what's cooking in the summer kitchen…or pickling.

This fantastic mechanism is a No. 4 bread bucket.  Have you ever seen one?  It was a convenience item invented around the turn of the century to save busy women time as they literally "cranked out" all of the bread they needed for their growing families.  It actually won a prize in the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904, which is noted on the bucket.  Let me tell you, this think is solidly built, and yet not over-heavy to use.  I can imagine it was a God-send to mother's across the growing U.S. of A.

I read about this handy-dandy machine in my January edition of "Backwoods Home" magazine.  You can read the article here.  As a collector of old kitchen items (because I USE them!), I knew I wanted to find one. I put my very talented yard-saling mother-in-law on the task, and sure enough, last weekend we got the call that she'd found one!  It's in great shape, as you can see, and today was it's maiden run in our homestead kitchen.  This little lady cranked out SO MUCh bread at once!  I'm really impressed.

I don't know about you, but while I love all of the various no-knead, wet dough methods of making artisan bread at home, it's just not what my boys want to make sandwiches with.  They want sandwich bread to be like grocery-store bread.  Fine.  Because this can sometimes be a bit of a hassle, I just don't often put the effort in to make this kind of bread at home.  Enter the bread bucket.

This process was as simple as dumping in the wet then dry ingredients, cranking a couple times to combine, and then cranking for three minutes.  I left my dough to rise, cranked it once to punch down, divided and transferred to greased pans.  One more rise in the pan, bake, done.  The recipe I used was an 18 cup recipe, and it made many (6 big loaves!)  This is the kind of sandwich bread the boys will like for PB&Js.  I'll just freeze them, and bring them out as needed.  It's awesome to accomplish so many loaves in one shot, without burning out the motor in my KitchenAid.  Awesome.

Also brewing in the summer kitchen…half sours!  These aren't our cukes yet, but it is my dill.  Ours will be along in a couple weeks I think.  We. love. pickles.   (those plates inside are to hold them down)

Next up are pickled peas!  There is a great recipe here (of course).  Yum.