The Pun Also Rises

"Waste Not, Want Not"

    As anyone who knows me will tell you, I hate to waste food. Wasting paper is inevitable. Wasting time is fun. But wasting food is simply unacceptable. So, last week, when I noticed I had some milk that was nearing the expiration date, I knew I had to find a way to use it up before it went bad.

    I hatched a clever plan.

    I remember hearing from a friend that you can use sour milk to bake bread, so I decided to do so. After all, you can never have too much bread. In fact, most people complain that they don't have enough bread, or don't have enough dough, which you need to make bread. Bread has even been referred to as the staff of life. Sushi may be the katana of life, but it's much more expensive than the staff, and more to the point, wouldn't prevent my milk from going to waste.

    Anyway, on Wednesday night I set out to bake bread when I suddenly realized I had no eggs. I briefly considered trying to find a substitute ingredient, but remembered the story I'd seen about a man who substituted Cadbury Eggs for real eggs when doing some baking, with disastrous results. Eggs is eggs, and I didn't have any. And while I'm good at hatching plans, I'm not so good at hatching eggs, so the bread had to be delayed.

    On Thursday I told a dozen friends that I'd be buying eggs to bake bread, knowing that if I told so many people, I couldn't possibly forget.

    I forgot.

    It wasn't until Sunday that I finally bought eggs. I wanted to use up as much milk as possible, because I knew it wouldn't last much longer, so I found the most milk-filled bread recipe I could: Irish Soda Bread. I had measured out two of the required four cups of white flour when I realized I was out of flour. Not a problem. I rummaged through my shelves and found some whole wheat flour, and added that instead.

    Then it called for salt and baking soda. I didn't have any baking soda, but I did have baking powder, which starts with the same word, so it must be a reasonable substitute. (My method of cooking is not quite precise.) Then I poured the milk to begin measuring out two cups and noticed two things:

    1) The milk did not, technically speaking, even fill one cup. Due to the fact that I had already used some on Thursday, I didn't have nearly as much milk as I thought.

    2) The milk was, to put it kindly, mildly chunky. Due to the fact that it had at this point already been expired for a week, the milk had gone bad.

    This essential foiled my plan of making bread to avoid wasting the milk. I now had a bowl filled with the wrong kind of flour, the wrong kind of leavening agent, and no milk. But I couldn't well throw it out. After all, that would be a waste of food, and that's the whole thing I was trying to avoid. So, I added two cups of water and made the dough. I now had a dough with baking powder instead of baking soda, wheat flour instead of white flour, and water instead of milk.

    In fact, the only thing I'd gotten right was the teaspoon of salt.

    Nonetheless, I put it in the oven. And then, I suddenly realized that I hadn't even used any eggs in the recipe. Stupid eggs. I felt it would be a waste if I didn't use them, so I scrambled three eggs and had them for dinner while the bread baked.

    When the bread was done, I decided that I couldn't really call it Irish Soda Bread, given how little it had in common with the bread of that name. I described it to a friend as Scottish Soda Bread, but she insisted that it was still mostly Irish, so it should be called something like Ulster Soda Bread. I replied that I thought it would be a poor name for bread, because after all, nobody wants a stomach Ulster.

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    Seth Brown is a local humor writer who has a recipe for disaster, but never follows the recipe. His website is www.RisingPun.com

All work on this page is copyright Seth Brown. If you are sharing it, please give attribution. If you want to reprint it, please contact me first.