The husband does the grocery shopping.

We are having dinner guests over tonight for a dinner of homemade hummus, yellow chicken curry, and for the finale, a pineapple coconut bread pudding. I did the majority of the grocery shopping on Sunday so I could concoct the curry ahead and let the flavors marinate and intensify for a few days, but I wanted to wait to buy the bread until the night before so it could dry out, but not get too dry.

So, in true good husband fashion, Sam generously offered to go to the store while I attended my beginners sewing class. What a sweetie! I carefully explained what I needed, mainly 3/4 pound bread and a small container of half and half, and he agreed to pick it all up. Well, at least I THOUGHT I carefully explained what I needed.

I came home from my class last night ready to whip up the dessert, and saw looming on the counter two enormous bags of bread cubes ready for pudding. "Wow," I thought, "3/4 pounds is a ton of bread." The task of mixing all that bread into one dessert seemed daunting. In fact, eyeballing the quantity of bread, I couldn't for the life of me figure out how the recipe expected to fit all that bread into one 9x13 baking pan. So, with the daunting task of mixing all that bread into dessert, I did what any normal gal would do and put off making the pudding. Instead, I laid the bread out to dry, hoping some of the volume would decrease with the loss of moisture.

As I was spreading the bread out in bowls (three of my biggest mixing bowls, mind you, because 3/4 pounds bread cubes is A LOT of bread), something clicked and I realized that something was not quite right. I casually asked Sam exactly how much bread he bought.

"I bought four pounds of bread, just like you asked for," he replied proudly, "It took the baker about ten minutes to cube it all, I hope it's what you need." Whoa there, four POUNDS of bread?!?!? I just stood there for a moment, wondering what to do. Did I tell him he bought to much, and risk hurting his feelings after he did such a good deed? Or should I come up with stealth ditch-the-extra-bread plan to preserve the warm fuzzy feeling he had for doing me a favor. An image of myself cloaked in black - Zorro style - sneaking out to feed the ducks at midnight flashed through my mind, but after a quick assessment of my options, I realized there was no way I could hide the excess bread from him to cover the mistake. So instead I grabbed the recipe and showed him the line that says 3/4 pounds bread.

We laughed until we cried, marveling at the fact that he heard me say three or four pounds of bread, when I heard myself say three fourths pounds of bread. We laughed and laughed, then we immediately hit the internet for recipes for other bread puddings. Looks like this week we will also be enjoying a savory mushroom and goat cheese bread pudding, as well as a whimsical PB&J bread pudding. Ha, reviews of our efforts to follow.