Homemade Bread

I did this and that in Golden Week, and one day we had a BBQ.

One reason for the BBQ was that I wanted to make bread and use the BBQ to cook it! You might wonder how that is possible, but my BBQ has a lid and becomes like an oven.

I wanted to make my own bread because I wanted to make 'yomogi pan' (bread flavored with mugwort). I LOVE the taste of mugwort but wanted a different way to eat it. Tenpura is nice but too oily, and yomogi-mochi is nice but too sweet! Neither option is healthy. Bread seemed like a good choice :) I got the yomogi from my garden where I grow it in a pot {so that it doesn't spread and become a weed}. It's from Kagoshima, from my mother-in-law's garden originally!

Have you ever made bread? It's not so difficult but it does take time - you have to begin two or three hours before you even start to bake it.

The result? Wonderful! I baked the bread as rolls, using a muffin pan. The shape was interesting and the taste was SO MUCH better than in a shop! They were light and fluffy and the best bread I've eaten for a long time.

The only disappointing point was that they didn't have any yomogi flavor at all! At first I blanched the yomogi leaves before drying them and chopping finely to add to the bread dough. Maybe I didn't add enough, or maybe the flavor was lost in the blanching water because my rolls were just bread, not yomogi-pan. Oh well, the color of the bread was nice!