Rice Pudding
  
Submitted by Mireia 


Ingredients (cake) 
Rice for pudding: 1 glass (which is 4 ½oz or 125g) (the other week I used 2 glasses). 
“Milk”: start with 500ml and keep adding until you are satisfied. 
Sugar: up to you 
Lemon peel (when I make the lemon peel one I don’t bother with vanilla or almond essence as the lemon masks those other more subtle flavours). 


Directions 
Place the rice in a saucepan, cover it with water (so there’s about a finger’s width of water over the rice surface). 

Bring the lot to the boil & boil it for a few seconds, drain the rice of the water. (This is so that the rice is tender, otherwise it always feels slightly uncooked no matter how long you boil it in the milk; as well it gets rid of some of the starch). 

Replace the rice in the saucepan, a heavy saucepan is good, add milk (I use the Alpro soya original- unsweetened, but if you use one of the sweetened types, use less sugar). The amount of milk varies, you can actually add an awful lot, for 1 glass of rice a minimum of ½ litre of milk. 

Bring this slowly to the boil, stirring nearly constantly, it’s a mixture that will catch at the bottom of the saucepan if you bring it to the boil fast and leave it unattended (tedious process!). 

At some point whilst bringing to the boil add some fresh thin lemon peel (the other week I put the peel of a whole lemon). 

Again at some other point add some sugar (up to you the amount, the other week I put a large spoon and a bit, it was brown sugar which of course renders the mixture a sort of brown colour; use white if you want a nice white creamy result). 

Once you reach boiling temperature make sure your gas or electricity or whatever energy you use is at its lowest setting. At that point you can walk away for short whiles, keep stirring often, keep adding milk if it feels too stodgy, I don’t think you can add too much milk. 

Cook for 20- 25 minutes. 

Toward the end of the cooking you can add a good handful of desiccated coconut, it gives a nice crunch for the teeth to play with. 

Pour into a serving dish, sprinkle with ground cinnamon if you like (if you’ve used brown sugar it will look more attractive with some cinnamon to mask the brown colour). 

The French/ Spanish eat it cold or just nearly cold. This lemon option is always very nice in Summer. Of course you do not eat the lemon peel (unless you want to!). 

There are many variants 
Rice, milk, Vanilla essence & sugar. 
Or: rice, milk, Almond essence & sugar, add a good handful of ground almond towards the end of the cooking. The other day I made some caramel (burnt sugar) and poured onto some ramekins bottoms (the caramel solidifies quickly); Then I made the rice, milk & vanilla essence mixture without the sugar; I added some currants too and once cooked poured the lot in the ramekins on top of the caramel. Ate when cooled. The caramel and the currants provided the sweetness in different ways, as you got towards the bottom of the ramekin the caramel had started to melt and it was a bit like clear honey (if you remember what honey feels like). 

So over to you, experiment and enjoy!