I was talking with my brother about this recipe and I think he said it best, it’s pretty hard to screw up bread pudding. I have to agree. As long as you hit the key bread, milk, eggs and sugar it’s probably going to taste good. So this recipe is more of a guideline than hard and fast rules. Feel free to change up the spices, skip the water bath, switch up the pine nuts, whatever, bread pudding is really hard to screw up. I liked using the muffin tins because I just popped them out and they were already divided and held up pretty well in the transfer over to a bowl. I actually threw most of them onto waxed paper and into the freezer once they cooled down. They come back to life in the microwave really well. So on a cold winter morning you can have a hot breakfast in a few minutes that isn’t oatmeal.

Whenever I make mashed potatoes I usually try to make a little more than I need just so that I can have enough left overs to make these pancakes the next morning. Adding flour or something to thicken up the batter can be a necessary evil because it’s impossible to say how dry or wet the mashed potatoes are. I made two batches of pancakes from two different sets of mashed potatoes. The first set were perfect, cup of mash and two eggs, no flour needed. The second set used some overly wet mashed potatoes. I decided to try thickening it up with corn meal. Lesson learned, they didn’t taste like corn bread they tasted like crap.

My mother used to make this great German dish called milk rice. It’s a really simple rice pudding and it a really tasty breakfast when cold cereal isn’t going to hit the spot. I didn’t remember how she made it and it was too early in the morning to call her and ask so I did a quick search for a recipe and realized that all of the milchreis recipes took too long and didn’t use precooked rice. I had some left over rice from a stir fry we made a few days ago so I made up my own recipe. Here it is (all measurements are approximate because I was just eyeballing).