Homemade bread

You may recall that I've taken over much of the cooking in my house.  Some of it has been good, some of it just o.k. and some of it has been pretty bad.

A couple of days ago I dragged out our old, hardly ever used bread machine to see what I could do.

My first loaf suffered because I forgot to use warm liquid.  That was pretty much a short little hockey puck.  The second loaf was a potato bread that turned out a lot better.  But my healthy diet conscious wife said "why don't you try something with whole wheat flour."  (I knew that was coming and had already considered it.) 

In the meantime, I had bought a quart of buttermilk because I thought I'd seen a recipe that looked interesting.  I made buttermilk/banana pancakes this morning.  Now neither of us is fond of pancakes but we got through them and I thought they were pretty good.  But I still had quite a bit of buttermilk and was wondering how to use it before it went bad.  (Which brings to mind the old line - How do you tell if your buttermilk has gone bad, anyway?  But that's beside the point here.)

SWMBO to the rescue!  She found a recipe on the Internet for Buttermilk Honey Wheat Bread made in a bread machine.  The recipe said it would only take 55 minutes.  Now, I know how long my bread machine takes just to knead the dough and let it rise and bake it and I seriously doubted that.  But I went ahead, tossed it together and turned on the machine.  It's clock told me it would be all ready in . . . . . 3 hours and 45 minutes!  But hey, I'm retired, I've got nothing but time. 

It finally got done, we tasted it and loved it.  Wonderful!

It's a small loaf but there are only the two of us and we can always make more.

If you're so inclined, you can find the recipe here.  Just don't trust it when it says it only takes 55 minutes.