Give us this day our daily bread

"I'd like to learn to make bread, can you teach me?" asked my neighbor.

That's not a question I get asked every day, and I didn't hesitate to say, "Yes".

Miranda is a Chinese lady married to a New Zealander, and they're moving there to live.

Until then, she wants to learn how to make some of the more mundane things that those of us from the Antipodes tend to take for granted - bread being one of them.

I won't lie to you, cooking isn't always easy. It can be hard work, involving lots of preparation for a meal that might be eaten in minutes.

However, that shouldn't stop people from trying things.

After we'd scrubbed our hands and donned aprons (I am the world's best person at getting dry ingredients to spill down the front of a shirt), we approached the task at hand.

Under my careful eye, Miranda measured out three cups of strong bread flour into a large mixing bowl. Then she added a 15-gram sachet of instant dried active yeast, and two teaspoons of salt. Into the dry ingredients went one and one eighth of a cup of "blood warm" water.

Then the fun bit began. I plugged the dough hooks - two curved pieces of steel not unlike huge corkscrews - into my electric hand mixer, and turned her loose on the dough. After a few initial slips, the ingredients began to come together nicely into a ball, and so we switched from the electric mixer to just kneading the bread by hand.

Yeast is alive, a type of microscopic fungus that puts the alcohol and bubbles in beer, and also in bread. As she worked the dough, it began to warm and rise, starting to grow.

When the dough was smooth and elastic, I covered the bowl, and put it in a warm spot on the coffee table.

Bread dough takes about an hour and a half to two hours to rise properly, so we spent the time idly discussing the sorts of things that people who like to cook do - where you can get the best ingredients from, who stocks gadgets for the kitchen, and so on.

Endless cups of tea were consumed, while the dough rose like something out of a mad scientist's lab.

Time came to "punch down" the dough, so Miranda worked the excess carbon dioxide bubbles out of it - all the while saying that it was "a great way of getting rid of stress".

And she's right, baking can be quite calming. The very act of kneading the bread can let you work out all the tensions you feel, and leave you very collected when you're done!

I divided the dough into half, and shaped it up to put into a loaf tin. Once that was done, we had to wait again for another half hour, before putting it into the oven at 180 C.

There's nothing quite like the smell of bread baking, it's something that is the closest thing to "magic" in my kitchen. No wonder the big supermarkets in the United Kingdom, United States and Australia all like to have bakeries in their store - there's nothing like it for making you feel hungry!

Baking takes patience, and after another half hour's wait, we were rewarded with a golden, crusty loaf that sounded hollow when I tapped it.

We split the loaf, cut thick slices from it, drizzling the still hot surface with honey, and devoured it.

Today, I think I made amazing advances for Australian-Chinese relationships - by being a good cook and neighbor.

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