An Old Tradition for a New House

There's an old tradition amongst housewives that the first thing one should bake in a new house is a loaf bread.  The saying goes that if you bake bread first your cupboards will never be empty.  (Credit goes to Jac Scrivner for teaching me this tradition.)

So, for the first time, I used my shiny red KitchenAid counter mixer.  While Grandma never actually used this herself (she was long past the cooking days when Susan bought it for her), it evokes memories of the old counter top mixer Grandma used to have.  M&M cookies were made using the mixer, and while I wasn't into cooking at all back then, Grandma did try her best to include me on the process.

I hadn't unpacked the recipe boxes yet, but I did have my trusty Mennonite cookbook unpacked.  After a thorough check of the ingredients, I headed to H-E-B (Texas supermarket chain) and did some hardcore grocery shopping.  Getting back, I busted into making my first yeast-based bread (I feel like banana bread is cheating now!).

 When starting the process at 7:30 p.m., this thing is amazing!  I'll be hard pressed to use my hand-held mixer anytime soon.  I am definitely in love with the speed and power of this thing!

I forgot to get pictures in between the mixing and the dough rising.  It was really fun punching the dough down.  I had to leave during the process, and may have let it rise a bit too long the first time around, but all in all, it did come out pretty okay.

I'm not sure if I needed a bigger bread pan, or really just needed to learn how to divide more evenly, but the bread came a bit misshapen.  I added a light coating of olive oil on top (because it sounded fun) and voila!

Note to self:  Learn how to shape the bread.

The bread actually was pretty tasty.  It was a bit on the salty side (made note next to recipe to cut the salt in half for next time).  Winston managed to get himself up high enough to eat the majority of the loaf in the white dish.   I still have the two loaves in the tin pans left (mainly because I had bought some sourdough bread and a loaf of really yummy bread with seeds and other stuff from the store).

While I did actually make this bread the week after I got to Boerne, I've just now gotten around to posting this up.  The good news:  my cupboards have yet to be bear!