Given that I spent last Saturday afternoon cleaning the kitchen cupboards inside and out there were surprisingly few revelations and, thankfully, nothing dead and rotting behind the boards. Dear old Gladstone, my long deceased pussy, was fond of depositing all forms of dead and nearly dead carnage largely around the kitchen clearly understanding that the front room was out of bounds where blood and guts were concerned. This meant that those poor mites clinging to life would find sanctuary for their last moments in some safe hole away from his bulging eyes and salivating tongue. Generally women tend to treat me the same when I am “entertaining” and can often be found in the cupboard under the stairs frantically ringing a taxi. Since his passing though the mice and bird populations of Idle have expanded exponentially and I no longer have to regularly don the Marigolds to clear up more surgically dissected entrails with a peg on my big nose.
And so the only discovery of any form was of a full bag of wholemeal flour with a “best by” date of mid 2009. Of course being a tight Yorkshire Lad this wanton waste horrified me and so it had been sat on the kitchen top all week awaiting its fate. Surely flour did not go off after all it’s only the same as my mum’s M&S talcum powder and she has a house full of the stuff? Ashes to ashes….dust to dust? In a quiet moment I decided that I was going to make bread with the rain lashing down and unable to access the allotment outside – it was either this or Loose Women – again – and so the choice was easy. Unbelievably, having scoured my entire collection of “Jamie Rips You Off Again With Variations of the Same Just Different Pictures” I could not find one recipe for bread but fortunately help was at hand on the side of the flour packet. I had all the necessary ingredients so what could be hard about this?
Right from the outset there was something not quite right as the dough had the consistency of soggy sawdust and simply refused to bind. Whack in an egg I thought and promptly smashed it all over my foot. Number two egg was handled like gold as I cradled it through my hands into the mixing bowl forgetting that I had covered my hands in the equivalent of catering glue resulting in two giant, candyfloss-like hands. This was not going well at all. Still the dough refused to stick to anything other than my fingers and so I chucked in more water and now I had pure slime. More flour even if it was 2009 Vintage and finally I had a slab that looked like mortar and was probably going to set the same way. The instructions said to leave to expand to double the size and yet, after an hour, it was clear that this dough needed Viagra not yeast. It just lay there doing absolutely nothing and so I thought it was time to see if the oven could encourage life where all other forms of manipulation had failed. If it ever happened to me though I am sticking to the little blue pills as baking seems a bit drastic.
One hour later – double the recommended time – and the slab remained a slab which made me wonder if I should simply inscribe my name and save on a headstone. Still it’s all in the taste as they say and, yes, it tasted like compressed sawdust. As I said I am a self-confessed tight-arsed Yorkshireman and my dear old Grandmas would both have never wasted any food – actually they would have broken it into lumps and thrown them at the pigeons to bring a few down and guarantee a hearty supper making the best out of a bad job as they say. I tried it in soup, with jam and then simply on its own and still it tasted like sawdust as it gathered together like a glue in the pit of my stomach. Passing this on later may be like having a baby…this was not what self-sufficiency was all about surely?
Strangely it was a very restless night with various rumblings and eruptions from beneath and not even Question Time able to put me to sleep. It was comforting at spin class today having spoken with Xena, a nurse by profession, that I had probably eaten the biggest collection of bugs possible and that she would reserve me a bed at the local hospital for the weekend. And still the “loaf” sits there a testament to my total inability to do what sustained Stone Age Man many, many years ago although how the hell he knew the flour was in date or not who knows? Given my greenhouse’s propensity for flight in stormy conditions I think I have a use for the slab and as for the rest of the still vintage 2009 flour…time for the bin.
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