So I made one of your soup suggestions -- thanks!

One of the requirements of our little soup exercise last week was to use ingredients you had on hand at that time. Well, this week, I happened to have all of the ingredients to make one of the suggested soups. I made Chicken Pot Pie soup. 

I need to work on it, though. I had pie pastry for half of a single crust. next time I will make more of the pie crust strips, maybe using a full single crust of pastry. I also over-baked the pie pastry. I'll have to be more watchful the next time. Despite this, my family loved it. This is a fun and easier alternative to traditional chicken pot pies. If I was feeling like being fancy, I would cut the rolled out pie pasty into a single large shape for each bowl. It would be super fun to have a chicken cookie cutter for the pie pastry, I think.

Big thank you to Amy in the comments from last week for making this suggestion!

What are the bread rules in your house?

Oh my goodness, I made a great. batch of bread the other day, and quite by accident. The bread was soft and lofty. The accident was I had put the bread (3 loaves) into pans and left them to rise while I went for a walk, took care of some harvesting, and paid bills/reconciled accounts. I forgot the rising bread dough was on the counter. It was my husband that called out to me that the bread looked quite high. I quickly got back into the kitchen and preheated the oven, popping the pans in while it was still heating up.

I was lucky the bread didn't fall back. Instead, it remained high. Once it cooled, and  as I was bagging the loaves up, I could feel these would be soft loaves of bread. Lately, my bread has been on the dense side. It stales quickly and has been overly dry when used for sandwiches on day two or three. This new batch was a welcome change.

Here's the difficult part of baking a superior batch of bread -- there were still some slices of the old bread remaining to be consumed. I so badly wanted to cut into one of the new loaves. But I also knew that if I cut into the new loaf while there were still old slices leftover, there's no chance anyone in my family would eat the old, stale bread, ever. 

Our general bread rule is that the old loaf needs to be eaten before cutting into the new. The exception to this is when I'm planning to use bread with dinner. Fresh bread and butter alongside a bowl of soup is magnificent. 

The next morning, there were still a couple of slices of the old loaf left. I would be breaking my own rule if I ignored those. But I wanted a piece of toast with breakfast made from this really good bread. I thought about it while I dished up some apple and crabapple sauce. In the end I went ahead and sliced off a pice of the new stuff, feeling slightly guilty that I'd be making my family members eat the older bread. Yeah, I felt guilty for breaking the "bread rule." In the end it worked out. My husband toasted up the old bread telling me he likes the denser bread as it doesn't tear when spreading butter or peanut butter. We both got what we wanted. But still, I broke a rule.

What would you have done? Do you have any bread rules in your house? How do you make sure you use up bread before it goes moldy?