People of Britain, throw out your breadmakers and mircowaves! It’s official. People in this country have nothing to do. 2.38m are economically inactive. The number of people claiming benefits is 1.56 m. We will have to get used to having more time. Lashings of it. Until now it was all about time saving devices and outsourcing.

Why use a breadmaker when making a loaf by hand can keep you busy for up to 24 h! So goodbye dishwasher, hello super slowcooking and the dummy guide to idleness. We had the credit crunch lifestyle and the recessionista but what about  the sparetimeboom?

Hang on, that means 820.000 people are not working and not registered as unemployed. What are they up to? They must be secretly working on something. A cult? Training for Britain’s got Talent? Too lazy to sign on? How do they survive? Foraging for nuts and berries and Vogue for thinspiration?

Not only did the government employ interior designers to give jobcentres a shabby chic makeover so less people like to hang out there. It held an online competition. The winning entry, by  68 old Betty S. from Maidenhead was swine flu and has proven to be a big hit. Flu pandemics keep people away from public places (jobcentres) and blurr the line between redundancy and sickleave.

The economy is stale. The only thing rising is the amount of time.

Best time killers (The hardest work is to go idle.  -Yiddish Proverb)

• Public transport 
• Trying to get hold of customer services. Any.
• Making bread
• IKEA ( time flies with self assembly)
• Baby 

Rich Bread and butter pudding

These are great times for cheap comfort eating and what is there better and more time consuming than Bread and butter pudding. Let the dough rise, bake the bread, wait a couple of days for it to go stale, make the pudding and e voilà: You spend a week in the kitchen not doing much and have a yummy dish. Both crispy and creamy, sweet and salty, with just the right amount of butter, enough cream to soak through the layers of bread and a toasty golden brown top. This recipe came to me through my mother in law via her good friend Delia.

• 8 slices of  stale bread
• butter
• orange peel
• sultanas
• 250ml milk
• 50ml double cream
• 50g caster sugar
• grated zest of 1 unwaxed lemon
• 3 eggs
• freshly grated nutmeg

Arrange one layer of buttered bread in a baking dish, sprinkle the peel and half the sultanas over, then repeat. In a jug, mix the milk and the double cream. Stir in the sugar and lemon zest, whisk in the eggs. Pour over the bread and sprinkle with some freshly grated nutmeg. Bake in the oven for 40 minutes. Cost: 2.89/ Time: 5 days.

This entry was posted on July 16th, 2009 and is filed under recipes, topical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.