Grande Ma’s

When I arrived in Grande Prairie it was dinner time. All the restaurants were closed and my mom and grandma saved me a plate of food from grandma's kitchen. It was a simple ham dinner with peaches for dessert. My camera was still packed in my luggage, so I didn't get a chance to take a picture. So, I'll document my lunch with grandma later on instead.

When I was a little kid, as I've mentioned before, I spent a lot of time with my grandma. She taught me how to bake when I was very little, always let me pound down the dough, sift the flour and so on. No one showed me how to cook, I had to find that out on my own, but she showed me how to make bread.

She was not really up to the idea of making bread with me again. I went to the store and picked up some yeast and flour, since she had neither, and went to work by myself, using the original recipe from the cookbook I remember from my youth. The binding is somewhat ruined and it's somewhat falling apart, but perhaps it has always been that way.

I made both Bread and Buns with the recipe. I am notoriously bad at following recipes, which is why I rarely, if ever, bake. Strangely, I can make bread without a recipe quite well, but in following this recipe I screwed it up twice. The first I used twice as much yeast because I halved the recipe to make buns and the second time I forgot to add salt. Oops.

I love everything about making bread. I love that it takes all afternoon. I love the feeling of dough in my hands. I love the smell it fills the kitchen with and, of course, I love to eat the warm loaves that come out of the oven. Unfortunately my bread was sort of subpar, but I'm vowing to learn how to make the perfect loaf of sourdough in the new year! I ate the results with a bowl of Campbell's vegetable soup while grandma knit me a new toque.