When I was about 10, my neighbor came over to babysit my brother, sister, and me. My sister being about one at the time, my mother left one instruction: check on the baby. Instead, we baked bread, which my neighbor loved to do. I don’t remember how the bread tasted, but I do remember my mother yelling at the babysitter,“You didn’t check on the baby!”
“But Mrs. Lear, how did you know?”, the girl responded. “Easy,” said my mother. “There are no white footprints leading to her room, while there is flour all over the rest of the house!”
This, and the fact that bread takes a long time to make, has led to a lifelong aversion to baking bread. That came to an end today, with a little coaxing from a few corners, not the least of which were my wife and daughter. I started with the simplest recipe I could find, after my wife found yeast. It’s Super Easy Bread for Beginners, which is found on about.com. This is a recipe that is nearly impossible to get wrong, and yet I almost did, by misreading the amount of salt (I thought I saw a b in tsp). It is an extremely white bread, but it’s a start. Next stop will not be a challah, as I’m still not up to either separating out eggs, or braiding. But it will be a more whole or cracked wheat bread with some fun seeds. Wish me luck.
For the record: no flour all over the house, although daughter’s shirt needed a good sweeping.