February pictures

Blanket fort/popcorn fun:

The Valentine's Day craziness:

New haircut:

We had been eating airbread for a while because it was so busy, and I finally got around to making homemade whole wheat bread. As soon as it got out of the oven, Heidi said, "Mom, can I have a piece of bread right now? I know I'll get burned, but I don't care." I think we went through a loaf and a half that day. I make good bread.

Tut, tut, looks like rain!

Playing outside:

And in February, Kevin learned how to ride his bike! (Skip to the end of the video where he manages a nice long ride.)

bread day/a very honest post/a teaching moment

Today was bread day. The kids always like to help me with the whole process of making bread, but normally it drives me nuts because it's always such a mess. I was pretty patient for a while and allowed Kevin to help put wheat in the Nutrimill and didn't get upset when Heidi kept dipping her finger in everything from the yeast mixture to the freshly ground flour and eating it. But at some point I just got sick of it and sent them to get Daddy to play duplos with them.

It seems like bread rises so fast when you mix it in a Bosch. I think it took around fifteen minutes for the dough to spill over the sides and start taking over the kitchen. I punched it down and decided to stick it in the fridge so we could go to the park instead of having to stay home babysitting bread.

When we got home, I opened the fridge and found that the dough had spilled over again and was taking over the fridge and drying out. It was no big deal because I just stuffed it all in again and had it mix for a while. It didn't take long before it was all smooth and moist again.

Kevin and Heidi really like touching bread dough and eating it (yuck!). I was tired from being at the park, and I was pretty annoyed when they tried to help with shaping the loaves. I don't really care what the bread looks like, but things got crazy and I was grumpy and didn't like having them in my personal space. I told them to just go play because I didn't want their help. But then I thought about the talk by Elder Perry (see last post) and realized this was actually a pretty good job for them and well within their abilities. So I said I had changed my mind and they could help me make loaves. They both got a loaf-sized ball and got to squish it and knead it while I made the other four loaves. I didn't even yell at Kevin when his dough fell on the floor. (I may or may not have baked that loaf anyway . . . ) Then I took Heidi's hands and helped her shape her dough into a loaf and put it in the pan while Kevin squished his dough into his bread pan. Kevin helped me cover the bread with towels to rise.

I was very glad that I stepped back and realized this was a good teaching moment instead of giving in to my instinctive response, which was to harshly tell them to go away. The spirit in the room completely changed. The kids were thrilled to get to help, and it was fun for all of us. I want to have a home where there is an expectation that everyone helps, so if we are going to have that, I have to start now with letting them help when they can, and also remember that they will not always do the job as well as I would like it at first since it takes practice.

Is it worth it to bake your own bread?

Bread in the store is quite expensive. I guess you can get airbread for something like $1.00 a loaf, or sometimes cheaper, but there's a reason it's that cheap. But the better-tasting bread that actually has some nutritional value can cost several dollars.

Many people turn to making homemade bread in an effort to save money on bread. A lot of people insist it saves them money, even if they've never calculated how much it actually costs. But I have also started to see comments from people who say, "I thought I would try to save money by making my own bread, but then after buying all the ingredients I realized that I had already spent a lot more than if I had just bought it." And then you also have to consider if it's worth it to you to spend the time to make it.

Now, one thing that is important to remember is that a very valuable aspect of making homemade bread is that you know exactly what is in your bread. Every single one of the ingredients you put in is something that you can pronounce. And there are a lot of health and taste benefits to making homemade bread. For many people, this is enough, even if it's more expensive to make it than to buy it.

But cost is still a consideration.

So I decided to do some research and calculating and see how much it costs to make one of my recipes for whole wheat bread. This is the recipe:

Crunchy Wheat and Honey Bread

1 1/4 cups water

3 tbsp. honey

2 tbsp. margarine or butter, softened

2 cups whole wheat flour

1 1/2 cups flour

1 1/2 tsp. salt

1 1/4 tsp. yeast

I just throw all of these into my bread machine, and let it run through the dough cycle. Then I shape it into a loaf and bake at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes in my oven.

Wheat
Several places on the internet say 1 cup wheat kernels yields about 1 1/2 cups flour. That's approximately what I usually get when I grind just enough for the recipe I'm making.
There are 56 cups of white wheat in a 25 lb. bag (based on what I measured myself).
White wheat from the cannery costs $11.45 for a 25 lb. bag. (See the order form at providentliving.org.)
A little calculating:
(56 cups wheat kernels) X [(1.5 cups wheat flour)/(1 cup wheat kernels)]=84 cups wheat flour from a 25 lb. bag of wheat
The price per cup of whole wheat flour from the cannery is $11.45/84=$0.14 for one cup of flour.

Now that I've calculated that, below is a spreadsheet that shows the price of a 1 lb. loaf of bread using ingredients exclusively purchased at Kroger, Harris Teeter, and Costco, respectively. Costco doesn't have whole wheat flour here, so I used the price of whole wheat flour at Kroger for that table. The last table calculates the price of making this recipe if I use wheat from the cannery and the rest of the ingredients from whichever store has it for the best price per unit.

I should note that prices for many foods are going up or will go up soon, so these calculations might not be accurate in a couple of months, but I thought I would post this anyway, and then after prices have changed I can do this again and it will be interesting to see what effect it has had.



Explanation of columns in the table:

• Ingredient: I think this is self-explanatory. I am assuming the price of the water is negligible, which it probably is, and the price would be difficult to calculate anyway.
• Price and Amount: These give the price of a bag or box of that ingredient, and the amount of the ingredient in the bag or box.
• Price/unit: This is the number in Price divided by the number in Amount, rounded to three decimal places.
• Unit/measurement: This is copied straight from the table at the top of the spreadsheet. I found these values from the website shown below the conversions. The website converts amounts of various kitchen ingredients between different units of measurement. Since most ingredients are sold by the pound or ounce, I needed these to convert the numbers to cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons.
• Amount required for recipe: copied straight from the recipe, although fractions were converted to decimals.
• Price for recipe: This is the product of price/unit, unit/measurement, and amount required for recipe. It is the amount the you are paying for that particular ingredient every time you make bread.
• The total price to make a 1 lb. loaf of bread is in bold beneath each table.
• Below that is the total price of all the ingredients except whole wheat flour and all-purpose flour.

Observations:

• If you use the least expensive ingredients and cannery wheat, a loaf of this bread costs 50 cents.
• Cannery wheat actually isn't much cheaper than store-bought wheat right now, although normally wheat costs about half of what it does right now. Right now the savings are less than a cent per loaf.
• Yeast from the grocery store is a lot more expensive than if you buy it in bulk at Costco. At Kroger and Harris Teeter, the total price of all ingredients except the flours is nearly half the price of the entire loaf, and this is largely because the yeast costs so much. So just buying yeast at Costco decreases a good portion of the cost per loaf.
• Before I did this spreadsheet I had been assuming that all the ingredients except the flour were pretty negligible and would only account for a few cents. But even using the least expensive ingredients, that was still 14 cents per loaf. It's still not very much, but it's more than I expected.
• Flour is a little less expensive at Kroger than Costco. I had been assuming that Costco's all-purpose flour must be the cheapest, but then again the price of flour at Costco has risen a little bit recently.
• All-purpose flour is less expensive than whole wheat flour, even if you grind it yourself, although when wheat kernels are less expensive the price is probably fairly similar.

So if you only take into account the price of the ingredients, it is probably cheaper to make your own whole wheat bread. You do also have to consider if the time is worth it to you, as well as what equipment you are planning to use. If you are grinding your own wheat, you will also need a wheat grinder, or you'll need to factor in the time spent using a mortar and pestle. If you don't want to mix the bread by hand, you will need a bread maker or a mixer. A mixer and a wheat grinder could cost about $600, so you would need to consider how much use you get out of those before they break down, and if you would save enough money making your own bread to justify the cost of those.

Note: I added a new table to the spreadsheet to calculate how long it would take for an appliance to "pay for itself" in the amount of money you would save by using it. The first column tries various prices for one loaf of bread bought at the store, and the second shows how much you would save by making your own with my recipe. The rest of the columns show how many loaves of bread you would have to make before you would save as much money as you have paid for the mixer or wheat grinder. So if you think about which bread you buy from the store, how often you would make bread instead, and how much bread you make each time, then that can give you an idea of how long it would take to pay for that appliance in savings.

Some more thoughts: Another thing to keep in mind is that homemade bread seems to disappear faster than storebought bread. That's partly because everyone is so excited about the warm bread that it disappears in the first hour, and partly because it's hard to slice it as thin and each slice is more dense than the store's airbread. But that could be a good thing because your family is consuming lots of nutritious and delicious bread. I also find that homemade bread makes me feel full faster and helps me feel full longer than storebought bread. I guess for me, I've stopped wondering if I'm saving money or not by making homemade bread, because I love the taste and the nutritional benefits enough that it doesn't matter to me. You have to make that decision for yourself.

random musings

I love and hate making bread. I like the feeling of mixing and kneading bread because it seems so productive and motherly and homey, and I like the yeasty doughy smell. But at the same time I really hate mixing and kneading because if you don't have the right amount of flour it's really annoying. If I don't have enough flour I add some and knead some more, of course, and just as I start feeling like maybe this time I have just the right amount and it's mixed pretty homogenously, the dough starts feeling incredibly sticky again and it gets all over my hands and the counter and I have to start all over again. But if I have dough that has just the right amount of flour, where it's smooth and sticking to the counter slightly but not so much that I can't even work with it, I just love the feeling of kneading it.

I still haven't figured out why my bread seems to always taste sour and fermented. I was reading some things online and it sounds like rising too fast or too long can cause this. So maybe I need to experiment with adding less yeast than the recipe calls for or not letting it rise as long. Ryan doesn't notice it and doesn't even know what I'm talking about when I complain about it. Ever since I was pregnant with Kevin, my taste buds have been a lot more sensitive. I wonder if food will ever taste normal again.

When you buy something new and you are going to write a review for it, in general it is a good practice to wait until after you have used the item for a while before writing the review. In other words, don't buy a new crib and set it up, and then write a review saying how cute the crib is and you can't wait to see how your baby likes it when he arrives in two months (although this might work for reviewing decorations). What people want to know is how the products works over a period of time, not how it looks out of the box. Also, a review of a product is not the place to talk about how fast the item was shipped to you; it's the place to talk about the actual product. Just a little pet peeve of mine.

I really like the ruched maternity tops. They have elastic sewn into the side seams, and for some reason that makes a really flattering fit. I also mostly like the secret fit belly jeans by Motherhood Maternity. Before I had ever been pregnant, I had this strange misconception that low elastic panels were cool and high ones were nerdy and old-fashioned. Then I actually tried both while pregnant and I realized that it's a matter of functionality, not style. I realized that low panels hurt my tummy. The secret fit belly would be about as nerdy and old-fashioned as it gets according to my old standards because they go really high. But I like them because my pants actually stay up pretty well, unlike the cheap JC Penny jeans I bought when I was pregnant with Kevin. The only thing I don't like is that since the panel covers my entire tummy it can get pretty hot, but then I can fold the panel down and I don't have to experience major abdominal pain because the panel material is light and doesn't squeeze so hard. Now, the sales people always play up the secret fit belly pants. Every single time I've gone to Destination Maternity they've told me that I've got to try a pair on even if I'm not planning to buy jeans because the secret fit belly is so amazingly comfortable. The way they talked, I thought I was supposed to try these things on and instantly feel my tummy settling into a world of bliss and rainbows and weightless joy or something. Yes, they are comfortable, but I still feel the weight of pregnancy pretty keenly down there.

I am pleased to report that Baby Girl does, in fact, have bones. Elbows, even. I felt them with my hand. Which is good, of course, because humans kind of need that sort of thing.

I keep bumping into things with my growing tummy. I keep forgetting it's there. I think I've had a lot of growth in the last couple of weeks.

In March we get the lovely experience of drinking pool water. Actually, our city uses something other than bleach for most of the year to disinfect the water, but every March they have to flush out all the pipes with bleach, so our water tastes and even smells like a pool. I guess I appreciate them keeping the pipes clean, but it sure tastes yucky. I grew up drinking well water, and it was really good, so I guess I'm pretty picky about my water now.

already an interesting day

The night before last night I dreamed that I had beautiful twin boys. They sort of fell out of me. I was really concerned because I'm not even halfway to my due date, but they were healthy and strong and looked full term. My mom was there and we were busily trying to figure out a way to get to the hospital with them to make sure everything was all right (because they were five months early!). I was kind of glad to wake up and find it was a dream, but it did make me feel more baby hungry.

When I woke up I mentioned to Ryan that I was out of breath, and he said, "No wonder. You were running through my mind all night. Literally. We were running from the flood."

So between running all night and having two babies at some point as well, I guess it's kind of surprising that it was actually a rather restful night.

Then Kevin and I made bread together. By hand. It was the most stressful thing I've done in a long time, but I feel like a good parent because I cooked with my child and didn't even yell. It was fun too, though. Kevin enjoyed stirring the dough with a measuring spoon and helping me measure ingredients and trying to taste the dough (which he didn't like, but he kept trying it anyway). In the end, the damage actually wasn't too bad--one flour-covered outfit and a counter covered in about as much flour as you'd expect from making bread by hand, plus the dishes and our hands, of course. It was a new recipe that calls for a little bit of cornmeal and oats, and it turned out very nicely. I bought a lot of cornmeal a few months ago and then realized that I don't like cornbread enough to cook it often enough to use all this cornmeal by the time I die, so I'm on the hunt for other good recipes that call for cornmeal (besides cornbread). We still need to try making tamales. The bread turned out quite nicely. Kevin ate about five pieces yesterday evening before dinner--he kept begging for more! Now I can't decide if it was good because it was made by hand, or because it was a good recipe. Or maybe it's just that Kevin makes awesome bread. I usually let my bread mix in my breadmaker and then I bake it in the oven, but lately it hasn't been tasting good to me, so I've been wondering if it's the recipe or if it's something about the breadmaker (I suspect that the breadmaker warms the dough slightly while it mixes, and I wonder if that changes the taste). I know I shouldn't have changed two variables at once (method of mixing and recipe), but I guess I was so excited to try this recipe that I did it anyway.

My first class today was cancelled because of the snow, but they only cancelled class until 11:00, so I still had to go to my second class. It didn't snow a lot, but there was a lot of ice. On my way down to catch the bus, I passed a girl who was standing by the sidewalk, staring at it rather fearfully. As I passed, she asked me if it was slippery. I told her it was a little slippery, but her shoes looked like they had better traction than mine did, so she would probably be fine. I had to walk a little more slowly than normal, but it didn't seem that slippery to me, and the stairs are easy because you take one step at a time anyway. So I was a little surprised to look up from the bottom of the stairs (there are a lot of stairs before you get to the bus stop) and see her still almost at the top of the stairs. She was clinging to the rail for dear life and going down the stairs very slowly. I'm pretty used to ice because we had ice pretty often in Idaho when I was growing up, so it didn't really faze me. If you have ice often enough, you kind of get used to the different types of ice and figure out how to walk without slipping. I guess this was the first time it occurred to me that a lot of people around here are scared of walking on ice because they don't know how to do it.

Just before I left, I was doing the usual things--putting on my coat, grabbing my keys, putting on my backpack, etc. Then Kevin got a look of realization on his face that said quite clearly, "No! It's starting again!" and started crying because he knew I'm going to start going to school again. It didn't take him too long to recover, but it's always tough to leave him crying like that.

about bread

I grind my own wheat (with the ward wheat grinder--what a blessing!) and make whole wheat bread for our family. Recently I've had a couple of complaints about whole wheat bread:

The main complaint is that it seems to frequently have a sour-ish fermented taste. I've tried to describe it to Ryan several times and he says the bread tastes good. The first time I noticed it I thought it was because I had added gluten and potato flakes, which many people say makes whole wheat bread better. But after making whole wheat bread many more times, both with the dough enhancers and without them, I've found that they mainly affect the texture, not the taste, and whether I add them or not the strange taste still persists (which is a relief since I have a #10 can of both gluten and potato flakes and I would hate for them to go to waste). I've thought that maybe I should chalk it up to having weird hormone levels from breastfeeding, since I had some food aversions to bread in the first trimester of my pregnancy--maybe some similar hormones are still lingering? Anyway, I think the solution to the problem seems to be not letting the bread rise too long the first time it rises. That seems to make sense since the yeast could be growing too much and causing that fermented taste. But if anyone else has experienced this problem and figured out what it was, I'd love to hear your thoughts (or at least hear that I'm not going crazy).

The other problem was the edges being a little burned, especially the top. I think I've figured this one out. Most bread recipes say to bake at 350 for about 30 minutes. Even with 30 minutes the bread seems to be burned on top, but I like to bake the bread for 32 minutes because the inside of the loaf isn't done enough at 30 minutes, and of course that worsens the problem of the burned top. One solution that I read about is to cover the loaf with some aluminum foil after the top of the loaf has cooked enough. I have tried it a couple of times, and it does work, but of course that means you have to check on your bread, which I don't usually remember to do (nor do I want to). Then I remembered from my yeast breads project in 4-H that if the outside of your bread is cooked but the inside is still doughy, then next time you can decrease the temperature and cook for a little longer. So now I cook my bread at 325 for 32 minutes, and it's just about right. For some reason it took me a while to feel comfortable with deviating from the 350 degrees that most recipes call for, which is surprising because I'm generally pretty comfortable with modifying recipes. At some point in a few years we will probably move to a place with a different climate and/or altitude, and I'm interested to see if that affects the cooking time and temperature. Maybe all these whole wheat bread recipes are coming from Utah.

new breadmaker

Today I finally decided I was going to buy a bread machine. I've been making it by hand, but I don't have the time or motivation to make it as often as we need it, so we've been going without bread sometimes lately. I didn't want to pay $60-200 for one, and I had heard success stories of people getting them at thrift stores, so I went to the PTA thrift shop and bought one. It looks practically new, it has the manual, and . . . it was $10. We tried it out tonight, and, lo and behold, the result was bread. And it tasted good.




If you look closely at the lid, you can see where the bread started baking against the top of the machine. That's probably my only complaint, but with a little experimentation that can probably be fixed.

my problem

Recently I have been dealing with a problem: I discovered that I'm sick of store-bought bread. Throughout my pregnancy I was making home made bread (that was when I had a lot more time on my hands). I didn't buy bread until after K was born--at that point I felt that I was so busy that I couldn't make it myself anymore. But I guess I am spoiled because now when lunch time comes around all I can think about is how nice it would be to just eat several slices of fresh, real bread. I'm also tired of spending the money for store-bought bread--RT will eat the air bread that costs $0.50 a loaf because he just needs something to spread the peanut butter on (his words, not mine), but I only like certain kinds of whole wheat (home made white bread is still good to me), and those are more expensive. I've also been wishing I had bread to snack on, and store bought bread just doesn't work for snacking for me. (By the way, on my side of the family, we get boughten bread, not store bought bread.)

So I've decided I'm going to try making home made bread again. I am starting to feel like I have time to do it again. However, I am trying out a new trick: making bread mixes. I got the idea from everydayfoodstorage.net (the link is on my blog roll now, because I read her stuff all the time).

Before I explain how I do it, here is the recipe I used today (from the T family cookbook).

Delicious Grain Bread (Bread Machine)

1-1/8 cups water

1 3/4 cup flour

3/4 cup whole wheat flour

1/2 cup crushed bran cereal (1 cup whole flakes)

2 Tb. cracked wheat

2 Tb. dry milk

1 tsp. salt

2 tsp. yeast

2 Tb. margarine

2 Tb. honey

Mix in order required by your bread machine. Pull out after dough cycle and raise and bake at 350° for 25 minutes or until brown and crisp (or bake in the machine). You can use raisin bran for the cereal.

I just make it by hand because I don't have a bread machine.

To make the mixes, I put all of the dry ingredients in a ziploc bag (one mix per bag). I have some wonderful margarine powder in my food storage that I bought from Walton Feed, so I put that in the mixes too. So next time I make bread, I will just have to mix the yeast, water, and honey, add the mix, and then continue as normal for the rest. For me, mixing, kneading, and shaping takes the most time, and that part isn't eliminated, but I think it will save me time and make me feel a little more willing to bake bread if I have these mixes made, since I won't have to get out all the ingredients and do all the measuring. I made my first mixes today, so I hope this works out well!

This won't work for all bread recipes--some recipes that I have used are just water, flour, oil, honey, yeast, and salt. But I think this will really help me for most of my breadmaking. I may also try it for biscuits and muffins, which we make all the time.

I have also been trying something new for shaping my loaves. Instead of using my hands to shape the dough, I put a little flour (it really doesn't take that much!) all over the ball of dough, roll it out flat with my rolling pin, then roll it like cinnamon rolls. After that I can just pinch the ends under and pinch the bottom a little bit, and then I have a beautiful loaf. At first I thought it would be way too much work, but I actually like it because it makes it so that I don't have to use as much flour to make the dough manageable (which means my bread is more moist), shaping my loaves doesn't take as long, and the finished product looks really nice.

Here's my finished product:


While I took the bread out of the oven, K was loafing around in a bath towel and a diaper.