Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday Review

I said in Monday's post that I make almost everything at home. I wasn't kidding. I am all about saving money. When Boyfriend and I decided that I would stay home, we lost about a third of our income. Most of it was discretionary but we did have to learn to not spend so much money. We are blessed that he has a very secure job with the Navy as a civilian. One of the things I wanted to learn to make was bread. I have a rule about kitchen toys. I will not buy the big expensive ones until I know that I will use them. I started out making bread by hand. Kneading dough makes for great arm muscles. Once I proved to myself that I was going to make the bread on a regular basis, I got a bread machine to make my life easier. Actually, Boyfriends mom bought it for me for Christmas. She got me a Sunbeam machine from Walmart. It runs around $50 at my local store. This is it: http://www.sunbeam.com/Category.aspx?section=kitchen&cid=241. I have to tell, I love this machine! It makes making bread so easy. I do not use it to its full potential. You can make cakes and jams in this thing. I actually stopped baking my bread in it. The bread tasted really good coming out of the machine but we had a few issues with it. First was the size. The bread comes out very tall. Two slices was too big for a sandwich and one slice cut in half was not big enough. The second issue was that the paddle used for mixing and kneading was still in there leaving a whole in the bottom of the bread. So I use the machine to make the dough then bake in the oven in a bread pan. We make all sorts of doughs in this machine. We make most of our pizzas at home now too since you can make the dough in the machine. It is the best of both worlds!

3 comments:

Melissa said...

Yep love that little machine, just can't convince hubby I need/want one.

Anonymous said...

I would love to start making my own bread.

Angela said...

It really is easy. Maybe I will post bread recipes for Monday's recipe?