Every Sunday morning, Mom would pull her huge granite bowl out of the cupboard and start her weekly bread making marathon. She made 7 loaves of bread every single Sunday for 20 years until I was a junior in high school. My parents divorced that year and we kids couldn’t wait to have store bought bread, that’s what all of our friends ate. Silly, silly kids!

Though I was active in the kitchen and made meals almost every day, I was never part of the bread making marathon. I think this was her de-stressing time – imagine the kneading that goes into 7 loaves of bread at once!

This is her sifter. Even though I have it, it’s not mine; I just borrowed it about 15 years ago 😉

She didn’t use it as a sifter – it was her flour measure for making bread.

That’s all it was used for. She would dip the sifter into the old cherry can, where the flour was stored, a few times and go on with her recipe — she knew just how much water to use with these few scoops of the sifter.

It’s been almost 2 years now that we started our new way of living – doing more for ourselves. One morning I was making toast with the store bought bread I had been living on for 21 years and realized I’d had enough of this store bought bread! I talked with Mom – she could not remember the measurements for her bread recipe that she had made for 20 years. It took a few tries with Google to come up with something that didn’t have milk, eggs or anything else unnecessary. The search “basic homemade bread” finally brought me to Suzanne and her Grandmother Bread at the very top of the search page. THIS had to be Mom’s recipe. I could finally use the sifter for what it always been used for!

I have finally learned how much to dip out of the new age cherry can, where I store my flour.

This makes a 2-loaf recipe of Grandmother Bread.

Or 1 loaf of bread and 8 hot dog buns!

Cindy blogs at Chippewa Creek ~ Our Life Simplified.


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