MYOB streak

Last night I made foccocia to go with our meal. First time I've tried that and it was wonderful. Later I realised that I've been on quite the MYOB (Make Your Own Bread) streak. 

We have been making bread for a long time, since early on in our time in Japan, but only with a breadmaker and usually only wholemeal loaves (though there was a time when David made fruit bread). So, we always have yeast in the house and I'm familiar with the ingredients that go into bread.

I love baking and cooking, something my mum instilled in me. But she never cooked bread (or fish), and so I've never really gone there until these last nine months. It just seemed too hard.

I think there are three reasons for the change:

1. I have big hungry boys. Most of this bread-making has been an effort to make the meat go further as well as fill them up.
2. Our year in Australia. We enjoyed many scrumptious breads in Australia (one of the reason we put weight on there and had trouble taking it off again while we lived in the country). While bread isn't hard to get here, most of it is quite expensive and a lot is sweeter than we like for a main meal and wholemeal is even more expensive. However we have a flour mill down the road, so bread flour and wholemeal flour isn't hard to get or expensive.
3. I feel ridiculously proud and accomplished every time I successfully bake "special" bread. That's a big incentive to keep going.

Here's what I've made in the last nine months since we came back, most of these several times:

Wholemeal bread rolls. The boys love these. Actually they love everything in this post...my teenage boys aren't too hard to please when it comes to plain cooking.

Empandas. A great way to stretch out left-overs. Baked meat-filled bread. A bit time-consuming, but really worth it. These were great for wrestling season as they were neat, could be eaten anytime (even breakfast), anywhere, and provided protein for the wrestlers.

Pizza, of course.


Savoury mince scrolls. These were moist and scrumptious fresh, but also as leftovers. I believe a couple made it into lunch boxes too. Another left-over stretcher.


Hot cross buns. Sweet bread, and very more-ish.


Foccocia. I was inspired by a recipe on Thrive Connection, a website for Global Christian Women. I'm estimating this cost less than 250 yen to make (AU$2.90). I stretched our meatloaf into left-over territory. Without it we would have easily gone through a whole kilo of mince (US=ground beef) last night.