Added later: I never completed this post, but it lets me know when I first got involved in no-knead baking. Lots more posts on bread later.
My aunt was a great, adventuresome cook (and author of the carefully-historically-researched, critically well-received Little House on the Prairie Cookbook). When I was around 8 years old, she taught me how to make bread. Maybe five years after that, at Christmastime, I made bread for friends and dropped it at their house (for a number of years after that, I was known to some grandparents only as “the boy who made the bread”). It was a great project for a kid to spend a day doing: combine the ingredients, let it rise, knead, rise more, punch down, etc etc. Most people I know don’t have that much time on their hands.
My wife has been a Mark Bittman fan for some time and I was interested when she pointed out his no-knead bread recipe. I looked at it and noticed that you need to bake the bread in an enameled Le Creuset-style dish. I didn’t have one and wasn’t keen to invest that much to find out whether I like something or not. But I think it was looking through the comments to that article that I was eventually led to “Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day”