Give me some of that bread …Homemade Bread Recipe!

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Yep, I did it. I have been meaning to make homemade bread for a looooog time. And now, in our quest to slowly eat less processed food, I decided to give it a try.

I looked around for a simple and easy bread recipe, since this was my first time; and to no surprise the recipe comes from my wonderful friend (we actually have exchanged e-mails over another recipe) from the Eggless cooking. Well, after all I have used so many of her recipes that I knew that would be a good one; it only depended on me and not the recipe!

In reality, I really wanted to do a whole wheat recipe, but she only had this recipe using all purpose flour (but on her notes she says that you could replace 2 cups with whole wheat, however she points out that she hadn’t tried it). So, I decided to stick to the all purpose unbleached flour since this was my first try with bread making. If there is one thing I have learned in the past 2 years or so of baking is that baking is like chemistry, altering “like” ingredients is not the same as in cooking. So, I try to stick to the recipe and learn what each ingredient “do” to the recipe and make alterations in later tries!

Here is the original recipe:

Ingredients:

  • 5 and 1/2 to 6 cups All Purpose Flour
  • 3 tablespoons White Sugar
  • 2 envelopes Rapid Rise Yeast ( she used Fleischmann’s and so did I)
  • 2 teaspoons Salt
  • 1 and 1/2 cups Water
  • 1/2 cup Milk (I used whole milk)
  • 2 tablespoons Butter

Procedure:

  1. Combine 2 cups flour, sugar, undissolved yeast and salt in a large bowl.
  2. In a medium saucepan, heat water, milk and butter until very warm. Use a candy thermometer to see if the temperature is between 120F-130F (approximately 48C-54C). (I don’t own a candy thermometer so I just waited until the mixture started to bubble)
  3. Stir the milk mixture into the flour/yeast mix.
  4. Use an electric mixer at medium speed and beat for about 2 minutes, scraping the bowl occasionally.
  5. Stir in another cup of flour, beat again for 2 minutes at high speed, scraping bowl as needed.
  6. Stir in enough of the remaining flour (2 and 1/2 to 3 cups) to make soft dough.
  7. Lightly flour the surface you will be working on and knead the dough until smooth and elastic, about 8-10 minutes.
  8. Cover; let rise 10 minutes. (I skipped this step, I was not paying attention)
  9. Divide dough in half. Roll each half to 12×7 inch rectangle. Beginning at short end of each rectangle, roll up tightly. Pinch seams and ends to seal completely.
  10. Grease two 8×4 inch loaf pans and place the dough seam sides down.
  11. Cover using plastic wrap; let rise in warm, draft free place until doubled in size, about 45 minutes. (She says here that some dough may need more time, mine took about 3 hrs to double their size, I almost lost hope, maybe because I skipped step 8 LOL)
  12. Preheat the oven at 400F/200C for about 15 minutes.
  13. When the dough has doubled in size, bake it for 25-30 minutes or until done. Remove from pans; cool on wire rack. (mine took exactly 25 minutes)
  14. Like always you have to wait for the bread to come to room temperature before you can cut it into slices. If you prefer eating warm bread then just apply some butter and tear it off and enjoy.

Note: This was a wonderful recipe to have the help of little hands. She LOVED ”working” the dough on the counter :) No wonder I missed step 8!

The bread came out smelling wonderful and after waiting to cool, we cut into and I was SO happy that it tasted just as wonderful as it smelled!

Next try… whole wheat bread!

Enjoy! Love,

Roberta

Twitt

Breakfast Cookies??? Yep, you read it right!

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Yep, cookies for breakfast, but I’m not talking about store bought cookies full of sugar and chemistry, I’m talking about the healthy kind of cookies – YES, they exist – that you could eat even for breakfast. In fact, they were meant to be served as breakfast.

Again, no creation of mine (I’m sure you are wondering if I will ever write a recipe that is my own creation -uhhhhh, maybe or maybe not!), the recipe is from my good eggless baker friend – I have never met her, EVER – but I check her blog on weekly basis, so yes she is my friend from my point of view, there I said it!

I stambled upon this recipe while browinsing her blog for some new food ideas. And then, BINGO, the ‘Breakfast Cookies’ spoke to me!

Here is it:

INGREDIENTS FOR COOKIES:

  • 2 Cups Whole Grain Cereal (She used Fiber One Cereal Honey Clusters and I used Kashi Honey Sunshine))
  • 3/4 CupFlour Blend (See Below On How To Make This)
  • 1/2 TeaspoonBaking Soda
  • 1/2 TeaspoonSalt (I Used 1/4 Teaspoon)
  • 1 TeaspoonCinnamon (I Used Only 1/4 Teaspoon)
  • 1/4 CupUnsweetened Applesauce (Instead Of 1 Large Egg)
  • 1/2 CupBrown Sugar
  • 1/4 CupCanola Oil
  • 2 TeaspoonsVanilla Extract
  • 3/4 CupLow Fat Ricotta Cheese
  • As NeededCinnamon Sugar/Plain Sugar For Dusting
  • 1/4 CupDried Cranberries (Optional, she added this and so did I)
  • 1/4 CupChopped Walnuts (I did not add this)
INGREDIENTS FOR FLOUR BLEND:
    • 1 CupAll Purpose Flour
    • 1 CupWhole Wheat Flour
    • 1 CupWheat Germ

– OR -

  • 2 CupsWhole Wheat Pastry Flour (She Used This Combo and so did I)
  • 1 CupWheat Germ
PROCEDURE FOR FLOUR BLEND:
  1. Combine the flours and wheat germ in a bowl. Store it in an air-tight container or sealed bags and use it for baking anything from cakes, cookies, brownies etc.
PROCEDURE FOR COOKIES:
  1. Preheat oven at 400F/200C for 15 minutes and line/grease a baking sheet.
  2. Coarsely crush the cereal either using a rolling pin or pulse it a couple of times in the food processor.
  3. In a large mixing bowl, whisk together the flour combo, crushed cereal, baking soda, salt and cinnamon.
  4. In another bowl, whisk together applesauce, brown sugar, oil, vanilla and ricotta cheese.
  5. Add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture and combine gently.
  6. Drop by tablespoonful onto the baking sheets, leaving about an inch between cookies.
  7. Flatten cookies with the back of a fork and sprinkle tops with sugar.
  8. Bake about 18 to 20 minutes, or until nicely browned and crispy around the edges.
  9. Leave it in the baking sheet for 5 minutes and then transfer to a wire cooling rack to cool it completely. Serve it with blueberry milk or strawberry milk.
  • Note: mine cooked in about 16 minutes, they did get a little brown in the bottom, but they were not burned.

You see what I’m talking about, the ingredients are pretty harmless to offer to little ones at breakfast time. Especially on these ‘let’s go we are running late’ kind of mornings… you just crab a couple of these and the kid can eat while the car is in movement!

It was a great success around here, specially when I told my little on in the morning: “Would like some cookies to eat with your yogurt?”. You had to see her face: “Cookies?? That would be fun!”. No joke, that is exactly what she told me. Hoary for Mama!

You can always keep these around for snack and serve as dessert after lunch or dinner without feeling so bad to offer a cookie because you know EXACTLY what went in!

Cookies for breakfast anyone???

Love,

Roberta

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I know you have been waiting for! {Debt Free Part 2}

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I know you have been waiting on this one forever!!! It has taking me awhile to get back into the swing of things after our vacation to the land of the Sun (more on the vacation later). Before jumping to Debt Free Part 2 you can check out Part 1 to refresh your memory or start over!

Now back to business..It is mid 2011, and I’m telling the husband that we should try to focused on paying off my student loans and he is telling me that I should open a Roth IRA…. it did not make sense to me to be saving for retirement while I was paying so much in interest on the student loans. It just did not!

But, I could not convince him that paying off the loans was REALLY the best thing we could do for our retirement. He was just not grasping the idea. Keep in mind that I can run numbers – especially when it comes to our personal finances – in my head fairly quickly, the husband, on the other hand, is like “São Tomé” [Saint Tome] – he only believes in what he can see! And on top of it,  he loooooves to save money!

Until one day late in 2011 a friend of mine [sweet Andro] introduced me to David Ramsey. Yep, you probably have heard of him. He was coming to Houston for a one day Get Debt Free type of seminar. We bought our Groupon tickets and I decided it could not hurt me to go hear what David had to say!

Yep, that was the best money I ever spent. David showed in a very simply form how to get out of debt. He calls his method “The Seven Baby Steps”. There are:

1. Set up a $1,000 cash Emergency fund

2. Pay off all debt using the snow ball method

3. Put 3-6 months of expenses in savings

4. Invest 15% of household income into Roth IRA and pre-tax retirement

5. College funding for children

6. Pay off home early

7. Build wealth and give

I will keep this post mainly to step 1 and 2! We will get to the other steps in later posts :)

David said “you money people” [like me hint, hint], put the numbers on a paper and present it to the “not so money people” [the husband hint hint] and shut up, let them come to you with questions. BINGO!!! Couldn’t the husband have said that to me before??? He probably did it, but being stubborn as I’m, I guess I had to hear it from someone else. LOL

That is all it took. I showed the husband (with numbers on a paper) that if we stopped ALL savings for ONLY one year and ONE year only we could be debt free. And since I was feeling very empowered by Mr. Ramsey I added 8K worth of the remaining of my car loan on top of the 17K from student loans. He agreed with the condition of not more than a year. The deal was sealed!

Step 1: We already had a emergency cash set aside, so we moved along to step 2.

Step 2: Stop ALL savings. For vacation, housing fund [we do have this savings with very little money going in for on going house fixes - you know old houses always have something breaking down]; 401K, Roth IRA, college savings.

We also revised all monthly budget – yep we have one – on excel that I have built over the years, nothing super fancy but it details every monthly household expenses so we know ECXATLY where our money goes EVERY month. (if anyone is interested I would be happy to share my template!)

This seems to be crazy, but it is very important to know WHERE you money goes and more so when you are trying to pay off debt. That way you know what you can spend on month after month.

Crazy as I’m, I revised the budget every two weeks – it took me on average 30-45 minutes – to make sure we were on track and how much money we had to spend on top of the regular household expenses and paying off the debt. It was nice to have that figure every two weeks, since we were in a very tight budget, it was nice to have a bit of money here and there to do a few extra things so we did not feel that was ‘only work and no play’.

In fact, my diligence over the budget paid off really well (side note: not taking all the credit for myself here, but I did this part, but I could not do all without the husband being on board and also without his paycheck LOL). We were able to do several family trips WITHOUT straining from the budget, NOT ONCE BABY! Yaaayyyyy for us :)

The car loan went first – the snow ball effect – pay off the small debt first (I know it seems a little crazy financially when you look at the interest rate), but once you pay off the small one first it gives you that boost to keep going. The money that was used to pay the car loan was then applied to the student loans payments. 11 months later – under one year, promise kept to the husband – WE WERE DONE, DONE, DONE, DONE. DEBT FREE!!!!

Still have the mortgage, but hey I consider ourselves debt free as it is! Cheers!

Now back to reset all of our monthly savings :)

How about you??? Are you on top of your finances??? On the road to be debt free as well?? Who is in charge of paying the bill in your house???

Happy debt free!

Love,

Roberta

 

 

 

Twitt
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