Happiness after mourning a small appliance

[Last night's Facebook post:)] 

Panifex mortus est. 'The bread maker is dead'. :( So after years of baking really great bread, including the weekly Sabbath challah, my bread machine has died. and my attempt to make bread last night resulted in a watery, terrible mess that had me just wrap the pan in a bag and carry it outside to the bin.  Sadly, they not only don't make that model anymore, Panasonic no longer makes affordable bread machines (all I saw were a couple in the $450-$650 range, and they didn't have the yeast hopper I liked so much about this one.  You can get all sorts of fancy machines these days, and I was looking at various features more in the $80-$130 range, and I think I've found a nice Hamilton Beach one (the name I was trying to think of earlier today while explaining it to a friend, and I kept coming up with Black & Decker (which does make appliances, but not what I was trying for) and Smith & Wesson (which is right out for bread-making)). But it'll be a couple of weeks till I can get it and so for tonight and the next little bit, we've had to have matzoh crackers instead.  Known as 'the bread of affliction' (really), matzoh sucks all of the taste and moisture out of your mouth, and one form is commonly used at Pesach (Passover) as it is unleavened according to the commandment.   But it can be substituted and blessed for Sabbath. But it's just not the same.  Here's hoping the new machine, when it is ordered and arrives, will do just as well as this one, which has lasted a minimum of ten years.

[Today's Facebook post:] 

Thanks to a kind friend who gave me a bread machine she'd used a few times, I am up and running again with bread making.  She even found the manual, which includes a conversion between the active dry yeast that is used in the recipes of the booklet vs. the rapid rise/instant yeast I am used to and have, recipes, troubleshooting tips, as well as directions, which I have now read from cover to cover. The main difference is since it doesn't have the yeast hopper (which is not unusual--I couldn't find any on Amazon that did, including the same brand I'd had), you put the wet ingredients in first, then dry ones, then yeast, to keep the yeast and liquids as far away from one another as possible until they are mixed and only at that time should the yeast be activated.  The times are a little different.  There isn't a rapid bake for regular loaves like on mine so it takes a little longer to bake a loaf (but not as long as the regular setting on my old one), but the dough setting is cut by an hour in time, which is very useful since I use the dough setting every week for challah.  I'm going to test it this weekend to do a trial run in preparation for the challah-making on Thursday. Thank you, thank you, thank you for letting me have this, and for meeting me today to get it to me.

:) 

2 am

So I just finished making the challah for the week as I got a late start tonight. But I think it will be worth it.

 Here are a couple of other pictures from the interim of no blogging. First, it pumpkin contest entry (we got second place, behind a Baby Yoda one) :

And finally, this year's Halloween costume:

Alright, good night! 

What a day

I had my first attempt to use the dough setting on my machine, followed by punching it down, one more knead by hand, my first try at braiding, brushing with an egg mixture, and baking for 25 minutes. The first picture is the braided dough before baking, the second is the final result. It was a recipe that did the two loaves I needed at once. I'm really looking forward to tasting it tomorrow. I even put a few sesame seeds on top to be fancy.

The bread was my crowning achievement for the day, along with getting in some information on a website in a timely fashion. Otherwise, I managed to 1) forget to take any of my medicine, oral or injected, 2) had my blood sugar fly up to the 340s as a result, 3) received a kitchen timer in the mail that didn't work per the instructions so rather than just returning it I unscrewed and fiddled with it most of the day, figuring out how to put it back together but unable physically to do so, and getting mightily frustrated, to the point where I just threw it away, since I couldn't return it, 3) slept most of the rest of the day, 4) had a recurring anxiety dream which began with Dungeons & Dragons (which oddly enough, as a gamer, I've never played) in the Patterson Office Tower at the University of Kentucky, and ended with a full-out musical number with Nancy Drew in that location.

I get a little off when my medicine's off. The dream was my anxiety, I was more frustrated than normal, my blood sugar was affecting my thinking and in general, I was both anxious and depressed.

But I made good bread, so that's going to be my takeaway. In the meantime I've taken all the meds I can at night (ADHD and water pill/potassium are the exceptions, as they're a morning thing). I've also had a bit too much caffeine today, and it's late, 1:35 am and I'm both tired and awake. I watched some 'Designing Women' with my roommate just now, though, so I feel a little better.

That timer was sort of a metaphor of my day. Non-operational, then wound too tightly, and you take me apart and the spring explodes and you lose the screws.

Lovely

So we had Sabbath dinner and the two challah loaves I made in the bread machine over the last couple of days exceeded my expectations immensely. It is rich and buttery, needing no spread but I'm sure it would go well with jam. My roommate said it was much better than what we've been getting at the bakery for $5 a loaf, special ordered. If I can keep this up he won't have to remember to order it on Thursdays, or go out on the bus on Fridays (it takes about 2-3 hours), and it'll save $40 a month. The bread flour is less than $4-5 a bag, and will make four or more loaves. So, I guess I know what I'll be doing weekly.

The recipe came from a book called Electric Bread. Here is the recipe, should you want to try it, for a large loaf [they call it that; they're smaller than a regular white bread loaf, and I thought they'd be denser, but they were incredibly fluffy]:

3/4 of a cup of water
3 cups bread flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 half stick of butter [1/4 of a cup]
2 eggs
1 egg yolk
1 1/2 teaspoons rapid-rise powdered yeast [my machine has a separate bin for the yeast that puts it in at the right time].