French Toast

I think (hope?) I am learning, as so many other cooks before me have, that getting the simple things right really is important. It doesn't get any simpler than French toast, so small changes in approach make the difference between insipid and inspired.

We had a D&D game scheduled for Saturday, and since I actually had a loaf of challah bread in the freezer I knew French toast would be on the menu. I had a recipe for an overnight version filed away, but instead of hunting for it I found one that I thought was similar enough online: Overnight French Toast. Friday night, after the kids were in bed, I pulled it out and thought Hm, this doesn't look quite like the one I thought I had. Oh, well, I'll just sort of munge this together with what I remember from the other one.... So I put the bread in a 9x13 pan, overlapped because there was no other way to fit it, and put it in the fridge overnight, and baked it in the morning (for much longer than this recipe says to, and I didn't flip them because they would have fallen apart...).

And the result was fine, nothing to complain about really. Maybe a touch underdone, but that's not exactly a tragedy.

Except it could have been much better, and I was bothered by my own laziness. I don't make French toast very often, since I very seldom have suitable bread for it around (might sound odd, but I mostly make sandwich bread these days, and very rarely make challah, which does work best). Which means that I blew a chance to make it really well.

Next time I will try to remember this, and use one of the two recipes that do turn out really, really, really well. One of those being Ina Garten's--also to be found in Barefoot Contessa Family Style, and the other being Cooking Light's French Toast Souffle.

Note to self: Accept no half-brained late-night muddling. Do it right.