That is a picture of a bread bowl.  The biggest bread bowl I’ve ever seen.  Here’s the Great Bread Bowl story.

My son and now daughter in law were married in a handfasting ceremony, with a lot of old concepts fitting with a handfasting incorporated.  One was that they wanted bread bowls as part of the meal, and 3 good types of soup were served in the bowls.  The caterer had never made bread bowls before, but worked the process out and they were great.

The caterers are fun people who did an excellent job. They thought it would be fun to have a huge bread bowl, so they baked this one using a huge metal salad bowl as the form to hold the shape.  Then they served the salad in the metal bowl, with the bread bowl around it. Everybody at the dinner thought it was so much fun and what a nice idea.  I had my eye on it as soon as I thought about a possibility for it………

After the dinner I asked the caterer what was to become of the bread bowl.  He said they would throw it away, since it had been handled without gloves, etc, and wasn’t good to eat now.  So, I said: not fit to eat, unless you’re a squirrel! (We feed birds and squirrels around here, any starchy product that isn’t any longer good for humans.  Even meat scraps etc go out for the creatures of the night.  Nothing of any food value goes into land fills here, cos animals eat too.)

So the caterer said I should take it, which I did, and put it in my car.

I really wanted to put it on the patio in one piece and watch some animals’ eyes pop when they saw such a huge chunk of food. But at home, it was raining and was going to be for several more days.  I didn’t want the thing getting wet and turning into a huge sloppy mess I’d have to scrape off the patio blocks.  So I tore it in half and then one half into two pieces.

I put 1/4 out there and for several hours, no animal came near it.  They didn’t recognize that huge thing as food at first.  Then some starlings discovered it was good to eat, and the fun started.  Several times the first couple days I had to move it onto the covered back porch so it wouldn’t get wet, and they came up on the porch to eat from this feast that was so much bigger than them.

After it stopped raining every day, more animals found it: squirrels, crows, sparrows, blue jays  and lots of starlings. The first 1/4 went away and I put out another 1/4 piece. That got whittled away pretty quick too.

The other day I put out the whole other half, cos the rain is just sprinkles now and then, and all these animals here are having a ball with this huge piece of food. It’s already much smaller than it was. Everybody eats, and I couldn’t imagine that big chunk of stuff being throw away when hungry animals would have a dream come true: such a big chunk of good stuff.  I like my animals, and this is fun.  There will never be another treat for them like this one. Humans can have fun with lots of things if they look for the fun in things, and I do.

So my son and daughter in law had planned a wonderful ceremony and a wonderful meal for everybody who attended.  Little did anybody know that “somebody” would still be enjoying that meal over a week later.  It’s all good.

And here it is, just three days later………..