cooking love.

You'll never believe what I found at 4 a.m. (after having shopped for three hours) at an outlet mall. A kitchenaid mixer for $160. Everywhere that I looked on the internet, it was way more expensive than that, plus shipping!! I just made more beer bread dough in the mixer tonight, and the loaves are cooking as we speak! I would truly love to be able to bake breads for a living. All kinds of breads! I am so in love with the kitchen right now. Our tiny kitchen, with cabinets that start a foot above our heads, with two drawers, and hardly any counter space. I am in love with making food come alive. I am enchanted by the way I can take many things and make something wonderful out of them!

The recipe I'm using is located here. It has a few unusual ingredients... mustard powder, powdered milk, and sesame seeds. You can buy sesame seeds at the grocery store, but I would go to a health food store or somewhere that sells them in bulk for cheap! I just substituted the mustard powder with a nice big glob of dijon mustard. We started drinking powdered milk because it's so damn cheap and if you keep it real cold in a container that closes you'll hardly notice the difference! Then again, we also drink soy milk and almond milk in addition to regular milk, so perhaps our variety of milk consumption also makes it easier to like something that a lot of people dislike. I swear of poor people who pay almost $4 a gallon for milk knew that you could get ten litres for $8, It would be flying off the shelves!

I did a booboo in my breads tonight, so they're not coming out quite right. When I was making the yeast mixture, I accidentally put the salt into it, instead of the bowl of dry stuff I was mixing up. Oops! I had to make another batch of yeast and soak it back into the sticky icky non-yeasty dough. They came out fantastic last time, I made six loaves (instead of two or four, like the recipe suggests) and Kay and Ash took a couple home with them and loved them! I have a lot of beer hanging around the house that I don't really drink much anymore and it seems like a good use of an used thing. I used a dark beer the first time and that seemed to work out a lot better, color wise. And besides, a thick, sweet, dark beer makes a good breakfast!