Bread Baking Bliss

About a year ago, we renovated our home pretty much from top to bottom. I'm now the happy owner of a beautiful, big, sunny, eat-in kitchen, complete with my dream stove , a La Canche with a 5 burner cooking top and 2 side-by-side dual fuel ovens. As a mother with 4 children, this is the room where I live most of my life. As a woman who loves to cook, it is also the room where I can get messy and create my art.

Now, anyone who is here on fish stick night might quibble with that description of my cooking, but bear with me. For the most part, I try to cook the meals I serve from scratch. I love shopping for ingredients, planning menus, and then getting to work. When I'm, chopping, dicing, sauteing, braising, simmering, baking, seasoning, and stirring, I'm creating. I'm creating something delicious for my family's table, and a happy atmosphere in our kitchen.

I'm trying to teach my children that food is not just something you grab on the run. It is a good gift from God, and we can take that good food and work with it to turn it into meals that nourish us body and soul. Even really little children love the magic of turning ingredients like flour and sugar and butter into cookies we can serve for an afternoon treat. It is a wonderful hands-on lesson that teaches the rewards of labor can be sweet.

We are losing something as people when we fill our grocery carts and pantry shelves with factory produced foodstuffs. We're losing the knowledge of how to make our foods ourselves, we're losing the chance to connect with our kids in the kitchen and pass those skills onto them, and we're losing the satisfaction and joy that come from sitting down to a table to eat a meal we've made with our own hands. More and more, I want to forestall those losses. So, to that end, I've set about learning how to make the bread and pasta that my family eats. I don't mean the occasional loaf of specialty bread, although I think that's delicious and fine. I mean I am trying to figure out how much bread my family eats each week (toast, sandwiches, bagels, English muffins, hamburger or hot dog buns) and how I can set up a baking schedule that will produce it right here in our very own ovens. I'm going to try and rotate my way through a variety of recipes to come up with our "house" varieties, and then work to estabish when I need to get baking. I'm planning on turning to my kitchen mentors Mark Bittman, Gerard Auzet, and Julia Child for their recipes.

And I'll turn here to share the progress I make as we go along.