Here's an easy recipe for lazy people like me, which was passed on to me by my friend Andrew just in time for Thanksgiving. I like it well enough, and I've seen other people choke it down when I made it, so I must've done something right.
Bread pudding sounds very posh, don't you think? All European and sophisticated. Maybe I only think that because I grew up on a diet of Ramen and Spam...Neither of which, fortunately, you will need for this recipe.
What you will need is...
- 1 can pumpkin
- 2 large eggs
- 1 large egg yolk
- 1 cup milk
- 1 tablespoon molasses
- ¼ cup sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- ½ teaspoon ground ginger
- ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
- pinch of salt
- bread cubes (French, or Wonder, or to your taste...I think they're traditionally meant to be a tiny bit stale, but whether that makes any real difference or not, I couldn't say...)
Preheat your oven to 325F. Dump everything except the bread into a bowl and mix it into a repulsive-looking slurry. Find yourself a smallish cake pan, perhaps 8"x8", or--if you're feeling especially fancy and have lots of this "cookware" stuff about, about six things called "ramekins" which are not Terry Pratchett characters--and rub it or them or yourself or whatever you see fit with a stick of butter until everything is safely greased. Fill your pan or ramekins or bodily cavities with the bread cubes, and then pour your unsightly yet sweetly-scented pumpkin sludge over them, pounding any rebellious bread chunks down into the muck like filthy peasants. Let it all sit for about ten minutes to soak, then pop it or them or yourself or whatever into the oven for forty minutes, which time you can spend digging holes (if you're still outside the oven) or screaming (if you're in). After that you should be pretty well set, or dead, or both. Remove everything from the oven, or instruct your next of kin to do so for you. Don't forget to turn the oven off, or to instruct your next of kin to do so for you, or to cackle while letting it all burn if you don't like your home much. Enjoy.
When I was a wee tiny little lad of 20 or 21, thousands and thousands of years ago, I used to amuse myself from time to time by attempting to write sketch comedy. Much of this has ended up on my website, linked to off of this page here. This all culminated in my senior year as an undergrad, when, to fill a general education requirement, I took a playwriting class. I wasn't especially good at it; most of what I wrote came out as more of my not-terribly-good sketch comedy. In any event, I'd thought everything I'd written for that class had been lost many years and hard drives ago. Recently, when I was cleaning out my old (relatively speaking) laptop, I found a cache of these senior year playlets. One of them, the third of my golem plays, I thought actually showed some slight glimmer of an absence of a total lack of promise. Another one was a silly bit of fluff about adultery with God. Having given this silly piece of fluff some minor editing and revision to make it suck slightly less, and having posted very little of any substance to this blog in centuries, and knowing that no-one actually reads this anyhow, I figured it might be wise to share this bit of fluff with you, my imaginary readership. I present...
I don't really remember what was going through my mind when I wrote this. All I recall is that the birds-on-heads thing is an obscure reference to a rarely-recurring character on Doctor Who with godlike powers and a stuffed bird on his hat. God often showed up in my plays to annoy and inconvenience people.
Ah, memories...I should get creative (if it can be called that) again.
Haymaker
You are one of life’s enjoyers, determined to get the most you can out of your brief spell on Earth. Probably what first attracted you to atheism was the prospect of liberation from the Ten Commandments, few of which are compatible with a life of pleasure. You play hard and work quite hard, have a strong sense of loyalty and a relaxed but consistent approach to your philosophy.
You can’t see the point of abstract principles and probably wouldn’t lay down your life for a concept though you might for a friend. Something of a champagne humanist, you admire George Bernard Shaw for his cheerful agnosticism and pursuit of sensual rewards and your Hollywood hero is Marlon Brando, who was beautiful, irascible and aimed for goodness in his own tortured way.
Sometimes you might be tempted to allow your own pleasures to take precedence over your ethics. But everyone is striving for that elusive balance between the good and the happy life. You’d probably open another bottle and say there’s no contest.
What kind of humanist are you? Click here to find out.