This weekend I got into a bread-baking craze.  My whole family loves bread and nothing — really, it’s true — beats good, homemade bread.  I’ve always enjoyed making it but the time spent doing that has been infrequent for several years.  We have an old bread machine that we’ve used for a long time and I’ve mostly made bread that way.  Trouble was, I lost the manual a long time ago and could never find it.

Yesterday I found the complete manual, nicely scanned and FREE for downloading as a PDF file because someone helpfully posted it on an Internet forum.  I was thrilled!  I immediately printed it out and put it in a binder to keep.  Having the manual makes a big difference because although bread machines are pretty easy to use, each one has its quirks and recommended ways of doing things such as what order to use when adding ingredients.  Last night I made a nice, basic rustic loaf and it turned out great.

Today I decided to make challah bread, one of my favorites.  I used the recipe that came in the manual of our bread machine.  I noticed at the end of the instructions that it calls for six, not three, braids.  I’ve never done six braids before.  I sat there trying to figure out what to do for a few minutes and then decided, forget that, I’ll make two loafs with three braids each.  That’s pretty easy to do!  But then I thought afterward, I wonder if there is any information on the Internet that might help me figure out how to do the more complicated braid?  A quick Google search on “how to braid six” brought me to the Chai Time blog replete with a nice video demonstrating exactly how to do it.  Very cool!

In all of this, I was reminded once again that the Internet can be a wonderful resource at times.  I would never, ever have been able to learn and do these things, to find the needed information so quickly, if there was no Internet available.