A piece of crunchy bread can make the simplest meal - soup, stew, an omelet - into a fancy meal. Many restaurants are serving frozen bread these days. This bread is often under-baked or lacking in flavor. Instead of hearing a crunch when you bite into the bread you hear nothing. Even worse, the bread feels squishy in your mouth.

What a disappointment.

The way to avoid disappointment is to bake your own bread. Your first reaction, I would wager, is that you don't have time to bake bread. Well, this recipe for French bread hardly takes any time at all and tastes as good as bakery bread. If you have a food processor you can have French bread in a flash. Serve it straight from the oven and your family will say "Ahhhh."

INGREDIENTS

2 cups bread flour

1/2 cup wheat flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon dried oregano leaves

1/2 teaspoon dried basil leaves

1 teaspoon active dry yeast

Assemble ingredients in food processor. Pulse. Add 1 cup warm water and process on high for 1 1/2 minutes. Place dough in bowl that has been coated with cooking spray. Cover with a towel and let dough rise until it almost reaches the top of the bowl.

Sprinkle a bread board with cornmeal. Turn dough out onto board and cut in half with a serrated knife. Pull and stretch each half into a long, thin loaf. (You may have to roll the dough a bit.) Slash the tops of the loaves with a sharp knife or scissor. Place loaves in a nonstick baguette pan.

Put the pan on the top rack of a COLD oven. Put a pan of ice cubes on the bottom rack. Set the oven temperature to 450-475 degrees. Bake for 20 minutes until the tops are light brown and the bread sounds hollow. A 1/2 teaspoon of garlic powder may be added to this recipe for even more flavor.