Bread!!!

We have a bread machine at home, and we went through this awesome phase where we made our own bread and pizza dough.  We still make our own pizza dough, but we gave up on baking bread.

Why?

The loaves are too tall, yet short (length-wise).  You can't make a sandwich and fit it in a sandwich bag.  We tried cutting the pieces of bread in half and stuff, but it just looks lame and is kind of obnoxious and the bread is all crumbly and ... frankly, I felt too lazy to figure out how to work it.  Maybe I could just put the bread machine on a "dough" setting, then bake the bread in the oven in a longer pan, so the loaves could be shaped a bit more like what you get at the grocery store.

When we lived in American Fork, there was a Sarah Lee bakery outlet down the street (you can buy older loaves of bread at a huuuuge discount) and it didn't seem worth it to me to bake my own bread when it was still really cheap to buy it at the outlet.

Then there's also Costco, where you can get tasty bread cheaper than the grocery store.  And we weren't students any more, so I didn't feel the need to scrimp on bread.

Then one day, something happened.  My brother introduced me to Dave's Amazing Bread (or something along those lines) at Costco.  It was like this super-heavy loaf of bread full of nuts and seeds and what have you and IT TASTED AMAZING.  When I wanted to feel really special, I would go out and buy that bread and eat a sandwich and feel like I was in heaven.  Then we moved to Austin and they didn't sell Dave's bread (or pepperoni. It was a sad day in the Dewey household.)

Anyway, I had to find a *new* kind of bread to eat.  I had been watching my food documentaries and whatnot and decided I wasn't going to buy white bread any more (it's a start.)  I bought some Orowheat, then decided that Costco's whole grain wheat bread was good enough.  One day, I noticed this organic-natural-sprouted-wheat-something bread and decided to try it.  It was soft and tasty and the best bread I've ever eaten (as far as non-artisan bakery-type bread goes, anyway).  But it was $7 for two loaves, and the loaves weren't as big as the Kirkland (Costco) brand bread, so I didn't buy it very often.

In my church, I'm an "Activity Days Leader".  That means that twice a month, I do an activity with the 10- and 11-year-old girls in our ward (congregation.)  Last month, a woman in our ward did a bread baking activity with our girls at her house.  It was fun, and I made pizza rolls with the dough I brought home.  We used regular flour and ground our own flour with her wheat grinder and she even let me use some of her flax seed meal ... and it just seemed so healthy.  And we had fun kneading our bread and letting it rise.  (Thanks, Katharine, you'll probably never read this but I love you.)

After thinking about all of the weird preservatives and additives in today's food, I decided to compare the ingredient labels of the bread I buy and the bread I like.  The $3.50/loaf bread had ingredients like, "Flour, wheat flour, sunflower seeds, oil." and I thought YES THAT IS WHAT BREAD SHOULD BE MADE FROM.  Then I pulled out my Costco bread and had my heart ripped in pieces.  Luckily, all of the difficult-to-identify ingredients were after a "contains less than 2% of the following..." label.  Where would I even find "cultured corn syrup solids" if I wanted to put it into my bread?

I felt torn.  I want to be frugal, I want to be healthy, I felt like I was being pretty healthy buying whole grain bread from Costco.  None of the regular grocery store bread looked appetizing, anyway, and it wasn't any cheaper.  But am I seriously going to be one of those people who buys organic $3.50-a-loaf bread?  Next thing I know I'm going to be buying $8 watermelons at Whole Foods!  So, what, am I frugal or cheap or am I turning into some kind of organics-obsessed hippy?  (By the way, my father-in-law's granola is very tasty.)

Maybe I should be baking my own bread again.  Maybe I should suck it up and put forth the extra effort to bake bread in a pan shaped the way I want it (because it's so hard to press the "dough" button on the bread machine, then transfer it to a different bread pan and bake it in the oven.)  But, oh, it's going to be so hard to perfect a recipe I like.

At any rate, I went to Sprouts (the equivalent of Utah's Sunflower Markets ... now they're owned by the same company!) and bought a bunch of bags of seeds and nuts from the bulk section (why don't more grocery stores have bulk sections?  We need Winco in Texas!!) and a bag of flax seed meal.  Some day, when I feel brave, I am going to attempt to make my own version of that natural organic whole grain bread.  I might let you know how it goes. ;)

There's my inner monologue for the day.