Soufflé Days

Le pain perdu. I love that name. The lost bread. What a wonderful way of thinking about those last slices of bread, or the end chunks, that sit on the kitchen counter for days on end until someone finally decides to chuck them in the trash. I’ve been eating a lot of bread these days; it is one thing you can always find in France. I eat it mostly alongside salads of arugula, tomatoes and chèvre for dinner and then smeared liberally with Nutella at all times of the day. Long white bagettes with their crunchy exterior, light, eggy yellow circles of brioche bread, perfect for pulling apart piece by piece, and hearty loaves of country pain aux noix from the Saturday marché. Eventually this afternoon, I decided I ought to stop my Nutella consumption and put the remainder of my pain aux noix to a better use. Not the Nutella is not a perfectly acceptable use for any kind of bread. All the time. In fact, it is much better than simply acceptable.

But seeing as I was finally sitting in my apartment and I had finally run out of things to write about, I figured I might as well try out this new toaster oven, which many of you know is now my sole means of baking anything. I have spent the weekend walking around the city without a map and sitting in parks and cafes writing in my travel journal and then blogging about my adventures. I have been seeing a lot of food, though I can’t say I have achieved much variety in my eating habits, which have been hampered by my Nutella obsession (see above). Since I have been out of the kitchen quite a bit and hitting the streets, a lot of my writing and pictures reflect that and can be found over at my new blog Un Je Ne Sais Quoi.

But back to the toaster oven. I bought the cutest little loaf pans the other day and I thought a little bread pudding was the perfect occasion for using them. Kind of like finding and reshaping the bread that has been lost. I consulted a couple recipes for bread pudding, including this one by Deb at Smitten Kitchen for raisin-studded apple bread pudding and one in a new cookbook I bought in Paris, Petites Cocottes. But in the end, I decided to just go with whatever felt right. The result was little loafs of pain perdu, soaked liberally in custard, studded with apples and topped with a little — you guessed it! — Nutella. I guess new habits die hard. I ate one for dinner, with a little coffee spoon, alongside a cup of black current tea.