Flax Prairie Bread

What? You haven't visited your local thrift store yet, and bought yourself a bread machine? I promise you, with little effort and about $6.00, you can find yourself a nearly new bread machine, and you won't regret the purchase. After about 7 years of regular use, my trusty bread machine finally keeled over, so off to the thrift store I went. As luck would have it, I found the exact same model that I'd had, only an updated version of it, and I seriously don't think it had ever been used. That's the thing about bread machines - - either they get used on a regular basis, or they are purchased and they collect dust (thus, the abundance of them at thrift stores!). Anyway, my bread machine gets regular workouts every week. In fact, if you were to stop by around 3:30 today, you'd find it happily humming away on my counter, making our pizza dough for our dinner tonight. I don't bake bread in my bread machine though - - I don't like the weird shape of the loaf, nor do I like the big hole that the mixing paddle leaves in the bottom of it. I use the dough cycle, and then bake the bread in my oven. I make our sandwich bread, pizza dough, dinner rolls, and any other recipe that strikes my fancy. Love it. So, now lets move on to my new favorite bread recipe.

Flax Prairie Bread

1 1/4 cup warm water
2 Tbsp. honey
2 Tbsp. canola oil
2 cups bread flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1/3 cup ground flax seed*
2 tsp. yeast

Place ingredients in the bread machine in the order listed. If you are baking the bread in the machine, select the whole wheat/rapid cycle. If you are baking it in the oven, select the dough cycle. When the cycle has ended, remove dough from bread machine, roll out into a rectangle with rolling pin, then roll this back up into a loaf. Place in a bread pan and let rise in a warm spot for about 30 minutes. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. For a soft crust, brush top of bread with melted butter, right after removing from the oven. This recipe makes a delicious, soft, large loaf of bread, and it disappears quickly in this house!

*I buy my flax seed in bulk because it is much cheaper that way. Then, I bought a coffee mill at the thrift store, and I use it only for grinding flax seed. To get the best nutritional value from flax seed, it is best to buy the whole seeds, and grind them yourself.