About 6 years ago my wife just had to have a bread machine. We looked around for quite awhile and finally settled on a machine from Costco. The smell of fresh bread baking in the kitchen was quite a treat. Never mind that those first loaves cost us far more than just buying a loaf at the store. I think my wife had the desire to bake bread because she was raised with freshly baked bread in her parent’s home. On top of that, her grandfather has been baking his own bread over in England for many, many years. I wasn’t all that excited about buying a bread machine because I was worried it wouldn’t get used. After the first couple months the fresh bread started to disappear. The times that we would make bread were getting farther and farther apart. Finally, the bread machine was put away in a cupboard not to be seen again for 3 years.
A couple years ago I started to notice I wasn’t tolerating bread and wheat very well. I’ll spare you the details but after a visit to the doctor, it was found that I am allergic to wheat (as well as darned near everything else on the planet). After the initial shock of not being able to eat wheat any longer I started looking around. Luckily for me there are a lot of other people in the same boat, although they have a much more serious condition known as celiac disease. In their case, they REALLY can’t eat wheat or it could end up killing them in the long run. The numbers of people with celiac are actually quite high and are getting higher all the time as more and more people are getting tested. This has caused a much higher demand for alternatives to wheat and gluten. There is a company called "Bob’s Red Mill" based in Oregon that makes alternative flours made from bean flour, tapioca flour, rice flour etc. They actually have a bread mix that we have started buying to make our own gluten free bread. That old bread machine has finally come out of retirement and is getting a ton of use now. It went from being a "mistake" purchase to being one of the most used appliances we have. While I’m not a big fan of keeping "stuff" around indefinitely, in this case, it turned out to be a very good decision.
Have you ever kept anything for years only to find that you started using it on a regular basis at some point?
you might consider visiting gluten-free girl’s website; she has celiac’s disease and writes about food/cooking. It might be a great resource for you. (She also has a book out.)
Thanks Barb. I’ll check it out.
That’s a great story…thanks for sharing it! I think it’s okay to keep appliances like this around. It’s like when you clean up your kids’ playroom and put a bunch of toys they haven’t touched in ages high up on a shelf. When you take those toys out a few months later they’re so excited to play with them again that it’s almost as if they were brand new toys.