Got any bread?

Okay, so perhaps we overdid it. Or I did, at least. Sometimes I tend to get carried away and get more than I need and then stand there helplessly staring at it, hoping inspiration will strike and show me the way to a brighter and better world…or at least a world where I do not need to throw stuff away. I hate waste and was brought up on the maxims of haste making for waste, my eyes being bigger than my stomach and more such meaningful homilies. I had done this mainly with clothes, shoes and, occasionally, lipstick, but rarely with anything edible. This time I had really done it, big time, literally.

It started with Father’s request for bread that was not high fibre, not rough, not multi-grain. Nice soft and squishy unsliced white bread, he asked plaintively, well deserving of a break from my usual almost-Fascist dietary regimen I subject the poor man to most of the time. The first time I tried to do this for him – a small request, after all, especially considering what I demand of him – I failed. The bakery was not making the aforementioned staple, since it was festival time and the demand was so low as to be non-existent. So I got a most interesting and delicious brown loaf instead; except for the colour, it was soft, squishy and rather nice, even Father admitted that.

But I was determined to do what I had promised to do. So the next time bread was needed at home, I went back to the bakery (which has what is perhaps the best fresh white loaves ever made since the dawn of baking) and demanded the familiar. Sorry, the friendly chappie behind the counter – who could have been the owner, for all I knew, he certainly threw his considerable weight around to deserve that cachet – the oven was not working properly, so the baking is delayed; fresh white unsliced bread would be out only an hour after I had dropped by. Nah, I said to myself and to the friendly chappie, let’s try something new instead. So I took home sliced white bread that he promised would be soft squishy and most nice, and some multi-grain stuff for me to keep my fibre-hungry insides satisfied with.

Problem: they were both ghastly. Father and I did our valiant best with the bread, but could not handle it after a few slices. Leave it in the fridge, I said, I would figure out what to do with it over the weekend. But there were miles to go and promises to keep, so I stopped at the first decent bakery I found on a visit into town and got a nice soft squishy unsliced white loaf of bread, just for Father. The only issue to deal with was the size. It was almost as big as the backseat of our little car and took up more space than I did. Almost.

But it was delicious. A lot like the much-reviled Wonder Bread of my fairly dietarily dissipated childhood on the inside – you could squash the entire loaf into one small pellet to flick at someone across a dinner table, I giggled to myself, but the crust was hearty, chewy and brilliant. Made into toast, it lacked some of the bite – literally – of the more fibre-rich loaves I preferred, but it made Father happy. Which was the point of the entire exercise, I told myself, giving my halo a well-earned buffing to make it extra-shiny.

But all this left me with a little bit of a problem to deal with. In the fridge I had two three-quarter loaves of disliked bread, plus a huge shelf-occupying hunk that took up more room than the cooked food the fridge contained. And I had to do something with it all, just to follow my own rule of not wasting anything that can be used. We already had breadcrumbs. We had eaten all the toast we could and should. With the multi-grain bread and some of the sliced white, I managed to make a large batch of strata, that wonderful way to use stale bread and make it entirely palatable – lots of tomato-onion-garlic goop, lots of cheese and a little egg and milk and voila, a stint in the oven produces something that comforts the nerves and satisfies the tummy. And the frugal vein that runs deep inside my soul.

That leaves us with about half the sliced white loaf and a great deal of the mammoth nice soft squishy unsliced white bread. Maybe bread-and-butter pudding? Or bread pakoras? Or even bread upma? Your choice, Father dear!