Kitchen Sink Bread

This recipe is for “Kitchen Sink” bread. I have a Hamilton-Beach bread machine now; I wanted to make this bread from my old Black & Decker manual/recipe book which requires Seven Grain Cereal, but I didn’t have any of that. Instead, I had a cupboard full of bags of stuff where I would buy something to use a tablespoon or two of in some bread, but I would never finish the bag.

This recipe is the cousin of another recipe uploaded recently (November 2022) to a Facebook bread machine group which is based on one of Killer Dave’s breads which contains a lot of seeds.

Here is the recipe:

1⅔ cups of water – I heat this up in the microwave using a Pyrex measuring cup for around 30 seconds and dump this into the bread pan. If you think the temperature is too hot, by the time all the ingredients are in the pan, it will be OK, trust me. If your bread machine warms up the liquid at the beginning, you don’t need to do this business with the microwave.

3 TBSP of powdered milk

2 TBSP of shortening (I use vegetable or olive oil)

2 TBSP of honey

2 tsp of salt

1¼ cup of whole wheat flour in Canada; in the USA, use 1 cup of whole wheat flour

2½ cups of bread flour in USA; in Canada, use 2½ cups of all-purpose or bread flour

At this point you are supposed to add ¾ cups of Seven Grain Cereal, but ¾ cups is equivalent to 12 TBSP, so add 12 TBSP of different things. For example: cracked wheat, corn meal, poppy seeds, pumpkin seeds (unsalted), sunflower seeds (unsalted), white sesame seeds, black sesame seeds, triticale flakes, hemp hearts, oats, “healthy” cereal (in Canada, Red River), different types of flour (spelt, triticale, tapioca, rye, etc.). If you don’t have 12 different things, then double up some items so you would have 2 TBSP of some things out of the total 12.

1¼ tsp of yeast (I use bread machine yeast)

Use the Whole Grain or Whole Wheat setting, this recipe is for a 2 lb. loaf. On my machine, there is no option to choose the crust, you may be able to select something here.

On my machine, the bread is first mixed with a chunka-chunka sound (about 2 minutes), and then it is mixed really well, with the blade going non-stop for about 13 minutes. After the non-stop action starts, I open up the machine, and using a plastic scraper, make sure there isn’t any of the mixture on the sides of the pan. I also flick the bread from the corners of the pan into the center using this scraper (there is a certain technique to doing this). Don’t just dump ingredients in the machine and come back 3 hours later, you have to be proactive.

If the mixing bread starts to climb up the wall of the bread pan, I drop a heaping TBSP of some “thickening” flour (I use rye flour, but others would do) right on top of it. This should help the bread to form a nice ball which is bounced around in the bread pan. I wouldn’t recommend doing this for more than two TBSP of the “thickening” flour.

I have made this bread many times, never had a flop!

Cheezies Bread

I’ve had a bread machine for years. I use it all the time.

Recently, I wondered if you could use Cheezies, the Canadian snack food, to make bread using this machine. So I experimented with a recipe for cheese and onion bread from an old Black & Decker machine recipe book, which I use with my newer machine, which is made by Hamilton-Beach and has a single mixing blade in the middle of the bread pan.

Cheezies are made out of corn meal, cheese and other stuff and are horribly addictive. They are a legendary Canadian snack food. I think the equivalent in the USA would be Cheetos which are crunchy (not cheese snacks which are puffy and full of air).

I foolishly bought a large package of Cheezies at Costco in Canada which contained all these 36g Hallowe’en-size bags of the snack. It comes in other sizes as well, as you can see from the Cheezies home page, http://www.cheezies.com

In order to prepare for making the bread (below), I took two of these 36g bags, which weighed approximately 80g (just a bit less than 3 oz.), dumped them into a bowl and using a mortar-and-pestle style method, crushed them up into a powder. You can do the same thing using a blender. This produces about ¾ cup of crushed Cheezies, well-packed.

Anyway, here is the bread recipe:

1½ cups of water – I heat these up in the microwave using a Pyrex measuring cup for around 30 seconds and dump this into the bread pan. If you think the temperature is too hot, by the time all the ingredients are in the pan, it will be OK, trust me.

3 tbsp of powdered milk – I also used just 1½ cups of skim milk, also warmed up, that worked OK too.

2 tbsp of white sugar

2 tsp of salt (original recipe calls for 1½ tsp)

3¾ cups of bread flour or all-purpose flour in Canada; in the USA, **use 4 cups of bread flour** (that’s what the recipe says)

¾ cup of powdered Cheezies (as created above)

1½ tsp of bread machine yeast

Use the Sweet Bread Setting, this recipe is for a 2 lb. loaf. The second kneading for this bread type on my machine is VERY long. Choose the crust you want if there is a selection.

I have also added 2 tbsp of dried onion flakes or 1 tsp of lemon zest or 1 tsp of some mixture of spices (dill and other stuff) to this bread, it turned out fine. On my machine, the bread is first mixed, and then it is mixed really well, with the blade going non-stop. After the non-stop action starts, I open up the machine, and using a plastic scraper, make sure there isn’t any of the mixture on the sides of the pan. I also flick the bread from the corners of the pan into the center using this scraper (there is a certain technique to doing this). If the mixed bread starts to climb up the wall of the bread pan, looking like a giant slug from the movie Dune as directed by David Lynch, I drop a heaping tablespoon of some “thickening” flour (I use rye flour, but others would do) right on top of the “slug.” This should help the bread to form a nice ball which is bounced around in the bread pan. I wouldn’t recommend doing this for more than two tbsp of the thickening flour.

I'm back on Facebook, and it's still annoying

 Why is Facebook so annoying?

If a posting has a lot of responses, it says "49 Comments" at the top, for example. If you click on this, it then says, "View 10 previous comments" and "All Comments."

If you click on "All Comments," it breaks this down into "Most recent" and "All Comments." But when you then start to read what are "all comments" (which is what I wanted to see in the first place), on some of the comments, after what is seemingly some default number of characters, it cuts off and you have to click on "See More" to read the rest of what is posted.

Is there something you can configure so you can see all of the comments (like REALLY >all< of them all of the time) without all this extra clicking?

It's like Facebook wants to intentionally discourage communication between people so they have more time to watch dashcam views of cars flipping over, lame "Just for Laughs" style videos, excerpts from movies about bullies, home movies of people acting like morons and ads which litter the place -- not to mention pictures of women with big breasts.

New Chips from Lay's

 Just announced, new varieties of chips from Lay's:

Rainforest - Using herbs harvested near old growth trees, these chips have a light scent of pine. The bags are specially sealed with biodegradable crazy glue to ensure freshness.

Pemmican - First in a line of indigenous-flavored chips, these tasty morsels will be sold in northern Canadian stores by special arrangement with Lay's to keep costs down, unlike typical other offerings in those stores like Cheerios ($20 a box) or a pound of fresh blueberries ($30).

Brazilian Beef - These chips with a South American tang feature the smell of smoke from burning Amazon rain forests nearby which were cleared to make room for more pasture land.

Sushi Boat - This variety features "Ocean Wise" fish, a fancy way of saying we are kind to the fish before we slaughter them. This variety is personally endorsed by David Suzuki.

Saltspring Salsa - These ones feature pieces of organically grown tomatoes which have been dried in the sunshine as well as other vegetables. There is also goat cheese from goats which have been been raised by the Saltspring Island Ladies' Co-op. These chips are slightly more expensive because of the ferry fuel surcharge connected with transporting the chips to the mainland.