This Maple Blueberry French Toast Bake is a crowd-pleasing variation of French Toast from our cookbook, What’s for Lunch?. Instead of dipping individual slices of bread into an egg mixture and frying them, we bake up a pan full of bread cubes with a delicious maple custard mixture and blueberries. If you don’t have blueberries, substitute cranberries or diced apples, or whisk 1 cup mashed squash or pumpkin in with the egg mixture!
Wash and prepare vegetables: dice onion, finely chop garlic, peel and chop carrots, seed and finely chop bell pepper, chop zucchini, and roughly chop mushrooms.
Heat oil in a large pan over medium high heat. Add ground beef, onion and garlic. Cook until browned, making sure to crumble the beef as it cooks. Drain excess fat.
Place ground beef mixture into slow cooker.
Mix in remaining vegetables, crushed tomatoes, broth, spices and salt. Stir to combine.
Cover and cook on LOW for 8-10 hours. Remove bay leaf before serving
