Today I worked from 6-10. The morning started out a little rough...the coffee pot broke. Now I know to most people this doesn't seem like a huge deal, but for me it mean the difference between a normal morning and a riot of old people running at me with their scooters, canes, and walkers demanding the liquid gold! Not to sound dramatic, but it could have been bad...they love their coffee. Luckily for them I'm also a part-time mechanic and I managed to find the piece that had fallen off and fixed it just in time.

 The best thing about getting off at 10:00 is that you have the rest of the day ahead of you, which is such a great feeling! I was going to take Scout for a walk, but he was too exhausted from his previous endeavor of shredding the cardboard box I had all my "give-away" clothes in. Thanks buddy. So while Scout napped I decided to make some whole wheat bread.

I feel like nobody makes bread anymore, at least not for your everyday eating. Homemade bread makes people ooh and ahh like it's a rare delicacy, when in reality it is one of the simplest things you can make. I've made lots of white bread (really REALLY easy), but I've been a little nervous to try a whole wheat recipe. Don't ask me why, it just seems scarier using things with names like flax seed, wheat germ, and vital wheat gluten in them. Bread was the thing that made me realize that I really wanted to go all organic in our kitchen. Evan and I went home to Pennsylvania on a month leave after he got home from deployment. I accidently left a loaf of bread in the cuboard. When we got home I pulled it out, and I was horrified to find that it looked exactly the same as the day I bought it! ---we were gone an entire month people! That really can't be healthy! Homemade bread stales so quickly that Evan and I have a hard time eating a whole loaf before we have to resort to using for toast and grilled cheese only. I started buying Rudi's Organic Bread at the grocery store, it is delcious and more nutritious for a store brand, but there are 3 things I'm not crazy about. 1. The slices are "heafty" which some people might love, but for us it's just too much bread. 2. These heafty slices come with a heafty price of around $4.95 a loaf. 3. You don't get as many slices as a normal loaf of bread, which means you end up paying more, but getting less (amount) that you would normally. Now I understand that everything organic is more expensive, but really I just want to be able to controll what we are eating. No more preservitives, chemicals, hormones, etc. just simple, good food. If I make my own bread I know exactly what is going into it, and I can make it just the way we like it.

I made my way to the organic departement in Kroger and found that Bob's Red Mill flour was the only kind they carried. So, with all the options I tried Bob's Red Mill whole wheat flour and I also picked up a package of vital wheat gluten (scary). I got the whole wheat recipe here. It was simple to follow, and turned out ok...but the top of my loaf deflated in the oven.

 See the sad, deflated top?

Grammy Grace and Pap's homemade Applebutter makes it AWESOME.

It still tastes great and is still fluffy and soft, which I wasn't expecting for a "whole wheat" loaf. I still might subsitute 1/3 white flour 2/3 whole wheat flour just to make it more wheat bread instead of WHEAT bread, if you know what I mean. I also want to add some wheat germ and flax seed, which both are supossedly extremely nutritious. For 1/4 of the price per organic loaf in the supermarket, it wasn't half bad! It definetly wasn't as scary as I thought it would be, but I'll have to perfect it a little more.

“All sorrows are less with bread.”
Miguel de Cervantes, Spanish author. (1547-1616)