A Year Older, But No Wiser

The husband's careful attention to detail astounds me. Really.

--The Faudie

Sunday was my birthday, and we'd planned a memorable event for the day: After attending a wedding in Houston on Saturday, we'd head over to Galveston for a birthday lunch at Gaido's with family. Sounds like a great plan, doesn't it? Unfortunately, the wedding left a certain little boy sluggish and (even worse) puking when he awoke the next day. As tempting as lunch sounded, it just wouldn't be fair to submit a sick-to-his-stomach six-year-old to a trip to a seafood restaurant. Reluctantly, we packed up and headed back to Austin with the boy attempting to convalesce in the back seat. (Just how sick was he? Well, he's fine now, but he felt so bad on the trip home that he couldn't even play LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga on his Nintendo DS. So yeah, he wasn't feeling well.)

Thus it was that we ended up back at home instead of at a table at Gaido's eating fresh snapper. And what can you do when your lunch plans fall through? You bake some bread, of course!

With more free time on my hands for my birthday than I'd anticipated, I started leafing through our bread machine cookbooks for a recipe that could be prepared with ingredients on hand. I ended up picking this one from Bread Machine Bounty:

Wheat 'n' Seed Bread

3/4 C plus 2 T milk
1 T honey
1 1/2 t shortening
1 1/3 C whole wheat flour
2/3 C bread flour
1/4 C sunflower seeds
4 t sesame seed
1 t poppy seed
1/2 t salt
1 t active dry yeast or bread machine yeast

1. Add the ingredients to the machine according to the manufacturer's directions, adding the sunflower seeds, sesame seed and poppy seed with the flour.
   
2. Select the Wheat cycle on the machine, and then press the Start button.

Yield: One 1-pound loaf

Nutritional Info
Calories: 81
Fat: 3 g
Protein: 3 g
Carbs: 14 g
Cholesterol: 1 mg
Sodium: 74 mg

The Husband's Futzings
One particular ingredient caught my attention when I was considering this recipe, and that ingredient was the shortening. I wasn't even sure we had any shortening in the house, but Angela assured me we did (though for what purpose, I have no idea). As you can probably surmise from the recipes on this blog, we don't do a lot of cooking involving shortening. [I bought some Crisco sticks ages ago--I think when we were still apartment dwellers--but I don't remember why. And we don't do any cooking that calls for Crisco. I consumed enough of that atherosclerosis-inducing colloidal complex as a youth, thank you very much. --The Faudie] Probably due to my unfamiliarity with this item, I didn't pay much attention to the fact that our leftover shortening was giving off a particularly sour odor. Does anyone know if shortening can go bad? Because if it does, then ours did. But I didn't know this at the time, and I proceeded to use the expired ingredient for this loaf of bread.

Oh, and I accidentally used one-and-a-half tablespoons rather than one-and-a-half teaspoons. That, I admit, may also have had an affect on the recipe. (As it says in the title above, I may be a year older, but no wiser.)

If you haven't guessed already, this particular loaf did not come out well. Oh, I'm sure it looks fine in the pictures, but trust me, of all the breads we've made with our machines, this one's the worst. It has an overpoweringly odd taste; Angela describes it as "bitter," but she's being charitable, I think. It probably doesn't help that the seeds used for this bread--sunflower, sesame and poppy--aren't terribly flavorful and probably don't have much chance of leaving an impression against an overly generous amount of expired shortening. The seeds that go into my favorite six-seed bread are much more flavorful.

Bad, bitter bread

I honestly haven't eaten any of the bread since trying the first, disappointing slice. The bread just tastes strange. It's bad enough to make you as sick as...well, as sick as the kiddo after a wedding celebration.