Bread Day

Ok so today I'm gonna take a break from my apparent garden obsession and talk about one of my current most life-consuming activities: Kitchen duty. Thursdays are like my super slave-in-the-kitchen day because it's bread day and dinner has to be done early because of regular Thursday evening activities. Also, since my aunt comes over to help mom (and me), it's the perfect time to heap extra work on myself, right? Right. Not sure how that reasoning works... but we'll go with it for now.
At any rate, since today was bread day, I thought I should share my bread recipe in case anybody is looking for a decent and relatively easy bread recipe. It's simple enough I've got it memorized and it's soooo good.  I also use this recipe for hamburger and hot dog buns, just to keep things simple ;)

Whole Wheat Bread, Pizza Angel style
Step 1: Dissolve 2 TBS brown (or raw) sugar in 3 cups warm water (approx 110 deg Farenheit). Dissolve 4 TBS dry active yeast into sugar water. Let sit till lightly foamy
2: Add 4 cups of flour and mix well.
3: Measure  1 cup of water, add 1/2 cup + 4 TBS olive oil and 1/2 cup honey. Stir together and add to flour/yeast mixture, plus 3 tsp salt. Mix well
4: Stir in additional flour until too thick to stir in anymore (or if you are using a stand mixer with a dough hook, knead until dough sticks to hook). Turn out on floured surface and knead till dough is smooth and elastic
5: Place dough in bowl with 1-2 TBS olive oil, turning once to coat. Let the dough rise till double. Punch dough down, shape into loaves.
6: Let loaves rise till nearly double, then bake at 350 for 25-30 minutes or till golden brown.
7: Cool loaves on wire racks. Consume and repeat.
Yield: 4 loaves
Pizza Angel Chef notes:
~I grind my own wheat and use 1/2 red wheat, 1/2 gold wheat.
~On the original recipe, the additional water in step 3 is actually milk, but I use water instead. Also, I reduced the original amount of salt from 4 tsp to 3 tsp (roughly) because the bread rises better with less salt.
~I sometimes add gluten to make the bread softer
~ Since I am blessed with two ovens, I usually rise my bread in a warm, moist oven. If you have only oen oven you can still do this at least for the initial rising. I preheat the oven for 1 minute with a pan of water in the bottom of the oven, so it's a great environment to rise bread.... it rises way faster!

P.S.
For some reason my bread almost always comes out with a little dent in the top. We've started calling it my trademark "belly button" loaves :P