The Great American Bread Baking Phenomenon!

I’m not going to lie, I dislike using a recipe that doesn’t include a picture of the dish. That’s just a pet peeve of mine. If I’m perusing a cookbook for a new recipe to try, if there is not picture to show me what the finished dish will look like, I usually skip it. I like to see what I’m going to make. That said, do as I say, not as I do. 😉

Because I have a great recipe for you to make, and I don’t have a picture to share along with it. Oh, no! It’s very good though, another family favorite, and I hope you’ll give it a try. I have baked this bread a lot over time, just not recently, which is why I have no picture to post.

Baking bread has become quite a thing as we’ve stayed at home these past few months. Toilet paper has not been the only item to disappear from our grocery store shelves recently, flour and yeast have as well. We have become a nation that bakes bread from scratch again. Hey, we’ve had a little extra time on our hands, so why not? Plus, it smells and tastes so good.

The recipe we have today is called Parmesan bread. I got this recipe off the back of a can of Pet Evaporated Milk many years ago. It makes two delicious loaves of bread; you can certainly freeze one after it’s baked to enjoy later. At our house, we usually serve Parmesan bread with an Italian meal such as spaghetti or lasagna. But it would work well with any meal actually, or even as a side with a nice, green salad.

Parmesan Bread

Ingredients

2 envelopes active dry yeast

½ cup lukewarm water

1 cup evaporated milk

¼ cup melted butter

¼ cup sugar

1 t. salt

1 T. Italian seasoning

1 egg, slightly beaten

½ cup Parmesan cheese

3 ¾ - 4 cups flour

2 T. melted butter

2 T. Parmesan Cheese

Instructions

Dissolve yeast in warm water in large bowl. Stir in evaporated milk, ¼ cup melted butter, sugar, salt, Italian seasoning, egg, ½ cup Parmesan cheese, and 2 cups flour. Stir in additional flour until dough leaves edges of bowl.

Turn onto floured surface. Knead 5 minutes, adding additional flour as necessary.

Place dough in large, buttered bowl. Cover and let rise in warm place 1 ½ hours or until doubled in size.

Divide in half and turn into 2 buttered 1 – quart casserole dishes. (They can be square or round in shape.) Cover and let rise ½ hour or until doubled in size again.

Brush tops with 2 T. melted butter; sprinkle with 2 T. Parmesan cheese. Bake at 350° for 25 – 30 minutes or until loaves sound hollow when tapped. Remove from dishes at once. Cool on wire racks.

I think you’ll find the recipe very easy to execute and, hopefully, one you’ll want to make time and again.

I’d like to share with you some pictures my daughter, Laura, has sent me over the past few months. She has definitely been bitten by the baking bread bug while quarantining in New York City. I think she also may be single-handedly responsible for any shortage of flour and yeast NYC might be experiencing. Just kidding! 😊

The above picture is of chocolate babka. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen two loaves of bread before that looked this pretty. And, Laura said it tasted delicious! She got it from a website called The Smitten Kitchen, who acknowledge that they borrowed the recipe from a cookbook called Jerusalem: a Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi. Good news, the Ottolenghi cookbook is available to read as an eBook via Overdrive. As always, it's free to read with your CIDL library card.

Also, I’ve included the link to The Smitten Kitchen if you’d like to give the babka a try:

https://smittenkitchen.com/2014/10/better-chocolate-babka/

Laura really likes to mix it up as you can see from the next group of pictures. From left to right: Naan, a traditional flat bread from India; an everything bagel; and sweet rolls, another old family favorite.

My daughter out on the west coast, Janelle, has also done some baking during the pandemic. She has issues with gluten though, and is learning to bake in a new way. How does chocolate chip banana bread sound? It sounds great to me. She told me that she uses half almond flour and half Bob’s Red Mill Gluten Free Baking Flour in her recipe.

Good luck with your bread baking. Do you know what is another good thing about baking bread? Kneading dough is a great stress reliever. Better get busy.

Updates on Previous Blog Posts

In my last post, I talked about the puzzle shortage and how my daughters and I are sharing our puzzles with each other when we’re done with them. One of my loyal blog readers, who also happens to be a retired library co-worker, kindly offered to give us one of her previously used puzzles to pass around. I took her up on her offer, and we met at our library for a properly social-distanced puzzle exchange. 😊 It was very good to see her! And, I’m grateful for her generous offer to share her puzzle with us.

That was also the first time I’ve been back to the library since just before my foot surgery back in January. It was kind of hard to wrap my brain around that; it was winter when I left, and now, after rehabbing my foot and one pandemic later, it’s May and springtime. Look at those beautiful white blossoms on the trees bordering the steps to the library! Oh, I know they smell wonderful, and I’m sad that we are missing them this spring. Just one of the things I miss about our library.

Do you remember the recycled tin can flower pots I blogged about at the beginning of May? I recently changed them out. They originally were planted with some cuttings I had rooting in water. My intention all along had been to plant the cuttings this summer into my own, normal flower pots that I always have on our back deck. That’s what I did this week: planted ten pots with lovely summer annuals, adding in the cuttings. And, in their place, I brought in my favorite marigolds to plant in my patriotic pots. Marigolds have always been among my favorite flowers, and I plant them every summer somewhere in my yard. I’m sure they’ll do well in my homemade pots.

As always, stay home and stay safe.

Bake some bread, do a puzzle, plant some flowers, enjoy the day.

Take time to smell the lilacs.