Five years of blogging and I have never posted my favorite basic bread recipe. I am chagrined. Woe, woe, and more woe.

This is the recipe I turn to when I’m teaching newbies, when I want bread fast (it takes three hours from start to finish, BAM), and when I want something to impress guests. Because there’s nothing like thick slabs of fresh bread with lots of butter and homemade jam to wow the masses.

I had each of my older two children make this bread when they stayed home from school last week. My older daughter has made this recipe on several different occasions, but my son, I was scandalized to learn, not only had never made it before, he had never kneaded bread before. Woe!

His bread didn’t turn out that great. It didn’t have enough salt (my fault—I wasn’t watching him measure), and then it was underbaked (again, my fault). (But, you’ll be proud to know, I exercised restraint and didn’t jump on it.)

My daughter’s bread turned out fine. She made half the dough into butterhorns and was quite pleased with herself.

This semester, we are tackling yeast breads in my baking class. This is, of course, the first recipe I taught them.

Up until now, they’ve had no idea what yeast was nor had they ever kneaded dough.

For being complete novices, the buns (for that is what we shaped the dough into) turned out marvelously. We sold out in mere minutes.

Lately, I’ve been making this recipe almost daily. Mid-afternoon, I mix up the dough and set it to rise. Towards suppertime, I shape the dough and then let it rest while I pull together the main dish. While kids are showering and the table is being set, the rolls bake. We eat one pan of rolls with our meal, saving the second pan of rolls (or loaf of bread) for the next day’s lunch sandwiches.

Easy French Bread
Adapted from The More-with-Less Cookbook.

Confession: it bothers me that this recipe is called “French bread” because I think of French bread as crusty on the outside and chewy with lots of holes on the inside. This is not that French bread—it’s just a good, simple bread. That’s all.

The recipe is flexible. Some of my common changes:

*doubling the sugar (shh!)
*subbing some of the white flour with a couple cups of whole wheat
*adding leftover cooked oatmeal
*using milk instead of water
*using honey (or brown sugar or molasses) in place of sugar
*tossing in some flaxmeal, wheat germ, or wheat bran
*instead of oil, using butter or shortening

This bread is best eaten the same day it’s made, though leftovers work fine for sandwiches, toast, grilled cheese, French toast, and baked French toast. Lots of French cooking going on around here…

2 tablespoons yeast
½ cup warm water
pinch of sugar
2 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons oil
2 cups water (boiling, if melting butter or soaking oats)
7-8 cups bread flour

In a small bowl, combine the yeast, the half cup of warm water, and pinch of sugar (to make the yeast ecstatic). Set aside for about five minutes or until frothy.

In a large bowl, combine the two tablespoons sugar, salt, oil, and the two cups of water. Stir well and, if using hot water, let it sit until lukewarm so as not to murder the ecstatic yeast. Add the yeast and a couple more cups of flour. Stir, continuing to add more flour until the dough is stiff enough to be kneaded. Don’t add too much flour, though! The trick is to keep the dough a little wet and supple—too much flour and it turns into a rock-hard, unyielding lump of frustration. (My daughter added too much flour this last time and I had to knead in water to loosen it up. Not fun.)

Knead the dough until smooth and elasticky, five to ten minutes worth of arm exercise. Dust the bottom of the still-dirty bread bowl with flour and put the dough back in it. Sprinkle with a little more flour and cover with a cloth. Let the dough rise until double—this should take 45 minutes to an hour.

Shape the dough as desired (see below), let rise until slightly poofy but not doubled (or it will collapse in the oven), and bake in a 350 degree oven until golden brown.

Options
*Basic loaves: divide the dough in half, shape into loaves, and place, seam-side down, in two greased loaf pans.
*(mock) French bread loaves: divide the dough in half and shape into long loaves, about 12 inches long. Place seam-side down on a greased baking tray, leaving 3 or 4 inches between the loaves. Sprinkle the tops with flour before making 4 or 5 quarter-inch slashes in each loaf.
*Dinner rolls: shape into 24 rolls and place in greased baking dishes. Beat an egg together with a tablespoon of water. Brush the the tops of the rolls with the egg wash. Sprinkle the rolls with sesame seeds, poppy seeds, rolled oats, etc.
*Butterhorns: divide the dough in half. Roll out one of the halves into a large circle between 12 and 16 inches in diameter. Brush several tablespoons of soft butter over the dough. Using a sharp knife, cut the dough into 12-16 pizza wedges. Working with one wedge and starting from the wide end, roll it up. Place the butterhorn, pointy tip underneath, on a greased baking sheet. Repeat with the remaining wedges and dough. Immediately after pulling the hot rolls from the oven, brush the tops with melted butter. 
*Et cetera: such as cloverleaf rolls and emergency sweet rolls, yum.

My children have learned a lot this year. Stuff that isn’t even touched on in a regular school curriculum, such as, say:

How To Not Fall Out Of A Moving Bus While Standing In The Doorway.
How To Turn On The Gas For A Warm Shower.
How To Not Have A Clue and Not Show It. (They failed this one.)
How To Carry A Tub Of Cake On Your Head All The Way To Market And Then Sell It.
How To Tolerate Being Stared At, Patted, Pinched, And Admired.

With them in school and both my husband and I working, book larnin’ hasn’t been high on the list. After sitting in classes for seven hours, I think it’s more important for them to spend the last remaining daylight running around outdoors than sitting at the kitchen table drilling flash cards.

That said, the lack of ed-you-kate-in, as in reading, writing, and arithmetic, has worried my mind. Not too much, but enough that I thought I ought to do something about it.

In my latest newsletter, I wrote about my frustration with how I’m not being used at Bezaleel. There’s a great need, yes, but no one seems to have the wherewithal to transform My Amazing Potential into A Viable Resource. At the end of my whiny rant, I quipped, “If nothing else, I can pull my own children out of school and tutor them.”

Last week was exam week at Bezaleel. Since there were no normal classes, rather than hanging out in the teachers’ lounge wishing I had something to do, I made good my threat and pulled my kids out of school, one at a time, for some serious one-on-one tutoring time, ba-BAM.

My older son stayed home on Monday, and Wednesday and Friday, the girls had their turns (the youngest was spared my tyranny). For hours each day, I directed, instructed, corrected, and guided to my heart’s content. And the kids were receptive! In fact, after working hard for six hours, my son said, “Can’t I stay home from school every day? This is so much fun!”

(Clarifying note: this is not what our homeschooling schedule normally looks like. I hardly ever get hours of uninterrupted instruction time with one child anywhere, either here or there.)

On a couple different occasions, I’ve been asked, now that I’ve experienced firsthand the institutionalized educational system, if I’m going to send my children to school once we return home.

The answer: absolutely not.

Let me be clear. I am so glad that we chose to send our children to school this year. The school is wonderful, the teachers kind and professional, the setting safe and secure. But I can hardly wait to quit this school business and get back to homeschooling because I miss it something fierce.

I miss hanging out with my children, including them in household chores, reading together. I miss being involved in their learning. I miss the challenge of deciding what, how, and when to educate them. I miss our lunches of leftovers, all of us perched on stools around the kitchen table. I miss our lazy mornings by the fire, piles of library books strewn across the floor. I miss free afternoons and lingering rest times and late(er) evenings. I miss dappling in special projects, spontaneous outings, and friend swaps. I miss being with my kids.

There are, of course, so many things I don’t miss, like all the bickering and feeling like I’m going to climb out of my skin and the exhaustion of Following Through. Having thirty-five, glorious, kid-free hours each week—hours in which I am not mediating fights, watching my clean house disintegrate under muddy feet and tossed clothes, listening to silly babble, being irritated by rolled eyes and bobble-doll heads (my daughter has a gift—she belongs on a dashboard), enforcing chores, disciplining, chiding, prodding—is downright blissful. And yet…

And yet.

These eye-rolling, bickering children are mine. Call me crazy (stop shouting already! I can’t think!), but those problems we have—and do we ever have our share of problems!—are ours to work through. I miss the, the…privilege? opportunity? of giving them my full (albeit often resentful and pissed off) attention.

So while I thoroughly enjoy my calm, quiet mornings, I am oh-so-ready to scrap the go-to-school business and delve once again into the daily drudge (that will, no doubt, make me want to stick a pin in my eye in 0.0062014 seconds, ahhhh!) of spending our days learning, fighting, living at home, together. 

PS. If I call begging you to watch my children because I am Losing It, don’t smirk. Or at least not so I can see. ‘Kay? Thanks.

PPS. It’s not just me hankering after our educational independence and freerer schedule—the kids are, too.