Weekend Brunch

Yes, there is more to it than just me drooling over the memory of this dish.

One of the things I received in the January delivery was a pouch of pureed butternut squash. I cook with winter squash a lot, but it’s usually in chunks, and I actually had to think a bit to decide what I could do with the puree. And then, while I was hungrily browsing some other food blogs last Friday, I suddenly remembered something that was sitting in the freezer along with the squash: a loaf of cinnamon swirl bread from Great Harvest. And suddenly I knew what A., A., M., and I were going to have for brunch on Sunday.

Bread pudding is one of those dishes that is really impossibly easy and also incredibly satisfying. In this case, you just mix in some of the squash puree with the milk & egg, and basically call it a day.

And you might want to add in some spices: cinnamon, ginger, allspice, and cloves. I doubled the spices, per the recommendation from nearly every reader comment on Epicurious, except for the cinnamon, since there was a lot in the bread already. And I cut the sugar in half, which will make sense to anyone who has had the aforementioned cinnamon swirl bread.

Then, because I am sometimes incredibly lazy, I dotted the butter (again, less than called for) over the bread instead of melting it and mixing it in.