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For years, our family has sought to live a healthy lifestyle. We like plenty of junk food, but realize that both our bellies AND pocketbook would be better served by eating a healthy diet as God intended. One thing that we have done on a regular basis is to make our own bread, pizza dough, and sometimes dough for hamburger rolls in a bread machine.
So, it is no great surprise that the Wholy Living booth at the recent curriculum fair would catch my eye. She had plenty of interesting cookbooks and books about WHY we should eat a better diet. And, I wasn’t primed to buy any of those at this time. I’ve still got plenty to glean from Sue Gregg’s books that we reviewed this past year plus a few La Leche League published cookbooks in the house.
No, what really got my attention was the Mother’s Day special for the Nutrimill and Bosch Universal with a ton of attachments. Call it the power tool combo for the kitchen. Hubby’s initial reaction was “you want to spend HOW much for tools to make bread from scratch?!?!”
After the initial sticker shock wore off, he came back with the “if you’ll USE them and it will SAVE us money while being BETTER than what we’d buy at the store, then you can use tax refund money for it.”
Talking with the lady who owns Wholy Living, I expressed a definite interest in the special. However, I really needed to see things in action before taking the plunge. This led to an introduction with a local grandmother (and former homeschooler) in our new town who was just started to rep for Wholly Living and was planning an upcoming bread class to introduce the equipment as well as whole grain baking.
P and I were the actual attendees for her trial run class while the other boys played with her grandsons. P was impressed with how easy it all seemed and how much food you were left with after the 2 1/2 hours was up. From the one big batch of honey whole wheat bread dough, she got 2 loaves of bread, 1 large pizza and just over 2 batches of cinnamon rolls. (Both our family and the other family there took home a batch of the rolls to bake.)
I got to see an interesting use for the whisk attachment ~ shredding very moist cooked chicken breasts in record time. P’s eyes lit up at the thought of chicken salad sandwiches when we saw that neat trick.
We also saw that the Nutrimill was easy to use, albeit a bit on the loud side. The boys all loved everything that was made (chicken pizza with a mixture of cheeses, shredded chicken with sauce for sandwiches on the fresh bread, and of course the cinnamon rolls we baked upon our arrival home.)
What also struck them was her explanation of how white flour is made. Here’s a photo of her handy demo of all the parts removed from the wheat to get the white flour.
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The great result from the class was getting to know the other homeschool family attending with twin boys! It was definitely a boy ‘day’ and we’ve since met up once for ‘play’ time with them. Even Little J likes the new friends.
I did end up buying the mother’s day special and have spent time this past week getting to know all the features. I can’t say that my first attempt at grinding grains and making the honey whole grain dough (into 2 big pizzas and 3 loaves of bread) was a great success. It’s all edible, but there’s a lot for me to learn about baking. Maybe after a few more passes through the process I’ll be ready to sell of the Kitchen Aid stand mixer, cheaper food processor, and my nice blender. The nice thing about the Bosch special is that it will replace them all and leave me with a little more room in the kitchen.
