Here's what's new:

Using What You Have: Homemade Bread

Welcome to my regular post sharing creative ways I’m making do with what we have. I often share these types of things on Instagram stories, but I know a lot of you don’t have Instagram or don’t check it regularly, so I’m transcribing some of my weekly stories into blog posts to give you inspiration and encouragement for ways you can make do and use what you have.

If you’ve been around here for awhile, you know that I used to bake bread all the time. Well, actually, my bread machine did most of the work — I would just dump the ingredients in and let it do the work of turning them into a beautiful dough. And then I’d shape it into a loaf, let it rise in a bread pan, and bake it.

(Side note: I often get asked why I don’t bake bread in my bread machine. You totally can and I have sometimes, I just think it’s softer and has a softer crust if you bake it in the oven.)

In the past few years, I hadn’t baked bread as much because I’d been finding so many great deals and markdowns on whole wheat/whole grain bread. I would just buy extra loaves when I found a good sale and we always had some in the freezer.

But recently, I haven’t found as many good markdowns on bread and I had actually gotten to the very end of my freezer bread stash. And I knew it was time to pull out the bread machine and make some homemade bread!

This is the homemade bread recipe we’ve used for years. An online friend shared it on her blog (that’s no longer online) and I made some tweaks and it became a favorite.

I love that — thanks to the bread machine — you can have a loaf of bread dough ready to go in the oven in just and hour and a half! And you usually only spend about 5 minutes total to make it happen since the machine does the work for you!

It was so wonderful to have the smell of fresh baked bread wafting through our house again! In fact, it inspired me to try my hand at baking Artisan Bread again — something I had tried years ago and flopped. Stay tuned for my post on that, hopefully next week!

Psst! Here are some of my other favorite bread recipes.