Baking Artisan Bread

This afternoon I was finally able to try the recipe from the Mother Earth News Magazine. It had a whole section on bread baking and the recipe (supposedly) made enough dough to last a week. The idea being that at dinner time, you would always have fresh baked bread. The recipe was easy to follow but I went thru half of my flour canister. I bought these canisters at Target and just love them. They are very old fashioned looking and remind me of my Grandmother's canisters when I was a girl. I have two antique scoops in them that were my Mother's and Grandmother's. The big canister holds about seven pounds of flour and we buy the 25 pound bag at BJ's. The sugar canister holds 5 pounds of sugar. This is the recipe in Mother Earth News. It was a four page spread and I think tomorrow I'll try their recipe for whole wheat sandwich bread. I made a double recipe today. Each recipe makes about 3 loaves of Artisan Bread. The steam from the water pan makes the outside crispy and crunchy and the inside tender and moist. My Kitchen Aid mixer that I absolutely could not live without.

The dough rising.

Three delicious loaves resting on a bed of cornmeal and ready to go into the oven.

Fresh out of the oven. The whole house smelled like fresh baked bread and primer (my husband was busy priming our bedroom).
Three hot and steamy loaves. We ate two for dinner with our pasta tonight. Delicious!

And Uncle Kevin sent some artist paper and watercolors for the kids for Christmas. He had directions included. This is Tae painting a bug, heart, cross, bleeding circle thingy.

1. Use only 5 colors.
2. Paint nothing that you know of.
3. Fill the entire paper with color.
4. Return painting to Uncle Kevin.

I think he is actually looking for artistic material for the album cover of his new CD.

And here's mine. Tae wanted me to paint with him. Morgan said it looked like a fish or a squid or an alien. Uncle Kevin might want to rethink this.


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