I am covered in bread flour,

or so it seems.
I was trying to tip the last of the flour from the previous bag onto the scales and it somehow landed on me. Of course, when I began this exercise there was only a spoonful left in the bag. Now it seems as if there was half a bag full instead.
I make our bread. I started this little caper after a friend found a second hand bread machine in one of those "cash-convert" type places and gave it to us. Dad had tried her bread with her machine and decided it was far superior even to that made by the local bakery chain - and that is far superior to most of the bread you can buy in a supermarket.
At the biggest supermarket in our district you can actually buy bread which is partially cooked in the United States. I object to this on environmental grounds and on nutritional grounds. Bread does not need to travel that far, nor does it need to be so full of preservatives so as to have some semblance of freshness.
So, I started making bread - or rather I shove the ingredients in and the machine makes it. I can use wholemeal or whole grain flour. More importantly, I can add things. Today's bread has wholemeal flour, rye flour (4:1) kibbled rye, kibbled wheat, sunflower & pumpkin seeds in it. This is the fairly standard day to day load for us. Sometimes I will ignore the seeds and add a handful of chopped walnuts or put a little cornmeal in.
I do break out and make other things from time to time. This usually occurs when we have visitors. When there are just two of us we need a loaf that will do for my father's morning toast and marmalade as well as a possible sandwich, bread and cheese, or toast for soup. When we have visitors I can break out and try other combinations.
I have a book full of bread recipes, a gift from another friend. We exchanged cook books one year. She took a book of Australian recipes back to the United States with her and gave me the bread book. There are things in there that I am unlikely to try, such as the recipe which contains beetroot. It may be very nice but the resulting loaf is clearly pink. I cannot imagine serving pink bread. There are things in there I have still to try. The cheese and onion bread sounds good.
But there is something else about making bread, even in a bread machine. It has nothing to do with the carbon footprint of the loaf, the nutrition, the lack of preservatives or the possible variations on the theme. The something else is my father coming in and saying, "that smells good".
For that I will go on dusting the flour out of my fur.