My house smells wonderful right about now.  I’m baking bread!  I found a wonderful new cookbook that I downloaded this week called Kneadlessly Simple*.  Absolutely all the recipes in this book can be made without kneading.  This is a huge benefit when you have a tiny little kitchen!  You just mix everything in one bowl, allow the dough to rise as indicated, then put in the pan to bake.  No muss, no fuss!  Only one catch, if you thought making bread took a while before, this process is even longer.  It relies on the chemical properties of yeast to “chemically knead” the dough.  It works great, but you must have patience.  A process that can take a few hours is stretched up to 24 hours or so.  The dough has to rise for long periods that you can adjust to your schedule so that you can get on with your life, and out of the house! 

I mixed my dough up yesterday and left it on the counter overnight.  This morning started my second rise before church.  Then I baked it off when I got home.  So from yesterday to today it’s been about 20 hours.  That’s a long time to be anticipating a warm piece of bread with butter!  But it will be so worth it!  There is nothing like the smell, texture and taste of fresh-baked bread.  You can get a true “crusty” loaf of bread with a soft crumb inside.  The butter melts into the warm piece and that sweet creaminess compliments the texture so well!  And sandwiches made with homemade bread?  All I have to say is “WOW!” 

Maybe the patience factor is why you don’t see a lot of homemade bread anymore.  We, as a society have become used to convenience.  Bread in a bag, pasta in a box, dinner in the freezer (or drive-thru).  Sometimes we pay for choosing convenience over patience by consuming more added fats, sugars and chemicals.  I’m not saying we should do away with all processed, convenience foods.  That would be like throwing out the baby with the bath water!  Families today don’t have time to make pasta from scratch or bread on a daily basis.  But maybe we can cut down on our overall use of processed foods.  Choose items with fewer ingredients.  Read labels and make sure you know what you are eating (if you can’t pronounce it, maybe you shouldn’t eat it.)  Try to cook from scratch at least once a week.  Once you have that down, work on twice a week.  Then three times.  Do you see a pattern?

And if you’ve never done it before, bake a loaf of bread.

*If no knead bread sounds good to you, check out Kneadlessly Simple:  Fabulous, Fuss-Free, No-Knead Breads by Nancy Baggett.  You can find it on Amazon.com and it’s even available in Kindle form.