Crisis averted.

If you've been with my little blog since the beginning, you know how much I love and use my bread machine. It makes bread at least twice a week and sometimes more on the weekends if I have time. We rarely buy bread at the grocery anymore unless I get a hankering for some pitas (which I could also make if I wanted to go to the trouble).

Lately, breadmaking has been a little of a challenge. A couple of weeks ago, I went to make my regular loaf of whole wheat bread. I put all the wet ingredients in the pan and when I went to measure out the flour, I noticed it was crawling. Yes. Tee-tiny nearly microscopic crawling things were in my flour. I took everything out of the Rubbermaid bin I had kept all the bread things in, and to my great horror, found that all of my supplies were crawling with critters. White flour. . . wheat flour. . . barley flour. . . rye flour. . . gluten. . . coconut milk powder. . . buttermilk powder. . . all the sugar. . . it all had to be thrown out. Every. Single. Last. Bit. We took the bin outside and hosed it off. Thinking it was safe, we put it back in the kitchen under the table. And guess what?

A couple of days later, there were still tiny crawling things in the bins. We took them all outside, cleaned the floor and the bins with hot bleach water, and having decided out invaders were tiny pharoah ants, we put ant baits in the bins when they dried. Mister packed up his wine & beer supplies with bay leaves, and so far, it seems to have worked. I'm still keeping an eye out for the little critters, though.

Tonight I went to bake a loaf like I usually do in the middle of the week. I put all the ingredients in the pan, put the pan in the machine, set it on the Express cycle, and went about my business. When I went to check on it later, I saw it wasn't rising, and. . . wait. Is it BOILING in there?

Yes. It was boiling. The ingredients hadn't been mixed when I turned on the machine, so it all just sat there in a blob cooking in the pan. I thought, great, now the bread machine's crapped out on us, and we'll have to start buying bread again. I took the pan out to let it and the machine cool off. Mister and I were contemplating going to the grocery to pick up a loaf of bread, when I noticed the BREAD PADDLE sitting on the counter. Then it dawned on me.

I had altogether forgotten to put the paddle in the machine. Made bread so many times I have the basic recipe memorized, and I FORGOT to put the PADDLE in there.

So, after the machine cooled off and Mister cleaned out the pan for me, I started over. And sometimes, that's all you can do: laugh at your dumb mistakes and just start over.

Till next time ---- if you fall off the horse, just dust yourself off and get back on.