bread pudding

I meant to make a pumpkin bread pudding the other day, but it turned out I didn't have canned pumpkin in the house. I always have canned pumpkin--I buy it up in the fall when it appears in stores, and shelve it. It's always there--just as there are always cranberries in the freezer, bought up against some future shortage. Apparently I slipped up last year and didn't lay in quite the pumpkin supply I had expected. So, chocolate bread pudding instead, and it was pretty tasty, I have to say. This is not a dessert I grew up on -- or, if it is, I have somehow forgotten it. But it's certainly one I'll repeat while the days are cold and damp and it's a comfort to have the oven on. Easy, delicious, and thrifty--what more could you want?

Here's what I did:

Dug in the freezer for the half-baguette I knew was in there. It was. Pretty stale, and not very big, but there nonetheless. I let it sit out a while to thaw, then broke it into chunks and dropped them into my 3-quart (or so) casserole. That didn't look like enough bread, and Mark had brought some big sub rolls back from his camping trip with Nick, so I ripped one of them up and put it in there, too.

Then I melted half a stick of butter in the microwave. Most bread pudding recipes seem to want you to butter the bread, but I didn't see that happening with the chunks I'd just thrown in the casserole. So I broke three (well, really, two, but that wasn't enough and I added another one later) eggs into the same container with the butter, then added three cups of milk, and whisked it all together. Oh, with about half a cup of brown sugar and a teaspoon or more of vanilla. It was a big container--a one-quart pyrex measuring cup, as a matter of fact. I probably should have mentioned that earlier.

So then I poured all that nice stuff over the bread and let it sit there for a while as the oven preheated to 350. (What really happened is I had only two eggs and two cups of milk and the bread absorbed it all, so I added another one of each and it looked much better. But you can skip that step.) Just before I put it in the oven I threw a handful of chocolate chunks into the casserole as well, trying to push most of them down under the bread/milk mush. At this point I was pretty skeptical, I have to say. It looked like strata. In fact, of course, it was strata, with sweet instead of savory fixings. Who knew?

Then I baked it for about 40 minutes. Towards the end I turned the heat up a bit to brown the top.

While the pudding baked, I made a caramel sauce by melting a stick of butter in a pan with a cup of brown sugar, then whisking in half a cup of cream when it was all melty looking. I poured half the sauce over the hot pudding and let it soak in before we ate it--and if I make this again I'll probably only make half a recipe of sauce, since I don't have any vanilla ice cream to pour the sauce over. But that's easily fixed, of course.