Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you that today is the last day of I Require Sustenance as a regular feature. For a few months now, every Wednesday, I’ve brought you a real recipe and my attempt to cook it, and I’m sure we’ve had a lot of fun. But now the time has come, as it always does, for the fun to end. I Require Sustenance will stay on as an irregular feature here on mikeschramm.com, but will no longer be seen every Wednesday. Circumstances which are too complicated to explain (I was getting bored of it) have made this so.

Please enjoy the last regular I Require Sustenance.

We’ll end I Require Sustenance where we began it: with bread. The first kind, where I started, is the more complex type of bread– you use yeast to make it, and the bread has to be allowed to leaven and rise. But the other kind doesn’t require yeast, and is much easier and faster to make. For this reason, it’s usually called quickbread. Actually, waffles and pancakes are versions of this– usually you just mix flour, milk, and eggs together and bake for a certain amount of time. Milk and Honey Bread is a sweeter version of this, more like a really sweet banana bread, best used for breakfasts– it’s pretty rich. You may actually want to put in honey to taste– I put in the whole 1/2 cup and the bread turned out really, really sweet. We’ll need:

1 cup milk
1/2 cup honey (or to taste)
3 tblsp. butter
1 1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup sugar
3 teas. baking powder
1 teas. salt
1 egg, beaten

I’m pretty proud of the fact that after having done this for a good three months now, this is the first recipe that I didn’t have to buy anything for– I actually had everything sitting around my kitchen.

First things first, you’ll want to preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Then, start by mixing the honey and milk in a saucepan, and cook it at medium heat until the honey melts. You’ll end up with a sweet smelling mixture with a consistency somewhere between honey and milk. Add and melt the butter, and then turn the heat off and let the mixture cool.

Then, mix up the dry ingredients. I mixed the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt into a large mixing bowl and mixed it up pretty well. Beat the egg, and have it ready to go as well.

Once the milk has cooled, I combined the egg in with the milk, and then slowly mixed that mixture into the dry one. The original recipe that I had said to beat the whole thing for a minute or two– again, no beater in my kitchen, so I just grabbed a big spoon and churned it all together for a few minutes. Eventually (surprise) I had a dough like mixture.

Which I poured into a greased loaf pan. This is a pretty small recipe, and it won’t rise, so it shouldn’t fill more than half the pan or so. Stick that thing in the oven and let it bake. I went back into my room and watched a little Sealab 2021. That’s great stuff.

The original recipe I read said to bake 65-75 minutes, but by the time my timer said 50 minutes, I smelled the thing cooking, opened up the oven, and found it was almost burned around the outside. I pulled it out and saved it in time– I would say, depending on the oven, you should probably check it at 45 and only let it go to 60 if you need to. The general rule in the recipe said to poke it with a toothpick in the middle and see if it comes out clean– if it does, it’s done. I didn’t have a toothpick, so I just stuck my whole finger in. No, just kidding, I stuck a knife in, and it came out clean, so I assumed it was done.

Let it cool, then take it out of the loaf pan and let it cool some more. Voila, you’ve got a bready ticket to the land of milk and honey!

Man, I know– that was bad. I ended this column none too soon.

I Require Sustenance is over and done, but used to run every Wednesday at mikeschramm.com. If you wanted to submit a recipe or be a guest chef, that’s too freaking bad. You missed your chance. Oh, all right, fine. I’ll make an exception just this one time. I can’t stay mad at you!