Give us this day our daily bread.

As a kid, this was one of the phrases that used to roll glibly off the tongue as part of the Lords Prayer. You know, one of those things that you glibly say without thinking too much about it. I have come to realise that there is a deep profundity & a heartfelt plea involved in those seven words, especially for someone resident in that particular era. I mean, the whole growing thing, the harvesting, the winnowing & the grinding, all things that had to happen before one could even consider producing something that you could spread a bit of butter & jam on.

The easy way for me now is to wander the half a block down to our local store & buy a loaf of pre cut, presliced, pre packaged stuff. This is as much a social event as anything, as there are always neighbors to talk to & Jen at the store, if she doesnt serve you herself, always has this inexhaustible supply of young tourists working there who love to practice their English. All in all, you can kill a good hour sometimes just getting your daily bread.

Other factors, however have intervened. The price of said daily loaf has inexorably been crawling its way upwards. Also, Herself doesn't/can't eat bread any more. So after about half a loaf, it starts getting stale & inevitably ends up feeding the birds. Yeah, yeah, I can hear you all chorusing now. "Freeze it, you silly man !" But the plain fact is, I don't like frozen bread. So, other measures must inevitably come into play.

Have you ever noticed that just when you think that you have all the flash shiny appliances that you ever need, along comes a new one that you just have to have. One of these was the trusty bread maker & I must admit that they are a handy device. No more hand kneading dough, or waiting for it to prove in the hot water cupboard or on the drying rack over the coal range, just chuck the ingredients in , push the button & hey Presto. 3 hours later the perfect loaf of bread. As someone who used to make bread for a living, I think that they remove a certain mystique from the process, but never mind.

My Mum gave us a breadmaker quite some time ago & mostly it has sat gathering dust & looking forlorn on the shelf as we didn't feel that it was actually economic to bake your own, but now it is. After a couple of truly disastrous efforts involving not enough water & yeast that was probably past its use by date when the Lords Prayer was written, I have finally turned out a reasonably acceptable loaf of bread. It cost $20.00 for a 10kg bag of premix from Bin Inn, so I figure that after about 6 loaves I will be on the winning side financially. Not to mention the satisfaction of doing it yourself.