1:28 B is for...

Bread slicing guide. I picked this up last summer at a rummage sale for 75 cents US. It's been one of those things that has rattled around towards the bottom of my wishlist for many a year. I've never been certain enough that I wanted one for it to rise to the heights of paying whatever the real going price is. Seventy-five cents was a good price for trying it out.

I should have bought one years ago.

I have always been rather in awe of people who claimed they made all their own bread and actually used it for sandwiches. I love making bread (and eating it too), but have never mastered the art of slicing it by hand in even slices such as one would want to use for sandwiches. A thick slab, toasted with melted cheese? Yes. A thick slice, hot from the oven, with melted butter and jam? You bet. Two reasonable slices with a sandwich filling in between? Not so much.

Enter the bread slicing guide. Using this puppy, I can make reasonably even slices which even my family will admit are good for sandwiches. Add to that my recent desire to greatly reduce the amount of HFCS I and my family are ingesting, and suddenly I'm making bread three times a week. We're eating quite a bit more bread than we were before, but on the other hand, I've noticed that the snacks are diminishing at a much slower rate. More bread (made at home with no preservatives, high fructose corn syrup or other additives) ; less potato and corn chips.

That's a tradeoff I think I'll make. 7 minutes to put the ingredients in the bread machine. 5 minutes to heat the oven and shape the bread into the loaf pan. 1 minute to slice what I need when we want to eat it. Not bad.

Oh, and the marmelade?

It came out just fine.