I know this is not very helpful in terms of my NaNoSweMo goal but I made soup, spaghetti sauce and bread today and did not knit very much. Niels was sick over the weekend and was not fever free for 24 hours yet this morning so he stayed home from school. Every time I walked into the living room to sit on the couch and knit while they played there was some chaos in my way or something that needed attention. I got several loads of wash done (and folded!) and a lot done in the kitchen, most notably, the bread. I don't bake bread very often but I was looking in an old spiral notebook that has recipes I wrote down in the mid-90s, I think. My mom needed the recipe for Swedish meatballs that she gave me and that's where that one is. I was looking through it and found a recipe for Honey Whole Wheat bread which I say is from the bread book in Bon Appetit series of cookbook. I think that must mean it came from my mother's house so I am going to have to look at it again when we visit them because the recipe seemed woefully lacking to me.
There's no mention of kneading, just of beating the dough in the mixer. That made some sense to me until I got to the second "knead" and the bread was so incredibly sticky. I decided to knead it by hand instead. I had also substituted bread flour for the all-purpose and I think my whole wheat is pastry flour and I also added vital wheat gluten, so I wasn't exactly following the recipe anyway. I kneaded in a bunch more flour until it felt smooth, let it rest, and then shaped a loaf put it in the loaf pan rather than just beating it in the mixer and "turning it out" into the loaf pan. It was a success. (It's shiny because I had just brushed it with butter when I took this photo.)
The crust is very thick but the crumb is soft and sweet. I started to write that sentence in the past tense because I cut it and we all ate a couple of slices with dinner and it's almost gone! This is one of the reasons I don't bake bread that often, it takes all day and then is gone in an instant. I need to learn to make more than one at a time.
the sheep free knitter 