Bread & Ham

Monday is bread making day but I can be flexible. It hurts but I can change my plans! 🙂 Yesterday (Monday) I wanted to get the canning done and I knew it would be too much to can four different dishes in 19 pint jars and make bread so I put the bread off until today.

There is never a bread making day that passes that I don’t remember the struggles and awful bread during those first few months, maybe years, of making whole wheat bread. I wish everyone, even those of you who have no interest in baking bread, would try fresh, home made bread from fresh milled flour. It’s like the difference in eating a store bought mass produced fish stick or a piece of just caught fried fish! Of course, I love fish so that analogy may not sound good to you. I’ll admit that I love making the bread even more than I love eating the bread and I know many people don’t enjoy making bread so . . I won’t judge those of you who do not want to make your own bread.

The wheat gets milled into flour. I use a combination of kamut, hard white and hard red wheat. I don’t always measure how much of each but the majority of it is hard white. I need a total of close to 485 grams. The good thing is that 485 grams of wheat equals 485 grams of flour but 1 cup of grain does not equal 1 cup of flour. Glad to know that? 🙂

There’s the dough all mixed up and ready to rise. It was very cool – about 64 degrees in the kitchen when I started and I wasn’t sure how long it was going to take the dough to rise. I had just turned on the wall oven to pre-heat to bake a ham and I thought . . the big oven (regular stove with an oven) vents at the top and that would be a good place to stick the dough to rise so I turned off the wall oven, turned on the big oven and that was a great idea. That’s only the second time I’ve used that oven in the 3-1/2 years I’ve had it. It’s gas and since electricity is pretty much free and the wall oven is electric, I use it.

Hard to see but it rose nicely.

Then it was divided and put into two cast iron bread pans.

The dough loved the warm spot next to the oven vent.

Then it was baked and we have bread for the week!

I wish I still had pictures from those first loaves of whole wheat bread I made. Poor Vince. He told me they were good but they weren’t. I hope he’s being honest now when he says he loves this bread.

The next few days are going to be cold so soup and sandwiches will be great. Vince has been wanting split pea soup so I may put some of that in the slow cooker Thursday. I also want to make tomato soup maybe Saturday.

I will be gone tomorrow so we had ham, beans and cabbage today. There’s so much I can make with leftover ham. I put some of it in the freezer but kept a lot of it out for the next few days.

New Year’s Eve – 2024 is almost history and 2025 is almost here. I hope you all have a happy and safe New Year’s.