Looks like...

One of the traditional Easter dishes in my family is called... well, I don't know how to spell it, but it's pronounced look-sha. It's not a very complex dish - or at least, it looked simple when my grandmother made it. White yeast dough is rolled into 2-foot long snakes, which are placed on a baking sheet, brushed with egg, and sliced into 1-inch pieces. The bread is baked, then put into a bowl and drenched in honey, water, and poppy seeds. It's basically bread and water. Sweet, soggy bread. Ick. The Aunts loved it, but I ate as little as possible.

The day before Easter I found myself with a half loaf of very hard, stale, whole-grain, seedy bread. I sawed it into pieces and soaked it in custard (3 eggs, 3 cups milk which turned out to be 1 cup reconstituted goats milk, 1.5 cups 1 %, and 1/2 cup half-n-half, because that's what I had in the fridge, a pinch of salt and a slurp of sugar), topped with melted sweet butter and a thick sprinkle of black sesame seeds, and baked at 325 F for an hour, more or less. (Yeah, that's what most of my recipes look like.)

I ended up with a chewy, custardy bread pudding, slightly under-sweetened, and improved it with a glop of honey on top.



Amazingly, it looked and tasted like look-sha. Except good. I had it for Easter breakfast.

Where do you suppose that inspiration came from?

(Thanks, Grandma!)