We Have a Winner!

I've been experimenting with different bread recipes trying to find one that works for our family. The main criteria being:

1. Simple ingredients that I have on hand (yeast, flour, salt, etc)
2. Not overly elaborate steps
3. Low maintenance

Let's face it, I have 3 kids and I work full time, I don't have time to knead, proof, rinse, repeat, babysit and all that comes with the more common bread recipes. I have a KitchenAid mixer with hook, so that cuts down on the amount of hands on I am willing to put into this. I don't want a bunch of extra stuff in the bread either, so I avoided recipes that have shortening (gross!), butter, whole milk, buttermilk and a host of other oddball ingredients that I either don't want in my bread or I don't have in my house often enough.

Tonight I think I found my winner. From start to finish it was a little over an hour and that was 40 minutes of cooking. In between steps I found time to hand wash the mixer parts and empty my dishwasher, so it's a multi-tasking friendly recipe!

http://www.theheartofnewengland.com/food-Simple-Bread.html

The bread does have brown sugar in it, but it's not super sweet at all, in fact, I forgot the sugar was in there until I just looked at the recipe again. I have some honey that a friend from church gave me from her hive, so I am thinking I might try to use that next batch to see how it tastes. If anything, I would rather have my kids eating bread with local, fresh honey in it than GFS brown sugar :)

Tomorrow I am testing driving a recipe from the Hillbilly Housewife, Italian Beans and Rice:

http://www.hillbillyhousewife.com/italianbeansandrice.htm

Last month Spartan had coupons on their website, http://www.turntospartan.com, for $1 off of a 2lb bag of dried beans, so I picked up some dried northern beans and we've been trying to use them in different ways. We made a very tasty bean and ham soup, and now it's time to put them to the beans and rice test.