I have several bread recipes if you want em. I like to make my own bread, although since I’ve gone back to work, I haven’t been doing that so much. Shame really, packaged bread tastes so gross after having eaten homemade for so long.
I love making homemade bread, but so far (since getting my fab new oven), I’ve only managed it about once/month. It’s not at all difficult, and personally I adore kneading by hand, but it just takes...babysitting, I guess. That’s why I only manage it now and then. But it’s loads of fun, and the bread is great.
Carlotta, do you have a recipe for yeast rolls? I have one that looks pretty good (it was the sweepstakes winner at the state fair here a few years ago), but I’ve never made them before, so what do I know?
PB & J is quite a staple in our house. I can buy jelly cheaply enough. We prefer strawberry or raspberry. I am NOT a fan of grape flavored anything. There are a lot of different peanut butter brands...and I want to say the one I usually buy is something like $2.69. But for some reason I have $3.19 stuck in my head...but I switch brands quite a bit. Sometimes to take advantage of a sale or a coupon. I recently switched to the store brand of my local Publix. They are the BEST STORE EVER. They’re not necessarily super cheap...but their store brand is phenomenal. It’s better than the national brand...no matter what it is you’re buying. The store brand PB is “natural”. So it doesn’t have anything added to it & I have to stir it up quite a bit to get the oil to mix really well. It’s only got 1g of sugar for every 2 tablespoons. But it tastes the most peanutty and I think it costs less than $2. They also have a version in the deli that they sell...that just comes in a deli container...it’s more expensive, but probably fresher.
I probably spend a little more on bread than I could. But it seems like there is only white bread for cheap. And what’s the point of eating white bread? When we were little my mom would get it & we would use it for fishing. If you spit on a small piece & then rolled it into a ball, you could put it on your fish hook. We called it glue bread b/c it dried really hard after being wet. So, if I want wheat bread...I have to pay more for it.
I keep slim fast cans at the house, to give to Jocelynn if I feel like she’s not getting quite enough nutrients. They have kid specific versions of the stuff, but it’s much more expensive. $10 for about 30 ounces. But I can spend like $8 for 66 ounces of slim fast.
By ‘jelly’ I suppose you mean a preserve, what we call ‘jam’?
Because Jelly’s a desert that wobbles oh-so-delightfully.
Jelly is a clear, bright product. It is generally made by cooking fruit juice and sugar with pectin as a jelling agent and lemon juice as an acid to maintain a consistent texture. Jelly is firm and will hold its shape (it “shakes”). Generally, jelly contains no pieces of fruit, although specialty jellies, like pepper jelly, may include pieces of jalapeño or other pepper.
Jam is made from crushed or chopped fruit cooked with sugar, and often pectin and lemon juice. Jam can be a purée of fruit or have a soft pulp, but it does not contain chunks of fruit.
Preserves are fruit cooked with sugar to the point where large chunks of fruit or whole fruit, such as berries, are suspended in a syrup base. The texture of preserves is not smooth like jelly or jam.
Marmalade is a soft jelly, often citrus-based, that includes both the flesh and peel of the fruit suspended throughout the jelly base. The bitterness of the peel offsets the sweetness of the jelly.
Conserve is a mixture of more than one fruit, often with added nuts and raisins, that is cooked until it becomes thick. It is used as a spread for breads, pastries and meats, and in the latter use is closest to chutney.
Chutney is a spiced condiment of Indian origin (chatni is the Hindi word for strongly spiced) made of fruit or vegetables. It is typically served as an accompaniment to food, not as a spread. The spice level can range from mild to hot, and the consistency from a fine relish to a preserve or conserve. Fruit chutney consists of chopped fruit, vinegar, spices and sugar cooked into a chunky sweet-tart-spicy mix: according to one explanation, it “blurs the Western distinction between preserves and pickles.”
Fruit Butter, such as apple butter or prune butter, is fruit purée or pulp combined with sugar, lemon juice and spices, slowly cooked down to a smooth consistency. The “butter” refers to its spreadability: there is no actual butter in the product.
Fruit Curd is a creamy spread made with sugar, eggs and butter, generally flavored with citrus juice and zest.
Fruit Spread is generally a reduced-calorie product made with fruit juice concentrate and low-calorie sweeteners replacing all or part of the sugar.
Haven’t we had this conversation over and over again?
We do have an inordinantly extensive array of sweet stuff to be spread on toast and other bread products (not that I think that’s a bad thing), which is why there are so many different names. In AmE, jelly is different from jam (which is different from preserves which is different from fruit butters—which aren’t anything like butter or peanut butter—it’s all very complicated), but it’s different for an entirely different reason than the reason it’s different in the U.K. et. al.
I think I use strawberry jelly, but raspberry JAM. The jam has seeds in it & I like it.
Jason & I have thrown about the idea of my making bread myself. I’ve made it before, by hand & machine. I do enjoy the taste of it...but the thing about store bought bread, is that it typically has preservatives in it. We might go through 2 loaves of bread in a week...or just use 2 pieces. So I store my bread in the fridge to keep it fresher longer. I do not know if home made bread would work the same. I suppose I could do a little research & find out...but I just keep forgetting about it. I think someone told me stuff like baking powder is the preservative but I never bothered to find out if it was true.
We used to have a hostess day old bread store. It was awesome. Because it was all so cheap, it was the one place my mom let us pick something out for our very own. I always got the little single serve cherry pies. But it’s been bulldozed now. There’s a car lot where it used to be. There is a peppridge farm place not too much further down the road than where the hostess place used to be...but I often forget it’s there. I need to plug my freezer back in (unplugged to clean it out & defrost it) so I can go bet some bread in bulk & freeze it.
“We likes the strawberry preserves, but the jelly is just like thick juice and it runs out and ruins the bread and gets all over everything so we would prefer that no one brings jelly home but spends the extra dime to buy the preserves so we can just enjoy the fruity chunks in peace and leave the killing to the other voices that like the jelly and not the jam because they’re sorta wimpy on account of not having ingested the tasty chunks one would find in preserves instead of the thin water juice-like stuff in jelly....”
