Just As One Man's Trash Is Another Man's Treasure . . .

. . . Likewise, One Man’s Stale Bread is Another Man’s (d/b/a my mother) Croutons!! As long as the bread didn’t have green flecks of developing mold spores, my mom would cut it up in pieces, dredge it with butter, and slow-toast it in the over for three-quarters of a day. Old white bread, cinnamon loaf, hamburger buns, Kaiser rolls – it made no difference; all got the same treatment. Her frugality inured to our benefit; those croutons were yummy!

But as kids, of course, we overlooked how great-tasting the croutons were; we just zero’d in on what a penny-pincher our mom was. And she used other miserly techniques that exasperated us all as well. Like she’d buy a gallon size jug of the cheapest dishwashing liquid in the world . . . . and then water it down to make it last longer. Whenever we did dishes at her house, nobody, but nobody, could ever get that stuff to lather.

As an adult, I do a half-assed job of dish rinsing, and I know it’s because I never learned a proper respect for the sud. (I’ll never forget the first time I saw my husband washing dishes. He used a special sponge called a Dobie Pad [all I’d ever used were pieces of old bath towels or the occasional dust cloth!] Each and every dish he washed got its own little dab of detergent. Dang! The lather he generated! Don’t get me started. I’m not saying I married the guy because of how he did the dishes; but I readily concede that hygienically speaking, I definitely married UP.

When all is said and done, though, in this day of fast-diminishing resources, there’s a crying need for folks to conserve, preserve, and protect; so it turns out that skinflints like my mom and grandma are exactly what this earth needs.

Yeah, you heard me right. Grandma was a tightwad, too. Instead of parting with the 87 cents for a jar of Dippity Doo, she’d just spit on a bar of Ivory soap and fashion a spit curl on each side of my face. By the time these curls dried, they were brittle hooks on each side of my face that paralyzed my facial muscles. Grandma thought I was pouting so she’d offer me sweet treats to snap me out of it. And even though I was scared that the act of chewing would rip the skin off my cheeks, sometimes you have to eat through the pain, so I went ahead and had some cake Hey, speaking of cake . . .

Cake Comments:

“Small But Tall cakes are so, so upper crust,” enthused one fan.

“Don’t be a heel; buy your friend a cake!” admonished another enthusiast.

“This cake is the toast of the town,” chortled one aficionado.

Cake Facts:

One Small But Tall will feed 15 baguette customers or 12 Brochen consumers.