Wow! What a great experiment Lois! Thanks for letting me know your results. Honestly, I don't make many cookies because I don't want us eating them. We do better without. I really only make them on Fridays (after club treats) and special occasions, like Christmas... and then I like to make things like coconut cookies that are more coconut than grain flour.

One day I will get around to trying those antique recipes though... I am definitely intrigued by 'old ways'.

Oh! I mentioned that my Artisan braided bread didn't fare well yesterday... Well, today was our orthodox celebration and so I tried Myst's suggested recipezaar recipe and it was FABULOUS!!

I had to change a couple of things of course because I didn't have exactly the same stuff in my cupboard but it's very forgiving... much like Cara's Best Buns. I took 1/3 of the batter and the children and I made a mini-braid... even though it's supposed to be large... I figure that would be better than nothing... then we put the rest of the dough in a regular glass bread dish.

The 80 minutes rise time is not true in my case though... I just left it in the oven over night with the light on and then turned the oven on in the morning when I woke up.... What a beautiful loaf of bread. Even my pickiest eater said that it was better than any store-bought... and we've been buying the really delicious Enjoy Life breads that are super expensive so that people could have their bacon and tomato sandwiches for breakfast on the weekend....

So, I was really surprised that even my picky boy liked this bread better than the store bought... it doesn't even have to be toasted!!

And even though we had full fanfare of perogies (varenyky) and cabbage rolls (holubtsi), he mostly ate the bread with peanut butter and honey! Silly kid... he gets perogies but once a year and left them behind for bread that he'll get every weekend. Tsk, tsk!

I also like that fact that it was so much cheaper than $6 C/loaf!

Sorry for all my run-ons... I was up until 3 am prepping for today and then up again at 6 am because the baby decided it would be an 'early' day... I can hardly tell which point is 'up' right now. I'll come back tomorrow and make grammar/sp. corrections and try not to be too embarrassed.

I just couldn't wait to share my news about the bread!