A recipe that (warning!) resulted in sub-par dill onion bread
Let's get this out of the way: this is not going to be a story of perseverance, and ultimately, victory, or at least, it won't be for the food that resulted from it. What it is going to be is me showing off my new KitchenAid, the love of my life, my best friend and forever soulmate, to whom I will tie myself until we both shove off this mortal coil; she, worse for the wear but still a stunning shade of sea foam green; me, extremely creaky and at that point potentially also a shade of sea foam green, considerably less stunning.
As you've likely read, everyone's making bread. Bread, it's so hot right now (get it???): it'll fill the empty void in your stomach and brain and emotional center, worn away from your time on this earth, or just online. I made bread for the first time back in either middle of high school, when someone (me? my dad?) suggested we try it with our new KitchenAid. What a beautiful way to start your day, with fresh homemade bread, albeit not from a homemade starter! My soon-to-be favorite was dill and onion (or onion and dill, or onion dill, or...you get it), even more savory than regular bread, and particularly delicious smelling.
So it was with great excitement, and considerable confidence, that I approached making this bread again on a cold winter day. I had my newly gifted KitchenAid, which I approached with great caution, reading the instructions thoroughly twice, lest I experience a situation similar to the one that ended my relationship with my last one, when someone who will not be named broke it by leaving a spoon in the bowl and turning it on. I warmed my yeast, wondering whether it was bubbling enough to be active (this is a dark foreshadowing). Then I added the flour and other ingredients, using slightly more minced onion than called for. The instruction to "add 1 cup warmed cottage cheese" seemed to mean "do this when you're finished with the dough" but the following line "Mix and add 2 1/4- 2 1/2 cups flour to make a stiff dough" seemed to say "add flour after you've mixed all the ingredients," No offense dad but that's confusing! (This similar recipe goes with the former, in that you mix the cottage cheese with the rest of the ingredients and then add the flour.) Thinking I'd improve on things, and because I have three to four different types of flours in my pantry right now (brag!), I used bread flour instead of regular, which also could have been a mistake; at this point, I have no idea exactly where things took a turn.
At this point, I'll backtrack and explain that a year prior to this, I'd made several ill-fated attempts at baking homemade bread. For those, I'd used a starter I'd gotten from a friend, but despite the time I'd allotted to this potential new hobby I found myself cutting corners, and getting antsy, and as a result, I never made anything quite impressive enough. I was highly disappointed at the time, mostly because I need to be good at the activities I undertake but also because I remembered bread-making being so easy when I was a kid (wonder if that's because I wasn't doing the lion's share of the work?). I was deterred after a few alright attempts.
Returning to the task a year later with packaged yeast, I felt more confident. I had a mixer, so I didn't have to knead endlessly by hand. I had the yeast, so I wasn't dependent on a fickle starter. How quickly that confidence faded away, however. The KitchenAid was doing the dirty work for me, and the first go-round, it did. The mixer produced a stiff dough, and I left that to rise.
When I returned, said dough hadn't risen as much as it seemed like it should have, though it was puffed up. Shaping was the real issue, however; it lost much of the height it had gained when I "stirred it down" as per the instructions, and tried to reshape it. When I returned after the second rise, it didn't appear to have risen at all. Feeling highly defeated, I put it in the oven anyway. When it came out it looked... fine? I was so distracted at this point I forgot to brush it with butter and sprinkle it with salt (extremely rookie moves to forget the important finishing touches), and slicing was a bit of an issue. The inside was good, especially warm, if slightly more bland than I recalled.
Ignore my horrible slicing please.
So maybe the subject line of this is an overstatement: the recipe works fine. It might even work great, if you don't entirely mess it up.
KATE
P.S. HARROWING tales about hamburger and rice from Betsy:
OMG this brings me back to my childhood except that my mother was not a very good cook and still bravely presented something somewhat edible every night for 11 children. And we were not fussy. Just always starving. The older girls would mix up hamburger patties once a month— more like meatloaf as Quaker Oats and eggs were added. We would mold them and put them in packets of 9–3 rows of 3 with wax paper in between and then wrapped in aluminum foil and frozen. One night one of my brothers bit into a burger and pulled out a bandaid that had somehow fallen into his patty. He simply spit it out and kept eating. Like I said, we were hungry.
And slightly more subdued stories about things to do with a ham bone from Madonna:
For us, a ham bone means navy bean soup. That's what my mother did, too. In those days, Monday was wash day (laundry) and she usually put a pot of bean soup on the stove to cook for our noon meal (called dinner). Or some other kind of soup but I mostly recall bean.