An Unexpected Outcome of Reading Jen Hatmaker’s book, Seven

I promise I have lots of pithy spiritual wisdom to share thanks to reading and rereading Seven over the past few days. But for now I thought I’d share one unexpected, highly delicious, and definitely life-changing result of reading the book.

In the first chapter, Jen relates her experience of spending a month eating only seven foods: eggs, chicken, spinach, sweet potatoes, avocados, apples, and whole wheat bread. In the course of her research, she discovered just how much bizarre and unhealthy junk goes into store-bought “whole wheat” bread. Appalled at this nutritional counterfeit, she attempted to make her own whole wheat bread. Unfortunately, it didn’t really work.

Most people would read a chapter on fasting and be inspired to fast. I read it and was inspired to bake whole wheat bread. More on that contrariness in the promised pearls of wisdom posts ahead. =)

On to the bread making bit! It turned out that my mom had a goal of making real homemade bread as well (she’s made bread-maker bread since I was a kid, which is delicious, but was ready to step things up a notch). She had an instructional video and some serious kitchen equipment, so this afternoon she dug it all out and we got cracking. Technically, we got milling, because we actually milled our own whole wheat flour from whole wheat kernel thingys. All my life I’ve hated shopping, been terrified of “crafts,” and run screaming from anyone who says they “scrapbook.” I’m not a girly girl. But I think we can all agree I just won back some major womanhood points with that simple phrase: we milled our own flour.

I could describe the bread making step-by-step, but it would be a pretty boring description. Here’s the crazy part: it wasn’t hard. It was a pretty simple process. It took a little over two hours total, but two hours of that time was spent waiting for the bread to rise and/or bake. So you could easily be bopping through other projects while you waited for it to rise. We did use a big mixer with a special dough hook, but concluded that you could easily do one loaf at a time by hand (we made five loaves in one batch, so were grateful for the mixer).

Here’s the even crazier part: the loaves came out looking gorgeous (that's the real bread we made in the picture!), the whole house smelled amazing, and the bread is quite possibly the most delicious baked item I have ever tasted. We ate a loaf of it for (not with) dinner. And the ingredients for all five loaves came out to about $1.50 total. We were thrilled, proud, and full. =)

We are never buying bread again. And if I ever get to meet Jen Hatmaker, I’ll be the weirdo who hands her armfuls of fantastic homemade wheat bread!