Bread Machine!

It arrived!  The bread machine.  My theory is that I'll be able to quickly and easily make sandwich bread instead of buying store bought, saving us money in the long run and allowing me to make more nutritious bread with ingredients that I can control.  We'll see how all of that works out.

In the meantime, I'm anxiously awaiting a huge order from King Arthur Flour.  Organic whole wheat flour, baking powder that doesn't contain aluminum, yeast, granular lecithin (to increase the bread's shelf life a bit), vital wheat gluten.  For some reason I always think "viral wheat gluten" in my head.  Thankfully I haven't actually said it aloud when trying to talk to someone like I know about the intricacies of baking bread. 

The truth is that I've only attempted breadmaking a handful of times, to very mixed results.  The dough wouldn't rise enough, or else rose too much and then deflated.  Or it was chewy, or too dense.  I've had much better luck with sweeter loaf breads like banana or pumpkin.  (Oooh, pumpkin bread.  Mmmm.) Hopefully the bread machine will take out some of the guessing, especially because I'll be following a recipe from Marilyn Shannon's book Fertility, Cycles & Nutrition.

Honestly, I never understood the point of bread makers when I was younger.  Where's the fun in just dumping stuff into a pot and not getting your hands dirty?  I'm still sure that baking "real" bread actually is more fun, but I've come to realize that anything that I can dump ingredients into and then find ready-to-eat food in a couple of hours later is definitely my friend.  Slow cooker, I brought you a buddy!