Challah

     This week I made challah following the recipe in The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I expected the challah to be a heavier bread than it is.  I've never eaten it, but I have seen it in grocery stores.  (I truly believe that just about all super market breads are made from the same dough then shaped and finished differently to give the illusion of  variety.)  The challah is a very tender bread.  It is pretty, slightly sweet,  moist, and tender bread.  The egg wash gives the crust a beautiful sheen on the braided loaf. 
     I've read that challah is an excellent bread for French toast.  I guess we will find out on Saturday morning.  Lost Bread has was always a weekend treat growing up.  Since my mother worked, weekdays were usually cold cereal because that was something my brother and I could fix for ourselves.  On weekends, however, we had wonderful breakfasts.  Being good southerners, cold days meant grits, eggs, and bacon.  My mother would always cook extra grits, so she could make fried grits the next day.  She would fry the cold grits in the bacon grease from the day before.  My brother loved fried grits; I was always a grits purist and thought frying them was a way of ruining perfectly good grits.  Sometimes we would have pancakes.  I grew up with Aunt Jemimah pancakes and Mrs. Butterworth's syrup.  But my favorite weekend breakfast was always Lost Bread aka French toast.  If you read about Lost Bread (pain perdu), you'll learn that Cajuns and Creoles did not believe in letting anything go to waste, hence Lost Bread is way of salvaging stale bread or bread that would have been "lost."  My mother would usually make it using sliced, stale, white bread, but occasionally we would have some left over French bread (my absolute favorite).  My brother liked his Lost Bread with syrup, but I always liked it with powdered sugar.  My  mother would dip the bread in a mixture of eggs, milk, a smidgen of sugar, and a little vanilla extract and then cook it in a cast iron frying pan.
     Here I digress.  Many years ago when I was teaching English to eighth grade boys, I had an end of the year spelling/vocabulary test.  The spelling part was 50 words, and then the students had to use any 25 of those words in sentences.  I will always remember the sentence using the word abstract, "My mother uses vanilla abstract when she bakes." 
      Back to Lost Bread.  Today, Lost Bread is still an occasional weekend treat.  Sometimes I'll use almond, rum, or orange "abstract" instead of vanilla.  Sometimes I'll use a little brown sugar, or nutmeg, or cinnamon, or pumpkin pie spice.  I've also been known to use a little flavored coffee creamer from time to time.  No matter what variation I use, it always makes me think of  those childhood weekends and my mother's Lost Bread.