If you’ve ever bought or baked fresh brioche, surely you’ve noted the subtle shift, occurring sometime during day two or three, when said brioche turns from something you can’t keep your hands off of, to something you feel you should be eating because it’s there.

When that initial magic is gone, the toaster can help revive it to a certain extent, especially if you top it with thin slivers of salted butter and generous amounts of grated chocolate straight out of the toaster. But my favorite thing to do is to give an entirely new life to the brioche, either by cooking a simple pain perdu (“lost bread,” the actual French toast) in the skillet, or by baking it into a bettelman.

Bettelman is the Alsatian word for bread pudding: it means “beggar” in the Alsatian dialect, and I like the reminder that it is, at heart, a thrifty dish, meant to use up scraps of bread. I first learned about it from Christophe Vasseur, who runs the now deliriously popular Parisian bakery Du Pain et des Idées and bakes a wonderful apple bettelman drawn from his childhood memories, for which he kindly shared the recipe for my book Clotilde’s Edible Adventures in Paris.

The bettelman I’m presenting here is a different — and slightly more indulgent — version with chocolate and almonds, and it is an equally easy and enthusing way to upcycle your brioche: cubed and soaked in an egg and milk batter made chocolate-y by the addition of cocoa powder, it is then layered with chocolate chunks and chopped almonds, and baked until custardy in the middle and crusty-crisp at the top.

If it’s not brioche you have on hand, but challah or croissants or any other kind of bread enriched with milk and/or eggs, feel free to substitute that. The recipe can also be made with stale bread of any kind, though the texture will be less pillowy then. And if you have less than 200 grams or 7 ounces of brioche leftover, feel free to cube it and keep it in the freezer until you have enough to make the recipe.

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This post has been eight years in the making.

Eight years ago, Maxence and I visited friends in London. On the night we arrived, Zoe made lasagna and a big green salad, which she proceeded to toss in the bowl using two gorgeous wooden instruments, shaped like four-clawed bear paws.

If this had been a cartoon, you would have seen me hypnotically drilling my gaze into her hands, red and white spirals spinning in my eyes. “Where does one find those?” I asked, hoping they were a London treasure I could hunt for. “Oh, the bear claws? I got them as a gift back in the US,” she explained. If this had been a cartoon, you would have seen the balloon of my hopes deflating with that elegant sound balloons make when they deflate, and falling, a limp rubber thing, to the ground.

Ah well. This did nothing to detract from the pleasures of the London weekend, and I put the bear claws out of my mind.

Fast forward eight years, and I found myself spending time in Canada, in Stratford, Ontario to be exact. And on my very first day there, while walking around the city center, my eyes locked with a stack of the long-yearned-for utensils in the window of a Canadian arts and crafts shop.

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I want to express my sincere thanks to all of you who took the time to share recommendations for my stay in Stratford and Toronto. I spent most of my time in Stratford and very little in Toronto, so I feel another trip is in order to explore the city and try many more of the tempting places you wrote about. But I did make it to Chinatown, to the Kensington and St-Lawrence markets, and to the Distillery District (all in one walk-intensive afternoon).

And even though I spent little more than a day in Toronto, my picks for this week’s Three Very Good Things are all drawn from the city:

~ Bumble bee dessert dumplings at Lai Wah Heen. I had a very good and very fun lunch at this upscale dim sum place, located inside the Metropolitan Hotel, and we ended our meal with these deep-fried, mochi-like dumplings, filled with a green tea paste. Adorably shaped, too, as I’m sure you’ll agree. They tasted like Japanese wagashi, only deep-fried, and the interesting plating touch — that sprig of curly parsley, those loose strands of grated carrot — makes me laugh in retrospect.

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I am writing this installment of the Three Very Good Things series from Canada, where I’ve been for a week now, as the Gastronomic Writer in Residence for the Stratford Chefs School. I’m having a wonderful time, the weather is unseasonably balmy, squirrels are running around everywhere, and I am eating very well. Here are a few highlights from this past week:

~ A salad of shaved fennel, frisée, and slim artichoke wedges, topped with fresh herbs and crispy prosciutto.

This exceptionally well-balanced and well-dressed salad was served at the “restaurant lab”, where second-year students of the chef school cook and serve dinner every weeknight. It was served as an appetizer-sized portion, but I could have eaten a bucket of it.

~ Kale, kale, and more kale. Kale is an elusive ingredient in France: it is grown essentially as an ornamental plant (I’m told the name is chou vert demi-nain) and not commonly sold as a vegetable. So I took the opportunity of being in Canada, and having access to a well-equipped kitchen in Stratford, to get organic dino kale from The Gentle Rain, the local health food store.

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