Adventures in bread making

Since we've been home from Virginia I've been working on getting our food storage built up. So we've visited Costco and placed an order with the Church cannery and we're slowly getting food built up. I realized, however, that it's not going to do my any good to have food storage if I don't know what to do with it. My friend Mande was nice enough to agree to teach me her bread making skills. So this morning I loaded Mitchell into the car and we headed over to her house. Mande is currently living in a house that used to belong to her husband's grandmother. With the house they inherited a big closet full of food storage and two wheat grinders. Not a bad deal. However, the food storage is at least 30 years old and a good deal of the food was no good. She did manage to salvage some wheat that looked like it was still okay. So this morning we set about using her fancy wheat grinder to grind some wheat for the bread. It was all very pioneery and domestic. So the wheat grinder sounds like a jet engine and you have to run the wheat through several times to get it anywhere near flour consistency. We only ran it through twice, and I think that was our biggest mistake. The whole time Mande kept exclaiming that the wheat smelled weird. I've never smelled wheat, much less touched it, so I cannot be blamed for how this all turned out. She should have known :) So we tossed all the ingredients into her mixer and things just went downhill from there. We followed the instuctions perfectly (mostly), but instead of nice fluffy bread dough, we ended up with a lump of gravelly cement. Again, I blame the under-grinding of the wheat, but who knows. Needless to say, it also didn't rise properly, but we baked it anyway. In the end we had three very sizable bricks. I really do think that you could build a house with them. Not only were they ugly, coarse, and heavy, but the funny smelling wheat resulted in some funny tasting bread. We decided that if you were starving you could probably choke it down, but we weren't starving, so we didn't touch it. And here's the kick in the pants for you, Mitchell the kid who won't eat anything, stood there and ate that bread like a starving child. So it turns out I don't need to make nice dinners for him, I can just throw him a nasty loaf of bread made with 100 year old wheat and he'll go to town. I guess we'll just call this whole thing a science experiment, now Mande knows she needs to get new wheat.
Here's a few pictures of our good times.