Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Babies and Bread Machines

I'm a few days away from my daughter hitting the three month mark and I still can't shake the "I have a baby! Holy crap!" feeling.

(Photo care of the lovely Danielle)

It is all those stereotypical crazy/awesome/wonderful things and also, occasionally, really, really gross.  Really. 

You learn all sorts of new skills when you have a baby, and one of the top ones is redefining time management.  Babies have no sense of urgency.  They don't care that you have an appointment in an hour - they want what they want right now.

This means that I've come to appreciate my 'new to me' bread machine on a whole new level.  I can just throw in the ingredients, hit the start button, and 3-4 hours later, I have delicious bread!  If I can't get to the machine, it has an automatic keep warm feature, which shuts itself off after an hour.  It is freaking amazing.

So far, I've made one loaf of each of the following kinds of bread:
whole wheat
oatmeal
cinnamon
4 cheese

Totally worth it.  The cinnamon bread was fantastic toasted with butter, although if we had maple spread in the house, I'm sure it would have been great with that too.

The four cheese bread (ricotta, swiss, old cheddar and parmesan mixed right into the bread dough) is also lovely.  So far I've mostly eaten it plain with butter, but I've also turned it into fantastic garlic toast.  I'm thinking it'll make interesting sandwiches as well since it is so flavourful.

Do you enjoy making bread?  Do you use a bread machine?  Got any good bread recipes?