Monday Q&A | Bread Storage, Two Kids, and more

I’ve been reading your blog for a few weeks now and really enjoy your posts. A while back I decided to try my hand at making bread. I haven’t fully gotten the hang of it, but each time I try, it turns out better and better. My questions are: How do you store your bread? Specifically sandwich bread. Do you slice it all at once? Slice it as you go? Do you have a special bread keeper? Plastic bag? Paper bag? So many questions.
-Melissa

First, I’m so glad you’ve hung in there with the bread making. If there ever was a case where practice makes perfect, this is it!

As far as your question goes, I store my bread in plastic bags, which I reuse and reuse. Most bread leaves the bags so clean I don’t even usually need to wash them between uses.

We go through loaves of bread in a flash around here, so I slice a loaf as we go and leave it out on the counter, but if you are single or live in a small family, I highly recommend freezing your bread. Homemade bread has no preservatives in it, and tends to mold much faster than store-bought bread, so freezing it is important if you take a while to eat a loaf.

To make it easier to defrost your bread, I’d suggest slicing it before you freeze it so that you can easily remove just as many slices as you want.

I do freeze my loaves when I make more than one, as I often do when making whole wheat sandwich bread or French bread. This is a great way to have homemade bread available and ready without having to constantly bake.

I’m having my second baby soon, and I was wondering what you thought the biggest changes and differences were once you had two babies. Mine will be 18 months apart, and thankfully, I will not be going back to work once the new baby is here.

Hopefully you have time to answer my question! I’m 25 and am the first one of my friends to have babies, and both my husband and I are only children, so even our moms don’t know what it will be like to have 2 🙂

-Bonnie

My first two kids are 19 months apart, so that’s pretty similar to your situation.

Life definitely got busier with two babies, but the thing I remember the most is that having my second baby was not as hard as I expected! This is partly because my second baby was an easier baby, but also because I knew better what I was doing as a mom. I just coped a lot better the second time around!

So, overall, I felt that the adjustment to having 2 kids was easier than the adjustment to having my first.

Life might feel a little overwhelming at first with two very small children, but I just want to encourage you to remember that this is just a phase of life and that these two small children will grow and will eventually be able to feed themselves and sleep through the night and all of that good stuff.

Also, I should share with you that while 2 children do require more work in some ways, it is not necessarily always harder to have 2 children than 1. Even when Lisey was a small baby, Joshua was quite entertained by her, and she by him. He used to sit with her on the floor and hand her toys and when she was very small, he liked to stand by her swing and talk to her. As they got older, they spent more and more time playing with each other and they’ve been close friends their whole lives so far.

Of course, now two more children have been added into the mix, and I have to say, I really like the fact that they all play together. I don’t need to expend much effort entertaining them because there is always someone here for them to play with!

I always combine my bag of whole wheat flour with a bag of all-purpose flour. I’ve made banana bread and carrot cake with this combination in the past. I see that most of your recipes call for all-purpose flour, would the different breads and rolls come out to tough if I were to substitute half the flour with whole wheat?

-Annette

Nope, whole wheat flour does not make yeast breads tough. Because it is heavier and contains less gluten, it makes them a little more dense, and of course, the whole wheat adds its own flavor to the mix (this would make the cheese flavor in something like a batch of Cheddar Twists a little less pronounced), but your results should be just fine if you like whole wheat breads.

Kristen, I’m looking at buying a grill–but I’m not sure what to get. Since you just posted information about grilling chicken (which means you obv. own a grill), I thought I’d ask for your opinion.

We don’t have a patio or a backyard for that matter. We currently rent in a huge condo building in Chicago.
Would you suggest, for someone like me, to go with a small, portable charcoal grill? A gas grill? Are there other options for preparing food that tastes like it was done on the grill otherwise?

–Reese

As far as I know, there is no real grill option that is safe to use indoors other than the sort of grill that is built into some cooktops.

If you want grill marks on your food, you might try purchasing a grill pan, which looks like a skillet except that it has ridges on the bottom.

If smoky flavor is more what you’re going for, you might heat a cast iron pan until it’s really hot before adding your food. This won’t be just like grilled food, but it would be tasty, and it would produce a crispy outside like the grill.

I’m sure I have a number of apartment/condo-dwelling readers who have more experience with this than I do, though, so do check the comments to find some better advice than mine!