Cheddar Breakfast Bread Pudding

Now that we’re entering fingerless-glove weather, I find myself craving The Hot Breakfast. Usually, I can sneak out the door on a cracker and be fine until I dip into my cheese valise at lunch, but when the wind kicks up, I want a heavy belly when I board the train. I’ll take oatmeal, groats, gruel – but what I really love is breakfast bread pudding.

Once you discover this use for stale baguette, you will dream of this dish in your blackest sleep. I am the sort of person who falls asleep by thinking about future meals, and this is one recipe that I use in place of Ambien – if I think about making this, I fall asleep quickly just so I can get up to eat it.

Breakfast bread pudding is similar to strata, but it’s less eggy and you don’t have to prepare it the night before, though you could. It takes about 30 minutes to bake, which is all the time you need to shower, walk the dog, and pack a lunch.

Although the recipe below calls for sundried tomatoes (I used some that I’d oven-roasted), you can really use any tidbits rattling around in your crisper – leftover roasted veggies, scraps of bacon, some chopped onion. On a whim, I tossed in kielbasa. Boom. Delish. The result is custardy and fluffy with just a little crunch from the toasty bits on top.

~

Cheddar Breakfast Bread Pudding

Serves: 2

4 eggs

1 cup whole milk 

2/3 cup cheddar, cubed or grated (I used Quickes Clothbound Cheddar)

6 thickly sliced baguette rounds, preferably stale

½ cup cherry tomatoes, halved; or sun-dried

½ cup kielbasa, bacon, or chopped ham (optional)

Fresh herbs, such as basil or chives

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease two oven-proof ramekins with a pat of butter or a little oil. You can skip this step, but the ramekins will be a little tough to clean.

2. Cube or shred baguette rounds, and divide them between the two ramekins. Tuck cheese, tomatoes, and kielbasa into the bread, leaving plenty of crannies.

3. Mix together eggs and milk in a tall measuring cup, then pour over the bread mixture in each ramekin.

4. Fill a casserole pan half full of water, then set the ramekins into this cozy water bath. Pop the whole thing into the oven, and bake for 30 minutes, or until a fork comes out clean and the puddings are nicely browned. Top with fresh herbs. Devour.

Bread Puddings are baked in a water bath. Easy peezy.

Note: These are best right out of the oven. If you're making these for yourself, store the extra one -- unbaked -- in your fridge, and bake it up fresh the next morning.

Bitter Greens, Eggs, and Cheese

Here is my idea of a perfect breakfast: sautéed mustard greens with bacon, a poached egg, and a nice dusting of Parmigiano. This combination is like Feng Shui for Sunday morning. You’ve got your bitter, your salty, your sweet; and texture-wise, you’ve got crispy meets soft meets damp-leafy.

C’est harmony.

Dandelion greens or chard also work in this recipe. Don’t be afraid to add a few red pepper flakes if you want to create some heat. Word has it that bitter greens are good for you during a change of seasons. They tonify the liver, so says my Chinese herbalist. I find them very cleansing the morning after, oh, a Manhattan and an enormous cheese plate.

Mustard Greens w/ Poached Egg & Parm

1 bunch leafy greens (about 3 packed cups, chopped)

4 strips bacon

1 Tbsp. vinegar (Balsamic works well)

1 small purple onion, chopped

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 egg

Grated Parm or Grana Padano

Fry up the bacon, and reserve a teaspoon or two of bacon grease in your skillet for sautéing. On medium heat, soften the onion and garlic in the bacon grease. When the onions are translucent, add the chopped greens. While the greens cook, simmer a saucepan of water and crack your egg into a cereal bowl. Add a teaspoon of any old vinegar to the hot water – this will prevent the egg whites from fanning out into an octopus. Gently slide the raw egg into the hot water and let simmer 3 minutes or less.

When the greens are good and wilted, sprinkle them with a Tablespoon of good vinegar, add some crumbled bacon, and give them a final stir. Then arrange them on a plate, top them with your poached egg, and add a few cranks of pepper and as much grated Parm as you can handle. The sweetness of this cheese goes perfectly with the other flavors.

Birchrun Blue

Okay, so I know what you’re wondering, luvs: what kind of blue cheese should I eat for breakfast?  Oh come on, you drink black coffee to snap your eyes open, why not add a jolt of blue cheese, occasionally?!  I already told you about the nighttime cheesecap, so good with a cucumber martini – it only seems right to dispel today’s gray skies with my new fave on an English Muffin.  With some fig jam and a pot of lavender Earl Gray, this combination makes Mme. Fromage very happy.  Maybe one day, she will host a blue cheese tea party.

What makes this a good blue for breakfast?  Ahhh, let me count the ways.

1.     It’s creamy and spreadable.  Let it sit a spell so that it softens up while you boil your tea.

2.     It opens like a meadow on your tongue, then becomes salty and almost floral.  There’s a gentle finish – no biteyness, whatsoever. 

3.     It goes well with jam.  I bet a rose petal jelly would be nifty.  Fig is a little heavy, but one has to make sacrifices.

4.     It’s cozy.  

Birchrun Blue comes out of a small farm in Chester Springs, Pa., Birchrun Hills Farm, that only produces two kinds of cheese, this one and a gruyere-style.  This is a raw milk beauty with a gorgeous, reptilian rind and a faint speckling of blue color.  I’m learning an awful lot about blue cheese these days, including how the mold (Penicillium roqueforti) gets into the mix – often by inserting long skewers into the ripening cheese.  In the early days of Roquefort, farmers stored bread in damp caves to create mold, then grated the moldy bread into vats of curds.  Mmmm, sexy.

If you follow news of the fromagiosphere, then you've probably heard that roquefort, the original French cave-aged blue, is likely to become obsolete in the States, or at least very pricey.  Yesterday the BBC ran a story about the 300% tariff increase, and Our Lady of Wisco Cheeses at Cheese Underground offered a post about it -- it also includes her blue cheese love- list.  The tariff goes into effect April 23, so get out your blue veils.

Today’s breakfast comes with a toast to Albert over at the Fair Food Farm Stand, who gave me a nibble of Birchrun yesterday a.m. (this is his “second favorite blue”) as I was passing by his stand on my way to work.  That means I’ve officially had blue cheese for breakfast twice now, and given the amount of cheese in my crisper, I think this will become a sneaky habit.