Recipe!

I've been trying quite a few new recipes lately and thought I'd share what my family has enjoyed here and there. Not necessarily a regular column, but definitly something that will be repeated. I thought I'd start with my bread recipe. I got it from "America's Test Kitchen CookBook" and have adapted it to fit my ingredients and kitchen. It's yummy, and now that we are exclusively on homemade bread we eat it all the time - literally.

In 2 C. glass pyrex measuring cup:
1 C. Milk
1/3 C. Water
3 T. Butter/Margarine

Microwave for 1 min. 30 sec.

While liquid is in the microwave, add 3 T. honey to your mixer (mine's a KitchenAide, LOVE IT, and recommend it to those who make a lot of bread).

Pour liquid over the honey in your mixer. Add 2 1/2 tsp. yeast, 2 tsp. salt and mix with the bread hook dough. Slowly add 1 C. all-purpose flour and 3 C. bread flour (bread flour is the secret to good homemade bread, took me a few years to figure this out, but it does make a HUGE difference). Mix thoroughly until dough pulls away from sides of the bowl.

Flour your counter top and pour your bread dough onto the counter. Knead by hand on the counter, adding more flour until dough is no longer sticky and to desired consistency.

Spray bowl with cooking spray, put your dough in the bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise until double (about an hour).

Punch down, shape into loaf and put into sprayed metal loaf pan. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise, again 'til double in size or to desired size of loaf. Heat oven to 350 degrees, along with a bread pan that's half full of water. This keeps the humidity in the oven high so the crust isn't too hard or over cooked. Bake for 35 mins.

Remove from oven and from bread pan onto a wire rack. While still warm, rub the outside of the loaf with butter/margarine.

This recipe freezes well, see my previous posts abour freezing bread dough.

This May Not be Kansas, but it's Still Scary!

The threat of tornados is still scary to me here in the midwest. We had these in Alabama as well, but the weather man there was AWESOME and you could turn on the news and know where the tornados would hit if they came down. Here in Indiana it's just pretty much "A storm is coming TAKE COVER!"

We also get straight line winds that make me nervous and wishing for a basement. A couple of nights ago the wind was just howling, and the next day I was picking up some toys scattered around the backyard and found some shingles. Uh, oh! Yep, a few had been ripped off the roof in the night. We were really blessed that some shingles had been leftover from a back porch area that the previous owners had added onto the house, and the fact that they left the leftovers was so amazing. We didn't have to go hunting for matching shingles, but Jesse was out on the roof until well after dark last night trying to get them attached. Of course the weatherman predicted rain today, so it HAD to be done yesterday...then it didn't rain at all.

Good news though, we have a fund raiser this year that I think will be a success. The YW are selling ward cookbooks for $5 each and we've had a ton of Relief Society sisters making multiple orders. There are 95 recipes in the books, they were all submitted by the RS sisters, most by email, so it wasn't terribly hard to put together and they only cost $1.62 per book to make. Meaning the majority of the funds raised will go to the girls. I'll post again if it's as big of a success as I'm hoping.

Jesse also got two raises this week, he got a merit raise AND a cost of living raise. I told him this meant we had no excuses for date night anymore :). We just can never seem to justify the cost of dinner and a movie, plus the cost of a babysitter...but once a month shouldn't hurt, especially since we only go to the dollar movies.

We've also discovered RedBox rentals. We had been limiting our movie watching to the dollar theater then just buying the movies we wanted at Christmas. For the cost of seeing a "real" movie, we figured we could just own it. Now that we have found Red Box, we can 'preview' the movie for cheap and decide if it's worth the $15. Of course movies that we KNOW we'll like we go ahead put it on our 'to buy' list (like Star Trek, Narnia, or the Bourne movies), but this just gives us one more option. The only bad thing is the RedBox we go to is in McDonalds and those fries are SO, SO TEMPTING!