Habanero Herb Bread

So my boyfriend and I are sitting at the bar on a Sunday morning, contemplating what to do with our day. We started down the road of making Indian food, which lead to the idea of making naan. After looking up some naan recipes and deciding it was too involved, we kind of dropped that idea. We kept going down the cooking route, and bread came up. And then I had the brilliant idea to make spicy pepper bread. This lead to the googling of several recipes, and a trip to the store.

After arriving at his place, I ended up googling even more recipes. Neither of us had ever made bread before, so there was much research to be done. The tasty, tasty bread we made ended up being an amalgamation of several different recipes.

So here it goes:

2 1/4 cups warm water
1 package dry yeast
2 tbsp sugar

1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp salt
Honey
3 cups flour

And freshly chopped:
Habaneros... lots and lots of habaneros
Rosemary
Sage
Thyme
Oregano

So first we combined the warm water, yeast, sugar, salt, and some of the honey. That sat for 15 minutes until it was good and foamy. Then we added everything else. It ended up taking substantially more than the 3 cups of flour that was called for to make the batter nice and stiff. At some point I kicked the boy out for some secret ingredienting (Yes, I just made ingredient a verb. Deal with it).

Then came the fun (messy) part. We floured the counted, and the boy got down to kneading, while I buttered the bowl (why? I don't really know, but a couple of the recipes called for it so why not?) Once the dough had been sufficiently kneaded we tossed it into the buttered bowl, covered it with a damp towel, and let it rise for an hour.

When it had risen, we kneaded it for another 5 minutes. Then we tossed our dough into a loaf pan, tossed our pan into a toasty 350 degree oven, and let it bake for an hour. The house smelled delicious by the time we pulled it out. And it was fantastic bread that was spectacularly devoured by all who came near it. It had a good kick to it, but wasn't too spicy. Really, it was awesome!

And the boy even took a picture of it for me: