Stuffed French Toast

Hi Crushers,


As you may have read here and here, I've started baking bread, but sometimes you just want to do something with the bread that doesn't involve making a sandwich. Since the bread you make at home doesn't have preservatives in it, you either have to freeze what you're not using or use it up before it gets moldy. We had bought some regular wheat bread at the store in case my adventures in bread making didn't work out, but since they did, we found that we had more bread than we knew what to do with.

Time to hit the recipe books! I had two problems to solve:

1. What to feed a hungry guy?
2. How to use up the bread?

The answer is Stuffed French Toast.

I recently had some friends *waves hi to Susan and Erie* ask me to do some posts on what to do with leftovers and offer some meatless meal options. While this might not totally satisfy Susan's question on leftovers, this fun breakfast-for-dinner option answers the above problems and is meatless.

So much bread!

Note: We don't usually have too many leftovers in our house, but when we do, we usually just have a leftover night and eat up what's in the fridge. If we have specific ingredients like ground beef, veggies, or something else, then those can easily be incorporated into another meal. More on that will come later this week.

Stuffed French Toast (loosely based on this Food Network recipe):
Batter Ingredients:
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
1/2 tsp cinnamon
2 tbsp sugar
6-8 half inch slices of day old bread
1 tsp butter

Filling Ingredients:
1-8 oz package of cream cheese (the low fat stuff works fine)
1 medium or large banana
1/4 cup orange juice
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp vanilla

Directions:
Whisk all of the batter ingredients together except for the bread and the butter. In a shallow dish, soak the bread in the batter for 30 seconds on each side. In a large frying pan, melt half of the butter. When it is hot, fry four slices of bread on each side until it is golden brown. Set those slices aside and repeat with the rest of the bread until it is all cooked. It should take about 2-4 minutes for the slices to cook.

The mix is a little lumpy, but I think it was because the bananas were still a tiny bit green.

In a medium/large bowl (I used the KitchenAid mixer), beat the filling ingredients until they are smooth. Heat the filling in the microwave or in a sauce pan on the stove so it doesn't chill your French toast. Place a piece of French toast on a plate and spoon the filling over the toast. I found it helpful to press down on the middle of the bottom slice of toast to make a little dent or pocket for the filling. Cover with a second piece of toast. If you want (and we did), spoon some more filling over the top. No need for syrup!

I made a dent in the bottom slice on the yellow plate to hold in the filling.
I forgot to do that for one the green plate, so you can see how all of the filling escaped!

 

Variations:

1. If you read the recipe that this is loosely based on, you could put half of the toast slices in the bottom of a baking dish, spoon filling over them, and then cover with the rest of the slices and bake it for about 8 minutes at 350 F. We were too hungry to mess around with baking, so we didn't.
2. I think that the next time we make this, I'm going to use half of the cheese and more banana to cut some calories and fat.