Cream Cheese Bread Pudding

How many ways can you serve up leftover bread?

Ingredients
cooking spray
Bread like french loaf, tear off into small 1" pieces
cream cheese (I used pumpkin flavored for this one)
1/2 cup cranberries
4 eggs
2-1/2 cups non-fat milk
3/4 cup Splenda
1-1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

Steps
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Spray small glass dish.
3. Spread cream cheese on bread slices.
4. Place bread single layer with cream cheese side up in bottom of dish.
5. Sprinkle with cranberries.
6. Mix together eggs, milk, Splenda, and cinnamon.
7. Pour mix on top of bread and cranberries.
8. Bake about 50 - 60 minutes. The bread pudding is ready when you can stick a fork or toothpick in and it comes out clean.
8. Let cool for 5 minutes.

Variations
Monte Cristo bread pudding: Same as above, only no Splenda, regular cream cheese and slices of ham and turkey.

Banana Cranberry Bread

This week's leftover ingredient is bananas. This was so easy to make and so yummy that Marc may start buying extra bananas on purpose. This bread comes out super moist.

Ingredients

2 eggs
2/3 cup Splenda
2 very ripe bananas
1/4 cup applesauce
1/3 cup skim milk

2 eggs
1 tablespoon canola oil
1 tablespoon cinnamon
2 tablespoons poppy seeds
2 cup all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup cranberries

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350. Spray bread pan and lightly dust with flour.
2. Mix eggs and Splenda.
3. Mash bananas until there's only small pieces and add to mix.
4. Add applesauce, milk, eggs, oil, cinnamon and poppy seeds.
5. In separate bowl mix flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
6. Slowly add dry ingredients to wet, mixing them together as you go.
7. Add cranberries being careful not to over mix.
8. Bake for about 40 minutes until top is golden brown and toothpick comes out clean.

9. Cool on wire rack.

White Chocolate Cranberry Bites

These cookies are like mini-scones but not dry and crumbly. The white chocolate and cranberries give it a sweet taste. Ingredients
1/4 cup butter spread (Smart Balance)

1/2 cup canola oil

3 cups Splenda

4 large eggs (or egg whites)

1-1/2 teaspoon vanilla
5-1/2 cups all purpose flour
2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup white chocolate chips

1-1/2 cups dried cranberries

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350F. Cover cookie sheets with wax paper sprayed with cooking spray.
2. Mix flour, baking soda and salt.

3. In seperate bowl mix butter, oil and Splenda. Gradually add eggs and vanilla.

4. Add flour mixture slowly to well combined. Add chocolate chips and cranberries.

5. Roll into 2" cookies and place onto sheet.

6. Bake for 12-15 minutes. Cool on wire rack.

Turkey Cranberry Pizza

You may have spotted in my last post one our favorite cooking techniques for using up left overs. That is pizza!

Our pantry, or freezer as in this one, typically contains something for whipping up a pizza. Last week used left over bagels with our 'Sweet & Sour Chicken' for a delicious meal in minutes. Today we were low on bread so we went for our "in case of emergency" Boboli pizza shell to use with our left over turkey and cranberry from yesterday's Christmas Eve feast - which my parents picked up from Ralphs ready-to-go boxed meals to make cooking a breeze. Not to digress to much but this has been a long standing Christmas tradition in Mammoth because it afforded us a gourmet meal that was easy to cook after skiing all day and easily fed a group of hungry skiers for an incredible deal, about $40 bucks.

So to make the very yummy Turkey Cranberry pizza we preheated our oven to 425 and took our thin crust wheat Boboli pizza shell out of the freezer and scraped off the ice. I'm not sure how long they can be kept in the freezer but ours has probably been there about 3 months and still tasted ok.

After de-icing the pizza I spread low-fat cream cheese for the base then shredded turkey followed by the mashed cranberry sauce. A few extra small pieces of turkey and a sprinkle of low-fat mozzarella cheese for the topping. Baked about 15 minutes, the pizza was superb! The cream cheese melted nicely and the mix of turkey, cranberry and cheese was wonderful. The cream cheese and cranberry sauce also gave the pizza a perfect sauce so that it wouldn't be dry. I'm thinking this might make a good combination for a bread pudding. So keep an eye out for Turkey Cranberry Bread Pudding next.

Here's to creative cooking with left overs. By the way the cream cheese and mozzarella cheese had also been left over of course. The only problem as Marc likes to say is you never know when we'll have this set of ingredients again to try to repeat this. But you can always count on the pizza.