Yesterday I made rice pudding. We had an extra pan of rice we never got around to using for a meal, rice that was a bit crusty on the top. We had milk and cream that were just past their pull dates, but not spoiled. We had enough eggs, surely a metaphor for abundance in these days of avian flu. I even had real vanilla extract to spare, another metaphor for abundance.
I tasted the custard and thought it tasted odd. Could the milk and cream be closer to spoiled than I thought? Did the extract add a metallic alcohol taste, an astringency?
I put the pan in the oven, hoping it would taste better when warm. After 15 minutes, I stirred it and tasted it again, and that's when I realized--I hadn't put in sugar.
Happily, it was easily fixed. I pulled the pan out of the oven, sprinkled sugar over it, stirred it again, and tasted it. Finally, the taste I wanted!
The rice pudding is one of the best I've ever made, and I'm sure that a large part of that is the added milk fat. I more often make rice pudding with skim milk, which is not a metaphor for abundance.
I have all these metaphors. Now to compose a poem that goes a bit deeper than these surface level significances.
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