The scent of baking bread kept mysteriously wafting by my nose. I wasn’t baking bread, and the only thing I baked all day was corn fritters, and they smell like corn … not fresh and yeasty bread. Even having taken my allergy pills today, my nose was still so stuffed up, I couldn’t follow the scent to its source, but I knew I was smelling fresh baked bread. It’s a scent I’d know anywhere.

I discovered the source a few minutes ago when I went to stack the dinner dishes in the sink for washing tomorrow. I’d left the ziplock bag of bread from the freezer open. This is still some of the bread I made on Christmas Eve. It is, even in the world of bread stored properly in the freezer, probably beyond its “best by” date. Not inedible, but likely getting stale and dry. Or soggy, which is even worse. The kind of bread best served with stews, soups, and dishes with sauces. Generally, I would say that bread stored in the freezer, even for a short time, loses its wonderful bread smell. Yet, here I have a loaf of bread baked on Christmas Eve, carried on a 160 mile road trip in a ziplock bag, stacked with a bunch of other loaves in a tote bag, and then tossed into my freezer without being wrapped in plastic wrap or foil –it even had frozen veggies tossed on it at one point– and it smells as though I just made it today and is perfectly edible. It’s a wonderful thing.

I believe I will be mass baking our bread more often. It keeps much better than I expected. As much as I love baking bread, it is a pain in my butt due to my kitchen being completely non-user-friendly and inefficient. Spending a day baking bread every three or so weeks would be often enough to feed my need to knead, but not so often it would make me want to scream about my kitchen.

And now It’s time for a little smear of grape jelly on a thin slice of bread.

Mmmmm.