Whole wheat bread (Still Baking #1)

A new year! A new month! A new BLOG THEME! I'm excited, are you?

As I may have mentioned (because it's the most exciting thing going on in my life right now), I am going on leave from work on Wednesday! Since I have tomorrow off anyway, I'm functionally on leave now. WOO!

Since I will have free time, and since I need a theme for my blog that is supposedly food themed, I am going to bake something every day between now and baby having. Get it? The baby is still baking and so am I.

I'm going to try to make some healthier baked things but I also have a couple of people who I wanted to send Christmas goodies to but didn't quite make it on, so there will probably be some of that in there too. And I'd like to play around with deglutenizing some more stuff because, well, I've got the free time and I still have all this xanthan gum, ha ha. So yeah: baking stuff. That's this month's theme.



Today I made these lovely loaves of bread. They're just generic whole wheat, nothing too interesting at all. Every time I don't make bread for a while, I forget how easy and satisfying it is. I got Peter Reinholt's The Bread Baker's Apprentice for my birthday last year and it changed my bread baking life. So many simple tips for making bread that make even the most basic loaf like four times as good. It's not vegan (maybe half the recipes are by default) but I've had great success veganizing things out of it. Highly recommended.

Um, anyway... yeah. These loaves turned out well, I think. Saving them for breakfast tomorrow morning.

Several times today, the Emperor wedged himself into the empty half of a case of Trader Joe's fizzy waters that we have sitting next to the oven in the kitchen. Apparently it's exactly the right size for him to sit in, and he thinks it is hilarious. He's weird, but here he is: