Housewifery

Here are the recipes from today.

Since I'm such a bad water drinker, I'm trying kick my juice addition with this flavored stuff. I filled our little spicket with a couple of jog fulls of brita water, half a sliced cucumber, 1 small sliced lime, and a handful of mint. It's so refreshing over ice on hot days like today!

Okay, so I'm not the most experienced baker when it comes to using yeast, but I read a few recipes on pinterest that didn't actually look too hard, so I adapted them into this super easy recipe.

Easy Crockpot Bread

Ingredients:
6 cups all purpose flour (plus a little extra to work with)
1/2 teaspoon active dry yeast
2 1/2 teaspoons salt
3 cups room temperature water
1 tablespoon olive oil
Garlic salt, parsley, flaxseed, poppy seed, sesame seeds, or whatever else you'd like to top the bread with

1. Mix flour, yeast, and salt together in a large bowl. Slowly pour in water and mix with a wooden spoon until combined. You might not need to use all your water -- I left out about 1/3 of a cup. You want the dough to just come together.

 

2. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let sit for 3-4 hours or until about double in size, full of bubbles and smells of yeast.  I'm impatient, so I put the bowl on the stove to be warmed by the pilot light of the oven.

3. Punch the dough down in the bowl and place on a well floured smooth surface. Gently knead the dough with floured hands until the outside of the dough is coated in flour and no longer sticky to the touch. I probably folded my dough together less than 10 times -- you don't need to overwork it at all!

 4. Flour a clean dishtowel and place the dough inside to rise for another hour or two. I put it back on the stove to rise again.

 

5. After an hour, the dough should be about double the size again.  I shouldn't have tied my cloth so tight! The dough was trying to escape!

6. Grease the base and sides of the crockpot with the olive oil and drop your bred in there. Gently shape the dough into a mound a sprinkle whatever you like on top of it. I used garlic salt because I can't get enough of that stuff!

7. Set your pot to hot and let it cook for 3-4 hours with the lid on. (I popped the stone ware in the oven at 400 for about 20 minutes right at the end to brown up the crust a little bit.)

8. Turn your oven and crockpot off and pull the stone ware out. Let it rest. Make sure the stone ware is cool to the touch before you try to do anything. Carefully pull the bread out, slice and enjoy!

I also made veggie soup for dinner. Super-duper easy. I keep calling it refrigerator soup in my head because I just pulled everything out of the fridge, threw it in a pot with some chicken stock, and boiled it until it was done.