Cheese, onion, and whatever you want bready goodness

Hello world! So I have recently started sharing my cooking experiences with my friends by putting up notes on facebook. Grammar angel is a nickname, but don't expect my blogs to be perfect! I'm not the world's best cook, but I love good food, and as a housebound distance student, cooking can be the most exciting thing that happens around here. I figure seeing as I enjoy it so much, and my life is devoid of entertainment, why not share my cooking experiences with the world and see if anyone cares :)

I made this one using 1/2 the quantities in the
 recipe below, with onion, cheese and basil

I don't tend to use recipes for bread any more, but the family wants to know what I put in my bread for our Easter lunch, and I'm procrastinating. With bread, as long as the consistency feels right it seems to turn out OK. If it has cheese in it then it doesn't dry out too much and tastes better :P I usually put in more sugar than other recipes recommend because doing so tends to counteract what might otherwise give handmade bread an overly yeasty flavour.

Because everything's better with avocado

First I mixed:
1 1/2 cups warm water
1 1/2 tablespoons (or 1 packet) yeast
1 tablespoon of sugar
Leave for 5mins to froth

While that is getting its froth on, I mixed:
4 cups flour
1/2 tsp salt
Dry herbs (basil and/or rosemary is good), if you want fresh herbs, put them in with your diced ingredients.
If you're slightly short in yeast, sometimes I add a little baking soda, just to make sure it rises.

Make a well, pour the water/yeast mixture in, mix into a dough and knead a little - so the flour's mostly soaked up and it's smoothish. Cover the bowl with gladwrap and make sure it's somewhere warm - sometimes I put some warm water in the sink and pop the bowl in if it's cold!

While that's doing some rising, grab whatever you want to be in your bread and chop it up FINELY. I would usually put in 1 diced tomato, bacon (about 4 pieces), half an onion and a couple of generous handfuls of grated cheese.

When the dough has risen for 20 or 30 mins (or you have finished chopping things up and you get bored), punch it down and add your other ingredients - I find it easiest to do this by squishing the dough out, sprinkling the ingredients across the surface, folding the dough over it and squishing down, then repeat til you're done.

Beware that if you mix in something like tomato the dough will get sticky. What I did for that was, when everything was mixed in, I just sprinked some flour over the surface and kneaded it without folding it over so the outside lost its stick but the middle stayed moist.

Shape it how you want on an oven tray, brush with milk (or melted butter for crunch and extra yum points!! ), sprinkle with cheese, and let it rise a bit more while the oven heats up to 180 or 200C. Pop it in for 30-40mins, take it out when it's all golden brown and yum looking.

Le voila, you have bread!

Wasn't this fun? Now back to my assignment...