Garlic herb cheese leftover oatmeal bread. And equally random soup.

Once you have tried a few different bread recipes, you can start to realize that you can wing it, and if you are lazy like me -- hardly able to muster up the energy to open a cookbook and certainly incapable of remembering which recipe you really like -- this is a welcome revelation.


If you have flour, liquid, salt, and yeast, you will have bread. And if you have noticed the order you do things and how the dough looks as you've mixed it according to the directions, you can easily make it all happen without precise measurements.
Today I had some herbs that I had picked a while ago, and they were sort of wilting on the counter. A vision -- or a taste-- of cheesy herb-y bread floated in my brain -- the kind of embellished sandwich bread that calls for, in addition to the basics, some form of fat and an egg.


For liquid, my stand-by -- potato water in addition to regular old water.

{Potato does something incredible to bread. Keep the water from making mashed potatoes, cook up a potato, chopped in small pieces, in the microwave, and puree with your hand blender, or use a little potato starch. It just adds that little something to the texture and the flavor...}

For flour, I used some unbleached white and a lot of white whole wheat, and then I remembered a little container of leftover steel-cut oat porridge....A quick zap with a little water and in it went!

Dissolve the yeast in about a cup and a half of warm water, add a tolerable amount of flour, make sure you use a goodly portion of salt (1 tablespoon for 7 cups of flour), and chuck in your extras to your heart's content.

As you mix (in the stand mixer), continue adding liquid (water, milk, buttermilk -- once I used the liquid from baked beans! It was good!) until you get the mix you remember from all those times you used a recipe.

Only, make your dough a little looser than you think. The first two mistakes home bakers make are

1. Not enough salt.

2. Not enough liquid -- because they want to be able to handle the dough, but actually, you shouldn't handle it much, and if you want a tender, moist bread you have to get a little sticky.

Don't forget the autolyse -- just the thing for the distracted baker -- an excuse to leave what you started for 20 minutes and go do something else...


The texture of the developing (fermenting) dough changes magically after this rest. You can see the gluten's development. What had been somewhat rough and resistant becomes docile and silky. A quick knead (I let the mixer do it, but not for long at all) and into the greased bowl it goes.
A long slow rise results in a better product than a hurried one in an overly-warm place. Yes, the dough will rise, but the chemical reaction is actually different. Your dough will be carbonated rather than fermented, and a yeasty (unpleasantly so) taste is the outcome. The heavy kneading called for in most recipes is to trap the gas, whereas the leavening in the slowly risen bread is quite different, but here my memory fails me and I would have to look it up. You will note, however, the faint whiff of alcohol after the long rise, signaling the fermentation...

Bread made this way has an amazing taste -- not flat, but rather dimensional; it also keeps well, not developing that off flavor hurried bread has the next day.

Now gently -- GENTLY -- turn and turn again for another rise. Then form into loaves. My mixer is the 6 quart one, so my 7-8 cups of flour usually yield three large loaves or in this case, four small ones and one medium one. (The latter braided, of course!)I like the little ones for this savory bread -- then I can freeze it and have it handy to round out a simple supper.
As the oven nears its preheated temperature, slash the bread. I set the oven for 350* (I have convection), but when I put the bread in, I turned it up to 400* so that it would be heating rather than cooling.
See, the oven cycles on and off, and when the buzzer tells you it's preheated, that means it has gotten to its temperature and will now start to cool off until it sinks below the point that it triggers the thermostat -- and for that great lift you want your loaves to have, the oven needs to be heating UP, not DOWN.

Set the timer for 15 minutes, then turn the heat back down to 350* for the final baking, in this case, just 10 minutes more (these were small loaves).

Is that not glorious? The braided loaf was glorious as well. The photo of it, less so -- sorry!
A freshly baked loaf makes a pot of soup a good hearty meal. (If you have big appetites to feed, make sure you offer tortilla chips with guacamole, hummus, and a bowl of nuts as well. I meant to do that tonight, but what is spacier than a homeschooling mom on the second day of school, I ask you? Not much. We seem fine, however.)

A recipe for the soup, you say? Oh fie!

I give this concoction the appetizing name of refrigerator-cleaning soup -- boil up a ham bone, take off the meat and put it back in, throw in all the little leftover veggies you have lurking about (corn, swiss chard, green beans -- all chopped up in the food processor), add some potatoes and a little orzo, and voila! Not lovely. No. But! Delicious!
Serve it up on the Goodwill dishes (love those shallow bowls!), with cheese and butter on the side, and there you have it -- a recipe-less mid-week supper!