I like to make bread, but I prefer to use a bread machine to do it. Five to ten minutes of hands-on time, then go away and do other things for three hours. Get the bread out, get the paddle out of the bottom of the bread, let the pan and paddle cool for ten minutes. Run water into the pan with the paddle lying at the bottom of it. Go do something else for half an hour. Wash and dry the paddle and the bread pan, put them back in the machine, and put the machine away. By this time the bread is cool enough to cut if you want to, though I find it cuts easier if I let it rest for several hours or overnight.Nobody is born knowing how to make bread, especially in the variants so easy to do in a machine and so difficult without a machine. I've found two books to be completely indispensible for regular bread; sourdough is another matter and I've already talked about it.The first is Better Homes and Gardens' Complete Guide to Bread Machine Baking: Recipes for 1 ½ & 2 lb. Loaves.The Complete Guide to Bread Machine Baking: Recipes for 1 1/2- and 2-pound Loaves (Better Homes & Gardens) When I looked up the reviews already present at Amazon, I was both amused and exasperated to find that nearly half the reviewers were complaining that the recipes didn't work for them. Obviously they hadn't done their homework. Bread, especially machine bread, is extremely sensitive to altitude. I live at approximately 4200 feet, and for a recipe to come out right, I have to use about ¼ more water or whatever liquid the recipe calls for and ¼ less yeast. Also, if you aren't satisfied with the add-ins the recipe calls for, you can always add more or less or something else.For example, my husband loves rye bread. One of the rye bread recipes is particularly enticing, but it omits caraway seed. My husband loves caraway seed. He doesn't like rye bread without it. So I add three tablespoons of caraway seed. Bear in mind that the add-ins very rarely, and only if they melt, affect the basic recipe at all.My favorite apple bread in the Complete Guide isn't spicy enough for me. I add one teaspoon each of nutmeg and allspice to the basic recipe, and I also like to add nuts, preferably pecans or walnuts. Notice that none of these melt; therefore they cannot affect the basic recipe.Sometimes a recipe really doesn't work for you, not because it doesn't work but because it doesn't meet your taste preferences. I tried one of the tomato bread recipes. I tried a tomato bread recipe that called for a small amount of sun-dried tomato. It wasn't enough. There's a slight onion taste and no tomato taste at all that I can discern. I could add a lot more sun-dried tomatoes, and probably will try that later, but for now I'm going to try another tomato bread recipe, one that calls for a six-ounce can of tomato paste. I'm guessing that I will find that more satisfactory. I may throw in some sun-dried tomatoes also, but that isn't essential.I like to check cookbooks out of the library and paperclip (Don't dog-ear library books. Please don't dog-ear library books.) each page that has a recipe that seems interesting. Then, if there are just two or three paperclips, I photocopy the recipe and return the book to the library. If the book looks like a paperclip porcupine, I buy a copy of the book and carefully move the paperclips from the library book to the appropriate pages of the new book, and then return the library book. I found Complete Guide to Bread Machine Baking to bristle with paperclips, and so I bought it. I will use it for the rest of my life.The other book I find essential I spotted at a thrift store for a dollar. It is Bread Machine Magic. It's an older book, and has recipes for one pound and one and a half pound loaves. Since I prefer to make two pound loaves, I double the one-pound recipe except that I use only one and a half times the salt. That's one of the rules in doubling recipes, though I don't know why. There's a revised edition at Amazon Bread Machine Magic, Revised Edition: 138 Exciting Recipes Created Especially for Use in All Types of Bread Machinesand I may decide to buy it. It has one fewer recipes, but it includes two-pound loaves. It, like the other book, bristles with different colors of paperclips. It's hard to believe there could be that many different variants of what is basically flour, water, and yeast, but believe it. It seemed never to have been used; I suspect that it was given as a gift to somebody who didn't really like to bake. It contains a plethora of sweet and savory breads that are good for holidays and every now and then, but in most cases not really suitable for day in and day out bread.It has a citrus rye bread recipe that sounds fascinating, and I am thinking of making it later today. I finally have all the ingredients. There were some that I couldn't find in the grocery store, and in my present condition of decrepitude (I broke my back three months ago) I'm not up to grating citrus rind myself. So I had to mail-order them. But they arrived a couple of days ago, and yesterday I was making apple bread for our computer techie, who is coming today to fix my color printer and to show my husband a new laptop he might want to buy. I don't usually make more than one loaf of bread a day, though I made three the day before Carlton and Cathy's Olympic ceremony open house. We were all asked to bring a covered dish from another country. I had just tried out cheese bread, and decided an English-style cheddar cheese bread was international enough.There's a good-looking apricot bread I may make Saturday night for Sunday morning. Or I may make the orange bread again, or try the peaches and spice bread. We both love peaches. Or the orange sticky buns . . .A nice recipe for whole wheat hamburger and hot dog buns is marked with a paperclip. I normally use Tanya's bread--a recipe given me thirty years ago by a friend in Fort Worth--for hamburger and hot dog buns, but it wouldn't hurt to try a new one. There's a whole section on shaped breads--you use the dough setting on the bread machine, and then take the dough out to make everything from dinner rolls to elaborate Christmas stollen. (The computer wants to change that to "stolen." Sorry, computer, but I know what word I want.)With these two cookbooks, and the two sourdough cookbooks both of which I bought from Amazon, I'm set to bake anything I want to bake. I even ordered muffin rings from King Arthur Flour so I can make my own English muffins; they're also good for hamburger buns. The King Arthur Flour site also has hamburger and hot dog bun pans, but they're a little pricey for me. I'd rather use a large cookie cutter for hamburger buns and hand-shape the hot dog buns.By the way, I got my bread machine at a thrift store for five dollars. Clearly it had never been used.You can enjoy making bread without working yourself into exhaustion, with these two cookbooks and two good sourdough cookbooks. If you don't like a variety of breads, you can confine yourself to the recipes that come in the bread machine instruction manual, but in that case you might as well use store-bought bread. I like variety, and I like experimenting with recipes. To my mind, a cookbook that isn't written on isn't much used, or at least it isn't used to its fullest extent. Do study the introduction; it usually contains general rules that pertain to all the recipes in the book, such as how to cope with high altitudes, but then play with the recipes until they do what you want them to do.And enjoy. If you aren't going to enjoy making bread, you might as well buy it.