Saturday Morning, Baking Bread

add honey from the honey farm

to the bowl with yeast and warm water, and set aside.

in a separate bowl, measure bread flour

and salt

mix by hand

Not literally!!!

Oh, okay...literally

pour in the frothy yeast mixture, and mix some more

knead for ten long minutes, to make your muscles strong

Let it rest, let it rise, punch it down, let it rise.

pat it into greased loaf pans

Let it rest, let it rise.

bake it in the oven for a long, LONG time

I make bread often, and when I'm solo, I make my bread solely using the easy five-minute method. 

But that, of course, is because when I bake bread solo, I only care about the product, those rolls or that pizza crust or the next day's sandwiches and toast.

When my little girls ask to bake bread, they're not asking to bake bread because they want to eat bread (at least not solely). They're asking to bake bread because they want to measure, and mix, and taste honey and salt on their tongues, and sift bread flour between their fingers, and knead bread dough with all their strength, and warm their feet on the oven door while they watch their loaf rise, and burn their fingers because they just can't stop themselves from touching that brown crust before it's cooled.

Baking bread...when I tell you that it's the process, not the product, when I seethe so hard that my heart speeds up as I watch a dad take the glue bottle from his daughter's hand and micro-manage her craft project at the library, when I let my girls make big messes and big mistakes, when they draw on themselves with permanent marker, when they do a terrible job of brushing their hair, when we spend an entire day together and don't "do" anything...well, then that's when I want you to think about baking bread. Sure, that bread that my girls baked tasted delicious, tasted even more delicious to me because they'd baked it, but that wasn't really the point of the activity, was it?

The point of the activity was the process.

P.S. We use the bread recipe from here, and we love it: