Eat and Be Merry

Hello Friends,
While I'm flattered that Robbie mentioned in his last blog that my bread pudding was the "Best Ever," I would be in the wrong if I did not correct him. Correction: Robbie, my latest batch of bread pudding was the best ever. My first batch - the one that received the original title of Best Ever - was a basic bread pudding with chocolate chips and coconut. By default, with these two ingredients alone, it nearly reaches the pinnacle of desserts. Sadly, the recipe I used recommended I use a very large baking dish, which resulted in a short bread pudding (By short, I mean not tall. It was less than 2 inches from top to bottom.) This translated into a relatively dry dessert. Thankfully, Robbie and I have been making no-name-Jello-sugar-free-instant-puddings once or twice every day, so with flavors ranging from pistachio to butterscotch, we've complemented the dry bread pudding quite nicely. HOWEVER, the latest batch needs no friends on the plate as a complement. Using some random "Cinnamon Bread Pudding" recipe that I found online, I made the richest, moistest, most delicious bread pudding this world has ever seen. Featuring 4 1/2 cups of creamy milk, lots of tasty raisins, 14 slices of whole wheat bread, and mixed throughout with zesty cinnamon this bad boy is the tops in the dessert world! Yum.

I should point out that this latest version was created yesterday morning (Monday), and therefore was not weighing me down at the Pro Crit National Championships.

Ummm, I don't have much to say about that race; the only way I'd be happy to write all about it would be if we'd come home decked out in red, white, and blue... which didn't happen. I suppose the best part is that I thought the race itself was downright easy! The warm up race the day before saw me in an early break, but once we were swallowed up by the peloton, I hardly had enough juice left to keep going. But in Sunday's featured race, I felt like it was so danged easy that I was pedaling without a chain. So the plan next year is to find it easy and win the thing. That should be easy as pie... err, easy as bread pudding. (Good one, Teddy.)

Best Ever Bread Pudding Recipe
4 1/2 cups milk
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
3/4 cup sugar (1/2 cup if you want to eat more of the end product than you actually should)
whole bunch of raisins
1 tsp cinnamon
dozen or so slices of stale bread - you can dry out the bead in the oven at a low temperature to make your bread "stale."

Cube the bread and dump it into a greased 9x9 bakind dish with the raisins mixed in. Combine the rest of the ingredients in a big bowl and pour over the bread/raisin stuff. Bake that beast for between 40-60 minutes at 350 degrees. I baked mine in a water basin for the first 40 minutes and not for the next 15 minutes.