♥ Bread Makers ♥

I thought I would take this moment to express my love and appreciation for my bread machine.

I always thought it would be cool to make your own bread but never did it because I was sure it would take forever. This winter we got our hands on a bread maker and our life has never been the same! I can not even begin to tell you how much we love it! Once you use it once and see how easy it is you will wonder why you never used it before.

You can find recipes everywhere to use with your maker. I always use www.allrecipes.com but I'm sure there are other sites. When you find a recipe you like you will notice it just gives you a list of ingredients and then just tells you to put them in the order recommended by your machine. I always put the wet stuff in first, then the flour and then all the rest of the dry stuff.

You can make so much stuff in you machine. We make pizza dough in ours once a week, we don't ever buy pizza anymore. This is the recipe we use and its AWESOME!

Dinner rolls are another big hit in our house, there are never any leftovers. Here is a good recipe for dinner rolls.

I'm not sure about other bread makers but I can put the ingredients in mine before I go to bed and set it so that when I wake up we will have a warm loaf of bread waiting. Homemade bread also goes great with spaghetti! YUM!

Did I mention we also make our own sub buns? I can't even express how great a big sub is on bread you made yourself. Oh the possibilities are endless!

I hope this inspires you to get in the kitchen and make some great bread!



Put in the ingredients ...




... and out comes yummy bread!



-Ally

Freezer Jam!

Who knew freezer jam was so easy?

Not me! That's for sure! While at the grocery store today they had a GREAT deal on fresh fruit (BOGO) So we got a ton, Don't get me wrong between me and the kids I'm sure we will have no problem eating it but I decided I wanted to try and make jam. Why not right? Well, turns out its easy! There are recipes all over the internet and everywhere else for that matter but here is how I did it.




This is what you need:

• 2 cups mashed fruit
• 4 cups sugar
• 1 package of pectin
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice
• Freezer jars
  

First thing you want to do is mash up 2 cups fruit. I used strawberries and blackberries. You can mash them with a potato masher or go the easy way like me and use a food processor. Once you have your two cups of mashed fruit add 4 cups of sugar to it. Mix it together and let it sit for 10 min. (The pectin I got was already a liquid so I didn't have to heat it or anything) Mix together the pectin and lemon juice and stir that into the fruit sugar mix. That was easy right? Now put the jelly in the freezer containers and let them sit at room temperature for 24hours. After 24 hours you can put the Jelly in the freezer where it is good for a year or in the fridge where it is good for 3 weeks. One batch filled up 5 little freezer containers.

Enjoy and good luck!

-Ally



**Update**

It turned out great and even picky pants herself loves it!