Who's going to pay my Cooking School Tuition?

During my first two pregnancies I craved hamburgers, french fries and fry sauce. When I was pregnant with Cass I wanted to eat so much fry sauce, that Mike bought me three bottles from Hires and gave them to me for Christmas. When my cravings this pregnancy were so different from the previous two, I thought for sure that meant I was having a boy. But no.

I crave salad. Lots and lots of green salad with caesar dressing. I eat a giant salad every day. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not normally a salad hater, but I'm not the girl who goes to a restaraunt and orders one either. I order steak, or pork. But this pregnancy I am craving salad, with cucumbers (I must have the cucumbers, and avocados, and tomatoes mmmm). The thought of eating something sweet is not appealing to me at all. Just bring on more salad please. My kids look at me like I'm crazy.

Yesterday, I started craving home made whole wheat bread. This is something I normally really like, but yesterday I just HAD to have it. So, I thought, I've made bread before, I'll just whip some up. I make homemade rolls from scratch on a regular basis. Not to show my inhumility, but I make awesome rolls. I like the rolls I make better than any other bread on the planet. Just thinking about them makes me want to go start baking. In fact I enjoy baking so much, I often tell Mike that my dream is to open a bakery with breads, rolls, cinnamon rolls, cookies, brownies. I tell him, I'd have to become one of those really fat bakers, because I would be too busy eating all that I bake. But I digress.

My sister was telling me about a new bread recipe that her neighbor had made her the other day. I thought, yum, a new recipe. Since I didn't have that recipe in my possession yet, I decided to make the old stand by recipe that my dad has been making for years, and my mom before that (sometime around the time I was 10 my dad took over the bread making responsiblities).

Now, the last time I made this particular recipe of whole wheat bread, was the day I went into labor with Lily. Lily is now 3 1/2 years old. I also made a chocolate cake that day along with a huge roast dinner. I think that was the huge boost of energy that they say you'll get right before you go into labor. Now, I've made other kinds of bread in the interim, poppy seed bread, chocolate chip pumkin bread, chocolate bread, cinnamon rolls (lots of cinnamon rolls) and dinner rolls, but just not whole wheat bread in loaf form.

I knew something was wrong when I mixed the dough together, and it was still in a completely pourable form. I seemed to remember this dough being stiffer than that. I checked the recipe again, and I had done everything right. I poured the mixture into the loaf pans and waited for them to raise. They did (a little faster than I was expecting), and I put them into the oven. Somehow, as I was cooking dinner, my timer got turned off, but I noticed that about 35 minutes into the 42 minute cooking time. I checked on the bread in the oven, only to discover that each loaf pan had overflowed, and large chunks of bread were now burning on the bottom of my oven. Each loaf pan was covered in bread on all sides, inside and out.

The tops of the loafs were sunken in, and ugly. I pulled them out of the oven and let them cool, thinking that the product INSIDE the loaf pans would at least be edible. When the loaves were cool enough to dump out of the pans, they were cooked in the middle, but not on the sides. An anomaly I know.


Here is where my loaves ended up. In the trash next to the carton of Ben & Jerry's Half Baked that I ate while watching the BCS Championship to console my self from my baking catastrophe.

I guess I'm not ready to open my own bakery after all. At least Urban Meyer won.