Savory Sausage Bread Pudding

Seeing as I love things that are starchy and eggy and substantial, bread pudding is a no brainer. Rice pudding, for that matter, is also a long-time favorite of mine. Both can be eaten with lots of cinnamon and are uniformly palatable anywhere along the hot to cold spectrum. I was introduced to the universe of a savory bread pudding by Heidi of 101 Cookbooks with her recipe for Asparagus Bread Pudding and have made it several times over the last year. I love Heidi's website, and I enjoy the way she talks about cooking and living in San Francisco, but it drives me slightly crazy that all the recipes she posts involve three or more ingredients that not only do I not keep stocked in my (fairly extensive!) pantry, but would require a trip to a specialty grocery store to acquire. It might be a personal shortcoming of mine that I don't have 6 different obscure colors of rice in my cupboard, but I just don't. Because of this, I've enjoyed every recipe I've pulled off her site and recreated at home, but I can count the number of times I've done so on one hand.

Bread Pudding is a good thing to make when you buy those delicious two loaves of crusty French Bread at Costco every single time you shop there, even though you know there's no way you can eat both of them before they go stale. I'm not great at learning from experience; I usually make it 2/3rds of the way through one loaf before the outside becomes rock hard. With over a loaf of bread to use up in a short period of time, Heidi's recipe came immediately to mind, but not only did I not have asparagus, but asparagus falls into the category of vegetables that my boyfriend will not eat. What I did have lying around however, was delicious homemade sausage from Idaho. A little clicking around the internets landed me on this recipe from Cooking Light which I used as a basis for my dish. The awesome thing about improvising off an already "lowfat" recipe is that instead of my standard substitutions (less oil and butter, low/nonfat milk instead of whole, etc.), I don't feel naughty adding more delicious things to the basic recipe. For example, in this recipe, I probably used two or three times as much cheese as I was directed to, but overall it was less than three cups, so whatever.

My Sausage Bread Pudding started by browning about a pound of amazing Idaho sausage in a pan over medium heat. I chopped one and a half Granny Smith apples into bitty pieces and added that and one chopped white onion to the sausage, covered the pan to keep all that good vegetable sweat in, and cooked that on low for 10 or 15 minutes until the onions were translucent. In a big ole mixing bowl I whisked together 2 cups of milk and 4 eggs, grated some cheddar cheese in there, and salted and peppered the wet ingredients. Carefully, with your serated knife, cube the stale bread into pieces about an inch to half inch square. With this bread, I found it was easier to slice the bread a half inch thick and just rip the slices in to little pieces. There's no need to make this part pretty or uniform. Throw your bread cubes into the wet ingredients, add your sausage mixture to the bowl and stir until everything is wet. I added some extra milk and one or two more eggs during this step, because you want all the bread to be moist. Let the mixture sit for at least 10 minutes, and pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees.

Spray a 9x12 baking dish with Pam and dump in your yummy soggy concoction. Now is the fun part: I grated three different kinds of cheese on top. For some reason, I had a ton of cheese in the fridge last week, so I just went nuts. Cheddar, mozerella, and parmesan, all yummy and sprinkled on top of the pudding like a generous coat of freshly fallen snow. Cook on the center rack for 45 or 60 minutes until your pudding is fluffy and set and the cheese is bubbly and browned. Remove the pudding from the oven and let it rest for 15 minutes before serving.

I ate this plain for dinner the night I made it, but when I packed it in tuppers for lunch on the subsequent days, I put a good sized square of pudding and then stuffed the rest of the space with fresh spinach. Two minutes in the microwave to warm up the pudding is the exact right time to steam the spinach and get some extra iron and vitamins into your meal. Obviously, Cody's lunch portions did not include the extra vegetation, but he concurred that it was especially delicious the next day.

Last week, because I am possibly a creep who reads too many blogs, I made a recipe from Emily Gould's "famous secret blog" Heartbreak Soup. (I'm not going to get into it, because that's weird, but Team Emily, duh.) I know that the saga is over-exposed and that she got a lot of flack for the extremely long and confessional story she wrote for The New York Times magazine, but I thought it was fascinating and well crafted. Also, I adore a good overwrought food metaphor, and girlfriend is full of them. I deeply understand the impulse to connect what you eat and what you feel in a personal and convoluted way, because it appeals to my passive aggressive desire to communicate in symbolism rather than words. I also like talking about cooking in a way that is experiential and non-technical, because that is how I operate in the kitchen.

I followed Emily's recipe for chicken soup pretty closely, whole bird and all, except I went running while the delicious ginger broth was simmering instead of doing my laundry. Also, I subbed out some vegetables and added fresh carrots and celery and noodles to the strained broth before shredding and reincorporating the chicken meat. I added so much stuff during that last step that by the end the soup was so thick that I couldn't effectively skim the frothy fat off the top, which made delicious soup, because, man, there was a lot of olive oil in there. I loved the ginger in the broth and I made the soup Tuesday night and ate the very last of it for dinner on Friday, which was noteworthy because I hardly ever like a soup recipe so much that Cody and I don't need to freeze at least a few tuppers of it for later.

Chicken soup last week seemed frivolous and wasted on the healthy by this recent Monday night, however, when I truly was deathly ill with something evil tight in my sinuses and rough in the back of my throat. I reprised the chicken base of this soup to make myself some comfort food, Avgolemeno soup. Too sick to feel like stopping at the grocery store on the way home from work, I just used frozen chicken breasts. I didn't even defrost the chicken before browning it in a little olive oil and five cloves of garlic, and then dumping in four carrots, half a bunch of wilted celery, a chopped shallot, a quarter of a red onion, and two bouillon cubes, covering everything in water and letting the mixture simmer for an hour while slumping on the couch and watching my DVRed episodes of "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" and sending Cody out for a lemon for the next step of the soup. Think about how this television show would be much cooler if they actually sang more than one Sound of Music song per episode.

After your mixture on the stove is brothy, 1-3 hours, remove the chicken and strain out the vegetables. Say thank you to the vegetables because you are sick and talking to inanimate objects, and put them in your yard waste bucket. Return the broth to your stove and turn the heat to medium high. Add 1 cup rice. While the rice is cooking, shred the chicken breasts with your hands into little bite sized pieces. Juice one lemon into a medium sized mixing bowl and use the microplane grater gifted to you by your best friend to grate a few teaspoons of zest into the lemon juice. Whisk four eggs and a teaspoon of flour into the lemon juice until everything is frothy. Return the chicken to the broth and wait for the rice to soften(approximately 15 minutes). While you are waiting for the rice to be ready, you can dramatically fling yourself onto the couch or the floor to make a point about how sickly you are feeling, because now Cody is back from the store and ready to be impressed by the severity of your discomfort. You can also adjust the seasoning of the broth with salt and pepper.

Next is the tricky part: temper the egg mixture. Scoop a cup of simmering broth out of your soup pot with a measuring cup and pour very slowly it into the egg bowl while quickly whisking with your other hand. This warms up the eggs so that they will not scramble when introduced to the hot broth. Take your whisk and the tempered eggs and pour that mixture slowly into your broth on the stove, whisking the soup in the big pot. At this point, the soup will turn from a brothy color to an opaque creamy white. Continue to stir the soup with your whisk for three to four minutes while everything gets thick and yummy. It is not necessary to bring the soup to a boil.

Once your soup is done you can serve in a big bowl with a piece of toast. I also recommend watching all those episodes of Battlestar Galactica that you've been missing because you've been out town every weekend for the past month, which is probably the reason you're exhausted and got sick in the first place. If you're lucky, when your boyfriend went to buy the lemon for the soup, he will have also bought two single serving pieces of red velvet cake, which is the perfect dessert to almost any meal, but especially Avgolememo Soup.

After all this is consumed, take a big glug of NyQuil. Be sure to put the extra soup in the fridge before the NyQuil step, because I'm pretty sure that what the apothecary gave Juliet was actually NyQuil, and you will undoubtedly pass out approximately 34 seconds after the sweet potion passes your lips.

Today, a little more than a month shy of our four year anniversary, Cody told Facebook that he is "in a relationship" with me.

The internet is weird.