we made bread

And not just any bread.

Jack and I have started a couple of new diets and exercise programs so that, well, geez, why do you think we've started diets and exercises? Of course. Because our shapes have become more and more like grandparents and we can't keep up with the girls anymore because of our big bellies. Or something like that.

One of the diets is all about burning fat and building muscle. Sounds easy, right? Don't kid yourself. Weight Watchers is easy--just keep track of the calories, fat grams, and fiber grams in every bite of food you put in your mouth and assign points to the food and keep track of the points and you'll lose weight as long as you don't eat too many points of food and as long as you drink lots of water and as long as you exercise. And suffer.

The fat burning-muscle building diet is about all of that and more. You don't need to keep track of points. But you do need to eat five meals every day and those meals need to be balanced, a certain percentage of protein, carbs, and fat, and about three hours apart.

Oh, and don't forget the shopping for the correct foods and determining what to eat and when to eat it.

By now, you've probably figured out the secret to weight loss on these diets--you spend so much time figuring out the diet that you don't have time to eat. Add a little exercise time, and some time at work and there's your waking moments.

Well, not really.

Jack and I have been trying to get all of the diet stuff figured out for a couple of weeks. He works with a guy named Bernie who has been on the fbmb diet since last September and has lost almost 50 pounds. Bernie gave us some sandwiches he made on his own homemade bread. It was incredible. Lots of seeds and nuts and grains. Not like anything I've ever eaten before that I called bread. None of that fluffy brown-colored white-wheat bread I've been paying almost $4 a loaf for. At Costco.

Bern gave us the recipe for the bread so on the way home tonight, Jack and I stopped at the grain store (I had no idea there was such a place). We bought rye flour, oat flour, brown rice flour, buckwheat flour, and barley flour. We bought bread flour, wheat gluten, dough enhancer, and lecithin. (It's an oil replacement. I don't know where it comes from. It comes as little tiny bright yellow beads? And no, I don't know what wheat gluten is or what dough enhancer is, but they both look like another little bag of some kind of flour.) We bought flax seeds and sunflower seeds. We picked up a bag of pecans and a bag of dried cranberries. It only cost us $40 to make our loaf of bread.

Okay, okay, all of those little bags of flour et al will make many loaves of bread.

When we got home, we measured all of the newly purchased ingredients along with water, canola oil, salt, honey, oats, and yeast into our bread mixer/baker and pushed a couple of buttons and 58 minutes later, we had a loaf of that yummy bread. Well, we had half a loaf because we worried that the recipe might make too big of a loaf for our mixer/baker to handle, so we only put half of the ingredients into the mixer. Yes it was yummy, but it was also so adorable. What could be cuter than a little tiny loaf of bread all full of seeds and grains? I mean, seriously, what?

And because we still had enough of the mixture of many flours for another tiny cute loaf, I put all of those ingredients into the mixer/baker along with the pecans, cranberries, some raisins, and a bit of cocoa and what do you know? Yes, that's right, another adorable tiny loaf with fruit--with fruit--just 58 minutes later.

I love these diets and exercises.