At Home My Way

I made a delicious loaf of Italian bread the other night to go with supper.  Italian bread is different from French bread in that traditional French bread (baguette) is made from only flour, water, yeast, and salt.  Italian bread adds a little milk, sugar, or fat to soften up the loaf. Sometimes we buy those $1 loaves of "french" bread at Walmart and either make sandwiches with the bread or make garlic bread with it.  They're pretty good stuff if you don't have time to make homemade.  They have few preservatives and are much cheaper than buying sliced white bread for sandwiches.  A few cuts with my electric knife and I have some great sandwich bread with a little more stretch to my dollar.   But I wanted a recipe so that I could make those at home. I've been trying french bread recipes and they're good, but not the texture that my husband prefers when we make garlic bread at home (because he's prefers store bought - ugh!).  I knew the loaves I ...

I love to make homemade sandwich bread.  I like that it has a little more "bite" to it than store bought bread.  Now,.. we still buy sandwich bread.  But that's only because my husband prefers his sandwiches on super soft, super white bread.  Me?  Not so much!  I like homemade white bread, especially the original recipe found HERE that this recipe for Molasses Light Wheat Bread comes from.  But, I also LOVE wheat bread!  To make wheat bread, I vary the amounts of wheat to white flour in the bread, depending on what I'm in the mood for.  Typically in the winter I want dark, almost bitter wheat bread and I up the wheat to white flour ratio in that type of bread. I made this loaf Sunday, on a hot day in July!  I wanted it for sandwiches (specifically, peanut butter) and for toast!  One time I suggested to my mother-in-law that I love toast made with homemade bread.  She told me that she was afraid to make toast with homemad...

My menu plan for the week is pretty simple.  We ate lots of leftovers last week so I plan to include lots of the items I had planned to use last week for this week's meals. Breakfasts :  Leftover Cinnamon Buns (these are BEYOND delicious so I am posting the recipe today); Yogurt w/ fruit and Perfect Granola Homemade Biscuits Toast w/Homemade Peach Preserves Lunches : Salad with Homemade Ranch Dressing & crusty bread Peanut Butter & Homemade Jelly sandwiches Pizza Hot Pockets Suppers : Ham Steak w/ pinto beans and rice (from the freezer) Taco Tuesday with cheese beans, nachos Chicken & Homemade Noodles Homemade Pizza Spaghetti Sauce NOW... WITHOUT FURTHER ADIEU... the cinnamon buns! They were beyond wonderful!  I was in awe of the beautiful pastry sitting on my plate.  They were as beautiful as any I had ever seen "under glass" in fancy bakeries!  And delicious?  YUM!  I could go on and on... B...

I found a recipe for Homemade Bagels making the dough in the bread machine.  I knew I had to try it! I love my bread machine!  I think lots of people have these little appliances and don't use them.  Get your bread machine out of the cabinet!  They are so wonderful!  I rarely bake anything in mine, but I DO use it for all the mixing and timing.  That saves lots of steps.  But what I most like is that anything you mix in the bread machine is "managable".  There are no huge day-long baking adventures created with one batch of dough in a bread machine. This little recipe made 8 bagels!  Perfectly managable.  Especially for a night when I had worked all day, came home to make supper, and wanted to do try something new like making bagels.  I have tried making bagels before but never with this much success.  These are perfect!!!! These bagels are chewy, with a crispy crust, but light inside!  I loved them!...