Easy Homemade Bread

I know I’ve mentioned in a few posts that we’ve been making our own bread again. We love sourdough bread but a few of the kids had mentioned that they really wanted something more like store-bought so I tried a few recipes and with a couple of tweaks we have found a combo that we really like… Mr. Awesome and I haven’t been eating much bread but we have tried a slice here and there as it smells so good! It is quite exceptional when it’s still a little warm and smeared with real butter and then drizzled with a bit of local honey… mmmmm!

This bread is great to use as rolls and as an alternative to English Muffins for breakfast. It also toasts up really nicely! We save all the breadcrumbs in a baggie in the freezer to use in our recipes where breadcrumbs are needed.

I recently converted my sourdough starter ‘Fran’ to a pasta madre/lievito madre/stiff dough and I like the results so far. You can learn more about this process HERE. I think I want to try to make some Panettone for Christmas this year so I wanted to get some starters going and get a little more familiar with the process.

I’ve also been researching about the Herman starter and Charlie starters so I may want to them out as well.

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Save the Dishes Oven Placard

I don’t know about your house but here we often have different people doing different things in the kitchen. One rule is that they need to check the oven before turning it on because sometimes people tend to ‘hide’ things in there and forget about them.

I’ve had many things that have been ruined because one person put a dish in there and the next person didn’t check it… most recently it was a plastic cover for one of my casserole dishes and the whole dish of peach cobbler that had been made for dinner… sigh.

This dish alone will cost me almost $40.00 ** to replace as I haven’t been able to find the lid sold separately… luckily the carrier is still alive!

More often than not it was my bread dough that was hanging out in there… minding its own business when someone would forget to check, even with the oven light on they forget, and then the temperature would go up and ruin the dough… (crying face).

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Homemade Sourdough English Muffins

We’ve been experimenting with sourdough recipes for a while now and this one has been a favorite of ours. It’s super easy to make but does have a bit of time required for rising so we usually start these the evening before we need them.

You can mix them by hand, use a stand mixer with a dough hook, or even mix them up in your breadmaker… we’ve tried them each way and they all turn out great. I like to put the dough in the oven for its long rise… be sure to leave the light on for it to keep it comfy!

These work great for breakfast sandwiches, mini pizzas, or with a bit of butter and jelly… yum!

This recipe may look a little tricky but once you made it a time a two you could probably do it in your sleep! If you don’t have a sourdough starter you can find tons of easy recipes online to start your own or you can buy some starter like we did HERE.** (Yes, that’s an affiliate link but it won’t cost you a penny more to use it.)

Homemade Sourdough English Muffins

Ingredients:

  • 1/2 c. active sourdough starter
  • 1 T. sugar or honey (we prefer to use local honey but that’s not really necessary)
  • 1 c. milk (I haven’t tried using milk kefir but it would probably work as well)
  • 1 t. salt
  • 3 c. all-purpose flour (may need a little more or less depending on the climate)
  • a bit of cornmeal of flour for dusting

Directions:

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Easy Peasy Sourdough Pancakes and Waffles

We have a breakfast schedule set up to help keep things running smoothly here which means that every Thursday we have Pancakes and then on some weekends we have Waffles. I also love our sourdough and kefir so we adjusted our original pancake recipe to incorporate these. This recipe is so easy that my girls make it by themselves.

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Sourdough Battered Squash Blossoms

Oh my! How did I not know that fried squash blossoms were a thing?

I just happened to search for ways to use squash blossoms the other day as we have several veggies starting to ripen and it seemed such a waste for those big beautiful blossoms to just wither away. That’s when I found out that fried squash blossoms were a thing and I had to give them a try.

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