The Bread Fiasco

Corn, yeast, oatmeal bread? This is going to be interesting.

 I was out of bread so I decided to make some quick 5-minute cornbread in the microwave. I dumped a cup of flour in a bowl and - oops. No cornmeal. Well, OK then. How about yeast bread in the rice cooker? (I'm getting into this alternative baking since I don't have a working oven.) Directions said to add a little bit of water to proof. I've never proofed before and I've made a lot of bread, but decided to try it.

 Oops, I wasn't supposed to add water to the flour mix like I just did. Now the batch is too wet and I'm out of flour. I tried adding powdered milk instead of liquid milk but it just seemed to dissolve. Ha. Oatmeal. Just the thing. It's rising now.

Then it hits me. I'm getting a ride to the grocery store today. I won't have time to let the dough rise and bake it too. I would have been fine with the cornbread, but not yeast bread. So I cut a little time off the rising and turn the cooker on. Of course, being a rice cooker, it keeps shutting itself down to warm. I keep turning it up until time to go. Then I unplug it and wrap it in a towel. 

The bread was still warm when I got home. I turned the cooker back on for a while. I gave it a taste test and declared it done. It really was pretty good bread. Imagine what it would have been like if I had done it right!

Not a Crock Pot

I bought what I thought was a tiny crock pot at a yard sale. It had never been used, but didn't come with a box or instructions. I only paid a couple of dollars for it and thought it was a great deal.

I finally decided to try it out. My neighbor cooks beans in her crock pot, so I thought I'd give that a try. I have bags of dried beans in the cupboard. I put the beans in, added water and turned it on overnight. I didn't expect them to be completely cooked in the morning, and they weren't. I kept the pot on low since it seemed to boil over if I turned it on high. As the day went on, they still were crunchy. At the end of 24 hours, they were edible, but just barely.

Next I tried baking bread in it. I read that it works as well as a bread machine. I whipped up the dough and set it on a piece of foil and turned in on high. After several hours, I realized the pot kept shutting itself down to low. I thought this was a bit peculiar. And the bread was not baking.

I decided to go online and see what was up with this little crock pot. I soon found out what my problem was. It wasn't a crock pot at all. It's a RICE COOKER!!! I've never had a rice cooker before so I read some online directions, put in some clean rice and water and tried again. This time it worked like a charm! Within 10 minutes, or so it seemed, I had a pot full of perfectly cooked rice. I added butter, salt and a can of onion soup. It was delicious. Now I can make rice to go with those beans.