OOPS...supper
We forgot to take food out of the freezer for supper tonight. I was planning on doing Chicken Marsala.
We have options.
A) You go to the store. Buy a bunch of their cheap chicken. Potentially grab other items on shopping list. Also buy fresh mushrooms because I didn’t differentiate on the list when you went last week and we needed both fresh & canned. I start cooking when I get home. http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/emeril-lagasse/chicken-marsala-recipe/index.html Here’s the recipe. It’s easy.
B) Eat out. ?? We have the BOGO from Pei Wei, I think.
C) You thaw out the sausage from the freezer when you get home & we do breakfast for supper tonight with the French toast/bread pudding & it just doesn’t get as much time to soak in the pan.
Love yoU!
He declared -breakfast for supper-. We had received a bunch of day-old/must-sell-by-x-date stuff from one of the local grocery stores at church. I had a loaf of delicious-looking, but fairly stale, caramel-apple-cinnamon bread. I decided I'd make a baked French toast/bread pudding. I've got a couple of recipes I had worked with before, so I had an idea of how to modify and use up what was in the fridge.
Emeril's blueberry french toast is great, but let's be real, it's a dessert. Holy cow! And I use this overnight French toast recipe all the time from Real Food for Healthy Kids, but I was making do and using what was on hand.
So, I cut the loaf into chunks, and tossed 'em in a 9x13" baking dish. Took out a mixing bowl and poured in what was most of a pint of half&half (any sort of dairy-type liquid would work fine) and cracked about seven eggs. I liberally shook on some ground cinnamon and grated a bunch of fresh nutmeg into the milk & eggs and then beat them with a wire whisk.
I pulled about 4-5 medium apples out of the fridge, quartered & cored them, and then chopped into bite-sized pieces. I spread all the apples on top of the bread chunks and then poured the milk/egg mix evenly over the pan, pushing down on the bread to get it to soak up as much as I could.
So, I dropped some little spoonfuls of brown sugar over the mix to enhance the 'caramel-apple' feel. This baby went in the oven at 350.
In the meantime, I cooked up some sausage we'd thought out quick in the sink and a fried all for all interested parties. I tried a 1/2 hour on the French toast, but that didn't seem long enough, so I tried the broiler to cook the eggy parts and brown the tops. It helped, but still not done. We had to leave for wrestling. I was going to watch, as it's the only night I could attend.
What to do?! I put the oven as low as it could go (170) and left it in. We all ate our eggs & sausage and loaded up. We got home and the kitchen smelled AMAZING!! Everyone had a bowl of our French toast/bread pudding. The Big Kid had seconds. The Sassy One ate without whining for help. I even put some apple & bread chunks in a Munchkin food-net thingy and Tiny Little Cashew went to town.
This was definitely leftovers-lunch for tomorrow.
Notes:
If you don't have stale bread and you do have the time, leave it out for a day or so (overnight, even). The dryness of it will help soak up the custard (i.e. egg & milk mix) better and you'll have less goo in the pan. -That's a technical term, goo.
Any bread - whole wheat, raisin, cinnamon swirl, will work. Adjust for what you have, what's on sale, or what you like.
Mix up the fruit topping and/or whatever else you want to throw in.
As in the inspiration recipes, you could absolutely make this ahead and get a more custardy result or have it ready to throw in the oven for any meal.
You don't HAVE to cut up the bread if you want whole slices.
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