For The Love of Bread and Its Storage

I have long struggled with how to properly store our bread.  We don't have a bread box and I am unwilling to give up the counter space for one.  I try my hardest to stay away from plastic baggies.  Up until now, I have been left with wrapping our loaves with wax paper and putting them in the refrigerator.  While this is a good solution, it is not a great one.  The wax paper can be reused only once or twice--by the second time around it is a crinkled, ripped and crumbly mess.  

Then I remembered this post. On Saturday, with two happily playing together and another one sound asleep, I made some bread bags.  Out of old linens given to me by my mother-in-law, they were really very simply to make.  I sewed two rectangles together and added a drawstring.  An end to my dilemma and some happy crafting time for Mama.

This endeavor inspired some bread-making today.  Normally, I bake two loaves of bread and a batch of granola on Monday morning.  For the past couple of weeks I have fallen out of the habit so it was nice to get my hands in some dough again.  It is easy to forget the meditative powers of kneading bread; how sweetly it comes back to me when the whole process begins.  

I use this book each week (it remains permanently open on my counter).  I have been using it for a couple years now and have not ventured beyond the first bread recipe in the book.  In fact, until today, I had not even looked at the recipes.  

On bread-making days, snacks are so easy.  I try to time the bread to come out of the oven when my two older children are emerging from their quiet time.  Warm bread with honey and milk is just right on these windy March days.

I remember baking bread with my Grandmother in California--her white apron, her various  bread concoctions, her freezer bags, and the folds of her hands folding into the folds of the bread.  Days long long past and days that have yet to unfold in the endless cycle of bread-making and life.  It goes on.