Behold! I Have Created Bread.

This is my first leavened bread, and it's actually pretty good. For some reason I opted to mold it into a "wad" shape, rather than putting it into a mold. It seemed like the hip thing to do. This wad of bread was surprisingly easy to make, with five ingredients:

• Flour (white and wheat)
• Salt
• Butter
• Yeast
• Water

I could have added Love as a sixth ingredient, but I wanted a control group before I started getting fancy. My next batch will include Love. At some point I'll experiment with adding Vengeance or Irony. Right now, though, it's just a wad of regular bread.

Why did I make bread? We were out of bread. With our new, uncertain financial situation we've been going UberFrugal. I didn't want to drive to the store to get bread. That would be silly, especially considering we have all the necessary ingredients to just make the stinkin' stuff. Plus, it was fun and smelled delicious as it baked. Also, I just felt like doing it.

It's really not that hard. I thought it would be some grand production. But mostly it's a lot of waiting around. That's my kind of work. Throw the ingredients into a bowl. Mush it up. Kneed the mush for a few minutes. Toss it into a bowl and let it rise in the oven for an hour while you nap or read or nap and read or watch children...wait wait wait.

Then mock the bread's attempts to rise up by beating it down with a few light punches. Split it into two sections and put them on a pan with the oven preheated to 425. Wait another half hour while the bread attempts to regain its dignity and rise again. Wait wait wait.

Then put the bread in the oven for 35 minutes...wait wait wait.

Then ya got bread. It's a full 15 to 20 minutes of work, max. And you can make a LOT of bread dough. Of course there are far more involved breads than this...I did a pretty simple one.

I don't know if I'll consistently make my own bread. But it was fun to do.