Your Grandma was smart! I don’t mind the ends but they poof out over the side of the pan so it’s not easy to slice thin for a sandwich. I cube it up at the end of the week and throw it in the freezer until I have enough for pudding. This is a great way to use up some eggs too!My no knead bread was cooked in the Dutch Oven I bought. It was great bread. It never lasted long enough to go moldy. With commercial store-bought bread, we cut it up into little pieces and put it into the chicken bucket, a little bit each day as a treat depending on how much old bread there is.
When I was little kid, grandma used to make it a special thing to see who would get the "special" end crust. You felt lucky if you "won" the end crust. To this day, I still eat those end pieces and consider myself lucky!
Grandma was good about getting us to eat all kinds of food. Whenever we got something new on the table that we did not recognize, we would ask grandma if we liked it. "Oh yes, you liked it a lot last time we had this," she would say. Of course, that was the standard line even if it was the first time we had that food.
I tried to make croutons with left over bread and it did not turn out very good. I should probably give that another try. That bread pudding sounds tasty. We don't really use breadcrumbs for anything in our house. I would certainly like to explore other options first, rather than giving left over bread to the chickens. But almost none of our leftover food or scraps gets wasted now that we have backyard chickens.
We don’t use crumbs often either, mostly in meatloaf because the fam doesn’t like it with oatmeal.