We have been on a bread and butter kick lately. More specifically, a homemade bread and homemade apple butter kick. People who made their own bread and apple butter used to fascinate me.
Who were these Martha Stewart type people who had the time and skills to accomplish these things? Did I miss the class on "how to be a housewife"? When did they find the time?!
These questions that used to plague me are now gone. Now that I am not working or in school I took the time to research how those homey-housewife, homemade bread baking, apple butter making people do it. They cheat. Yup. I learned that making homemade bread and apple butter is no big deal. On the contrary, it is easy as pie. Well, easy as buying a pie from Costco and warming it in the oven.
I found a recipe for no knead bread from a blog called the Steamy Kitchen. (Click here to see the recipe http://steamykitchen.com/168-no-knead-bread-revisited.html) She claimed that it was so easy a four year old could do it. She was right.
First I mixed all the ingredients together in a bowl, covered it with a towel, and went to bed. The next morning I forgot about it entirely. When I remembered it, it was the early afternoon and looked like this.
It smelled good and had more than doubled in size. Here is an extreme close up of the air bubbles...
I then pushed it into a ball shape with a spatula, put it on a piece of parchment paper, and let it rise again.
Two hours later I put it into a preheated dutch oven, and let it bake. When I took it out of the oven it looked like this...
I thought, "Holy Crap!" (in the voice of Frank Barone from Everybody Loves Raymond)
It tasted just as good as it looked.
I had meant to take a good picture of it once it was cut, but I got to hungry and just snapped this one before digging in.
I have since made this recipe two more times. The loaves don't always look the same, but they are always tasty.
Long ago Louis decided that he was going to be the "bread master" of our family. All my bread baking was starting to infringe on his territory. So he pulled out his bread cookbook and produced this little number...
Okay, so it wasn't little at all. It was huge. And soft. And slightly sweet. Like a giant donut. I told him he had officially re-claimed his title.
All this bread! What, you ask, were we spreading on all this starchy goodness? Apple butter of course! By the way, making apple butter is even easier than making bread. I poured two jars of apple sauce into a crock pot, sprinkled in some cinnamon and cloves, turned it on high and went to bed. The next morning I stirred it a few times until I thought it had reached the proper thickness. The only bad thing about this apple butter, is that once it cooks down there isn't much left!
It goes very quickly.
Especially when eaten on cornbread muffins.
So there. Take that Martha Stewart. Now I can fool people into thinking i'm a Suzy Homemaker too...
