I don't normally like kitchen "gadgets." It's far to easy to clutter a kitchen with novelty gadgets that do this and that and once the novelty wears off end up gathering dust on a shelf.

That being said, I really like making home made pizza dough and I have SO MANY duck eggs from our backyard ducks! I've been talking about making duck egg pasta for a while but doing it by hand I figured it wouldn't go well in terms of getting it thin enough for my liking. I also want to make home made frozen pizzas but doing this with a wild toddler has been impossible because she's always wanting me to hold her or getting into trouble in the kitchen.

For Christmas my husband ventured into the kitchen gadget section and bought me a bread machine and pasta machine to help make life a little easier. I finally pulled the break machine out this week to figure out how it works. The very first thing I made was pizza dough for home made sausage pizzas.

He also gave me a cast iron griddle which I chose to cook my pizza in to get a crispy crust. I can honestly say the bread machine, just for mixing dough is so helpful. All I had to do was dump my ingredients in and turn it on. An hour and a half later my pizza dough was mixed, had risen, and was ready to pizza construction.

I was a little scared of actually making bread though. I've never had luck making bread my hand. I decided to check the youtubes to see how others use their machines. Interestingly, a familiar face popped up at the top of my search results...@old-guy-photos! @old-guy-photos owns a bread machine and did a video on how he makes bread! So awesome!

Check out his video here

I did try to make French bread but I must have messed something up. It was very heavy bread when it should have been a bit lighter. Maybe it was the recipe I followed or just my own fault. I tried again to make blackberry bread and it turned out better in a sense. The bread machine didn't have instructions how to do this so I had to wing it. The bread was still an hour away from being cooked when the machine finished it's work so I had to pop the thing in the oven to finish it off. The bread was pretty good though. I like fruit breads so I'll have to learn if you can do banana bread and blueberry bread in it.

Later tonight I'm attempting to make my duck egg pasta for the first time. The bread machine did mix my dough for me with ease so the pasta dough is ready but resting before I can use it. Fingers crossed I can figure out the pasta machine easily. I'm got ricotta ready to make ravioli and might make spaghetti noodles as well.