New Baking

I have a new toy. There was an incredible sale on bread makers so though we were shopping for lawn resurrection supplies, we finally gave in to the impulse shopping urge. We'd been thinking of getting one for ages, but the timing was never quite right, or so I claimed. Wrong model. Wrong colour. Not a compelling sale price. But the biggest deterrent: we have zero counter space in the kitchen. I'd resisted my own carb-lust and dissuaded Beans' from indulging me...at least, for the time being. Faced with a 46% off sale, what's a bread-fiend to do?

I tore into the box like a kid at Christmas as soon as we got home, leaving ever-patient Beans to finish unloading the rest of the shopping/groceries from the car. Visions of crusty golden loaves, the scent of warm yeast and fresh baking had overtaken me. As he put away groceries, I pored over the manual. "We're having bread for dinner!" I declared at 6pm.

Uh-huh.

Right.

It'd been ages since I'd baked bread from scratch. Staring at the shiny new machine in my kitchen, I lost all sense of reality. I now have a bread machine, so (clap, clap), "let there be bread", right?

Kids, it takes HOURS to make bread. I'd forgotten that part, but I was bound and determined to bake bread, dang it. 2 hours+ to run the (empty) machine through a full cycle before first use, as instructed in the manual. I spent that time trying to comprehend the annoyingly structured instructions. (Note to technical writers: Page numbers. Table of contents. Put information in logical order. Use these tools when writing a users' manual. They are helpful.) Thanks to the back-assed sequencing of information, I failed to correctly set the "automatic extras dispenser" so my Hearty Nut Bread, while hearty, is relatively nut free.

Four and a half hours later (total machine magic and cooling time):


I woke Beans at 10:30 pm to show him my fresh-out-of-the-oven triumph. He tried to be enthusiastic, but it was a pretty sleepy review. He didn't even want to smell it!

Incidentally, we had rice for dinner.

The hearty nut(less) loaf made for a great breakfast instead!