As you guys already know, I went to a yard sale last weekend. It was huge, and one thing that I forgot to mention was that my wife and I purchased a bread maker. The owners said that they never used it, and sold it to us for $20. We thought that was a great deal, so we bought it, and were really excited about getting fresh baked bread at home, rather than paying for it at the store.

Now, here’s a note on bread, before I continue with my little story.

Have you ever looked at bread labels? The majority of low cost bread is sweetened with high fructose corn syrup. So don’t buy those, they aren’t that good. A lot of the wheat breads that are suppose to have nice fiber and good substances inside for you, don’t have much fiber at all. Most of the breads have more sugar content than fiber content.

Then there’s the 100% whole wheat breads, those are a little more expensive but they match the fiber content to the sugar content.

Oh and don’t get me started on the whole grain line up…I hate marketing gimmicks.

So back to the Bread Machine. The machine comes with a booklet that suggests how to make 2 pound loafs. It also has a disclaimer that talks about not using alternative bread recipes. So we used the exact measurements and processes that the book has for Wheat Bread.

The bread came out (no photos, sorry), and it was really gooey and undercooked.

So we through it away.

We tried again, this time trying to amend the recipe, and this time the outside was really cooked, but the middle was still gooey and gross.

My wife then talks to her mom and gets a recipe from her, and we figured it was going to work. The outside of the bread was really good, and it was finally a great loaf….until we cut it.

Not as gooey, but it tasted like complete garbage. So I buttered up a piece and threw some jam on it, and managed to eat it.

Today we’ll try it again, and if it comes out, I’ll make sure to snap a photo for all you out there that are interested in my personal life.

In other notes, I purchased Goya brand melon seeds. They aren’t real melon seeds, but rather pasta in the shape of melon seeds. We call it “lengua” in Spanish. I called my mom and asked her what the recipe was to make soup out of this awesome looking pasta from Mexico.

20 minutes later, I had a childhood favorite. Sopa de Lengua (which isn’t what it translates to be), and even though I live in a foreign land of sorts, I felt like home.