Clean-Out-the-Fridge Savory Bread Pudding

The traditional method for clearing out an overly full fridge is making soup. I guess this makes sense, but my mind doesn’t work as well when it comes to improvising liquid-type matter, and so I usually stick to omelets. You can put almost anything in an omelet! You cannot, however, put stale bread in an omelet, and that’s how I came to make savory bread pudding.

About a month ago, I went on my MFA retreat, and came back with a strange array of leftovers, most of which were ingredients I had not brought in the first place, but ended up with because of a last-minute stroke of guilty responsibility that led me to go around to all the cabins and clean out the fridges, leaving me with a disproportionate amount of Swiss cheese (two deli-style packages of slices), eggs (2 1/2 cartons), and — to my chagrin — hot dog buns (two bags).

I don’t really eat hot dogs. I will occasionally, but something about them has never appealed to me very much, and certainly not enough that I needed two bags of hot dog buns. So I put them in my fridge, and found them staring at me sadly every time I opened it for something…that I like better than hot dogs. I was about to give up and just put them in the freezer, when I had a stroke of genius.

I remembered Kevin’s encouragement about the impossibility of screwing up bread pudding, and I thought that hot dog buns should work as well as any other bread. When it came to the recipe, though, I was a bit stymied. I knew I wanted to make a savory one, not a sweet one. Hmm. I also wanted to use some tomatoes that were getting puckery and a surplus of leftover herbs. I also wanted greens and some pork, so I bought those (but that’s it). The main question was how to combine everything, but after reading a few blogs and recipes I came to this very foolproof formula for savory bread pudding:

Savory Bread Pudding, of Your Own Design

Ingredients

- stale bread, torn into little chunks (I used hot dog buns, which some people on the Internets profess to be the best for bread pudding…it was actually a little too moist in the end for my taste, but you can experiment)

- eggs

- milk (half and half or a mixture of whole milk and cream would probably be best, but I only had soy milk in my fridge and nothing terrible happened)

- onion, peeled and chopped

- cheese

- other ingredients: ground meat, tomatoes, greens, corn, herbs…the list goes on and on (I even threw some radishes in mine)

1. Put bread in a large bowl. Say you use 12 oz. of bread (about a large loaf, and per Kevin’s recipe). Then you’ll want about 5 eggs and 2 1/2 c. of milk. Beat the eggs in a separate bowl, and pour eggs and milk over bread. It is not the end of the world if you don’t have those quantities; you just want the liquid to cover the bread. So if you have less milk and more eggs, or vice versa, just up the amount of the other (things may become more or less custardy in response). Let soak about half an hour.

2. Meanwhile, cook everything else. Start by heating a little oil in a skillet and sauteing the onion. Then add whatever else you’re putting in, in order of time needed to cook. For mine, I did: onion, then ground pork, then sliced radishes, then kale stems (chopped), then kale leaves. I threw in some herbs at the last minute over heat, and then I added the tomatoes when the pan was off the heat. Season with salt and pepper (maybe overseason a little, because you’re adding it to all the unseasoned bread).

3. Preheat oven to 350º F.

4. By now, bread should be done. Add the pan of cooked stuff to the bowl of soaked bread. Mix.

5. Grease a baking pan. Pour bread/stuff mix into baking pan. Cover with grated or sliced cheese (I didn’t cover mine completely in the pic above, but you can). Grease one side of a piece of aluminum foil, and cover the pan, greased side down.

6. Bake for 15 minutes, then remove foil. Bake for another 10-15 minutes or until heated all the way through, cheese is melted, and things are maybe bubbling a bit.