Winter Miracle

I've always made homemade bread, ever since I was a teen. Not by choice of course, the parentals thought a 'girl' should be well versed in all the wifely duties, like making dinners for 6 people, creating baked goods from scratch and mopping the entire first floor. Looking back I'm not sure if that really was for me or for them... hmm... (side note: I still HATE mopping. Hate it. Hate. It.)

Anyway, I've only made homemade bread a handful of times since living here in WA although I've mentioned numerous times to the husband how I'll be such a great homemaker.....after he gets a job & I stop mine. Now that I'm juggling a toddler & work I really don't have the time for real down-to-earth homemade bread. Enter: my mom, the miracle worker. So one day she says, "Hey, I have a bread machine you can have. It's just collecting dust in never never land somewhere in the closet." *Hallelujah chorus*


Once it makes it to our apartment I then of course have the dilemma of procrastinating. I thought, "Do I really want to go through all that trouble right now? Ummm pass." It looked like a complicated machine and I really didn't have the energy to figure it out. Last Saturday rolls around & we got snowed in (a good foot or so) and I thought, gosh dang, I want me some homemade bread.

So I pulled out the booklet to read how the contraption works...and finished in 30 seconds. Step 1: Dump liquid in pan. Step 2: Dump dry ingredients on top. Step 3: Put butter in corners. Step 4: Dump yeast in middle. Step 5: Push button. Step 6: Wait 3 hours for warm deliciousness goodness in your belly. Seriously?

So it took me 5 minutes of prep to have an awesome loaf of bread. Yes please! Tristan was diggin' the bread too & slap on a lil' of my mom's homemade raspberry jam I snitched - Heck ya. I think I found my new best friend. I can't wait to try out some more recipes like garlic or cheese bread, cinnamon rolls (it makes up the dough for you), french bread...mmmmmmmmmm!