This week I had probably the most hectic two academic days of my college career (a paper due and 2 midterms in the span of 24 hours), and the main thing that kept me motivated through the endless hours of cellular respiration and genetic recombination rates was that after the molecular mayhem was over, Gertrude and I would be reunited (actually we weren't reunited but I will get to that later). Despite my daydreaming while studying of making an epic recipe, after all my tests were over, I pretty much wanted to do nothing. So basically, I "kneaded" a recipe that entailed me doing just about that: nothing. Luckily, bread machines are great fo lazy people who don't want to do anything more elaborate than dumping ingredients in a metal bucket. Plain bread is a bit boring though, so I needed to "spice" it up- literally.
Recently on my weekly sunday grocery store trips (what is better than spending way too much money on food after you go run 14 miles?), I have been accruing various spices for our spice cabinet such as thyme, oregano, basil, etc. Other than rubbing the spices all over my chicken that I make, I hardly use them- therefore I decided to go with some whole wheat herb bread that I could put my spices to good use in. The recipe I used was:
1 1/4 cups warm water
1 1/2 cup Bread flour
1/2 cup white whole wheat flour
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons dry milk (aka the weirdest stuff ever)
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2teaspoons dried basil leaves
1 teaspoon dried thyme leaves
2 teaspoons bread machine or quick active dry yeast
1. put ingredients in bread machine- wet ingredients, followed by dry
2. put bread on basic cycle with light or medium crust
3. enjoy!
Usually I am against using my bread machine in the place of Gertrude to actually bake the bread. However, the idea of turning my bread machine on, leaving for a few hours for some errands and then returning to freshly baked bread sounded extremely appealing. Even though the bread looked like a bread cube rather than a bread loaf and didn't rise quite right, the bread turned out warm, herby (don't ask if that is a word) and delicious.
After I spent my usual 20 minutes or so trying to do my bread photographic justice, I decided I had done enough work for the day (making the bread was superrrr exhausting as you can see) and that I would upload and write the next day. Well flash forward two days later, I finally got around to blogging and uploading. Unfortunately, my procrastination backfired since my roommate (who recently started an awesome blog http://craftcoma.wordpress.com), thought I had already uploaded my pictures and erased them of her camera when she was taking awesome pictures of gluesticks for her crafty blog. Luckily, I still had a few nubbins of my bread left in the freezer and was able to clean them up a bit to make them more presentable. I also decided putting them into the toaster over with some butter herb-garlic spread and a sprinkle of mozzarella cheese seemed like a good idea to make them look (and taste) much more food-blog-esque.
I just loaf bread so much!!
