Matthew's Bread

This is Matthew's bread...

This is Matthew...

So here’s a funny story. I was making a loaf of bread today, and my three year old decided he wanted to make a bread too. We’ve done this before, I give him some flour, he has fun making a mess and then eventually wanders away. Today however, I gave him a bowl of flour, and I added some water to it, and I showed him what I was doing with the bread dough, and he totally got the hang of it. He adjusted the amount of flour (by grabbing some out of the pile that I had set aside while kneading) till it all came together, and he did something very similar to kneading.
I still figured that any minute he was going to get tired of it, but he didn’t. He actually kneaded (sort of) his little ball of dough for the full 10 minutes while I did mine.
Afterwards he was so excited that he had made a bread, and I felt so guilty because I knew it was just flour and water. He kept checking to see if it had risen, and telling his brother all about it. In the end I figured, hey, why not cook it. The dough for making Chinese dumplings is usually just flour and water, so I gave it a try. We rolled it out flat together. I melted some butter, and I let him use a pastry brush to coat the whole thing (hoping to give it some kind of flavor). I also grated a bit of parmesan over the top.
I wound up baking it for about 15 minutes at 200c (that’s what my bread was baking at). And it actually came out. It was a bit of a workout to eat, but Matthew LOVED it!! Nathaniel did too, and even had a second helping. It tasted like a hard/chewy/buttery cracker.
Anyway, next time I hear someone tell me that bread is too hard to make, I can honestly tell them that my three year old son can do it, and without the aid of a recipe even!