Summon Bread!

As most anyone who knows me can attest, I'm not much of a cook. I most definitely like to eat, though, with bread right at the top of my favorite foods list. (Or maybe second. I like cheese a whole lot.) Also, I like tech toys.

Enter the bread machine. This is exactly my kind of cooking. Put ingredients in, set the program, push start, come back in a few hours...bread!

The machine I have is a "T-fal Actibread" that I bought from Amazon.com. It can make up to a 2-lb loaf, but normally that's too much to eat in a few days (even for me), so I usually make the 1.5-lb recipes. That's what causes the weird looking top of the loaf...with the smaller size, there's empty space in the machine so it isn't smooth coming out. No big deal.

There's a ton of different kinds of bread you can make in a bread machine. I've only really done French and normal sandwich bread to this point, but there's another dozen or so recipes in the bread machine's recipe booklet, and a nearly infinite variety on the Internet. Way too many of them are "gluten free," which holds zero interest for me, but those can be ignored easily enough. I'm thinking about trying possibly my favorite bread flavor ever next - banana bread.

With fresh bread available twice a week with almost no effort, it's hard to imagine why I'd ever go back to eating store bread!