Monday Q&A | Bread Storage, Two Kids, and more
I've been reading your blog for a few weeks now and really enjoy your posts. A while back I decided to try my hand at making bread. I haven't fully gotten the hang of it, but each time I try, it turns out better and better. My questions are: How do you store your bread? Specifically sandwich bread. Do you slice it all at once? Slice it as you go? Do you have a special bread keeper? Plastic bag? Paper bag? So many questions.
-Melissa
First, I'm so glad you've hung in there with the bread making. If there ever was a case where practice makes perfect, this is it!
As far as your question goes, I store my bread in plastic bags, which I reuse and reuse. Most bread leaves the bags so clean I don't even usually need to wash them between uses.
We go through loaves of bread in a flash around here, so I slice a loaf as we go and leave it out on the counter, but if you are single or live in a small family, I highly recommend freezing your bread. Homemade bread has no preservatives in it, and tends to mold much faster than store-bought bread, so freezing it is important if you take a while to eat a loaf.
To make it easier to defrost your bread, I'd suggest slicing it before you freeze it so that you can easily remove just as many slices as you want.
I do freeze my loaves when I make more than one, as I often do when making whole wheat sandwich bread or French bread. This is a great way to have homemade bread available and ready without having to constantly bake.
I'm having my second baby soon, and I was wondering what you thought the biggest changes and differences were once you had two babies. Mine will be 18 months apart, and thankfully, I will not be going back to work once the new baby is here.
Hopefully you have time to answer my question! I'm 25 and am the first one of my friends to have babies, and both my husband and I are only children, so even our moms don't know what it will be like to have 2 🙂
-Bonnie
My first two kids are 19 months apart, so that's pretty similar to your situation.
Life definitely got busier with two babies, but the thing I remember the most is that having my second baby was not as hard as I expected! This is partly because my second baby was an easier baby, but also because I knew better what I was doing as a mom. I just coped a lot better the second time around!
So, overall, I felt that the adjustment to having 2 kids was easier than the adjustment to having my first.
Life might feel a little overwhelming at first with two very small children, but I just want to encourage you to remember that this is just a phase of life and that these two small children will grow and will eventually be able to feed themselves and sleep through the night and all of that good stuff.
Also, I should share with you that while 2 children do require more work in some ways, it is not necessarily always harder to have 2 children than 1. Even when Lisey was a small baby, Joshua was quite entertained by her, and she by him. He used to sit with her on the floor and hand her toys and when she was very small, he liked to stand by her swing and talk to her. As they got older, they spent more and more time playing with each other and they've been close friends their whole lives so far.
Of course, now two more children have been added into the mix, and I have to say, I really like the fact that they all play together. I don't need to expend much effort entertaining them because there is always someone here for them to play with!
I always combine my bag of whole wheat flour with a bag of all-purpose flour. I've made banana bread and carrot cake with this combination in the past. I see that most of your recipes call for all-purpose flour, would the different breads and rolls come out to tough if I were to substitute half the flour with whole wheat?
-Annette
Nope, whole wheat flour does not make yeast breads tough. Because it is heavier and contains less gluten, it makes them a little more dense, and of course, the whole wheat adds its own flavor to the mix (this would make the cheese flavor in something like a batch of Cheddar Twists a little less pronounced), but your results should be just fine if you like whole wheat breads.
Kristen, I'm looking at buying a grill--but I'm not sure what to get. Since you just posted information about grilling chicken (which means you obv. own a grill), I thought I'd ask for your opinion.
We don't have a patio or a backyard for that matter. We currently rent in a huge condo building in Chicago.
Would you suggest, for someone like me, to go with a small, portable charcoal grill? A gas grill? Are there other options for preparing food that tastes like it was done on the grill otherwise?
As far as I know, there is no real grill option that is safe to use indoors other than the sort of grill that is built into some cooktops.
If you want grill marks on your food, you might try purchasing a grill pan, which looks like a skillet except that it has ridges on the bottom.
If smoky flavor is more what you're going for, you might heat a cast iron pan until it's really hot before adding your food. This won't be just like grilled food, but it would be tasty, and it would produce a crispy outside like the grill.
I'm sure I have a number of apartment/condo-dwelling readers who have more experience with this than I do, though, so do check the comments to find some better advice than mine!
Hi Reese - I also live in a large apt building, some of the units have private balconies and our recent newsletter reminded everyone that only electric grills are allowed on them (no charcoal or gas). Since this is my first spring in the building, i'm not sure if we have grills near the pool area for common use, but maybe yours does? For indoor options, I have a cast iron grill pan that I use on my stove top which is nice and big and also a little george forman that I've had since college. I use the grill pan more often since I don't need to find counter space for it, but the foreman is great to cook food quickly, no flipping required, since it cooks from both the top and bottom at once. In summary, check what your building allows, look for common-area grills, or go with a grill pan or george forman for indoor use. hope that is helpful!
Thanks for the tips about storing bread! My husband is EXTREMELY picky about bread and most of the time won't eat my homemade bread. (He only likes thinly sliced light and fluffy bread and I like to have whole wheat most of the time...plus its so hard to slice homemade bread thinly!) So storing a whole loaf of bread until I get a chance to eat it is a challenge sometimes. I can't wait until my little peanut is ready to eat bread and help me out! These suggestions will help me out a lot.
Get a small bottle of liquid smoke. Add a few drops to whatever marinade you're using and it will taste like it's cooked on a grill, even if you're using a stove-top grill pan.
On grilling while living in a shared building: My husband and I lived in an apartment in St. Paul, MN, for the first two years of our married life. For our first anniversary, I bought a Smoky Joe grill. It's a smallish charcoal grill that we kept in our storage unit when not in use. We would pretty much only use it on weekends, when we'd haul it out and do a little grill-out in our parking space. I'd leave the grill in our parking space over night (hidden by our car) to let the coals cool, then dump coals and ash into the communal dumpster before returning it to our storage space. We also brought it to parks sometimes to grill out. It worked great for us, and I'd always cook more than one meal when we had it out (i.e., hamburgers for dinner, plus grill a pound or two of chicken to reheat in the oven for another meal later) so we got the tastiness of grilling during the week without all the work of hauling it in and out of storage.
You could also look for a hibachi grill or one of those small table-top gas grills. You can't use them indoors, of course, but it might be easier to bring to a park if you're walking, or use at home if your building has any outdoor picnic tables.
Bread disappears around here pretty fast, too! I often bake 2 loaves at a time as the first one goes so quickly. I do the "slice as you go" thing, too. I find large Ziplocs work well for storing sandwich loaves (I reuse them over and over, too); I also have a Tupperware bread keeper (given to me by my mom) and it's really handy for storing a loaf,too.
If anyone's still struggling with getting a good loaf of bread, I highly recommend my whole wheat refrigerator dough recipe - I've been making this for years and it's never let me down. All my friends have had great success with it as well. It's also the most convenient way I know to make bread, since it does the first rise in the fridge!
http://abundanceonadime.blogspot.com/2008/05/bread-solution-refrigerator-bread-dough.html
Melissa, one more thing to keep in mind is that previously-frozen bread goes stale faster than never-frozen bread. Given how fast her family eats bread I'm not actually sure that Kirsten knows this. :-} So that's another reason to slice bread before you freeze it.
Reese, the indoor cooking method that's most like grilling is broiling. For example, the equivalent of a two-level fire is high broil (or close in, for older ovens) then low broil (or farther away). Liquid smoke is good stuff - the name brand is actually liquified smoke: they burn wood in a way that makes it smokey, then condense the smoke in a contraption that probably looks like an old-fashioned still.
Yeah, I don't have much experience with stale, moldy bread. lol It happens every now and then, but it's definitely not a regular occurrence.
I reuse old bread bags or english muffin bags to store homemade bread in. If you put the bread in the refrigerator for a few hours, it is much easier to slice. You can get really thin slices that way.
Hey Kristen!
Thanks so much for responding! We're really excited for our new addition, and your answer made me feel a lot better 🙂 Love your blog, recipes, pictures, and great outlook on life and family! P.S.-- We just made a second batch of yogurt last night. Thanks for the inspiration!
I like Bonnie's question! It's funny that I just turned 25 and I thought I'd have kids by now...but I don't. And all of my friends do! And if they don't, the remaining 2 have buns in the oven. 🙂
Bonnie,
I just went from one kid to two a month ago. I've got a much bigger age gap than you will--my older one is almost 6--but I just wanted to let you know that, honestly, it has been a lot easier than I thought. I actually wasn't too worried until the first week I was home from the hospital, when my husband was home with me all week AND my parents were here. My parents left the following Sunday, my husband was back to work on Monday, and that Saturday I started getting really, really worried about how I was going to manage now that I'm outnumbered.
But, it's gone very well. My daughter is much easier than my son was, which is a big help. A lot of things have just been much less stressful, because I've been through it once and am not so worried. The really big difference with this baby is that I just can't always respond to her right away. Sometimes she's just got to lay there (or swing there) and cry, because I have to do what I'm doing with my son before I can get to her. She seems no worse for the wear for it, though. Oh, and I'm not a fan of getting both of them into the car, but we don't drive much during the week, and taking both of them out for a walk is great fun, so we walk places if we can.
Good luck! I've been having so much fun with two that I really can't wait to have a third (although my husband isn't so sure, but we'll see how we both feel in a couple of years).
Thanks for the encouraging words, Lori. Glad everything is going really well with your family!
Reese - I have a grill pan as mentioned above and it works ok. But what works even better is a cast-iron pancake griddle that has two sides. It's a long rectangle that fits over two burners. One side is flat (for pancakes, etc.) and the other has ridges like a grill pan. I like to get it smoking hot as suggested and grill chicken breasts, kabobs, etc.
I have a griddle like that one, too, and I love it. The pancakes come out great, and I can easily fit 8 silver dollar ones at once on the griddle. The other side, when smoking hot, is a pretty good subsitute for grilling. My only complaint is how difficult the ridged side is to clean. Margaret, any tips for me in that regard?
Please be sure that your reader knows that she should NOT try to use any form of charcoal grill inside--charcoal burning creates carbon monoxide and you can die from asphyxiation by burning charcoal without adequate fresh air.
Likewise, if you use a grill pan, it's best to do it where there is good ventilation i.e. on a stove with a real vent (not just a fan). Otherwise the smoke will permeate the apartment and it's not very pleasant.
If you really have a "burning" desire for a charcoal fire, how about the fire pits or grills at a local park? That's when a little portable grill can come in handy.
Finally, look for the book "Cheater BBQ" (our library has it). It has some delicious recipes using rubs and liquid smoke that you can make in your own oven or crock pot and they taste yummy. Most of them are cooked in heavy duty aluminum foil, so clean up is a breeze.
Like Margaret, I also have a cast-iron griddle/grill. It's a great grill, but clean-up and ventilation are issues. The burners underneath the grill get pretty messy around the edges (we have an electric stove) and the grill itself gets burnt residue on it since my husband is still figuring out how to clean it well without scratching it.
Bonnie - get a double stroller. My girls were 18 months apart and even though the older one could walk, let's face it an 18-month-old can't really walk well enough to keep up with you. I felt sort of trapped at home until we got a double stroller. It's great for walking around your neighborhood or for packing in the car to be able to take them anywhere.
More advice - be mindful if you find yourself comparing them too much. Each child is a blessing unto itself and each one has ways to bring you joy, even if they are very different from the other child.
Whenever I have frozen homemade bread it's thawed to be pretty hard and only really good for toasting. I usually make my bread in the breadmaker, though - would that be why it doesn't freeze well?
Franci,
Bread becomes hard when you thaw it because it dries out. You need to do things to keep the moisture in.
We zap frozen bread slices in the microwave to thaw when possible. That seems to make the slices nice and soft. The other option is to leave bread tightly wrapped until thawed. For sandwich breads I package two slices to a sandwich size zipper bag and thaw them on the counter in the closed bag. (I know this seems wasteful of zipper bags, but we either reuse them to freeze more bread slices or use them to pack lunch sandwiches in). For larger breads, I leave them tightly wrapped in foil and a layer of plastic (you can reuse grocery store vegetable bags for this, and reuse the foil for more bread) until thawed, usually overnight.
During the thawing, if the bread remains sealed up, it will reabsorb it's own moisture and will not be dried out and stale. For a freshly baked taste, warm a thawed out loaf gently in the oven (wrapped in foil) for 10 or 15 minutes.
Thank you for talking about bread storage! I recently lost half a loaf to mold because we didn't eat it fast enough. This time I was smart! One loaf is in the freezer, the other we should be able to eat before it gets moldy!
I have a question though. I realize you don't have pets yourself (aside from Zoe's fish) and that they aren't exactly a frugal thing themselves, but I wondered if you had any tips on frugality and animals? My husband and I are animal lovers, have one cat and hope to get a dog this summer. The cat has to be indoors because of where we live, so unfortunately we do have to use a litter box (she's my last indoor cat though, I hate the litter!) but do you have any other frugal pet tips? Or know someone who does?
I'd be interested to see if anyone has any tips for this as well. My husband and I have 2 dogs: a 5 year old Bassett Hound and a 5 month old Boxer; both of which go through an entire bag of dog food every month--a LARGE bag of dog food! And I fear that it will be worse when Sophie (the boxer) is older. She has such a high metabolism! LOL!
Reese,
I have an older version of this grill: http://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/delonghi-electric-indoor-grill/ and it works really well. I think you can probably find them on eBay for cheaper than a hundred dollars, also.