Mmmm- Rice Bread

Last Sunday we had regional conference, which was pretty fantastic. There was one talk, however, that left me feeling pretty guilty-but in a good way. I felt humbled and motivated to be better. Anne Monson Dibb, President Monson's daughter, gave a talk about not settling for generic short-cuts in life. She used a really great analogy of home-made bread in comparison to the store-bought wonder bread prodcts that most of us settle for.

Obviously she was not judging anyone who doesn't have the time to have freshly baked bread in their home on a regular basis. The point that she was really trying to make was that there are other things in our lives that deserve much more attention and care than we are now giving them. Family togetherness should consist of more than eating dinner on the couch while watching Scrub's re-runs. Scripture study should be more than a race to the end of the chapter so that we can go to sleep- rather it should be a sincere quest for knowledge and guidance. Church attendance sould be looked forward to as a privilege and not as an obligatory 3 hour block of time that we run away from afterwords as soon as possible.

I really related to her mssage in a number of ways, and spent the rest of the day making goals that would get me on the path away from the rushed and convenient aspects of my life that I have been settling for. One of those goals consisted of making some bread. I found a good recipe and got to work. I decided to mix the dough in my bread maker because I did not want Emma to think that it was OK to mess with the dough while it was rising. I wish now that I would have made it by hand! When the breadmaker announced that the dough had finished rising, I pulled it out to get it ready to bake. That was when I noticed some weird lumps in the dough. On closer examination, I found that the little lumps were grains of rice.

I have two big bags in my pantry that are off-limits to Emma, which, of course, makes them irresistable to her Terrible Two obstinance. One is a 25 pound bag of flour, and the other is a 20 pound bag of rice. Apparently, at some point, without my notice, Emma had poured some of that contraband rice into my barely opened bag of flour- thus resulting in my rice infested bread dough.

I decided to go ahead and bake it up hoping that the rice would absorb some of the moisture and not be too crunchy. I rolled the dough out in crescent rolls because I thought that would make it easier to pull out the offending grains if needs be. They actually turned out pretty good. It wasn't great- and Ross almost chipped a tooth, but they tasted pretty good. I will have to try this recipe again when I have sifted out my flour.