The Thanksgiving Runt Buns

My wife cried out in desperation, “Why are they not rising?!?”

“Why are what not rising?” I asked as I looked at the obviously deformed buns in the bun pan. I was trying to quell my wife’s consternation over the “Now what are we gonna do about the bread for the Thanksgiving meal” problem.

Bread is an important part of most of our meals. Not having bread is like…well it’s like not having snow at Christmas or not having Hank Williams, Jr. sing “Are You Ready For Some Football?” on Monday nights.

We were heading to my daughter’s for Thanksgiving and my wife’s assignment was to bring a couple pies and THE BREAD.

So the other day she hollered down to me, “Will fifteen buns be enough?”

“Yep,” said I, “Ten for me, three for you, and two for Amber oughta do it.”

So she plopped 15 little frozen premade bun dough hockey pucks into the bun pan and put it into the fridge so that they could thaw and rise in unison.

But alas, when she pulled them out of the fridge, the nine toward the fridge door were bigger than the six toward the back of the fridge. After some scientific investigation, we could only surmise that it was like 20 degrees colder at the back end of the 18” pan than it was at the front. Maybe global warming was creeping into the fridge.

So she put them on the stove to see if that would snap the runt buns out of the doldrums.

But regrettably, when we got home from work, they were still smaller!

The nine toward the front of normal size (heretofore known simply as “The Nine”) were noticeably bigger than the abnormal six (heretofore known simply as “The Six”). We were both peering into the pan like bug scientists gazing at a new species.

I asked her if this had ever happened before. With a furrowed brow and a look of “Thanksgiving is ruint!” she said simply, “THIS has NEVER happened before!”

I asked her if she could just mix the runtbuns in with the normalbuns and perhaps that would inspire them to say, “Hey, I can rise to higher heights, look at that guy!”

But she wasn’t listening. And for the life of me I honestly couldn’t see the problem. Like Big Hairy Deal if the smaller buns are somewhat smaller than the others. It’s not like we are baking bread for Sean Connery or Tom Cruise or something. I would still eat them. Consider the six runts as part of my allotted ten. Good gravey! And besides, we’ll save on butter.

She grabbed another baking pan and dropped in some frozen premade dough nuggets. (I sorta remember an episode of "Little House on the Prairie" where Pa worked hard all day in the field harvesting dough balls and then gave them to Ma where she in turn froze them so that they could have bread in the winter.)

I didn’t ask, but I just assumed that my wife was going to somehow get 15 buns of proportional size so that her daughter wouldn’t think she was a total failure.

I thought about just getting up real early Thanksgiving Day and replacing the six dough balls in the new pan with six miniature marshmallows.

On the other hand, I wanted to be able to see the football game out of both eyes.

Hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving :>)
Dan Vander Ark
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