jan milliman

If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own kitchen counter.

As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve been making a lot of bread around here. We’re still amazed by the simple process: Four ingredients (flour, water, yeast, and salt) and five minutes of kneading. A bowl for the dough to rise in, a pan to bake the loaf in. It couldn’t be easier.

But as with every new endeavor, we’ve been looking at ways to improve the process. Not the recipe we learned from the Bread Man, because that seems to work up perfectly every time. But those bits before and after, they could use some tweaking, right?

We started with a big cupboard overhaul to get all our ingredients organized and easy to reach. We put in some shelf reinforcements to help hold the displaced containers and cleared out a nice easy-to-reach spot for the bread making stuff.

Then we decided that we needed some new containers for the various flours. So we hunted down the best options for size and purpose. And then we needed a container to hold all of those new containers. Now we have a handy bread-baking box that’s easy to grab when the baking mood strikes.

With everything tweaked on the front end, we turned to post-baking. How to store our bread? The folks at Niblack had some handy loaf-sized bags, so we snatched up a batch. But with all the baking we’ve been doing we’ve been burning through our supply pretty quickly. So we started the research process all over again to find some sort of reusable storage receptacle for our loaves.

I discovered that the Progressive International Adjustable Bread Keeper gets high marks from reviewers. I shared the Amazon link with The Mister, but he was quick to point out that it wouldn’t fit inside our bread box.

…

Bread box? Was it possible we could just put our uncovered loaves in that old thing? This stroke of insight lead to more research. I quickly discovered that the folks at eHow claim it’s entirely possible to store your bread in your bread box.

Who knew it could be that easy?

Now all I need is a good ice cube recipe …