The Easiest Bread You Ever Made

I have recently been pursuing making homemade bread. So far it's going OK. It takes years to perfect a good loaf and so far I've just been following recipes and learning the right places in my house to rise bread.

The other day I was doing laundry in the basement and saw my bread machine. It was all dusty with that sketchy kinda dust that comes from basements...but I hauled it up the stairs (this is an exaggeration...it weighs less than my dog)...and cleaned it up. Then I looked up a recipe for a really simple bread.

I was looking for something that used the bread maker start to finish, but ended up picking one that mixed the dough and did the first rise, and then you transfered to a pan for the second rise and bake. In the end, I think the results were good...and I learned that a bread machine can really cut down on the time you need to make bread! I had forgotten this.

The recipe I used was some random recipe from a website called "Soft As Wonder White" - I wouldn't really call this bread anything like wonder bread...but it was definitely a white bread, and it was soft, and good.

In order to use this recipe you probably need a bread maker. I suppose you don't have to have one...but the point of this post is how EASY it was with a bread maker. You get to stick all the ingredients in the bread maker and come back almost 2 hours later for a nice dough that's already had its first rise! Awesome.

The Easiest White Bread Ever

• 1 C. Water
• 1 Tsp. Salt
• 3 Tbsp. Margarine or butter
• 1 Tbsp. Honey
• 3 C. All-Purpose Flour
• 1/4 C. Powdered Milk** (See notes below)
• 2 Tsp. Sugar
• 1 1/2 Tsp. Bread Machine/Rapid Rise/Instant yeast (all essentially the same)

1. Add the ingredients into the bread machine in the order listed.
2. Set to the dough cycle. This will mix the dough and then rise the bread, and should take about 1 hour 40 minutes.
3. When the timer on the bread machine reads 1 hour, turn the oven onto 400 for about 3 minutes, and then turn it off.
4. When the timer goes off on the bread machine, turn the dough out gently onto a floured surface. Mold it into a loaf as gently as possible. Try not to work the dough much.
5. Put the loaf in a loaf pan and cover it with a towel. Place this in your oven which should now be luke warm. Make sure the towel won't inhibit the rising of the bread by being caught under the pan.
6. Rise 40 mins or until doubled in size. (When it looks like a loaf of bread...that's when it's ready to bake)
7. Bake at 350° for 25 to 30 minutes.
   
8. Take out of pan and cool.

NOTE: If you're using a very dark bread pan, knock the heat down to 325.

**Powdered milk can be purchased at the grocery store but usually does NOT come in any kind of reasonable size. In fact, I had to buy a box that would make like 50 gallons of nasty watery skim milk. HOWEVER....this is a VERY COMMON ingredient in bread recipes and it essentially can't easily be substituted with regular milk. So just suck it up and buy it if you're going to be baking bread regularly.

Who's Bringing the Shrimp?

Have you ever thought about shrimp...I mean REALLY thought about shrimp. Where they're from and what they eat and do? It's kinda gross, really. They crawl around all day eating fish poop. I'll tell you what though...they are DELICIOUS. Just goes to show that the phrase "you are what you eat" is a load of crap (haha..pun intended!).

I asked Aj to cook me a nice dinner this week. He agreed and kept it a surprise until I got home. When I got home he was hard at work cooking up a storm ...and it sure looked good! He kept being self depreciating and telling me he wasn't sure it would be good, etc...etc. He was making shrimp skewers with sauteed asparagus and mashed potatoes. The mashed potatoes came from a box...(We're huge fans of Yukon Gold which we think taste like KFC mashed potatoes...but they discontinued them and that was our last box.) The asparagus and the shrimp were freshly seasoned and cooked, though. When we finally sat down to eat and I tasted my first bite of asparagus....MAN! It was gooooooood!

Aj was excited that it tasted so yummy and mentioned something about cooking more (Can I get that in writing, please?). He even said that he looked up a shrimp marinade and made some changes to it to make it his own...Very impressive! It was quite possibly some of the best shrimp I've ever had. So I've decided to do another guest recipe so you can all taste the deliciousness of this shrimp!

If you're wondering how we grilled these in the middle of winter...we have a Japanese little stovetop grill and a single-eye gas range that we use for table-top cooking. Whatever method you come up with for grilling these...I'm sure it will taste yummy.

The Best Shrimp Marinade Ever

• 2 Lbs. raw peeled, de-veined shrimp
• 1 Large clove of garlic, finely minced
• 1 Tbsp. coarse salt
• Pinch of cayenne
• 1 Tsp. paprika
• 2 Tbsp. olive oil
• 2 Tsp. lemon juice
  

Mix everything but the shrimp together in a bowl. Skewer the shrimp 5 to a stick. Evenly and liberally coat the shrimp. Grill 2-3 minutes on each side or until the shrimp are opaque.

Enjoy!

February...an exciting culinary adventure awaits!

In just 5 days (give or take) Aj and I will be on our way to Japan to see the glorious sights and, first and foremost, to eat. I've been raving about Kansai food for years and years, and finally he will get to experience the delicious street foods, Japanese takes on American dishes, and to taste so many dishes his head will spin just trying to remember the names of them. We're going for 7 days, and 6 nights, and we couldn't be more excited. Excited to get out of these cold, cold temperatures and bask in the sunny 50 degree weather that is Osaka and Kyoto. Sweet escape!

Of course, any time you are about to go on an extended vacation...you start to get creative with what you have in the house. "Oh well I don't want to go buy groceries we're leaving in 5 days it won't get eaten!" (Actually I've been saying this for about a week now and we still have a week to go...) So when the food variety gets low...you start to get creative with what is in the cabinets and fridge.

Sometimes, you know, these meals make the best new things - things you add to your culinary repertoire and continue to make for years. That's how a lot of casseroles get started...Or so I assume. It's how I'd come up with a casserole if I were going to come up with a casserole. This time around, though, I chose a pasta dish. We had an old, opened bottle of yummy Chardonnay on the table with about 3/4ths a cup left in it, some veggies on the brink of going bad, a little heavy whipping cream left from my whipped cream experiments, angelhair pasta, a can of super low fat veggie soup, cheese, assorted dry sundries, and some boneless skinless chicken thighs that had been defrosting for about 2 days. Hmmm....

A pasta dish seemed to be the answer... A pasta dish made with a creamy white wine and tomato sauce, with stuffed mushroom chicken breasts perhaps??? Ah, indeed. I kept thinking it sounded like a delicious and dynamite idea!

Aj says that the days when I make random foods off the cuff are some of his favorites, because they're (in his opinion) usually really good. I am a harsher critic of myself. I don't like a lot of things I make...but that's part of being a cook! This... this turned out pretty good! The pasta sauce was so delicious I only wish I had made more. It was savory, thick and rich. I did have my qualms though.

I didn't love the chicken thighs - the chicken would have been better if it were breast meat. I can't help but think the whole thing might have been even better if it were stuffed mushroom caps instead of chicken all together. Yum! Either way I'd try some different renditions of this for sure! The only problem here is that when I cook like this I don't measure...so translating into a recipe is a bit harder... We'll see what I can do for you!

Creamy Grape Tomato Pasta

• 4 boneless skinless chicken breasts pounded thin with a meat mallet, or stuffed mushroom caps.
• About 1/4 cup heavy whipping cream
• 3/4 cup of white wine
• 1/4 cup some kind of savory vegetable soup broth
• 2 tablespoons cream cheese, if you have it
  
• 1/2 a package (about 4-6 ounces) of grape tomatoes, cut in half
• 1 cup roughly diced/chopped mushrooms
• 1/4 cup panko breadcrumbs
• 1/4 cup white cheddar or other savory cheese, grated (like parmesan)
• 3-4 cloves garlic, sliced
• 2-4 tablespoons olive oil
• Oregano
• Salt
• Angelhair pasta
  

When making this, keep in mind that it's a "What you have" type of dish. Use what you've got - don't go out and buy a bunch of stuff to make this! If you have regular tomatoes, seed them and dice them. If you have light cream instead of heavy, it's ok! If you have regular breadcrumbs - no big deal! Use what you've got! The wine is important, so maybe you should get a bottle of any nice white wine...you know... and drink most of it.

1. If you're using chicken, pound it flat and sprinkle it with salt and oregano on one side. If you're using mushrooms, remove the stems and lightly rinse the caps - mushrooms taste better when they're not rinsed so don't feel you have to.
2. Put 1 tablespoon of olive oil into a large nonstick skillet (butter will work in place of olive oil) and saute the garlic for about 1 minute. Add in the diced mushrooms and drizzle a little more olive oil over the mixture and a splash of white wine and saute for another 2-3 minutes or until mushrooms are starting to shrink and cook. Remove from heat and divide the mixture between two bowls.
3. In one of the bowls of mushrooms, mix the bread crumbs, grated cheese, and a sprinkle of salt and oregano and mix until well combined.
4. Put 1/4th of the breadcrumb mixture onto one side of the chicken and fold over the other side, pinching the chicken shut as much as possible. Do this for all 4 pieces of chicken.
5. Heat up the other 2 tablespoons of olive oil in the skillet and sear the chicken on both sides. You are not cooking the chicken all the way through you are just browning the outside. Remove and put on a plate.
6. In a separate pot, bring water to a boil to cook the pasta. Heavily salt the water.
   
7. Combine the wine and cream and bring to a rolling simmer. Reduce heat to medium and put the chicken into to the skillet with the sauce mixture. Add in the rest of the tomatoes and the rest of the mushroom mixture from the second bowl.
8. Cover and let cook without interruption 10-15 minutes. You do not need to flip the chicken.
9. By this time your water for the pasta should be boiling, so put in the pasta and let it cook 3-5 minutes depending on how firm you like your pasta. When the pasta is done, pour it into a colander and lightly toss with olive oil or pam-spray.
   
10. Take the lid off and mix in the cream cheese for an extra creamy sauce. Let the cream cheese melt and stir it around to mix it in the sauce. Replace the lid and let cook a few more minutes.
11. If the sauce is not thickening, take off the lid so some of the water can boil away, but make sure your chicken is almost done. If your chicken is not close to done, don't remove the lid.
12. Dish the pasta into 4 portions. Place one chicken piece on top of the pasta and scoop and drizzle the sauce across the pasta. Voila. Done. Under 30 minutes. Delicious!
    

I hope you'll try some kind of variation on this recipe, let me know how it turns out!

I doubt I'll have time to update before we leave for Japan but I will return with some fun photos of things we ate while there! In the mean time, here's some photos of things I've cooked during the hiatus of the last post to this one.

Garlic-Parmesan Pull-Apart Loaves

Holy Cannoli, Batman! Our little part of the world just brought in about 20 inches of snow. It started late last night and lasted until sundown today. We didn't even bother to open my store, and we spent most of the morning drifting in and out of happy-sleep in bed. It's been a good day. Cold...but good.

Down south we LOOOOOOVE snow. Nothing better than a snow storm. The city stops for (no joke) an inch of snow. Schools are canceled, everyone crashes their car into anything within 20 feet. It's glorious. Up here snow is a hated part of life. You tell someone you're looking forward to the snow and they look at you like you have a severe case of leprosy. That's when they know. They KNOW you're from out of town. Because, apparently, not a single soul in New England can find beauty and joy in snow. At first, I didn't understand this...it's so glorious and amazing and white and fluffy and fun! But you know what isn't fun?? Spending an hour and a half snow blowing and shoveling your driveway, and cleaning off your cars. Turns out that's not that great. Oh it's fine at first... until you get close to 2 feet and the plow truck that comes by throws ALL of the snow from the street onto YOUR side of the road, and creates a four foot blockade that you have to shovel down before you can snow blow. Well... then you start to see how SOME people could start to dislike snow.

Up here, if you have a son, he hates snow, because you make him go out and shovel it at 5 AM so you can get to work. And the wind is blowing, and the snow goes up his nostrils, and his whole body gets crusted with icy bits from the blowing snow/wind. And then he comes back in and no one has made him hot chocolate and there's no fire and he has to go to school and that's where the cycle begins. He hates snow...gradually. I mean...he likes it. He likes to skii and snowboard and sled and have forts and fights, but...mostly he hates it. There's an age where you go from liking snow up here to hating it... and I'd say that's about when you're big enough to start shoveling so your parents can quit doing it.

Me, though? I still love it. I'm making up for lost time. The most snow I had in the south was when I was about... a year old (and somehow had a snow suit, can we talk about how weird that is?) Now I love when it comes. I love when it comes on WEEKDAYS too! Weekends are not so good since it hurts my store's business, but Wednesdays...bring it on!!! So yeah, we spent a good hour and a half outside freezing cold shoveling and cleaning off our cars (only to have them piled with 4 more inches when we were done, might I add) , but we also played in the back yard with our dogs and smiled and laughed and had a fire and hot cocoa and marshmallows and hot soup when we came back in. My love for snow is infectious. Truly.

Ah all that marching around in deep snow made me tired and so I've just got a short recipe for you today. I know I've been talking about bread recently and I HAVE made two successful batches of bread, but this one is a much easier recipe I snagged from Pilsbury.com a while back at Thanksgiving. These make a super quick and DELICIOUS addition to dinner. They go great with pot roasts, stews and soups and just food in general!

Garlic-Parmesan Pull-Apart Loaves

• 1/4 Cup butter, well softened
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 3 Tbsp. Parmesan cheese (freshly grated if you have it)
• 1 Tbsp. chopped fresh parsley (dried will do if necessary)
• 1 can Pilsbury Grands Jr. Golden Layers biscuits

1. Heat oven to 350°F
2. In a small bowl, stir together butter, garlic, cheese, and parsley.
3. Remove biscuits from packaging. On a baking pan WITH SIDES (butter will run everywhere), make 2 loaves of 5 biscuits each. Set the biscuits on their edges, just touching.
4. Split each biscuit horizontally in half, divide butter evenly between biscuits and spread in between the split layers.
5. Reshape loaf
6. Bake 11 to 14 minutes or until loaves are a deep golden brown and thoroughly baked.

The first tester batch I made of these I used dried parsley, minced garlic from a jar, and bagged shredded Parmesan cheese. It was good but the second time I used all fresh ingredients and it was SO much better. I would highly recommend using fresh ingredients. Bon appetite!

Bread: Friend or Foe?

If one thing thwarts me in the kitchen, it's bread. Making bread has long since proven very difficult for me. My yeast is dead, the proofing water is not warm enough, the rising place is too warm, etc...etc...etc. It's not that I've never made a successful roll, but boy 9 times out of 10 breads involving yeast just do NOT like me.

I figured today I'd use my new purple kitchen aid stand mixer to make a bread recipe. I wanted to get that thing into action! I finally settled on a really yummy and simple looking french bread recipe from my Southern Living cookbook. Well turns out it was one of the few recipes that didn't need a dough hook...but still I proceeded.

I pulled out my yeast.... and it had expired. 6 months ago. Dammit. Well usually yeast will keep for quite a while even past the expiration date, but I was not taking chances! I knew bread was a foe and yeast was temperamental with me...so we got in the car and went to the grocery where I snagged some packets of instant yeast as recommended by my recipe.

At home I proofed it - I even used my candy thermometer to make sure the water was the right temperature. That's right. You think I'm joking when I say yeast is out to get me - I'm not! Over Easter I tried to make hot cross buns and made hot cross rocks instead.... Anyway...vendetta aside it was a successful proofing. A nice foamy yeast top. I mixed in my butter and salt and started mixing in my flour. So far, so good!

I decided to do my first rising in the oven, as it is small and I figured would be consistently warm. I had read somewhere a suggestion to crank the oven to 400 for one minute, and then turn it off and put a pan of hot water on the bottom rack. Well I only have one rack (small oven remember?) But I put it on the bottom of the stove and plopped my lovely dough bowl into the oven to rise! I set my timer...and it wasn't rising. It made it about 1/4th bigger than it began. I even let it rise an extra 20 minutes over the recommended.

As it would turn out, I think turning on the oven to warm it was a mistake since the oven is so small, and I think I killed my yeasties. Damn you yeast!!!! After 50 minutes of rising I decided it wasn't going to rise more and I punched it down and re-formed it into rolls for baking. The second rise happens at this point so I repeated the process I had before (keep in mind I didn't know I had killed my yeast with heat and that only a few were probably clinging to dear life in my dough...this came afterwards with research.) Ahhh well I got about another 1/4th rise, gave it an extra 10 minutes...and then decided to go ahead and bake that bitch cause it was MAKIN' ME MAD.

It wasn't really making me mad, just frustrated. Anyway my oven is hot as the dickens at 400 (Baking temp) and the rolls began to instantly brown...heavily. Uhg. I turned it down to 350 and let a little heat out of the oven and sat vigilantly to watch the rolls. Then I did my egg white wash for the lovely shiny crust...and then I watched vigilantly for 5 minutes until it was time to come out.

Well...at first I was extremely disappointed. The rolls were dense and thick, with a heavy yeast flavor. Ah. As I stood comparing my rolls to the rolls in the picture.... Well... let's just say I wasn't pleased. But we snagged them right off the hot pan. They smelled so good. And we ate them with some garlic parsley butter I had whipped up in anticipation for crusty french rolls. And they were good. Really, they were. It was damn sure not french bread, but they were like yummy dinner rolls. The thick yeasty kind that you meant to come out differently.

Disappointment aside, they are good. Aj's had 3 and so have I. We had them with mini mushroom-garlic hamburgers on them. I had one with blueberry Chevre (yum).

I'm sure you saw the picture up there and you said to yourself "that's the failure? Looks pretty good to me." Well thank you. But now I'll show you a picture of what it was SUPPOSED to look like and you can laugh and say "haha... frankenroll!" Jerk.

Well no matter. I have 2 days off in a row pretty soon and I plan to try again! I'd do it tonight but it's 11:19 and ... well... Yeast has bothered me enough for one day... I'll hand out the recipe for this one when I have the means to tell you how to make it come out right...

In A Pickle

Ah, pickles. Anyone who knows me knows that I love them. I love the crunch and I love the salt. I love the variety! Garlicky, sweet, salty, spicy - Any vegetable pickle, you name it and I probably eat it. So when I got the Just Bento cookbook for Christmas from my mom and found out that I could make salty, delicious pickles in five minutes.... well... you can imagine that I was excited.

Speaking of Christmas... I got a lot of great little kitchen things for Christmas, including a kitchen timer shaped like an ice cream cone , a good meat mallet (so I can stop using my rolling pin), a set of plastic matryoshka measuring cups, and two cookbooks. I already have a beautiful set of Matryoshka measuring cups from Anthropologie, but they are ceramic and I'm too afraid to use them for fear of breaking them. The plastic ones are a great substitute and add some flare to cooking! People who know me know I love anything that combines cute and practical.

Well, back to that Just Bento cookbook -- I see on the cover some yummy looking cucumber bits...and I open it up to find that it's a super easy pickle recipe. I'm going to share it with you here, because I've already made 2 batches and Aj and I love them! The Just Bento cookbook is great - it's simple - it's quick- it's practical. It's made for the American kitchen. It doesn't have insane ingredients that you can't find.

Japanese bento is the art of a packed lunch. It's a small, containered lunch that has a lot of color and a lot of love. It's not about what you pack but how you pack it. It's decorative and functional and delicious all at the same time. I took bento a lot when I was in Japan. Naturally, loving to cook and having ready access to easy bento ingredients, I bought my first bento box and so my bento insanity began. I took bento in that bento box 3-4 times a week, and ate at the cafeteria the rest of the time. It was great. Now with a full time job, it's good to have something fun to look forward to in the middle of the day.

While this recipe is great for bento, if you love pickles, you have to try it even if you don't have any clue what a bento is :)

Instant Salted Cucumber Pickles

• 1 English cucumber, sliced into thin rounds. (These are small, thin cucumbers. I found them pre-packaged in the produce section.)
  
• 1/2 Tsp sea salt (or slightly more if you like it salty)
• Squeeze lemon juice (I genuinely recommend using a real lemon, and not lemon juice from the bottle)

1. In a bowl, sprinkle the salt over the cucumber and massage well with your hands until the cucumber kind of goes limp.
2. Let rest 5-10 minutes.
3. Add a squeeze of lemon juice. Let sit for a few minutes.
   
4. Squeeze out most of the excess juices and then pack into a tupperware. Keeps for about 3-4 days in the fridge.
   

Spinach and Feta Quiche

Wow it's been a while huh? Christmas was a blur of celebration and fun, but boy do I have some exciting news!!!! I got a Kitchenaid stand mixer in Boysenberry (that's purple for you non-fruity folks) !!! Wooooo! It was a very generous gift from my husband and best friend. They like to combo-gift sometimes... And it always results in a very happy Brittany. I've always felt like a stand mixer was the last step to me becoming a real foodie. And now I am! Or will be... Target had some "shipping difficulties" (whatever that means) and it hasn't arrived yet. I will take some great photos and make something difficult in honor of it when it arrives. (Maybe a cheesecake... with whipped cream???)

In the mean time, though, I'm still cooking some good stuff in our old oven. This recipe was sent to me by my best friend Katie, and it's one of Aj's favorites! He loves it at all times of year, but I think especially in the winter. It's extremely easy to make and also very cheap! Photo to the left.

Spinach & Feta Quiche

• 1 pre-made pie crust (in the refrigerator section, a flaky pastry crust)
• 3 Eggs, beaten
• 1 Cup milk mixed with 2 tbsp. flour
• 1/4 Cup melted butter, cooled slightly
• 1/2 Tsp. salt
• 1/4 Tsp. fresh cracked pepper
• 10 Oz thawed and drained spinach (squeeze the water out)
• 4 Oz crumbled feta cheese
  

1. Preheat oven to 400°F.
2. Put pie crust into pie pan and prick all over with a fork.
3. Bake for 5-8 minutes. Remove and set aside.
4. Turn oven down to 375°F
5. Combine eggs, milk/flour mixture, melted butter, salt and pepper.
6. Stir in spinach. Then stir in feta cheese.
7. Bake 25 minutes or until set.
8. Let stand 10 minutes.