Chai Spiced Brown Rice Pudding

Everything is a bit sad, wobbly, and shaky in January. 

The look your Christmas tree gives you just before you decide to take it to be recycled at the tip.  The mince pie baby that I am currently hiding under my jumper. That shaky, squiggle your handwriting does when you remember that it's 2014 and not 2013 when writing the date. That 'back to work' face everyone pulled last week. The realisation that it's not actually at all ok anymore to eat cheese and biscuits for breakfast. 

The best way to get through it is to wrap yourself up warm. From the inside. Specifically, with a bowl of this chai spice rice pudding.

Serves two

Ingredients

200gr brown rice

Pinch of salt

400ml semi skimmed milk

100ml double cream

1 black tea bag

4tbsp honey

1tsp vanilla extract

1/2tsp ground ginger

3 cloves

3 cardamom pods

1/2 cinnamon stick

1tbsp coconut oil (or butter)

Toasted walnuts for serving (optional)

Method

1, Bring a medium sized saucepan with 1 litre of water to the boil with a pinch of salt.  Rinse the rice well in cold water and add to the boiling water.  Turn down to a low/medium heat and simmer for 30mins, stirring occasionally. 

2, Drain the rice and place in a bowl and cover tightly. 

3, In another saucepan, add the remaining ingredients except the coconut oil/butter and bring that up to a gentle boil.

4, Immediately lower the heat, remove the tea bag, and add in the cooked rice and stir well.  Stir in the coconut oil/butter here.

5, This will need a further 30-40mins of gentle simmering, being stirred occasionally until it has thickened. 

6, Serve hot or cold with toasted walnuts. 

Day One: Curried Mince with Rice

Day One of the Good Housekeeping's Cooking Compendium Challenge and the kitchen was full of questions. How many grams in an ounce? How many ounces in a pound? (Woe us, children of the 80s and our diet of metric.) Do we have any lemons? (Why do you need lemons? To make lemon butterflies to serve it with... We don't have lemons...)

What shall I cook the mince in? (We decided against olive oil). Why do we only have two onions in the entire kitchen? How much will this actually make? Is 1tbsp of curry powder really enough? Mild, medium or hot curry powder?

This is a really basic. The sauce is made by frying off onions and then curry powder with flour and stirring in beef stock and sultanas. This then simmered until the onions and sultanas are soft and the sauce is thick. The mince is then stirred through. The sauce was surprisingly rich, maybe not as spicy as our normal curries but good all the same. For a man who dislikes "out of context fruit" (Duck a L'Orange is his nemesis), Jim wolfed down a plate of the spicy sultana studded mince. Success.

Taste?
It was actually nice. I'm fully aware that I picked something quite basic to ease us into it. The sauce was thick and coated the mince well. It wasn't as spicy as we would normally go. I'm putting this down to palates though.

Difficulty?
Easy peasy, no lemon butterflies squeezy. Although a reoccurring theme throughout The Compendium is that it doesn't tell you how many people it will serve. There was a lot. Easily could have fed three or four. This worries me for the rest of the week, I haven't factored in leftovers.

Make again?
Maybe. It was exceptionally cheap. No cans of fancy coconut milk, thai basil pastes or bags of jasmine rice here. Would cut down on quantities a bit or keep the same and have leftovers. Would make a gorgeous jacket potato filling.

Learn anything new?
How many grams in a ounce and how to turn my scales into weighing in ounces.

Alterations?
The issue of cooked minced meat. I am assuming that this would have been meat leftover from a joint of meat and then minced rather than raw mince, cooked. As I don't have the facility to mince meat myself, we bought fresh minced meat and fried it off. I used a bit more stock than the recipe asked for because it was really getting thick. There were no lemon butterflies. I felt like I have let the side down.

Score (out of 10) -
A steady 7. I like having vegetables with dinner. Meat on carbs. Still a winner.