#SOL21 – Day 10 – Baking Bread

“Do you have anything going on tonight?” E asks me at dinner. “Because I know that Dad will be out helping with Robotics.”

I look across at her, put down my fork, and smile. In the pause before I answer, her brothers both chuckle because they know what’s coming as well as I do.

“I want to make Italian bread so I can use it for the garlic bread we’re going to make tomorrow in LME.* I found a recipe that looks good, and we have all the ingredients.”

“We can do that. Were you planning on getting started right after dinner? Yeast breads take at least 3 hours, you know,” I say glancing at the clock and seeing that it’s almost 5:30.

And, so, as soon as the kitchen is cleaned up from dinner, E hauls out the stand mixer and puts it on the kitchen counter. She asks a few questions about which yeast to use (we have three different kinds), which kind of flour would be best (definitely all-purpose for this), how warm the water should be (less than boiling is not a good enough measure), and “How sticky should ‘sticky dough’ be?” (Definitely more flours because this looks like pancake batter), but she does all of the measuring and mixing on her own.

Through the whole process, there’s only one time that she asks me to do one of the steps. “Mom, can you get out the mat for me?”

I walk into the kitchen and see the soft dough slowly dripping through her fingers. I laugh and pull out the mat. “You should probably let me sprinkle this with some flour before you set the dough on it.” And then’s she back to making the bread on her own. Good for her!

*LME = Life Management Education (think Home Economics) in our middle schools