Baking Bread

So, making bread from scratch is hard. Particularly when you're talking on the phone while you're doing it and can't recall if you've already measured out 3 cups of flour or 4. Clearly it takes more focus then I gave it, and perhaps a bit of luck.

I'm certain that I added the right amount of yeast, but maybe I needed to do a little dance, turn around in a circle 3 times and throw some salt over my right shoulder to insure that the yeast actually fulfilled it's life purpose. According to my favorite cookbook (yes, "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian") the dough was supposed to double in size over the course of 2 hours. It didn't. It maybe eighthed in size. So it was a little disappointing when I went to "punch it down" and the dough didn't really move.

That said, I made bread yesterday. From scratch. I used flour, wheat bran, oats, yeast, salt, canola, and a maple syrup/local honey combo to sweeten. And it's really good. Like grandma's kitchen good. We don't want to buy store bread anymore if we can help it. Infact, we ordered an electric bread maker yesterday before I embarked on the 'from scratch' train. I hope that we use it when we need too, because there will be times when we're just too swamped to beg the god's of yeast to RISE RISE RISE (!!!!). But I hope that we take time to make it from scratch just as often. The more you try the better you become, right?