Weekend Rehash and Bread Pudding Ice Cream

We admit it. After last week we're kinda sick of ham and reached our saturation point with our delicious but waaayyy too plentiful braided baked challah. Still, being loath to toss out any viable leftovers, we decided this weekend's cooking projects should be all about respite and reformatting.

Hence, a Friday night meal of hard-fried leftover Cheerwine ham with freshly-grated parmesan, egg and black pepper over radiatore (crinkly-shaped) pasta for a makeshift carbonara, and finally (for the sake of our sanity and marriage) a furlough in another part of the barnyard. Saturday night's chicken rubbed all over with a lazy pesto -- basil, garlic, lemon juice and olive oil whirred through the food processor -- was delectable straight from the oven. Somehow it was even more satisfying with the leftovers, bones and giblets cooked down for an herbed-up chicken soup with radiatore a day later.

We trotted back to the pig pen with smoked ribs slathered in mustard on Sunday, but that was just to keep us from making an all-day gobblefest of our challah bread pudding buttermilk ice cream. See, our challah recipe (we like Flickr user mollyali's recipe, pictured above) yields two big braids, and though we foist some on friends and flip up plenty of French toast throughout the week, inevitably a portion goes stale, and we were taught not to waste. Bread pudding seemed a simple solution, but we'd had a cup or ten of caffeine by that point and an awful lot of buttermilk on hand from the ongoing Biscuit Mission. So we got to cranking up some ice cream.

Get the recipe after the jump and use the comments to let us know if ramps are up yet where you are, whether you busted out the grill, or tell us whatever else you rustled up this weekend.
Buttermilk Bread Pudding Ice Cream

For the bread pudding:

1 loaf challah bread, stale
1 1/2 cups milk
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
1/2 cup brown sugar
3 egg yolks
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
Cooked or canned fruit of your choice (we used canned apricots)
1/3 cup Jamaican rum

Slice the bread into 1-inch chunks and spread in a layer in a baking pan. Pour in the milk and buttermilk and allow the bread to soak for four hours, or overnight.

Preheat oven to 350 F.

In a bowl, thoroughly combine sugar, egg yolks, salt, vanilla and fruit. Pour the mixture over the bread and stir to distribute evenly. Bake for 30 minutes, remove from the oven and sprinkle the rum evenly over the surface until it begins to soak in. Return to the oven and bake for an additional 15 minutes.

Remove pan from the oven and let it cool. Once it has, cut bread into bite-sized cubes.

For the ice cream:

4 egg yolks
1/2 cup sugar
2 cups heavy cream
1 1/2 cups buttermilk

Whisk together egg yolks and sugar until thoroughly mixed. In a saucepan, heat heavy cream and one cup of the buttermilk to 150 F. Pour a thin stream of this cooked cream mixture into the egg, stirring until the ingredients are thoroughly incorporated. Chill the custard for four hours or until very cold, but not frozen.

Once it's chilled, stir in the rest of the buttermilk, pour the custard into an ice cream maker* and mix until very thick. Turn off machine and gently fold in bread pudding. Spoon custard into a container with a tight-fitting lid. If there is a gap between the custard and the lid, press a sheet of plastic wrap against the surface of the mixture to prevent ice crystals from forming.

Remove ice cream from the freezer 10 minutes before serving.

*If you don't have an ice-cream maker either place the bowl in the freezer and remove every half hour to beat with a whisk or electric immersion blender OR pour the mixture into a 1-pound coffee can and seal it tightly. Place that can into a 3-pound coffee can, layer ice and rock salt around it and seal that tightly as well. Roll the large can between your feet or between two people for 10-15 minutes. Then open the can, take the smaller can out, clean it off, unseal, and stir the contents. Reseal the can, pack it into the larger can, place in more ice and rock salt and repeat the process until the mixture is semi frozen. Pour it into a fresh container and place in the freezer until it reaches desired solidity.