Late one Saturday afternoon I went over to Home Depot to get that last thing for the project I was trying to finish.  (That one thing is never all I get, and it's a terrible thing for my pocketbook that Home Depot's only a mile away, but still.)  I was covered with paint, wearing my torn-up "I survived finals week!" T-shirt , and my hair was up in a frizzy ponytail.  When you go to Home Depot looking like this, you're considered a friend.  Everyone's dressed this way.  You clearly mean business, in particular, their kind of business.  You're welcome at Home Depot if you're sporting the going style. 

That night I showered and scrubbed off the paint. Sunday morning I curled my hair and eyelashes, put on my makeup and earrings, and got all dressed in something floaty and pink for church.  Then I gathered the kids up to go.  But I couldn't find my planner (which contained my driver's license) anywhere.

After turning the house upside down, I mentally retraced my steps and realized the only place my planner could be.  I called Home Depot in a panic, identified the randomness in my planner (somebody else looking inside my planner is reason enough to scare me out of leaving it anywhere ever again), and threw the kids in the car to race over there.

Now, if you don't believe that how you dress affects how you're perceived, just walk into Home Depot dolled up for church.  High heels are definitely against the dress code.  I'd been there less than 24 hours ago, and nobody had glanced my way.  Now I had to run the gauntlet of all the eyes belonging to the paint-spattered, construction dust-covered Sunday-morning customers of the Home Depot.  The employees weren't any less surprised.  I was completely, completely overdressed, and everybody there knew it.  I wanted to say to them, "Hey, remember me?  Quart of satin-finish Behr "Pecan Sandie"? I'm one of you guys. Stop staring." 

I tap-tapped my way to the customer service desk and collected my planner, which, I noticed, was also pink, and left the store as quickly as possible.  And I made a mental note.  Wherever you're going, dress appropriately.

So. To begin. Stumble downstairs and get these things:

Whole wheat flour-I grind this stuff in my mill, but you can buy it in bags at the store or *gasp* use white flour. 

Yeast-I use Saf-Instant yeast.  I like Saf-Instant yeast so much that I buy it online, since I can't get it locally.  The other yeasts will work for practicing with bread, but if you're going to make bread on a regular basis, the instant yeast will be your friend.  It rises faster, making the whole thing take less time.  (Less time is good.)

Dough Enhancer-This is the secret to making bread that has a consistent texture from batch to batch.  Also, this stuff keeps your bread from going all crumbly for a couple of days after you bake it.  There are a couple of natural preservatives, gluten that helps the dough form up right, and some other stuff I don't know the function of.  I don't bother to make bread without dough enhancer.  That said, this can of dough enhancer isn't my favorite.  (Although I do appreciate my mother having sent me a box full of these cans and I am using them.)

My favorite dough enhancer is one you can make yourself with crazy stuff you can either find at a health food store or order online.  Here's the recipe I use:  (From Walton Feed)

Dough enhancer#1

• 1 cup nonfat dry milk
• 2 cups wheat gluten
• 2 teaspoon powdered ginger (you will not taste it)
• 4 tablespoons powdered pectin
• 4 tablespoons unflavored gelatin
• 4 tablespoons lecithin granules
• 1 Tablespoon ascorbic acid crystals

Mix all together in a bowl and store in refrigerator in an airtight container.

You make up a little Glad box of this stuff and it keeps in your freezer for a long, long time.  Or until you use it up.

Salt

Honey

Oil

Okay.  So here's that Bosch mixer bowl.  Measure out 5 cups of flour, 2 tablespoons of yeast, and 2 tablespoons of that dough enhancer.

Pour in 2/3 c oil and 2/3 cup honey.  If you put the oil in first the honey will slide right out of the greased cup.  Pour in 5 cups of tepid-to-warm water, and stir it up just until it's blended a little. You just don't want to see dry ingredients anymore.

Most recipes say at this point to cover it. If it's cold I cover it with a paper towel.  These days it...isn't cold...in Georgia.  Paper towel because if that stuff rises up onto the bottom of one of your kitchen towels, you might as well throw it away. Paper towels were made to be thrown away.

Now. Walk away.  Go make breakfast for your babies. Write on your blog. Paint your toenails.  The point is, don't bother this dough for half an hour.  (Do set a timer to call you back, though, if you're prone to wander off.  That would be bad for your bread.)

When you come back, you're going to have a big, bubbly bowl full of primordial ooze. At this point, Father Bird likes to come by and shriek, "It's aliiiiiive!"  Once he told me I'd better not make bread during a thunderstorm because lightning might strike and this stuff might evolve.  Usually he's not around when I'm making bread. Which is good in its own way.

Put in 2 tablespoons of salt...

and just bump the mixer to make that stuff collapse... (bump? just turn the mixer on and off real quickly)

so you have room to add 5 more cups of flour.

Set a timer for 9 minutes.  Why 9?  Well, because 8's not enough and 10's too many.

Bump the mixer again, and again, until that flour's incorporated.  If you just turn the mixer on full throttle, that flour is going everywhere.  As soon as it's incorporated, turn the mixer on and leave it on.  For a while it'll look like this:

Stand there and sift more flour in as the mixer goes.  Slowly it'll go from that wet-looking stuff up there to this stuff down here:

When it does that, stop adding flour, and just let it go until the 9-minute timer goes off. 

While it's doing that, line up your bread pans on a (clean) bath towel.

A note about the pans.  These are the pans I use.  They're heavy, nonstick, sturdy, workhorse pans.  My mother used to stand there with a can of Crisco and grease every one of those bread pans.  I don't have to.  So nice. 

Oil up your hands and section that wad of dough in the mixer into four hunks.  Pull, pat, and love each hunk into an oblong loaf like this:

and put it in the pan. 

Cover your row of pans with the other end of the bath towel.  Set that timer for 30 minutes and walk away again.  Go dress your naked children, or teach them to read.  Or better yet, clean up this mess you've made.

When you come back, the bread will have risen about double.  If it hasn't, leave it a little longer. 

Turn the oven on to 350.  

If you have a convection oven, you can put in more than four loaves at a time.

If not, then put one rack in the middle of the oven and just do the four.  Besides, four is a lot of bread, isn't it?

Bake it at 350 for half an hour.  When you come back, take one out and dump it out of the pan.  Look at the bottom.  If it looks like this:

It's not there yet.  Put it back in.

If it looks like this:

Shoot. Those pictures ended up almost identical-looking.  Well, if the bread bottom looks soft and blond, it's not done yet.  On the other hand, if it looks very very brunette, you've overdone it.  Somewhere in between is right, something like a honey-blonde. And not soft anymore. 

Now, if they're done, dump them out on the towel and let them cool.  If you leave a bowl with a stick of butter in it on top of the stove while you're cooking the bread, it'll be ready to mix in with honey and smear all over that hot bread before you hand it out to starving, jumping children. 

And don't blame me when your daughters-in-law get upset at you someday for setting an impossible precedent in housekeeping.  I'm only doing my job.

Whole Wheat Bread

10-12 cups whole wheat flour

2 T Saf-Instant Yeast

2 T Dough Enhancer

2/3 c vegetable oil

2/3 c honey

5 c water

**One last note.  Bread is something that it takes a while to develop instinct for.  When I started out, I had no clue what I was doing.  Stick with it.  You'll soon figure out when the dough is ready, when the bread is done enough, etc. Good luck.**

There, now that's off my chest, and everybody who thinks making bread is a nutso thing to do is gone, I can tell you about why I make bread. 

Oh, I guess I can't leave.

It started with my mother, really.  I remember standing at the end of the long table in the center of our kitchen and seeing rows and rows of hot brown bread lined up there, and waiting impatiently until it was cool enough to spread with honey butter and devour.  I recall how at Christmastime, she carefully made a loaf of fresh bread for each of us to take to each of our school teachers.  We carried them to school, wrapped in plastic and sporting a pretty bow, and the teachers all loved having one of us in their classes. 

For some reason, maybe those outlined above, bread lies at the very heart of domesticity for me.  A house filled with that unmistakable smell, mother staying close to the kitchen to watch it and handing out dough balls to play with, everyone waiting until that moment when expectation becomes indulgence...  Fresh bread is like nothing else in the world. 

Maybe that's why, one day about a week after I knew I'd be getting married, I cut my afternoon college classes to teach myself how to make bread.  I didn't know, and I was apparently more concerned about making bread than about acing Chemistry.  (Disclaimer:  I only tell you what happened, not what you should do...)

After I was actually married, the time had come, and I took the little hand mixer someone had given us for a wedding present out of its box and started to make some bread.  It mixed up the wet ingredients just fine.  It mixed the dry, too.  But when I put them together, and the gluten started to form up, the mixer started to have a little trouble.  It's just heavy dough, I thought.  No problem.  I turned the power up on the mixer.  The mixer complained.  I was having trouble holding it still as it bucked against the heavy dough.  This is supposed to work, I thought, mixer+dough=bread.  The mixer started to smell funny.  I figured it was the smell of a new machine.  They leave a little too much grease on the parts so they'll work right the first time, right?

The recipe said to knead the bread for 6-8 minutes.  My mother had always kneaded her bread with her mixer, and I was going to do the same.  I plowed onward.  Soon the dough begain to crawl up the handles of the beaters. Then it began to crawl into the mixer itself.  I pulled the dough back down and went at it again.  Again it crawled up the handles.  The mixer got slower and slower as the bread dough got tougher, and suddenly it stopped altogether.  A faint wisp of smoke came from its vented end.  I stood looking at it in horror.  That was the awful smell!

Oh, well, I thought.  So I've ruined that one.  I've got two more. 

Luckily I stopped there.  Luckily there was some tiny red flag waving somewhere in the back of my mind.  Luckily I wasn't so sure of myself that I ruined the other two mixers too.  I happened to call my mother that afternoon, and I happened to mention the bread-dough experiment.  She happened to laugh her sides sore at me. 

When Father Bird (who, I suppose, wasn't "Father" Bird at the time) came home, I showed him the broken mixer.  "Fix it," I demanded.  He dutifully took his shiny new screwdriver and took the little mixer apart.  Flakes of dried bread dough poured out of the little mixer's motor.  "What did you DO?" he said.

"I tried to make bread," I said accusingly, as though making bread were a fundamental new-wife right that I was being denied.  He started to chuckle.  He started to guffaw.  He laughed until tears ran down his cheeks. I started to cry too, but not because I was laughing.

And then, of course, he felt all bad, and I needed comfort, and well...we were newlyweds with a whole apartment to ourselves...

Those days seem very far away now. 

After a little research, I discovered that the kind of mixer my mother used was very important.  She used a Bosch Universal Kitchen Machine, which has the kind of horsepower that tough bread dough needs.  That was why she could knead the bread and read Southern Living at the same time. 

I looked up the closest Bosch store and called them.  They told me the price.  It might as well have been a million dollars.  Father Bird had just started his first job after graduating, and I was still working my on-campus job and going to school.  The memory of the frozen turkey that was all we'd had to eat during the week between his graduation and first paycheck was still very fresh in our minds. 

So I was aghast when, several months later, he came home from work and drove me to the Bosch store.  We stood around the corner from the counter, whispering so the shop owner couldn't hear.  "Pick one out," he said.  "Oh, honey, we can't afford it," I said, disappointment and longing thick in the back of my throat.  Why had he done this to me?

"Pick one out," he whispered again, "I got a bonus at work."

I almost cried again.  I hadn't known he even got bonuses at work, and here he was giving the whole thing to me so I could make bread.  I'd have kissed him if we weren't in a tiny shop with the owner watching.  I shook as I picked out my brand-new mixer, imagining in my head our little apartment filled with the smell of bread, of domesticity, of home.

Since then I've made many, many loaves of the same brown bread my mother made.  Every time it makes the house feel cozy and smell wonderful.  I've got a tutorial for you on making the bread, but the picture of the perfectly done bread bottom didn't turn out right.  So when I get another picture of that, I'll do the post showing you how I make bread. 

Months after we bought the mixer, Father Bird got another bonus.  I didn't even hear about it.  When he came home from work, a little late, he'd bought himself a TV.

So I hurried right down to the craft store and got six canvases.  There are six of us, I figured, so we'll each paint one, hang them in a grid above the couch, and fill up that empty space with something cute.  And we did.  And they were cute.  For the four seconds they all hung up there together.  Then, the little boys happened to my wall hanging.  They climb.  They grab.  They throw.  (Appreciation for art is something we're still working on.)

I hung the canvases back up.  And the boys happened again.  And again, until all I was left with was this:

Now, one sad canvas, cute as it may be, isn't enough to fill that big space above the couch.  But it hung there, a symbol of my defeat, for weeks and weeks as I mulled over a solution to my struggle. 

Until one afternoon when I was sitting, tired out, covered with children as usual, in front of the computer, watching one decorating video after another on the Pottery Barn website.  (Hey, when I sink, at least I don't sink that far...)  The Pottery Barn lady was painting these cute frames directly on the wall and I felt an extreme click somewhere deep in my mind.  My problem was solved.  If they tear anything off the wall that I hang on it, I'll paint my decorations straight on the wall.

I figured, I'd divide the area into four canvases and have each of my four children paint one of them.  Then I'd paint a cute frame around the whole thing and voila! the space would be filled with something cute, and the decorating requirement met.

Here's what I did:

First, I marked off the space I wanted to paint with a pencil and a level.  The center tape is directly over the center of the couch.

Then, I got my little plastic box of the wall color-

You do have little plastic boxes of all the wall colors in your house stacked up in a cute stack in your garage, right?

For the record, "Behr Parisian Taupe" was a color I picked when I was flat on my back on the living room couch, sick with my fourth pregnancy and staring at the hideous walls that were left after the removal of the horrible wallpaper.  Anything was better than that mess.  If Father Bird hadn't declared that it was the last time he'd ever paint the living room, I'd have changed the color by now.  It's just...bleh.  So don't choose that on my account. 

So I got the wall color and a little paint roller (love those cute little paint rollers) and painted over the edges of the tape.  This fills any place that your next color would think about seeping under the tape with wall color instead.  See?  The frog sticker is optional, but does give your camera someplace to focus on a bleh-colored wall.  This is also a good time to touch up over any...previous artwork.

Then I filled those rectangles with my base color. It took two coats. 

Now, (this is very important) I set the kids down in front of a movie.  I took one, put clothes on her that she had already ruined, set the canning pot upside down on the piano bench and gave her this:

These are all the colors on the other walls on the main floor of my house.  So at least they all match something.

I stayed close while she did this:

The blue line is a marker line drawn on top of the tape, to show her where to stop painting. The marker line isn't much help for four- and two-year-olds, I found.  I just stood real close and kept my hands out on either side of them to guide their paintbrushes away from the rest of the wall.  Remember to breathe when you do this, or you'll pass out and they'll paint the whole wall.

When all that dried, I took a little left-over piece of molding that looks like this:

and butted it up against the outside edge of the tape like this:

and drew around the outside with a pencil.

I put the middle of one big scallop at each corner, so that when I'd finished, I had this:

Does that big of a gap hurt your feelings?  Nah, I thought not.  When we paint that, we'll just slide the paintbrush riiiight around and make a pretty round corner.

Then I took an angled sash brush (a nice brush really helps here) and carefully painted right up to the pencil lines, carefully covering the line.  This also took two coats.

Then the tape came off:

and there was something lovely on the wall at last.  The very last thing is to take your pointiest paintbrush and your darkest color and carefully paint each child's name in tiny letters in one corner of each painting.  Or have them do it, if they can.

Here it is with Father Bird thrown in for scale:

Try to tear that off the wall, guys.

~Mother Bird~

She showed me how and I haven't gone back. Father Bird says he could eat these eggs all day long. Which is good, since the girls out in the yard just keep laying, all day long.

Here's how to make eggs that are better than fried, and (gasp) better than boiled.

Butter the pan. (I know it's nonstick, but the butter's important. Trust me.)

Crack all your eggs into the pan. Two eggs per person x 6 people = a solid dozen eggs. That happened fast.

Now put the pan full of eggs on medium-low heat, just until they get a little white like the picture below. When they are, gently pour in around 1/4 cup of water. Here's where the butter comes in handy, because some of that water will slide in under the eggs, some on top. Put on a lid. (There's no picture of my pan with a lid because my pan doesn't have one, and I use my grody old sheet pan as a lid. Works fine, not so photogenic.)

When the yolks are just set, take them off the heat, salt and pepper them, and...

have breakfast!

A grateful nod out the window toward the coop as you enjoy the fruits of the chickens' labor is optional, but appreciated.

Enjoy!

~Mother Bird~

My children are old enough, I maintain, to change their sheets themselves.

They are, at times, given to bouts of helplessness.

I am, at times, given to bouts of laziness.

My sewing machine will sew tiny little letters on things.

Got all that?

Then check this out:

I take my tiny-letter-sewing sewing machine and sew, in some dark and readily available thread color, the size of the sheet set on the hem of the pillowcase.  Then--and here's where the whole thing explodes into genius--I fold everything that's required for a bed change, put it right inside the pillowcase and just fold the extra, flappy bit of the pillowcase over the outside of the folded stack.

Now, if I've already sent them to bed and am back downstairs nursing a cup of hot chocolate, and they call me because they don't have sheets on their beds?

There will be no stomping back upstairs and grumbling to help them root through the linen closet. I can holler, "Get one of the sets marked "twin"!", and then go on drinking hot chocolate and being lazy.

That's my kind of domesticity.

~Mother Bird~

Why is this such a sad picture?  Because this row of hanging baskets is all the flowers I'll get in front of my house this year.  I planted two flats of snapdragons in the front flowerbeds this spring, and the little boys brought them to me, roots dangling, as soon as they bloomed.  The ranunculus and windflowers I planted in late winter met the same fate.  They're fine as long as they don't bloom. 

Before long I'll be a crazy lady in a big hat, out there in my flowerbeds, cutting the buds off all the flowers and muttering to myself...

But not realizing that they're picking pretty flowers to bring to Mom would be completely missing the point, wouldn't it?

You know that wall in your house that could use a bank of bookshelves?  Or maybe it's a niche next to your fireplace.  I had one big long wall in the schoolroom, and two nasty metal utility shelves that were holding all our books, papers, file boxes, and so on.  Not lovely.

Here's the link to the basic instructions to building bookcases

Here they are in process:

Basically, there's a solid, upright piece of 3/4" plywood on each side of each section, with smaller pieces of plywood glued-and-nailed all the way up, leaving little slots for the shelves.  What you see on the left there, with the clamp on it, is one of the verticals that goes against the wall.  It has one set of shelf supports glued to one side of it.  Make sense so far?

In the middle is one of the shelves that goes between a shallow shelf and a deep shelf.  It's as deep as the deeper ones, and has shallow supports glued to one side, deep supports glued to the other side.  All the supports are flush with the back of the vertical. 

And thus you go along, making the right number of vertical supports for the set of shelves you're making.  Then, take each of the supports that are going against the walls and screw them, down in the shelf grooves, to the wall studs with drywall screws.  Set the vertical that comes next upright and bribe someone to come stand there while you slide in the shelves.  This Old House has better instructions for attaching your shelves to the wall, but by this point we'd moved so far beyond the actual instructions that we were seat-of-pants-ing it. 

Repeat the vertical-holding and shelf-sliding.  A note here.  When I glued down the shelf supports, I made the slots exactly 3/4", and it made for some adventure getting some of the shelves in.  I won't say there was any swearing, but I think Father Bird thought some ugly things.  Heavens.

What's really holding this whole set of shelves together is the tension from the shelves above and below the window.  I measured the space, then built a basic plywood box to fit each space, and whacked those suckers in those holes and screwed them down.  (Use short screws so they don't come twisting out the other side, breaking your heart in the process.)

Then, when the shelves are all in and level and everything (shim under the bottoms of the verticals if they aren't), you just cut strips of 1 1/2" poplar to cover the front edge of each vertical.  Glue-and-nail those, then make edges for each of the shelves.  Cover the edges at the bottom with a little strip of quarter-round molding.  Paint everything.  And paint it again. And another time.  And...yeah, maybe just one more coat...

Perhaps these shelves look complicated.  The truth is, Father Bird went down to Home Depot and had everything cut to the right width, and left town for two weeks.  When he came back, I had the whole thing up, just waiting for him to help me whack in some of those sticky shelves.  Oh, and motivate me to actually finish.

The best part of the whole thing was when I was almost finished. I came to the door with a power drill in my hand, and the air conditioning repairman's mouth fell open as he looked from the drill to the shelves and back.  "You put them shelves up yourself? Really?"

Yep. Really. And you can too.

Good luck!

~Mother Bird~

And this on the kitchen counter:

And, inexplicably enough, carved on the stairs to the side door, this:

Initials I understand. Boys are boys. But the KKK is a mystery. Was there an event, or just boredom that caused a little boy to take a nail, or some other blunt tool, and carve the most sinister thing he could imagine in such a public place? I imagine he’d heard a reference to the KKK somewhere, it stewed around in his brain for a while, and finally found expression on a long summer afternoon when there was nothing else to do...

Soon after we moved in, two quiet grown men showed up to haul away some junk from a shed behind the house. Now I mentally probe my recollection of them to see if they match the part of themselves that they left here. No, those men grew up, moved on, and learned not to carve their initials in things. The boys that still live here are young, untrained, and bored. Sometimes when I’m cleaning the windowsill or the counter with the initials forever etched there, I almost think I can see them slipping around a corner with a guilty expression.

And so I wonder. How much of myself is left in the house where I grew up? Do the strangers who live there now pass a place or two in the house where a mute reminder provides a fuzzy snapshot of the child I was then? I’ll never know. The doors to that house are closed to me now. But of one thing I am sure. I never carved “KKK” in anything.