Baking Bread and a FUNNY Story!

My son has been on a health kick lately, having lost over 100 pounds now! He won't let anything he deems unhealthy touch his lips, and all his fruits and vegetable must be organic. While this is a very good wagon to be riding, I haven't quite gotten on board. I can't help it...I'm a Paula Deen kind of gal! Well, he will only shop at Whole Foods, and I say, as long as he can afford it, go for it!

Well, his current craze is making his own bread and for Christmas he received a recipe book for making your own bread in a bread machine. His having little experience with cooking from scratch, or at least from a recipe, I told him I would help him make his first loaf of bread. I have a bread machine and many of the ingredients he would need. I told him to pick out a simple bread and to read off the ingredients. Then, I would tell him what I had and didn't have and he could make his list. Well, turned out the bread he chose was NOT simple, and I had very few ingredients he called out. But he HAD to make this bread because it sounded so healthy! So off we went to Whole Foods with his list in hand. We searched for the first ingredient on his list...wheat bran...and found it. Then rye flour, unsweetened dutch cocoa, and a few others. Finally we got to the last ingredient...Plus. I had not heard of this ingredient before and suspected it might be a liquid...then remembered that was "Sure" I was thinking of! LOL! So we looked up and down the grocery aisles. Eventually we came upon two stock clerks and another gentleman who looked to be their manager. They eagerly asked if they could help us and I told them what I was looking for. I explained we were baking bread from an all healthy cook book and felt that Whole Foods would have this ingredient. They proceeded to help us in our search, one stock clerk looking in the baked goods section and the other going back to look on their computer. The manager even pulled his phone out and started searching for this ingredient on there! He found a Plus flour of some sorts, but they didn't carry it. After their efforts came up empty, I kindly thanked them for all their trouble and told my son we would check the recipe to see how much it called for. If a little amount, I was sure we could leave it out.

So when we got home, my son turned to the recipe and told me it only called for 2 tablespoons Plus. I figured that would be fine to leave it out. I decided, though, to look through the pages of this book to see if they discussed their ingredients. They did and I found several things in there I'd never heard of, but did not find Plus. So I went back to the recipe so we could start our bread. I started reading off the ingredients so my son could add them to the bread machine. Water, molasses, bread flour, rye flour. I then I got to it...the infamous product! When I read it I immediately thought of the effortless help those three men had given us at the grocery store, looking for this unknown product for what must of been 10 minutes of their precious time! And then, it was all I could do to contain my laughter! For there it was....written just as below....

2 tablespoons plus
 1 teaspoon wheat bran

THAT was the "plus" we were looking for! You can rest assured that from now on whenever we make a new loaf of bread, I will be making the grocery list! And if I ever see those men in Whole Foods again, I will be hiding my red face!
~~Annie