Simple fares - bread and butter pudding & homemade vegetable soup/stew

Sometimes I forget the simplest things are the best.

Two nights ago I bought a loaf of bread on the discount shelf at Somerfields after work and decided to make some bread and butter pudding. I made some before ages ago whilst I was still in first year of university, and it was really yummy (despite never having bread and butter pudding before... but the taste is confirmed by a recent bread and butter pudding I ordered whilst we were eating out). So the result from two nights ago:

Bread and butter pudding.

To those who aren't familiar with bread and butter pudding, it's made of layers of sliced buttered bread in a deep dish with generous sprinkle of ground cinnamon, ground nutmeg, sugar and raisins/sultanas/fruits. Then you beat egg and milk and sugar in a bowl and pour it into the dish, letting the slices of bread soak up the liquid mixture and then baking it in the oven until the top is golden brown.

So basically ingredients that you can find in most kitchens.

Couple of mistakes I made whilst doing this:

1. Putting sultanas on the top, which got a bit burnt in the process of baking it.
2. Baking it for too long; it was just slightly too dry to be proper bread and butter pudding.

It smelt great whilst it was baking in the oven! All buttery and cinnamony. Heaven! I didn't put much sugar in it because I didn't want to oversugar it since I wasn't following any recipe, but I ended up eating it with a drizzle of golden syrup and it was fantastic! <3 Leftovers in the fridge that got a bit hard can easily be softened again by drizzling some golden syrup and milk over it and then microwaving for 2-3 minutes before eating. :)

I also made a self-imposed rule yesterday that I will not buy anything more from the grocery store until Boy gets back on Sunday so that I can finish up whatever else that is in the kitchen. This includes a whole lot of the vegetables that I bought which I might as well finish because Boy isn't that much of a fan of vegetables.

I chopped up a whole load (potatoes, carrots, onion, garlic, Savoy cabbage) after work today and dumped them into my slow cooker with some chicken stock cubes and hot water and pepper and Chinese five spice and cracked two eggs over everything to make a familiar childhood soup. Because of the amount of stuff I put into the slow cooker, not only did it fill it up as if I were feeding yet another army, it also turned into more of a stew than a soup - more solids than liquid!

All the same - nice and warm in my tummy for this cold, cold night! And comfort food that is also relatively healthy!

Vegetable stew.

Yum yum. ^^