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Thursday, August 29, 2013

Gettin' all Little House on the Prairie up in this joint

I love to bake. Cookies, cakes, pies, breads - oh, bread! I love working with yeast dough - the smell, the texture, the kneading and stretching and rising and punching and rising again. If I was a KW (that's kept woman, or stay-at-home wife, if you prefer) we would eat only bread I baked myself. And I would do all sorts of other crafty and pioneer woman kinds of stuff.

But crafting dough and dough-based foodstuffs takes time - hours upon hours of resting and proofing. And when you work full time, sling plastic part time, are active in community organizations, and try to have a satisfying married and social life as well, there's just not much time left for dough. But I'm trying to learn to live again, remember? So I shall bake more this year than I have in the last three years.

When I do find time to bake, though, I get sidetracked easily and I go take a nap or start another project while my dough is rising and then it takes twice as long to get anything done. So I'm working to enlist the help of my friend P to the Enny to have an all-out baking day. She's game, but our schedules are both so hectic that - again - it's hard to find the time. But find the time we must! We're planning to work our baking day into the whole freezer cooking concept as well by either freezing several batches of dough or freezing finished bread products. I especially want to bake up a mess of bagels and freeze them to have for breakfast throughout the week. I found a bagel recipe on Smitten Kitchen that just looks amazing. I can't wait to try it out myself. Even if you don't plan to ever make your own bagels, pop on over to her blog to see the beautiful photos that accompany her recipes. I'm jealous.

So tell me, readers - do any of you have a favorite go-to bread recipe? Do you have a secret for finding the time to bake and making it happen? Do you bake at all? Or do you find it intimidating and just not worth the effort. I love seeing your comments, so share with me! Tell me your stories! Use the little "Post a Comment" box below. Let me know you're out there.

2 comments:

  1. I love to bake, too! All kinds of things, but mostly cookies, cake (I'm into baking cakes from scratch now, rather than mixes) and bread. I don't bake bread often, but I would like to. The last yeast bread I baked was tsoureki for Pascha, which is a braided sweet loaf with lots of eggs and dairy. My favorite cookbook is one I picked up at a Friends of the Library booksale years ago: The Great American Baking Book. I also love King Arthur Flour's website. If I could, I would fill my freezer with home baked bread too. :)

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    1. Steve is coaxing me to try baking Scandinavian goodies this year. He grew up on Swedish and Danish pastry living in the Chicago suburbs (his mom is half Danish), but those kinds of goodies are hard to come by in Southern Indiana. So I'm doing my research, including from some great club cookbooks I inherited from his mom. She enjoyed collecting interesting cookbooks from Junior Leagues, etc. I need to spend more time on the King Arthur Flour site. Great stuff there. My MIL also bought me a Martha Stewart baking cookbook that's a bit intimidating, but I need to dive into! I'm glad there are others out there baking! Stop by again and share what you've been cooking, Angie!

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