Healthy Bread In 5 Minutes - Hearty Wheat Sandwich Bread

I made up the master recipe from the bread book a couple of days ago, and made the sandwich loaf yesterday. It was delicious, but not a great sandwich bread. The crust was too crunch and the bread a little dense for our tastes for sandwiches. It was wonderfully yummy with honey though! I can hardly wait to try the rest of the dough out with some other recipes and to try one of the other sandwich bread recipes.

Bread Update

I've started the first batch of dough for my Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes book! The basic idea is that you make this dough and keep it in your fridge. It takes about 20 minutes to make the dough, but you can get about 4 loaves out of it, so if you do one a day it averages to 5 minutes each. Actually, I saw them completely make a loaf (minus rising and cooking time) in a 2 minute video, so there's hope it could be even faster eventually.

I'm a bit nervous, because it seems excessively wet, but I'll see tomorrow. You can still work with it if it's too wet, it's just a bit harder. The other thing is that whole wheat breads tend to take longer to really absorb the water, so that may be what is going on. Tomorrow I'm going to make sandwich bread with it, and then we'll see what I decide to do with the rest, probably another day. Now I'm just hoping it doesn't overflow the bowl!

New Books, New Ideas, New Adventure

I just got a couple of books i ordered off of amazon. I'm especially excited because I got to use the gift certificates I've been saving up from Swagbucks, and even have lots left.

Anyways, the books "Healthy Bread in Five Minutes A Day" and "Make Your Place; Affordable, Sustainable, Nesting Skills". Both books bring with them their own adventures!

I LOVE to bake homemade bread. I don't think anything tastes better, and the wonderful smell in the house when it is baking is just heavenly. I've been trying to move our family away from processed breads to healthier breads. I've been making wheat bread with home ground wheat for a little over a year, but now I'm so excited to have some new healthy bread recipes! I'm going to try making a bunch of different recipes from here, and I'll tell you all about it!

The second book is full of make it yourself recipes for cleaners, first aid products, etc. I'm hoping I can find some great, inexpensive cleaners that will work as wonderfully as our homemade laundry soap recipe does! I'll post my adventures and findings on this one too as I go!

Cleaning

I finally got done steam vac'ing my house! Yeah!!! It looks great. It's taken me forever to get it done. My mom gave us the steam vac for my birthday last year, but because of my Chostochondritis flaring, I haven't been able to do it.

The past month though I have been on a mission to get my house to stay clean. I started a new routine, and I'm so happy with how it is going. Because of the routine, I have focused on getting the carpets on just one floor of the house done at a time. This seemed like it would be a pain, but our steam vac is actually quite easy to set up, and that gives the rest of the house for the kids to play in so they don't end up playing on wet floors.

So, here is my solution for keeping a house actually CLEAN with minimal effort. Every morning I:
- wipe down the shower in our bathroom, the counters and toilets in all of the bathrooms and clean the inside of the toilets in all of the bathrooms
- clean the surfaces in the kitchen
- put a load of laundry on (Erik puts our laundry away, and on the weekend does any laundry that doesn't get done during the week... have I mentioned I have the best husband on the planet??)

These rooms don't get dirty because they get cleaned everyday, so doing ALL of that takes less than 15 minutes, and our bathrooms like freshly cleaned all day everyday. I wish I could say the same for the kitchen, but it is such a high traffic spot that it tends to collect junk. Still, it is clean at the start of every day.

Once I am done the everyday stuff, I work for 30-45 minutes on one floor of the house, the same floor each day for a week, and then switch to another floor the next week (we have 4 floors in our house). This means that every room gets a very thorough cleaning once a month, yes I realize that is enough to make some people shudder, but we are not very good about getting dusting and stuff done, so this is FANTASTIC for us, and remember those places that get really icky are getting cleaned everyday.

That just leaves the floors that need mopped, which we can get away with doing once a week, so I make sure I hit those at some point during the week and I am set! My plan is to pick one big thing on each floor to do along with maintenance cleaning each month. This month I picked the carpet, so everything got steam vac'd. Next month I'm thinking scrubbing floors by hand and doing baseboards... but i haven't decided for sure, I'd also really like to do closets and cupboards, so we'll see. One more floor left this month. This is week 4, but we had some bigger than normal messes this month because it's the first month so I had to spend 2 weeks on the family room level, but I'm okay with that, this system feels very forgiving to me. I hope I can maintain it!

Family Blog Updated

I finally got our family blog updated! Check it out:
http://dayinthehomeschoollife.blogspot.com/

A quick quote

" Two may talk together under the same roof for many years, yet never really meet; and two others at first speech are old friends. "
- Mary Catherwood

Things That Delight Me

In no particular order:

- listening to my son play as he weaves his own imaginary world.
- talking to friends
- talking about God
- even better yet, talking to friends about God :)
- having my nice warm kitty crawl up on my lap
- cuddling up in warm blankets
- sleeping in
- waking up to a clean house
- clothes, blankets, and towels fresh out of the dryer
- snuggling with a baby
- reading a really good book, the kind you don't ever want to put down
- finishing a project
- being able to "be there" for a friend
- tulips
- bright sunny, cool, days
- freshly fallen snow
- the moon glistening off of the snow
- the feel of air blowing through my hair during a boat ride
- getting really good coupon deals
- getting something for nothing
- comfortable silences with those I love
- Christmas morning
- walks in the woods
- Yellowstone
- nature
- feeling completely and totally in sync and connected with God
- the silence of a house right after everyone goes to bed
- morning snuggles in bed (after I'm awake :) )
- getting to know those people that I know the second I meet them will become friends.
- checking my e-mails in the morning and finding e-mails from friends
- opening my business e-mail to find a lot of orders waiting
- beautiful scents that don't make me sneeze
- vanilla
- surprising someone
- baking a special treat
- cookie dough
- impulse hugs and kisses from the littles
- snuggling and reading a story with my son
- seeing the look of pride cross Nick's face when he accomplishes something
- seeing 10 packages on the porch all full of orders I put together and all ready to go
- teaching a class
- seeing the moment something "clicks" ina person's eyes, especially if I have been teaching that something to them.

I could go on all day.... I think I'll stop there for today though.