Ain't Worth the Clean-up

What does making bread in a food processor have in common with Christmas? You got it! Right now I'm thinking both things just ain't worth the clean-up.

We have officailly reached the point where I am sick of all the Christmas decorations and they really gotta come down. Soon. Like yesterday. Traditionally we leave the stuff up until the kids go back to school. This year the kids don't head back until the 9th. I don't think I can hang in there that long. However trying to pack up all those breakable things with three wild children trying to help guarantees something, usually something of great sentimental value, will be broken beyond repair. So I guess Christmas stays for one more week, but I am really looking forward to having it all packed away, and the house cleaned, and put back to rights. I am not looking forward to all the work. No matter how I look at it I have at least two days of work getting it all boxed up. Sigh. Currently I'm not convinced that it was all worth it, that's a lot of cleaning up to do.

One of the best presents I received this year was a much longed for food processor. It's a thing of beauty. A sliver Cuisinart all shiny and new just waiting for me to try out everything it can do. Most things it does wonderfully. Nearly instant strawberry ice cream, fantastic. Bread crumbs, perfect! Chopping vegetables to make the mirepoix for the black-eyed peas for our New Year's Day party, so easy and so fast. I can't wait to make a carrot cake just to see how well it does shredding all those carrots. The one thing I have found that it doesn't do well well is knead bread dough.

Now I know this seems obvious to some, it is after all a food processor, not a bread machine. But here's the thing. It came with a dough blade, and there are recipes for bread in the cookbook that came with it. It should make bread dough. I figured I had to try it out at least once. In fairness it did seem to do a good job of kneading the dough, but holy cow what a mess. That was the first and last time I'm trying that. It just ain't worth the clean up. The dough managed to work itself into every hard to clean crack of that machine, I spent more time cleaning that thing than if I had just mixed and kneaded the dough by hand. And to top it off I had to hold the base while it was kneading the dough or it started to walk across the counter.

Now unless I am really in the mood to mess with bread dough all I want to do is dump all the ingredients in a machine and go have a cup of coffee while the machine does the hard stuff. Then I can just yank the dough out, shape into a loaf, and bake it up. I do not want to have to baby sit the machine to keep it from committing suicide by walking off the edge of the counter. Sadly my bread machine disappeared during our first international move 6 years ago, I really miss that machine. Happily my KitchenAid stand mixer does a pretty good job of handing the messy part of making bread. I guess I will stick with the KitchenAid unless of course I get a bread machine for Mother's Day. (Yes Babe, that was a hint!)