New Year's Day Breakfast

One of my New Year's Resolutions this year was to take a more active role in the kitchen. Normally, I'm allowed to make eggs in the morning, but that's about it. My wife had been reluctant to relinquish control of the cooking duties because of an unfortunate incident that occurred nearly a decade ago when - let's just say - I got a little too ambitious with my experimentation and she fell mildly ill as a result. Fast forward to today where we now have three young boys (5, 3 and 0) and she's understandably become a little more amenable to accepting some help. And lo, Friday Boy's Cooking Night was born.

We got a bit of a jump on the action this year thanks to the New Year's Holiday so our (my, since none of my helpers opted to participate) first foray into the kitchen in 2019 was the New Year's Breakfast. Rather than my go-to scrambled egg dish, we went a little more advanced with the First Order French Toast from the BB-ATE Star Wars Breakfast/Brunch Cookbook.

We opted to go with French Bread, which in hindsight may not have been the best choice. My thinking though was fairly simple minded. French Toast. French Bread. No brainer, right? Right???

Anyhow, a pound of French Bread goes a long way and the loaf itself was longer than our 9" x 13" baking dish. Even after eating the ends our 1" slices needed to be stacked (we had trouble with the "slight overlapping"). Because of our layering, the egg mixture was really prominent on the bottom level, and not so much on the top. Additionally, our cinnamon/sugar mixture wasn't evenly layered on all of the slices. If we do this dish again, I think we'll go with wheat bread as it's a bit denser (in my mind at least). I may also just try and take eight slices of bread since this is designed to make eight servings. They would certainly fit in the baking dish better.

Cooking-wise, we erred on the low side starting with 30 minutes and going up in 3-5 minute increments from there. I think closer to 40 minutes, with our oven at least, gets you in the ballpark, but it's also tough to say with the way our dish was layered.

Overall, I thought it turned out ok although it looked nothing like the picture in the book. My wife thought it should've been sweeter and I'd agree it's certainly not a dish I'd serve the kids without throwing some syrup on there. But hey, not a bad first effort. At least no one got sick!