Bread & Pasta

I'm hoping we can start becoming more frugal and practical with our grocery bill. So...let's make bread!

Bread
I've read and found that baking your own bread is much less expensive than buying bread. I'm not talking about the generic white bread. I'm talking about the rich, dense, flavorful, nutty, artisan type of bread. The kind that really just makes your sandwich that much better. Exploring types of bread, I'm familiar with beer bread; however, its life is short lived and serves better at the time you baked it.

So branching out, I tried making a whole wheat bread and using an all purpose flour recipe. The bread didn't rise and was very dense. More so than I would care for sandwich. Yet, its held up quit well and has yet to mold in a week.

Since I wasn't satisfied with the wheat,  tried rye bread. It did lack caraway seeds which later was actually available in the bulk section and fairly expensive when it comes to seeds/nuts/spices. The HEB carries bulk spices and we get very inexpensive spices where the jarred stuff, your really paying for the bottle. I do believe the rye did good. It lasted about 5 days. On the 5th day it started to dry out. Look how pretty :)

 I paired the rye bread with Roast beef and vegetables the first day I baked it. And Kalen had roast beef sandwiches on the rye for lunches.

 The carrots were super yummy. They came from the farmers market downtown and were purple on the outside and yellow orange on the inside. Said to have more beta-carotene. Very sweet, almost like sweet potato.

After this success, I moved to sour dough. Sour dough requires a starter which your supposed to put in a large jar. Round 1) the starter mix volcanoed all over the top of the fridge, so I had to transfer to another container. After reading further about sour dough starters, they don't need to be in plastic containers. And I needed to feed the starter about a day before I am to bake with it. So I did just that and moved to some a jar and a glass mug of Kalen's. Round 2) The jars could not hold all of the starter, so I moved half from each into another glass mug of Kalen's.  And went out on a search for better/bigger jars for the task. I stopped off at a big lots and a dollar general no luck. Ended up in a hardware store and bought two very large mason jars (32oz?). Round 3) on returning home the 3 containers had again doubled. so I moved them into the one jar. I'm hoping I won't have to split again. But because there is so much starter, I probably should bake two loafs. Feed the starter again and put in the fridge for two weeks. I'll probably have to teach Kalen how to take care of the starter or it will not survive since we have our wedding/honeymoon traveling later this coming month.

Now, I did try my hand at past. Didn't take any pictures. I was a little disappointed how they turned out because they were much denser/harder than I was expecting. So in the 2nd dish, I made chicken and dumplings (first time) and the noodles cooked for a few hours and softened up. It was nice because they had a better consistency than regular dumplings. Next time, I'll be sure to add the rise phase and use the pasta machine and hand crack it really thin.