Dead Bread

I have posted couple of times about the great Live Better site from the Guardian.
Last month was all about food waste, and the challenge was to go a whole week without producing any food waste.
Now, I think we are pretty hot on food waste. I take a perverse pride in using up all our leftovers, and the only things that usually make it into our Green Johanna are the veg peelings and egg shells etc.
BUT then when I actually stopped and thought about it, the Smalls do seem to be able to generate some kind of  toast crust/half eaten roll mountain in a surprisingly short space of time, and I had just been adding this to our hot composter and feeling ok as it wasn’t going in the bin. But actually, it is still perfectly edible. It just needs a bit of Make Do and Mend magic.

So I decided that in order to go zero food waste for a week, I would collect up all these odds and sods and bung them all in a freezer bag as they were left on the plates.
And it mounted up at an alarming rate.
I have two bags-one for savoury stuff-toast or rolls with marmite/bovril/peanut butter etc, and one for sweet-bits of hot cross bun, leftover bits of muffin etc.

Once the savoury bag was getting full, I decided to experiment with my Dead Cake Pudding recipe to see if I could make a savoury Dead Bread Pudding.
And I can! AND it is edible. In fact, better than edible, pretty yummy 🙂

This is what you need:

• Dead bread (see above)-about 400-500g
  
• 600ml milk
• 2 eggs, beaten
• If you felt a little bit crazy, you could add grated cheese/wholegrain mustard/sauteed onions

This is what you do:

• Bung your dead bread (frozen or otherwise) into a mixer and blitz into breadcrumbs (you can omit this stage if you want)
• Mix together the milk and beaten eggs in a jug
• Pour over the bread chunks and leave to soak in for ‘a bit’
• Grease a baking tray-I used our brownie tray which is about 20cmx15cm
• Transfer the mix to the tray. At this point you can top with some grated cheese if you like that sort of thing (and frankly, who doesn’t?)
  
• Pre-heat the oven if you feel the need, or just whack it all in cold and then turn on the oven and cook for a few minutes longer
• Cook for ‘some time’. I think it was about 45 minutes at 180C
• Remove from the oven and eat. We had ours with baked beans, and it was the ultimate comfort food!
  Needless to say that in the excitement of getting tea actually out of the oven, on the table and into hungry mouths, I forgot to take a pic of the actual cooked thing. It looked awesome. You will have to take my word for that…
• And if you have leftovers from your leftovers, I am reliably informed by hubby, that it is very nice cold for lunch the next day!

I plan to do the same thing but with some added sugar and dried fruit etc with the ‘Sweet’ bag, and make a more traditional Bread Pudding, but suffice it to say that I am very pleased with my new addition to my Zero Food Waste arsenal!