Crazy Bread Lady

I stayed up pretty much all night long baking bread. I don't know why. I have this sort of mania sometimes. Like I'll read about something and have to do it immediately or I can't think about anything else until it happens. So Ellen gave me this memoir/cookbook about a woman who seems just like Ellen. This lady thinks all tables need flowers and that all meals MUST have a salad course with separate plates. I guess when you're over thirty you stop eating food out of the pot with a fork, I don't know. I'll have to wait and find out.

Anyway, this lady insisted her bread recipe was amazing and super easy. So I sent Corey out to buy wheat flour and yeast and I kneaded some dough. Because many of my experiments like this (I'm referring to the multiple yogurt disasters) have gone terribly wrong, I was super impatient about my bread dough. I was convinced I had effed it up and it would just sit there like a sticky lump and do nothing.

I peeked at it every five minutes. I couldn't sleep, even though I knew it was ok to let the sucker rise over night. I just had to keep peeking. And sure enough, it looked like it was doing nothing at all. My heart sank, I fell asleep. But then, this morning, it was sort of puffy! When I punched it, my hand sank into the dough, air escaped. I had made bread rise! It was so awesome. So I slapped it around for awhile, covered it with a towel and went back to bed.


Then, when I came back to the kitchen at 830, it had risen again! I have made bread. I have it in the oven right now.


As I questioned earlier this week, why do I do these things? Why am I reading a memoir cookbook and baking bread? I bought the Mrs. Beeton book, I have 30 pounds of bridal catalogues to read while I knead dough. It's so satisfying to do these things, too. It feels really good to know that I took some raw ingredients and formed them into something way more delicious than the supermarket could do.

It's also really neat to sit down to a meal I made completely from the beginning. I didn't grind the flour or stomp the olives, but I certainly infused the oil and kneaded the dough. I'm pretty jazzed to make french toast from my new loaf of wheat bread. Yum!

Ok, so the final product is a little crunchy. As in rock solid on the outside and a LITTLE soft in the middle. It's ok warm with butter, but not so good just on its own. It certainly does not melt in my mouth like the book suggests. I wonder if I cooked it too long? Or if I did something wrong with the ingredients. When Corey gets home from work, I'll send him to the store for more yeast. I have to get this right!