Marie Grace Designs

About the bread...

 

This could go all totally wrong. Last time this happened I spent days dusted in flour and ended up in tears and Mac Daddy brought me home a bread machine. 

Yup. I'm gonna try to make homemade bread.

I don't know what it is about bread. I can bake cakes and cookies and tarts and pies. I can make custard and pumpkin roll and poached pears and cheesecake. But not bread.

I don't know if its the yeast or the humidity or the cat hair but every attempt I've made has resulted in either a brick or a flat doughy thing that casually resembles the belly roll of an old man in tight pants. 

If only I could give up on the dream of making fresh bread for Mac Daddy. He loves bread. He stops on his way home some days just to buy a fresh loaf of crusty grainy bread to have with dinner. It pains me to see him walk in the door with that paper bag. I wish he could just come home and open the door and have the smell of fresh bread waft around his head. 

Okay... well thats half the story. The other half is that I'm really angry that I can't make bread. Dammit.

So I've heard lots of good stuff about this book and this method and its supposed to be easy and even quick so we'll see. I'm not holding out much hope but I'm giving it a shot because I want nothing more than to put fresh bread on my holiday table this year. If I fail I swear I will smuggle in bread from the bakery and lie. Lie!

 

In the meantime I made cookies. I can make cookies. I made Bezzie's cookies. I even saved enough so that when the kids left this morning (with cookies lovingly packed in their lunches) I had cookies left to have with my coffee for breakfast. Cause ya know they say breakfast is the most important meal of the day!

Time out for eating...

I think one of my biggest hurdles when it comes to being busy and needing to get lots done in a relatively small amount of time is eating and cooking.

It can be difficult to keep a grocery budget, fix proper meals and fix them quickly. I'm always looking for ways to get things quicker without having to give up my self-imposed requirement of feeding myself and the crew whole fresh foods as much as possible. I refuse to succumb to boxed or frozen meals and that stuff in a can they refer to as ravioli is just wrong (IMHO).

Another big problem is making sure leftovers get used up. I can't stand having to throw away food that was just fine a few days ago but was forgotten about and sat in the fridge a bit too long.

I've had a plan for a new kitchen gadget brewing for a while and I finally bit the budget and sprung for it.

Meet my new best friend: A Breville sandwich/panini cooker grilling thinger!

Mac Daddy and I love to go to those over-priced fancy sandwich joints every now and then. You have to admit that "panini" sounds yummier than "leftover chicken sandwich" but all of a sudden they are one and the same!

Even plain old grilled cheese sandwiches are fancy, see...

All you have to do is plug it in so it heats up while you assemble a sandwich masterpiece. Its fast, low mess, and with minimal supervision even the younger kids can do most of the prep themselves.

It also cooks meats and slices of veggies on their own. I cooked 6 chicken fillets in about 4 minutes flat!

We lived on this thing alone all weekend. Grilled cheese with noodle soup, Mac Daddy made some sort of egg, cheese, bagel thing, and my favorite was apiece of chicken with some sliced portabellas, onion, and swiss... yum!

I can't wait to throw some fresh zucchini slices in there.

It was kind of pricey but I did a lot of investigating before I chose this one. The grill plates can be removed for easy and thorough cleaning, it has a flat plate that can be put in for grilling things that don't do well on the grid grill plates, adjustable temp control, it tilts to drain grease, and the top plate can be raised some you can put much thicker items in.

I think its worth it for the time it will save as well as the yummy creativity it has sparked. Its good to see the kids finding ways to use leftovers... Flyboy even made himself a chicken, cheese, flat bread quesadilla sort of thing.

And really... this does have a lot to do with knitting. Anything that will free up a bit more time for knitting/designing/writing/editing is okay by me.

See, I've been feeling a bit like a poser in the design department for a while now. The last quarter or so of 2008 sort of bit me in a bad way and I let everything slide. I found out I'm having some health issues I thought I was done with, my beloved grandmother passed away (her name was Grace), and all sorts of other things just had me going in unfocused circles.

I'm ready to get going again! I have a fresh pattern ready to go, another headed for editing, another headed for a publication soon, and much more!

What does all this mean?

It means... make your own sandwich! I have things to do!

:-)