what we use around here, if you don't have it that's fine, I used plain white sugar when I was in high school), 1 tablespoon of salt, and 1/3 cup of melted butter (that's 3/4 of a stick). I mix that together until the sugar and salt dissolve and then set that aside to cool. It is important to note that if you don't set it aside to cool, you'll kill your yeast. That's not good.

While the hot water mixture is cooling, I measure out 6 cups of All Purpose Flour into another large bowl. This just is to make it easier later, so I don't have to measure out more flour when I have sticky hands.

When the sugar water mixture is just about barely warm (in other words, not cold, and definitely not hot), add the yeast water to the sugar water and mix. Next add about 3 cups of flour to the water mixture, and mix with a wooded spoon until you can't mix it together anymore. Then add another scoop of flour, and mix again. Keep adding flour until enough of the liquid is absorbed that you don't have a sticky mess, and you can't really mix anymore flour into it. Then dump the dough onto a floured surface (I just use the counter, but I know some people prefer cutting boards or something), and knead in the rest of the flour until the dough is smooth and no longer sticky.

Kneading the dough means you are basically using your fists to fold the dough in on itself, then pushing it away from your body. Then you rotate the doughy ball a quarter turn, fold it in on itself and push it away again. People make this sound really hard and complicated, or else they make it sound like you're just supposed to punch the dough over and over again, like that's going to do anything except make tough dough. Picture a cat kneading something. They pull a little bit, they pat it down, and then they stretch their front paws our away from them. It's something like that.

After a few minutes, your dough will be nice and stretchy, and getting hard to knead. form it into a neat little ball, and let it rest.

 After a short time it will start to rise. My daughter says it grows. She actually was a little freaked out that every time she went into the kitchen, the dough was bigger. I can't tell you how long it should rest, because my house gets very warm when I'm baking, so things tend to rise quickly. You want you dough to be roughly double in size from what it was. I took my picture a bit early, so my dough isn't quite doubled, but I wanted to show you that it grew.

 After that point, squish it a little bit, and cut the dough ball in half. Set one half aside. With a rolling pin (or a wine bottle, which is all I have at the moment) roll one of your halves of dough into a rectangle shape. Then taking the edge closest to you, start rolling the dough together again. The instructions I found said to roll it like a jelly roll. I've never made a jelly roll, so whatever on that. Tuck the ends under the roll to get nice pretty ends, or don't if you don't care.  Repeat with the second half of your dough. Put both rolls on a greased backing sheet, and cut some diagonal lines on the top. These are to help release steam as the bread bakes.

 Let the dough rest a little longer. It will puff up some more, and you'll see those lines you cut start to spread apart. Then bake in a preheated over (350 degrees F) for 30-35 minutes. The bread will have a nice golden color to it. It is important to let bread cool completely before slicing it, otherwise the rest of the loaf will get gummy. We didn't let the bread cool at all, but we ate the whole first loaf before it cooled and got the chance to get gummy. Notice I didn't tuck the ends of my dough under, and I have pinched looking ends.

 The next morning I made French Toast with the second loaf. It was super delicious. It also meant I had to make more bread. From start to finish the bread took about 2 1/2 hours to make, but I really only spent about 30 minutes working on it. Give or take a few.

 This is the last of the first batch of bread. :) It was good.