the 'bread'

you either love it or you hate it...
not the bread itself, no one could actually hate this bread...
but the tradition of the bread is what you love or lothe...
or like me, I love the bread enough to tolerate the origins of it.
it's called Amish Friendship Bread
but I've had friends call it the 'Friend Hater Bread'

you know the stuff...
a friend gives you a weird
gooey,
goopy,
lumpy looking bag of 'starter'
along with a crinkled xeroxed paper
with directions like



DON'T use metal bowls or spoons
and
'mush bag' (how weird is that)...
and then you have this bag floating around on your counter for 10 days...
the whole 10 days you have to remember,
     "is this a 'mush bag' day or a 'add something' day?..."
and a curious, rebellious thought of... 
     what would happen if I broke the rules and USED metal!!!!
sheesh...the pressure!

and then when you have the bags to hand out to your friends people treat you like the plague...
"avoid her, she has those bags she's trying to force everyone to take!"
well, I was wanting some of the infamous bread and I had no friends (or enemy's) with a gooey, goopy, lumpy bag of starter to hand off to me...

enter Pintrest...

and there it was...
a glorious pin with the directions of HOW to start my own starter...
so I pinned it...
and waited...
and kept watching other's repin my pin of the starter...
in fact it's my most repinned pin E.V.E.R!

and for those of you that don't speak Pintrest...that means lots of other people also like Amish Friendship Bread...
...
so I waited a bit longer
and then decided to make the leap and try my hand at starting a batch of starter...
I followed this recipe from allrecipes.com

and it worked...

and I then followed this recipe to make the actual bread
I'm not going to be redundant and re-type the recipe, since there are a ton of recipes to follow...
I like the one I made, the family loves it and gobbles it up
(but don't bake for 1 hour, only 50-55 min was all I needed...5 more and it would have been too done!)...
and there are other variations on the bread recipes, click here to see them all.
we might try the lemon poppy seed version next...or chocolate?

I'm now onto round 4 of my starter, just bagged up and baked batch #3 this morning...yum!
and that's all folks...I'm off to mush a bag of starter...

p.s. if you'd like a gooey, goopy, lumpy bag of starter let me know I'm in a continuous 10 day starter cycle!
p.p.s.  If you'd like an invite to Pintrest or like some starter helps, let me know and I'll get you hooked started.