IMBB 25: Asparagus and Morel Bread Pudding
Photo by Melissa Schneider.
When Melissa and I got married three years ago, we planned our menu with zeal. Our caterers (Blue Heron, whom I'd recommend in a heartbeat) delivered a meal that our guests still talk about.
Friends and family wrote us afterwards to ask about our vegetarian main course, an asparagus and morel bread pudding. We forgot to ask for the recipe, but Melissa asked me to recreate it for our anniversary dinner last week. How convenient that I had chosen stale bread as a theme for this edition of Is My Blog Burning.
I bought a lovely Acme loaf three days beforehand. We waited patiently, resisting the urge to tear it into hunks and devour it. I came home early from work on Tuesday, cubed the bread, soaked it briefly in a custard mix, added peeled asparagus and rehydrated dried morels, and baked for forty-five minutes. The morel flavor seeped through the fatty custard, the asparagus poked through the tumbledown arrangement of bread cubes, and Melissa pronounced it good.
We went through three bottles of wine to accompany the pudding. Some party, right? Not exactly. My hand slipped as I opened an expensive bottle of rosé Champagne, and the bottle tumbled to the floor, gushing bubbles and booze everywhere. We each got a small glass of mostly flat Champagne. We stowed a California sparkling wine in the freezer to chill it, opened it, and discovered it was corked. Finally, our dinners almost gone, we opened a red wine from our Ferry Plaza wine club.
Give me a few days to round up the intriguing uses for stale bread that have arrived in my inbox and comments. It's been a crazy weekend, but I'll get to them soon.
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