baking day

Arline (daughter #1) has a “baking day” each week.

Whatever her hungry family needs baked for the next week happens that day. She makes a big batch of cookies, makes them into nice little balls, and freezes most of them. Then when she wants the family to have some cookies, she gets out the amount of little frozen cookies, bakes them right there and serves them hot. They all enjoy those hot cookies.

She does all of this in one busy morning.

Hmm.

But I digress.

I Usually make bread when we run out. That may be a week and it might be less or more. Often I give a loaf away so a batch does not last as long as when I don’t, and sometimes I make a lot of quick breads making regular bread last longer.

Today was make bread making day. So, remembering how Arline does it, and dedicated the morning to baking. I made three loaves of whole wheat bread, two of all french bread (my french bread is not really french, but it is not too bad, really), and then a dish of apple crisp, with apples from the freezer.

It really does not take much longer to make two batches than one. In fact both breads will be ready to come out of the oven at the same time.

Making bread is really not a hard job. It takes two elapsed hours to make a batch, but only about 20 minutes of that in actually time, the rest is proofing and baking time. I encourage every one to make their own bread, at least once in a while.

If any one is interested I’ll posts the recipe I use (Arline gave it to me and I follow it pretty closely).

A mixer makes it a lot easier, though I have made bread for years without one. My sep father who grew up working in a family owned bakery talked about making 25 loaf batches of bread and hand kneading it!

Arline and Lora both have Bosch mixers, which are pretty nice. We have a big Kitchen-Aid. In the bakeries where I worked the mixers were all Hobart, the parent company of Kitchen-Aid, so I went that direction. Ours is the big one where the bowl raises and lowers by a lever on the side and not the one that tilts back.

And that is a story too.

A long time ago on Miriam’s birthday I went to the Bon Marche (now Macy’s) to look around. I did not know what I wanted to buy her, but I was expecting to spend about $50.

Then I came by the display of these big mixers and I was hooked. My memory is that I laid out close to three big bills for it, but it sure has worked well for us. Miriam, of course, was amazed.

I know it was not terribly romantic as gifts go.

I am sure that I bought her some lingerie to make up the romance factor. That is my story, and I am not changing it!