Food – Rice pudding, specifically
Ok, I know my three readers are probably saying, “hey, this post isn’t about books; it’s about food!”. Yup. Guess what? I like to cook, and I like to eat – and I don’t happen to currently have anything to say about books.
NB re my recipes : they are almost always without quantities; they evolve in the kitchen. If this bugs you, please don’t complain, it’s how I cook. The Joy of Cooking (a pre 1965 edition) is a decent quantity reference, if you need one. Look, I mentioned a book! I couldn’t help myself…
Rice Pudding
Rice, milk, salt, sugar, vanilla
Take a quantity of cooked leftover rice – say it’s about a cup. If you don’t have leftover, make fresh. I like to use leftover Japanese style rice. It works better than Basmati or Jasmine for this recipe. Never use Uncle Ben’s, or some other kind of almost-rice. If you’re using leftover, salt it just a bit. If you’re making fresh, salt a bit more. (You can always put more in later, but you can’t take it out if there’s too much.)
Put it in a pot large enough to hold the rice and a quantity of milk. I can’t tell you what your most favorite rice-to-milk ratio is; put enough milk in the pot so that the rice looks right. Heat this slowly – not like how I do it, where I get impatient and then I end up having to clean up a huge mess. Let the rice and milk simmer together for a while, until the rice swells a bit more than you might like if you were eating it with a curry. It should not be sticking to the pot at this (or any) point. If it is, add more milk.
Make sure the whole thing’s been simmering for a little while – enough to scald the milk. If you’re on a gas stove, bring the heat way down as soon as the milk even looks like it’s going to boil and keep it on the heat to continue simmering the mixture. If you’re on an electric ring, bring the heat way down and be prepared to lift the pot off the ring, so that you don’t end up cleaning out scalded-on rice and milk from under the burner when it burst out of the pot.
When your milk is simmering nicely and the rice is plumping up, take one egg and beat in a fairly large cereal bowl with one tablespoon of (ie, turbindo organic) sugar and a bit of vanilla. (One tablespoon of sugar doesn’t make this very sweet. But start here, and then add more later if you want it).
NOTE: this is the reverse of what you thought you knew : Add a tablespoon of the hot milk-rice mixture to the egg (don’t add the egg to the hot milk). Mix it in. Do it again. And then again. Keep going until the bowl is almost full of milky eggy rice and is warm to the touch. You have occasionally stirred the rice and milk mixture.
Now, you’re going to add the eggy cerealbowl full to the milk and rice mixture. First, make sure the heat is on the absolutely lowest setting. Now, start adding the eggy mixture. Do it very slowly, please. The last thing you want is for your custardy rice pudding to taste like milkly scrambled eggy rice, though if you added enough hot milk to the egg mixture slowly enough, you have probably already avoided this problem.
If all goes well, you have watched your milky rice mixture turn a lovely shade of custardy pale yellow as you have finished adding the egg mix to the rice mix. It has thickened up appetizingly – and they say that if the custard has thickened, the egg is cooked… so you can take it off the heat now and let it cool a bit, or a lot, before you start eating it. You may add a bit more milk at this point, if it’s too thick.
Optionally : Add raisins to the milk / rice mixture before you add the egg. Maybe sprinkle some cinnamon on it when you’re ready to eat.
