Tonight’s dinner was Pizza Bread Pudding, salad, and soup. First off let me explain that it is the recipe that is a mystery to me, not the pizza I used when I made the recipe. If you’re not able to tell what kind of pizza you’re putting into a recipe like this, you probably shouldn’t use it. Green fuzzy pizzas are never ingredients for anything. Not even turtles like penicillin in there pizzas.

The Pizza Bread Pudding recipe is one that has been living on the refrigerator, and before that its home was the recipe box. It is a narrow strip of paper with just the recipe on it, and no attribution of any kind as to who made it or where it came from. The paper quality makes me believe it came from a magazine and not the newspaper, but beyond that it is a mystery.

See? Even when it is baked, its rather a mystery. Anything could be in there:

My recipe box is full of such mysteries, since it is not my recipe box, but my family’s recipe box, filled with recipes that have been added to it by at least three generations of cooks from both sides of my family. Occasionally recipe clippings will say who wrote the recipe or where it was published, but more often than not the recipes are either unattributed clippings from magazines and newspapers, typed up on home computers a few decades ago, or handwritten on fading recipe cards. At least the cards often say what member of the family contributed them to my collection, but if there is an origin beyond that it is forever lost to time and memory.

The Pizza Bread Pudding uses a few pieces of leftover pizza, milk, eggs, Italian seasoning, salt, pepper, and olives (although I assume you could add whatever pizza toppings you want to, really). Having leftover pizza is never a problem in our house, since this Fall almost every week has started with Raven making pizza as dinner for watching football. Even though homemade pizza is amazing, there are always just a few more slices than we can eat. Neither Raven nor I like leftover pizza, hot or cold, so it usually sits in the fridge for a week until we make more pizza the next Monday and the leftovers from the week before go to the dogs.

The dogs will be quite disappointed this Monday when they do not get their “dead pizza,” but I found this recipe and thought it was at least worth a try since there is always leftover pizza taking up room in the fridge. And its usually good homemade pizza too (although sometimes we do order delivery), so it seems a shame to not at least try to transform it into something that Raven and I will eat.

It actually turned out to be quite tasty. Raven and I agree that next time we should add more pizza toppings to the mix, since relying on just the toppings that were already on the pizza meant there was a lot more bread than filling goodies. We also decided that because of all the egg in it, this would actually make a good brunch meal. Pizza Bread Pudding for Sunday football, anyone?