Putting the Fat in Tuesday

In addition to eating pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, I also bought a dozen Fastnachts from the local Lutheran church. I just love the idea of the little Lutheran ladies staying up all night to make me donuts, also I love donuts. But I happened to get sick in the tummy (maybe from all the treat eating), so we didn't make it through more than two Fastnachts total. D finally asked me: "Why do you keep taking only one bite of different donuts?" "They all look so different, some small and solid, others big and puffy, some light and some dark - that I think they might taste different." But they didn't and my stomach would not stand for any of them.

So on Wednesday night, I decided to do something about the ten remaining Fastnachts. What would you do? Well, I attempted my first ever Bread Pudding. (Go ahead and google donut bread pudding. I'm not crazier than other people.) So I beat together some milk, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, and the really cool green eggs that we get from a local farmer (they're not green on the inside, just like normal eggs).

And I tore the donuts into bite-sized pieces, then tossed it all together with some raisins. To tell you the truth, I didn't make enough liquid custardy stuff and I didn't let it soak long enough. I think I chose the wrong kind of pan (deep instead of wide), and I think I might have cooked it too long. So it was a wee bit dry.

D basically turned up his nose at the results. Sooooo....I decided on Thursday that there was only one possible course of action: to soak the whole thing in booze. But the only alcohol I had to spare was the tail end of a bottle of brandy (left over from a party grogg, a great recipe I inherited from my mom), so Bob's Your Uncle that's what I our liberally all over the Fastnacht Pudding. Until it was drowning really. I kept trying to bail the brandy up and over the top, but it just wasn't soaking through.

D, who has little tolerance for the hard stuff, pronounced it inedible and, I believe, said something along the lines of "You have got to stop experimenting in the kitchen." So on Friday, after 24 hours of soaking, I poured out the excess brandy, mixed it with some butter, sugar, and vanilla, and made a really delicious caramel sauce. Mmmmmmm. That was goo-ood stuff. I removed the remaining pudding to a pie pan, poured the caramel over, and baked the whole thing to dry out the overpowering presence of brandy.

And finally, I produced something my husband would eat! After three days of noodling around in the kitchen, I basically had made upside down cake without the pineapple. Well, it doesn't matter because we ate it up in no time while watching Thumbsucker, the indie film released last summer and based on the novel by Walter Kirn, who happens to have written a really cool essay on the emotions of homeowning and interest rates in today's special Real Estate issue New York Times Magazine.