Tag Archives: food

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French Toast Fridays

I can’t remember exactly when this started, but sometime in the last 6 months or so, every Friday has become “French toast Friday.” It’s easy to whip up fairly quickly, and it makes Fridays seem a little celebratory.

Last night, I decided to play around and do a little prep ahead of time. This is what I ended up making:

ImageIt’s sort of a cross between bread pudding and French toast. I’ve been obsessed with cardamom lately, and I wanted to include that in the breakfast, so this little baby was born.

If you want to replicate this, here are some general guidelines. I’m not much of a measurer when it comes to cooking, so this is my best guess about the quantities:

The dish holds slightly more than 3 cups of liquid and is oven safe. If you have a larger dish, bread puddings in general seem flexible enough to alter ingredients to suit any size dish, so you could add an egg or two, use more bread, and increase the liquid to fill your dish.

Cardamom French Toast Bread Pudding

6 slices whole wheat bread (about 2 cups when cut into 1″ pieces)

3 eggs

1/2 cup half and half

1 cup whole milk

1/4 cup agave

3 tsp cardamom

2 TBS turbinado sugar (raw sugar)

Cut bread into 1″ cubes and place in dish. With hand mixer or immersion blender or by hand, mix half and half, milk, eggs, agave, and cardamom until smooth. Pour over bread cubes. Sprinkle raw sugar on top. Leave in refrigerator overnight, or at least for several hours. Bake at 350 for about 45 minutes, or until it slightly wiggles, but a knife poked into the center comes out clean.

If you’re feeling really decadent, you can also make an optional blood orange icing to go on top. I’m sure any orange would be delicious, but I happened to have one little lonely blood orange on hand that wanted to be involved.

french toast friday-2For the icing I used 2TBS of butter, 1.5 TBS juice from the blood orange, and about 1/2 cup powdered sugar. I melted the butter, added juice and sugar, and stirred till smooth. Drizzle over the bread pudding and enjoy.

Hope you have a lovely Friday!

*Edited to add agave

 

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Monday fun with a springform pan.

I recently bought a new cookbook. Most of the time I experiment or use recipes from the internet, since sites like Epicurious rock my world with all of their free and gorgeous recipes. I saw this cookbook in my local bookstore last year, and have been drooling over it ever since. I finally broke down and bought it as an ebook. It’s called Radically Simple: Brilliant Flavors with Breathtaking Ease. Today I made two recipes from it.

This is my version of the Rutabaga, Crème Fraîche, and Havarti Torte. I actually used items from our local CSA (community sponsored agriculture) membership since I didn’t have rutabagas on hand. I used turnips, radishes, and red potatoes. I used mild goat milk cheddar, and instead of the crème fraîche I made my own sauce by reducing heavy whipping cream and sautéing garlic. Sooooo…while not exactly the recipe in the book, it was inspired by it, and I used their baking instructions. I’m experimental like that.

Do you like cheese?

This did not stay together as well as the version in the cookbook, since I radically altered it and used much smaller vegetables. Thus, I do not have an on-the-plate action shot. It was delicious, so that’s really all that matters. If I make it again with these smaller vegetables I will likely just use an 8×8 pan.

Since the kitchen was already warmed up on this hot, hot day, I figured I should just keep going. I happened to have all of the ingredients on hand for the French Yogurt Cake with Nutella. This I made exactly to Rozanne Gold’s expectations.

This too did not fail to impress my taste buds. I heartily recommend buying this cookbook if you want delectable recipes and gorgeous photographs to go along with many of them. The book is really reasonable as an ebook (under $16 for 325 recipes). If you do buy it as an ebook, I recommend Google Play’s version over Amazon. For some inexplicable reason, the Amazon version does not come with color photos. I asked them for a refund. You want to see these food pictures in color.

My Honeybee Cardigan is blocking, and will be photographed soon. Happy Memorial Day!

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November Sunday Bread Pudding

Pumpkin and dark chocolate bread pudding

I don’t normally attempt to A) make sure I write recipes down or B) share them with the world, but what the heck. I love making bread pudding and I thought I would share this pumpkin-laden dish in the spirit of the pumpkin-laden upcoming holidays. We’ve been getting our vitamin A in the last week and a half with this and a large batch of pumpkin soup inspired by Knitxcore’s pumpkin soup post. So here is my recipe for Pumpkin and Dark Chocolate Bread Pudding:

Ingredients:
About 4 cups of bread cut into 1 inch cubes to fill a 9×9 baking pan. We used homemade whole grain wheat bread.
4 oz Neufchâtel cream cheese
1 cup pumpkin pie mix
1 cup half and half
3/8 cup agave
4 eggs
4 oz Ghirardelli 60% Cacao baking chocolate

Put cubed bread into 9×9 baking pan. Break chocolate bar into small chunks (or use chocolate chips) and sprinkle evenly over the bread cubes. Soften cream cheese and put it and all remaining ingredients into blender (or use hand mixer) and blend until completely mixed and smooth. Pour over bread and chocolate mix. Store in refrigerator overnight to allow bread pieces to soak up mixture. Bake at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes, or until tester inserted into the center comes out clean. Eat heartily.

We ate this with a scoop of Fage Greek yogurt to cut the sweetness. It was satisfactory. Enjoy!

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Happy Valentine’s Day!

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Shown above is my first every attempt at chocolate torte. The recipe is this one, minus the blackberry coulis because I wasn’t up for that much effort. I’ll let you know if it’s tasty. We’re going to pair it with some Rogue Chocolate Stout that I love. We’re spending v-day cooking and playing games with our neighbors. I also made stuffed mushrooms with pepperoni, cream cheese, goat cheese, gorgonzola, and parmesean. And beer cheese dip inspired by the dip at Deschutes brewery in Portland with havarti, gruyere, cream cheese, swiss, Sierra Nevada Torpedo beer, with a rim of Sierra Nevada Stone Ground Stout mustard around the edge. The neighbors made melt-in-your-mouth salmon with lime butter and a spinach salad. Yummy!

I have a looooong post in the works all about Portland and the kazillion projects I’m working on or recently finished. More to come soon.