Not My Mama's Breadpudding

I love bread pudding. It ranks right up there with tapioca on my list of sweet, gooey, comfort that you can eat with a spoon. I grew up eating a lot of bread pudding. My mama has a reputation for her bread pudding. Most of the time it is the traditional combination of stale bread, raisins, sugar, eggs, milk. But other times, especially during our annual beach trips, my mom's bread puddings take on a life of their own.

My mother is the queen of saving and re-using items. That ingenuity and creativity has served her well in making art, but it is not necessarily a good thing when it comes to bread pudding at the beach. You see, when you have a beach house full of people, you have lots of left-overs. By the end of the week my mom has usually assembled quite an interesting collection of food items to add to the dreaded always surprising bread pudding...half-eaten bowls of cereal, old grapes, apple chunks, limp pasta, and perhaps even a random piece of broccoli. Yes, my mama's beach house bread pudding is quite unique and always memorable.

Earlier this week, while flipping through one of my well-loved Barefoot Contessa cookbooks,I stopped at the recipe for croissant bread pudding and it hit me that I had never made bread pudding for my own children. I don't know why. It seems like such an easy, kid friendly dessert with a direct connection to my roots, and yet, I have never done it. And then I came down with a horrible case of strep throat (which is still causing me problems). Suddenly, my desire to make bread pudding shifted gears from nostalgia to a desperate need for comfort at its most extreme: something warm, soft,easy to swallow, and full of vanilla sweetness. And that's exactly what this recipe is. It's not my mama's bread pudding recipe, but it brings me just as much comfort and makes me smile to think of her beach house puddings. Click here for the Contessa's recipe (FYI, I cut the recipe in half for our family of four). I'd give you my mama's recipe but it is a well-guarded family secret and that is probably for the best.