This is one of the many life lessons that my grandmother passed on to me as she pounded dough and  stuffed turkeys on her old farmhouse kitchen.

She lived in a tiny Minnesota town that existed in a bubble, 30 years behind the rest of the world.  While most people were enjoying the joys of automobiles and higher education, my father was attending school in a two-room school house where most of the kids were dropped off by horse and buggy.

Throughout my father’s young life, my grandmother made everything from scratch because that’s what women did. And even as the times slowly changed, she stuck with what she knew. According to her, only lazy women bought bread from stores. They also used electric washing machines, drove automatic cars, and did not grow their own produce or put up jams in the fall.

I adored my grandmother, and I have fond memories of helping her make homemade stuffing and maple syrup-laced sweet potatoes when we visited her at Thanksgiving.  She died when I was eight, but I never forgot these moments, or her opinions about how good women kept their homes. However I saw them more as eccentricities of an era than actual words to live by – until about a year ago.  

Nice Buns 

If my grandmother were here today, I’m not sure how she would feel about my Energy Star appliances or my microwave oven. But I do know this -- she would be impressed with my buns, because for the last 10 months I have made, from scratch, every loaf of bread that has come into this house.

I should stop here and explain that I am not Amish, nor am I a martyr, or a woman with too much time on her hands. I work full time, have two kids, and I am not averse to ordering takeout, or buying a pre-roasted chicken from the deli case to save time. But I do now make my own bread.

It started on a trip I took nearly a year ago to my friend Maria’s cabin in northern Minnesota.  We split the groceries for the week, and the first afternoon her daughter asked if I’d make her a sandwich. “Sure,” I said pleasantly, as I pulled out a bag of Pepperidge Farm butter top white bread and some peanut butter.

Then I noticed the disappointed scowl on her face. She turned immediately to her mother and asked "do we have any non-bag bread?"

 It turned out that Maria had unearthed an abandoned bread machine in her alley the previous Spring, and being the sort of women to see treasures in other’s trash, brought it in the house, looked up the directions online, and made a loaf.  Her family was so impressed with the fresh hot bread, she kept doing it, putting  a new batch of ingredients in the machine each night so that a piping hot loaf was ready every morning to eat with jam and coffee.

I was instantly intrigued. I'd spent the last several years on a quest to find a brand of bread that everyone in my family would eat but does not contain high fructose corn syrup -- it's in everything and there's almost no way to avoid it.

At that point, my quest had been a bitter and disappointing failure.

However, I’m not the sort of person to slave over a meal, and bread making, I was certain, required more time than I was willing to commit. While I do love to cook, my favorite pot is a Crockpot, and I prefer recipes that require little in the way of precise measures or multiple steps. I worried the bread machine would be more effort than it was worth. Until I saw it done.

Bread machines, it turns out, are like Crockpots for carbs.  You literally place all the ingredients in the pan, turn it on, and four hours later you have bread. Set the timer, and the bread is ready whenever the heck you want it.

I was convinced, and as soon as I returned home I bought myself the fanciest bread machine I could find -- A Zojirushi X20 with dual kneading paddles and a two pound pan that makes long rectangular loaves.

"We are no longer going to buy bread from a store," I announced confidently to my husband the day my Zojirushi arrived.  

“Pfff,” My husband replied.  "It'll be in the basement covered in dust within three months.”

I had to admit, given my track record for impulse purchases and short attention span, it was a fair accusation. But I was not deterred.

I went out that day and bought two bread machine cookbooks, 10 pounds of flour, and a tiny and ridiculously expensive jar of bread machine yeast. I was ready.

My first loaf was a simple white bread recipe with five ingredients and little room for error. It was a resounding success. I layered the ingredients in the pan per the instructions, and voila , that afternoon I had an actual loaf of bread made by me. It was good, and crumbly, and delicious with butter.

However it was also stale in about 36 hours, which I have since discovered is what happens to bread that is not laden with preservatives.  This admittedly has been an obstacle to overcome, and I do often insist on ‘sandwich night’ after a particularly enthusiastic week of bread making. But that’s been the only real down side.

Except for the rare bag of Sunday bagels -- I'm still mastering bagel-making skills -- I have made every morsel of bread that has passed through my front door since the day my bread machine arrived. I’ve accumulated a list of favorite recipes, including a kid-friendly white bread made with semolina  flour, which has about as much protein as a serving of chicken; a pumpernickel that would make New York deli owners weep with envy; and buttery soft hamburger buns that have ruined my family for store-bought alternatives for the rest of their lives. 

I now buy 50 pound bags of bread flour from Costco and yeast by the case; and I have scoured the city of Chicago for unusual organic flours and sacks of vital wheat gluten -- which is the secret ingredient to making loaves tall and fluffy. 

According to my math, most of the loaves of bread that I make cost less than one dollar in ingredients, which means the machine officially paid for itself this month. But more importantly the bread machine has given me added panache around the house. My kids think my fresh bread is awesome, my husband brags about my buns to his friends, and I know that somewhere my grandmother is proud.

(PS I just finished making soft onion rolls for hamburgers tonight, and the whole house is awash in the sweet aroma of fresh bread with a hint of sautéed onions. Yum)