Bread making

I've been trying out different bread recipes for the last couple of days. The once I like best is Pumpernickel bread. I use the dough cycle on my bread machine and then shape the loaves and do the 2nd rising in the loaf pans and bake in the oven. I like how the crust turns out better this way. The pumpernickel has rye, whole wheat, regular flour in it along with some cocoa & instant coffee, molasses and a few caraway seeds. It definitely has a distinct flavor, but I like it. The other ones I tried were Oat bran (the loaves fell during the 2nd rising, so they were quite dense, but quite edible with butter and honey put on the slices) and Whole Wheat bread (it rose just fine, but wasn't quite enough to make 2 nice sized loaves - so will have to make one big one next time).

Tonight for supper we had Dave & Janet over along with their 2 young kids Mark & Julia. They brought a mandarin lettuce salad and we had chicken fettuccine (our favorite pasta recipe), steamed green beans, and some of the bread I'd made. For dessert we had homemade tapioca pudding topped with semi-thawed frozen strawberries and a few nibbles of a lemon poppyseed bread cake that tasted well but did NOT come out of the bundt cake so well.

Today Tom got his drill! He's been putting it to use already. He drilled some holes in the kitchen cupboards in order to run our wireless internet cords through the holes rather than having the wires hanging loose outside the cupboards. When that was done, he mounted the power strip cord that all those internet/phone electronics are plugged into up under the bottom of the cupboards above the kitchen counter so that no longer is laying on top of the counter either! This evening after our dinner guests left, he's been downstairs reassembling 2 bookshelves that he picked up for free. On Tuesday evening, Tom picked up a van load (15 passenger van load) of free stuff when he went to pick up these 2 bookshelves. Out of this free stuff we now have: a wheelbarrow, Yamaha clarinet-worth about $200 (which we'll sell on Craig's list or trade for something like a violin or canoe), a non-slick rug for downstairs, a duster (that can reach the corners in our stairwell ceiling), hose on a wide up wheel, another bicycle, northwoods cabin cookbooks, a clock, binoculars, laundry basket, and some misc. things.