So, this week was a bust for me as far as cooking and baking goes. Didn’t get to do much. DH’s nephew came home to Canada after four years in Asia, DH was swamped with lots of work at night after we closed the store, and we did lots o’laundry. All of that adds up to me cooking… twice, I think, all week. And they were fast and dirty meals, too. Nothing fancy, nothing new. Nothing to blog about certainly. Sorry. :-\

I did think of a few tips I wanted to pass along to those of you who want to make bread but don’t because you’re like me and you can’t stand sticky anything on your fingers as you work.

1. I have been known to employ my KitchenAid mixer to do the bulk of the dough kneading for me and then when the ball is formed, turning it out on the counter and giving it ten of the best minutes of my upper body workout.

2. Before DH bought me the Mixinator, I employed another method: mixing the wet and dry ingredients in a bowl with a big wooden spoon till it was all incorporated before turning it out onto the counter.

3. Recently I came across another clean method, and you will love this. It’s so simple, so clever, you will roll your eyes while asking yourselves why you never thought of it yourself. The idea is to lay out a generous sheet of parchment or wax paper on the counter, drop your flour down, make your well and then add your wet ingredients in the middle. Now, here is the fun part: Take diagonal corners of the paper and push the flour into the middle of the wet ingredients – alternating corners as you go before doing a quarter turn of the paper before picking up two more corners. Do this till all of the flour is more or less incorporated and you feel the ball isn’t sticky anymore. From there you can then turn it out and do your normal kneading on a lightly floured counter top.

Hopefully you’ll find one of these methods works well enough for you to adopt. Happy bread making!