More Electric Bread, a book review

Given last week's re-review, I thought I'd take the time to feature my other favorite bread-machine cookbook, More Electric Bread.  It is less eclectic in its selection of ingredients than The Bread Machine Gourmet, but still has a good range of recipes that cook the whole time in the pan, and all the recipes I have tried work.  There are the standbys--white and "whole wheat"(1), but there is also a surprising array of other yummy recipes. I have not worked my way through all of them, but favorites include "Cinnamon Sunrise," "Espresso" (a delicious coffee-flavored bread), "Maple Walnut" (mmm), and "Rice Pudding" (useful if you have leftover rice or have cooked the rice with too much water so it's mushy).

(1) See earlier comments on the portion of actual whole wheat flour that goes into these.

Yum!

Cooking Light's Herbed Chicken and Dumplings is scrumptious.

And I need hardly add that the dish is even better if they are made with herbs from ones own garden and celery purchased at the farmer's market down town1.

A good green salad and Walnut Bread from 100 Great Breads2 are excellent side dishes, and cheesecake made from Dad's Secret Recipe3 is a fine finish.

1It's even tasty if you happen to run out of chicken broth and have to use beef as a substitute for part of it.

2 I don't unreservedly recommend Hollywood's book; I can't figure out quite why he uses so much salt, for one thing--the only time I tried using his salt amount and temperatures, I ended up with a brick rather than bread. But, using 1 teaspoon of salt instead of one tablespoon, and lowering the temperature by about 100 degrees usually works quite well for me, and I adore the Walnut Bread. Others seem to do fine with his temperatures, so I can't be too didactic. Oh, and if you don' t have 100 Great Breads, get it from the library. Or make some other bread, any other bread. No one should deprive themselves of the joy of making bread.

3 It's not so much secret, really, as constantly in flux. It started out being one recipe, morphed into a combination of two or three, and is perpetually being tweaked from one batch to the next. I think this one had more zest than the last, but I'm not sure.