"bread pudding" news and stories

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.

By the time you lug yourself out of bed at 11 a.m. on a Sunday, do you really want to spend another 30 minutes prepping brunch before you start cooking? Try using make-ahead brunch recipes for an even more relaxing weekend morning.

I love cooking on Sunday morning. Sunday is usually the one day of the week I can do whatever I want, so they're pretty laid back and slow. It's only been a recent discovery that I enjoy cooking on my one easy day of the week, as opposed to a bowl of cereal, but I'm glad I finally did come to that realization.

Some of you may remember a post from earlier this week about Nazuki, a spice bread from Georgia. Well, everyone's been pretty busy this week, so the second loaf was starting to go stale. Of course one of the best ways to use up stale bread is a nice bread pudding, and that's what I made for my Sunday morning. My first thought was to make a savory bread pudding with some tomatoes that I need to use up, but I just couldn't see using a sweet bread in a savory dish. The flavors wouldn' mesh.

After breifly flirting with making French toast instead, I mixed up some milk and eggs with some cinnamon and brown sugar, then pourd it over the crumbled Nazuki in a baking dish. The bread pudding didn't take very long to bake, and it was delicious when it was done. It was a sweet dish, but not any more so than French toast and less so than sweet syrup on pancakes. If you don't have any Nazuki on hand, I bet this would be great with cinnamon raisin bread. The recipe is after the jump.

I never ate bread pudding while I was growing up. I remember hearing about it once on a cooking show and going to ask my mom what it was. The way she described it made it sound like unappealing, dried up bits of bread in lumpy pudding and so I put it out of my mind. Fast forward to years later when I was out to eat and a friend ordered the chocolate bread pudding. When it arrived, it looked and smelled amazing. My friend noticed my fascination and offered me a bite. From that moment on, I was a convert.

Over at Hogwash, Jess has also spent years having a shaky relationship with bread pudding. However, it looks like things are changing for her now that she's made a batch of the stuff with the stale leftovers from a loaf of Honey Orange bread. She is still struggling with the name bread pudding and so has taken to calling her batch French Toast Pie. She can call it whatever she wants, as long as she's willing to share!

Source

I used to hate bread pudding. It was just a bored, budget-minded housewife's way of passing off stale bread as dessert. Then I met a bread pudding that changed my mind and ever since, I've been a big fan. Huge.

But bread pudding isn't just for dessert, as per Heidi Swanson of 101 Cookbooks, who made a savory bread pudding using Spring's springy-est of vegetables, asparagus. Heidi used a mix of sourdough and walnut breads, and though recipes for bread pudding usually say "stale" bread, that doesn't give you license to use rock hard bread that you bought two weeks ago. Use bread that you've let dry overnight, or as Heidi did, left out for a day or two.