Wheat Bread

Man oh man, my grandma made the best bread. I mean, her bread was so good that getting a loaf of her bread was like getting a little loaf of gramma love. That sounds cheesy. Fuck you if you don't like it.

Anyway, I emailed my brother up in Alaska for Grandma's bread recipe, but he's trying to raise four young kids and can't be arsed to get back to me. So I had to make do with the recipe from the Better Homes cookbook.

And so, wheat bread. I thought there would be more ingredients:



That's not double vision there, that's two different kinds of flour:



So anyway, mix some flour and yeast in a bowl. Real exciting. Then I had to mix all the wet stuff and cook it just til it was warm, 110 or so, in a sauce pan. I'm no good at knowing how hot stuff is without a thermometer, so I just kind of guessed. Then I poured it in with the flour/yeast mix. Mmmmmm doesn't that look tasty?



This is right about where I started to mentally kick myself for not reading the whole recipe through before starting it. Turns out I was supposed to have my hand mixer all ready. Oops. Anyhow, got it mixed, added the wheat flour, and got ready to wrestle that ball of dough down. This was not going to be walnut-filled bread part 2. I got ready this time: old towel near by to scrape dough off my fingers, some warm water for the same reason, and a small bowl of "fuck you" flour. As in, "fuck you, dough. You're gonna do what I tell you to do, and you're not gonna turn into glue and make it impossible to scratch my head when it itches. Have some damn flour, dough! You're my bitch now."

As you can see, the dough came around to my way of thinking:



So anyhow, let it rise to twice the size. I have one of those things on my stove that carries heat from the oven up to the stove top, so I had the oven on warm and set the bowl right by the, um, oven heat vent thing. It rose pretty nicely, and punching it down was much easier than when I had to deal with the walnut bread.





I kicked myself again here for not reading the directions all the way through. Turns out I needed two loaf pans, not just the one that I have. So when it came time to divide the dough, I put one loaf in the pan and the other loaf got balled up and put in a cake pan:



Let it rise a bit more and threw it in the oven. The book said to let it cook for 40-45 minutes, but since the walnut bread was such a bitch and cooked so fast, I set the timer for half an hour. I tapped the loaves after half an hour, they sounded kind of hollow. I took 'em out.



Mmmmm that looks pretty good!

So I had a little bread smorgasboard. A very little one. I was kind of sleepy.



Mmmmmm marmalade. Mmmmmm apple butter. Oh hell yes.

Well, the crust was done. It was crunchy and if had been in there much longer it would have burned. The middle of the bread wasn't as light and fluffy as it should have been. I don't know if this is from under cooking or if I fucked up the part where I was heating up the liquids in the sauce pan. It's edible, though, so whatever.

Oh, a few weeks ago somebody posted a comment asking why the little black flashlight is in a lot of the cooking shots. I hit the wrong button and deleted it. Oh dear.

Anyway, the wiring in my apartment is shit. I'm always blowing a fuse by doing crazy insane shit like making some toast while brewing some coffee while watching the news. Since I have to go out the back door to get to the circuit breaker, I leave the flash light by the toaster oven so I can always find it. It's a mini Mag light, and it fits in that area well, so that's where I keep it.

What, that answer isn't sexy enough for you? Fine. It's in all of my shots because I am a giant and I want to show you how big my possessions are in comparison to a damn serious police-baton-size Mag light. You puny people could not handle the splendor and vast flatware in my kitchen, so I put a Mag light in my pictures to remind you of my awesome powers of being 100x bigger than you.