hate laundry? bake bread instead!

It's no secret around here, I tend to get most productive when avoiding another task. I suspect many can relate. Time to clean, I feel like painting; time to paint, I feel like cleaning, for example. Its just the way I operate. Turns out avoiding laundry has paid off for us all this time. Who knew? Go me.

As of late I have found a desire to get back to cooking and baking. Making and eating real food. I garden in the summer and love to eat food I have made, it just turns out that I needed a break from all the years of cooking and baking, something i have loved to do since I was a child. So I did. We ate junk for a while. No longer. The break is over. Also, it turns out that when you are at home like i have been for the last 4 weeks in between contracts, its probably a nice idea to cook a few more meals for a very hard working husband: the bub.

Enter Suzie. Suzie Ridler, aka Suzie the Foodie, has been my inspiration to get back into food. She lives on the east coast, a place I call home, with her loving husband and she l.o.v.e.s. - loves- to cook. She loves to cook so much that she makes ME want to be cook more. THAT'S how much. Suzie blogs about her adventures in cooking, takes on both basic and more advanced recipes, explains steps with detail, substitutes without fear, and documents both her successes and failures equally. She always provides beautifully shot photographs. She reeled me in. She even tried one recipe I found last year for Pear & Zucchini Soup and blogged about it after! Turns out she is also a frickin awesome person too! I encourage you to make your way over to meet her via her blog. You will not be disappointed and will definitely leave inspired to try something old or new.

So, baking bread. Suzie made bread one day. Suzie said anyone could do it. I was nervous. I am afraid of yeast, and the only bread I had made was in the early 90s in a breadmaker. It always turned out like a weird shaped rock. Suzie said I could do it by hand, from scratch, and I tend to like a challenge. So, I pulled out one of my old cookbooks, Pillsbury's Complete Book of Baking (1993), and got to reading all I could about yeast and bread and baking tips (aka rabbit hole). It was great. Even though Suzi had provided a bread recipe, I started out with the most obvious of recipes in my own cookbook I have been ogling over the years: Delicious White Bread. How could I argue, with a title like that? So, I followed the recipe step by step, and what do you know?

EASIER than laundry.

As a result/in an effort to avoid laundry, I have twice baked bread this month. I am as alarmed as anyone else. I made the same recipe again the second time, except instead I decided to make the second loaf Cinnamon Swirl. The great thing about this recipe is that it provides alternatives to plain while bread. I know.Turns out the smell it creates in the home alone erases all guilt in avoiding laundry and placates spouses too. Awesome. And the result? Awesome! I mean, its all * Tea, a drink with Jam (i made last summer) & Bread (i made myself)* for days to come over here. What's not to love about this?

Thanks Suzie!

♥ leel