Sourwhat? And is it an animal?

I'm going to make a few people who've perfected their sourdough skills over the last two years, angry. Probably. But I have a bread maker machine, it's 15 years old or more, and it still hasn't taught me any of the breadmaking skills i acquired myself - but is used quite regularly in our house. And we buy bags of premixed bread mix for it. There. I've 'fessed up. 

And fair enough - I can bake bread in the oven using more traditional techniques, and the only problem with my sourdough is that I always kill it because I'm scatterbrained and forget it. I could put it in a more prominent position but then I'd lose some of my valuable kitchen real estate for other cooking & processing projects. 

I'm going out on a limb here but: the bread machine's electric, I don't need to run my gas oven for an hour to make a loaf. We'd pay between $3 and $8 for a loaf of bread depending how 'artisanal' the originating company imagines itself to be, and the bread mix works out at $1 a loaf. The loaves keep much better than store bought if wrapped in a clean tea towel and then sat in a bread bin, it's a far better size than commercially-baked loaves for two of us, and it works out that we get between six and eight weeks' worth of bread on demand out of each bag.

The procedure for handmade bread, on the other hand, uses the gas oven as previously mentioned, a stand mixer that I have to find room for and then wash and put away plus a bowl and a proving basket, it's dependent on the vagaries of the weather and temperature, and therefore I don't do it as much and then without the good old Breville we'd end up buying commercially baked bread.

Okay - enough of that. I've said my piece, and with all sorts of  stuff getting expensive due to climate and pandemic it's a viable option for saving a few bucks that I thought I should point out.

Now on to another thing that worries me - the way we've become and are becoming disconnected from our food sources and food knowledge. I present just one story from News Of The Weird:

Can't Possibly Be True

In a study published in the December issue of the Journal of Environmental Psychology, researchers from Furman University asked children ages 4 to 7 to identify whether certain foods come from plants or animals, and which things were OK to eat. The results were shocking, as Oddee.com reported: About a third of the kids thought eggs came from plants. Forty percent thought hot dogs and bacon were vegetables. Almost half thought french fries were animal-based. More than a third thought chicken nuggets were plant-based, even though the word "chicken" is right there in the name. Another third said fish were not OK to eat. Seventy-six percent said cows were not OK to eat. We have some work to do, folks. [Oddee.com, 11/10/2021]

-- https://www.uexpress.com/oddities/news-of-the-weird/2021/11/12#:~:text=Can%27t%20Possibly%20Be,OK%20to%20eat. 

By the way, NotW is a great source of off-the-wall and offbeat news, almost as good as going to my News Stand and subscribing to a newsletter there so you can keep up with ALL my blogs and posts. 

ENJOY!