Reuse Recipe: Bread

My children love toast. Almost every day they wake-up wanting it for breakfast. I'm surprised they don't get sick of it. Luckily, we have a bread-maker. I can pull out the machine and put all the ingredients in for a loaf in less than 5 minutes. It comes out great every time... unless I forget the yeast or other vital ingredient. :)  It is much less expensive and much easier than buying it at the grocery store. The best bread machine book, hands down is this one: The Bread Machine Cookbook.  Our family favs are the raisin bread, the sally lunn, and the wheat germ and sesame wheat.  We also use the pizza dough recipe regularly. It is enough to make 2 thin crust cookie sheet pizzas.
Anyway, the point of this bread tirade is that we eat a lot of bread, but also end up with a lot of crusts and half eaten pieces of toast.  Throwing away food drives me crazy -- so I asked myself, what can I do with all these leftover pieces of bread? How do I keep things tidy in the process?
My solution is the bread bag.  I keep a ziploc in the fridge into which I put all the leftover crusts, bits of toast, heels etc. Keeping it refrigerated allows me to fill up a gallon size ziploc bag (about 7-10 days worth) without spoilage.

Then I have enough to use for one of several options:

1. Croutons - chop stale bread roughly in cubes and toss with spices like garlic salt, parsley and chives, bake at 350 until dry an crunchy, 7-10 minutes. We eat these on salad and also in soups like crackers.
2. Bread crumbs -crush the above mentioned croutons :) 
3. Stuffing - some people call it "dressing".  Martha Stewart's website has several good recipes for it including this one.  
4. Bread pudding - This book: Rustic Fruit Desserts has a lovely chocolate cherry bread pudding that my children refer to as "cake".  I also enjoy bread pudding with apples.  The only change I think almost always improves the pudding is to add a crumb topping. 

Note - if you are not planning to eat one of these items every 10 days - you can also just make the simple croutons and freeze them until you need either them or the bread crumbs.