An American in Provence

Whether it is due to getting married or living in France, my barely existent what may pass as domestic skills have been stirred.
After the, ahem, interesting attempts at apple pie were managed, I decided to make cinnamon bread today.
Only I didn't know that it would be enough for an army.
I found a recipe online. I was searching for something that doesn't require baking soda or baking powder, as apparently those are not available in France. I finally found one. I was actually able to convert into metric units (yay allrecipes.com !), which was nice. I should have however read the rest of the recipe. Rolling pin? Nope. Argh. Alain, do we have a rolling pin? Nope. But we do have wine bottles. We emptied out one and used it for rolling. The dough didn't seem to want to rise. I hope that what I put in there was yeast. The raisins we had are as hard as rocks, so I decided to leave them out too. So, two kgs of flour later, I was ready to put the un-rised dough into a greased pan. Greased with what? Butter? Olive oil? Vegetable oil? I took a guess at vegetable oil. We shall see. It turns out that the bread pan that I bought is about 1 cm too big to fit into our toaster oven. Perfect.
I am taking my creation over to Alain's parents tonight.
Maybe I should buy a bread machine.
And figure out where in the world I can buy baking soda and powder.

I think that in our new place we will need to install a kitchen, kind-of like the self-cleaning toilets. You step out, close the door, push a button, and WHOOSH! the place is immediately hosed down and drains through a hole in the floor. Forget aprons, I need one of those suits that people where when they go into class 5 infectious disease areas, covered from head to toe.

Creativity- Terrific quality for a good cook. Terrible quality for a bad cook.

And now, starring my favorite chef, making dough.