Give Us This Day Our Yearly Bread

A little over a year ago, I finally figured out how to make real bread. The kind with hard, crusty deliciousness on the outside and warm, chewy goodness on the inside. The kind you only get if you buy it from the bakery. It's not easy unless you have a special oven (as most bakeries do). It was a milestone and a cause for much rejoicing in our household, since my husband is European and misses his bread almost as much as he misses his family. Unfortunately it is very time consuming as well--one loaf of lovely bread takes about 12 hours minimum to make, and more if you really want the taste of the bread to be fully developed.

Ironically enough, JC and I decided to start restricting carbohydrates in our diet just a few months later to see if the hype about low-carbs diets is true. It is, by the way (at least for us). But oh, do we miss our bread! Anyway, we have been looking forward to Christmas because we decided we were going eat bread as one of our Christmas presents. And of course, if you only get to eat bread at Christmas, it HAS to be the good kind. So we made our Christmas bread and it was thoroughly enjoyed, if not terribly long-lived. And yes, it tasted as wonderful as we remembered. We thanked the geniuses who first took flour, water and yeast and made this fabulous creation. We sang our praises to gluten. And we ate the whole loaf in one day. Now we have to get back on the bandwagon, so we are a little depressed. However, we have decided that this will be our new yearly tradition and now look forward to that great loaf of bread that we will devour next Christmas.