It still tasted ok....

You know it's true, some things just never change. Never. A look back through all of my elementary school report cards will reveal year after year of good grades followed by comments from each year's teacher that read: "fails to follow directions," and "does not read instructions before beginning assignments." How did I still get good grades? I can't explain that any more than I can explain how my flaky, butter dinner rolls turned out weighing about four pounds a piece and were more chewy than flaky. Yet oddly they still tasted pretty good with a glob of butter melting over them. Hmmm....mysteries of the universe.
Had my parents ever taken me to a doctor, and had the doctors "way back then" been inclined to label children, I'm sure I would have been diagnosed with ADHD. My mother takes every opportunity to point this out to me when I lose interest in any number of things that I start and don't finish.  Whether I have an official disorder or not, I will admit I seem to have the inability to follow instructions that has followed me well into adulthood. That is why I do not bake. I love to cook a good meal, but I leave the baking to the bakery.
That is until I found myself in a big new kitchen with a new oven and lots of time on my hands. And just wouldn't it be great if I baked bread for my little family. That's what stay-at-home mom's do right? (Yes, I know this is 2011) That's what my mom did! (Yes, I know that was the 1970s).
So of course I have my Amish baking cookbook. I also bought several other books dedicated entirely to baking bread...without a bread machine...homemade bread...from scratch, as they used to say.  Well the first issue I ran into was the terminology, it's kind of tricky.  Sometimes flour is measured by cups, sometimes by weight. Then there is rapid yeast, quick yeast and fast yeast. If I am going to be expected to follow directions I need some uniformity and I need to know if the speed of my yeast is vital to the outcome of my bread.
I figured the dinner rolls would be something easy to start with, easier than a loaf of bread. I'm not sure what intimidates me about the loaf, but I think it might be the long rise time. Next to my inability to follow directions is my inability to commit. Four hours seems like a lengthy commitment for one loaf of bread. The rolls were a quick rise dough, according to the recipe, which I swear I followed. They smelled good. They looked good. They even mostly tasted good in a chewy sort of way. They were just really, really heavy.
My mom says my house is too cold for the dough to rise properly. And now, there's another reason I can't bake homemade bread - I'm too cheap to heat my house to a temperature that's warm enough for dough to rise! So until mid-July, I guess I'll stick with cookies, I've gotten pretty good with those. Cookies don't seem to care how cold your house is. If you're in the neighborhood, stop in and I'll make some coffee and bake you some cookies. Bring a sweater.

Yes, I actually took a picture of those 4lb rolls! I texted it to some friends from my old job to prove to them that I actually was baking!