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A Crazy Wonderful Life

Recipes

Easy Sourdough Sandwich Bread

One of my favorite things about being a homemaker is cooking for my family. I love taking convenience meals and foods and figuring out how to cook them from scratch with more nourishing ingredients. One food that my family loves is bread. We will easily eat two or more loaves of bread each week. Most store-bought sandwich bread has ingredients such as inflammatory oils and high fructose corn syrup, so it became my mission to find a homemade sandwich bread that my family would love. Enter this easy sourdough sandwich bread recipe. I love this recipe because it is simple and made with nourishing ingredients that I can feel good about feeding my family.

A few years ago, a friend of mine reached out to me and asked if she could share some of her sourdough starter with me. I really had no idea what a sourdough starter was, but she was excited to share it with me, so I said yes! 

I went to her house, and she gave me this little jar of white, bubbly goo along with a page of instructions to care for it and sent me on my way. When I got home, I put the jar of starter in my fridge and there it sat for another year.

One day, as I sat watching reels on Instagram, I came across an account that promoted the use of sourdough in just about everything. I watched several of her videos and became inspired to take my starter out of the fridge and start using it! 

It was really touch and go at first. It took a few days of me feeding it for it to revive and become active enough to use. Then it took me several weeks of experimenting with different recipes before I was able to find the perfect sourdough sandwich bread recipe for my family. My perseverance finally paid off, and I finally made a sourdough sandwich bread that my whole family loves!

This recipe is really easy and takes minimal active time on your part. The amount of time in this recipe really comes from the time it takes the dough to proof. I make two loaves of this bread every week.

*Pro tip: If you plan to bake on the weekends (which is what I do since I don’t have time during the week), feed your starter on Friday night and then again on Saturday morning. Mix up your dough and let it rise overnight. Then you can transfer to baking dishes for the second rise and bake on Sunday.

Sourdough Sandwich Bread Recipe

Ingredients:

½ cup (1 stick) of softened butter

2 tbsp sugar

1 tbsp salt

1 cup of active starter (fed in the last 12 hours)

2 ½ cups of water

8 cups of flour (approximately)

Instructions:

  • Add all ingredients except the flour to a stand mixer and mix for one minute.
  • Add in the flour one cup at a time until the dough pulls away from the sides. It should pass the windowpane test (the sides of the bowl are clean). The dough should be tacky but not sticky.
  • Place the lid on your mixer or place the dough in a bowl with a lid and allow it to bulk rise for 4-10 hours in a warm place. (The longer you allow your dough to proof, the more sour the dough will taste. If you don’t like a sour taste to your sourdough, allow it to rise 4-6 hours)
  • Take out the dough and divide it into two equal parts.
  • Roll the dough out flat into a rectangle then roll it up to shape.
  • Place the dough in greased or lined loaf pans and allow to rise for another two hours.
  • Bake at 375 degrees for 45 minutes.
  • Allow to cool before slicing.
  • Serve with butter, jam, or honey. 

Cooking with sourdough has been a fun experiment for me! If you’re interested in learning more about how to use sourdough, fill out the form below and I’ll share more tips and tricks with you!

You can also check out my Sourdough Pinterest Board for more sourdough inspiration!

I love cooking from scratch for my family! Check out this post for more nourishing, made-from-scratch recipes.

Easy Chicken Pot Pie

If you’re anything like me, you love a recipe that is both easy and delicious. Even though I have recently started making all of our meals from scratch, I still go for recipes that have simple ingredients. Enter this easy chicken pot pie recipe. I recently got this recipe from my mom, and I tried it over the weekend. It was super simple to make, delicious, and made enough that my husband and I could eat it for lunch in the following days.

Substitutions

I made my own cream of chicken soup rather than use the canned version, but do what works best for you! You can find the recipe for the cream of chicken soup here.

You can also use a can of veg-all in place of the vegetables in the recipe.

I used store-bought chicken broth, but you could also use homemade broth for this recipe. My favorite store-bought broth is Kettle and Fire.

Meal Prepping

I made this recipe during my Sunday evening meal prep along with two other meals so that my husband and I can have healthy, nourishing lunches during the week. If you would like to read about how I meal prep, go here!

Cooking healthy and nourishing meals for my family is one of the ways that I serve and care for my husband and my kids. When choosing recipes to cook, I go for things that are quick and simple, like this easy chicken pot pie recipe. What are your favorite easy recipes that you cook for your family? I’d love to hear from you!

Weekly Meal Prep

Over the past three years, my family and I have been focused on eating healthier. When my husband and I had Covid at the end of 2020, we had some recurring symptoms for a while. In order to help our bodies heal, we decided to clean up our diet. We ate pretty healthy for breakfast and dinner, but lunch was always hard. It was so easy to just run out and grab some fast food. We decided that healthier lunches were a must for us in order to improve our health, so I began weekly meal prep every Sunday afternoon to prepare healthy lunches for us for the week.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. I may make a small commission off your purchase at no extra cost to you.

Planning Meals

If you’re like me, planning what to cook is one of the hardest parts of meal prepping. I’m honestly still not great at this part, but my husband has suggested that I make a list of meals that we like and just rotate through them each week. I usually write down on my calendar which meals I plan to make and then shop for those meals when I get groceries. Having a rotating list has been a big help to me in planning our meals.

Setting Aside Time to Cook

Finding time to cook enough food for our lunches for the week was also a challenge at first, but I’ve come up with a pretty good system that works for me. Every Sunday afternoon at around 3:30 or 4:00, I begin preparing our meals for the week. I usually cook three different things, some of which we have for dinner on Sunday night. I do make everything from scratch because I don’t use packaged or processed foods, but I make sure to choose recipes that are family-friendly and pretty easy to prepare. It usually takes me two or three hours to get it all done, but it saves me so much time during the week. I can also be confident that we have healthy and nourishing meals to eat.

Recipes for this Week

This would be a pretty terrible meal prep post if I didn’t share a few recipes!! This past weekend, I made three meals that were pretty simple, and I’d like to share those with you! One of them is my own recipe, one is a modification of a recipe that I found online, and the other is a recipe from the blog Farmhouse on Boone (my favorite blog for recipes).

Recipe 1: Hamburger Steak with Air-Fried Potatoes

This is one of the easiest things that I make, and it’s one of my husband’s favorites!

Recipe 2: Smoked Sausage Sheet Pan Meal

This one takes a little time because you have to chop the veggies, but it is so good and very filling! I saw this recipe on Instagram, but I modified it a little. You can easily switch out the vegetables seasonally and adjust the spices.

Recipe 3: Chicken Corn Chowder

I made this recipe for the first time this week. We liked it, but the next time I make it, I think I’ll add a little smoked paprika or chili powder to give it a kick! Click here for this recipe. It may not be the prettiest presentation, but this is what it looked like when I made it:


We typically get two days worth of lunches out of each meal. I have recently switched out all of our plastic bowls for nice glass meal prep containers. We have to heat our food in the microwave, and I am not comfortable heating plastic in the microwave. You can find the bowls that I use here.

Since we’ve been weekly meal prepping, we have noticed a positive change in our health. We still get sick from time to time but not as frequently, and we recover much more quickly than we used to. Meal-prepping does take some time, but it is definitely worth it for us!

Do you do a weekly meal prep? I’d love to hear how you work it into your schedule! I’d also love to share recipes! Make sure to sign up for my email list so you can get my monthly newsletter that includes a recipe!

If you liked this post, go here to learn more about our family!