An Old-fashioned Rice Pudding

Rice Pud, with a lovely nutmeg skin

Now I have to admit to a love of an old fashioned pudding, and rice pudding has always been my favourite, my mother would often make it as a mid-week dessert, it was great to come in from school and discover that treat waiting for us after dinner.

I've always been under the impression that is is something very tricky to make, that it fails more often than not. Well, I'm delighted to tell you I found the world's easiest rice pud recipe ever - honestly, it was even easier to make than the lemon posset!

What happened was I was cleaning out a cupboard and found a packet of arborio rice, for making risotto. Obviously I had great plans once for risotto, but never got round to it. I had a notion that you can use arborio rice for rice pud as well as traditional "pudding rice", so I thought I'd check the net, find a recipe and give it a whirl. Especially with the cold and windy day we had yesterday, I thought it would be a lovely comforting end to our roast chicken dinner (ps, here's a link to my favourite roast chicken recipe too, Delia Smith's fast roast chicken with tarragon and lemon - it's divine).

The Delia Smith site failed me, as her recipe uses evaporated milk and I didn't have any. The excellent BBC Food website though and pages and pages of recipes from every celebrity chef ever. Some were quite complicated, but actually the second listing - totally uncredited - turned out to be simplicity itself so I went for it.

The only issue was that when I weighed out the 55g of rice the recipe recommended, I knew instantly it wasn't enough, presumably because I didn't have "official" pudding rice and was going a bit off piste with my arborio rice. So I increased the amount of rice to the official portion size for two people of about 120g, and that was the perfect amount.

Preparation time on this is a max of about five minutes, then you simply stick in the oven for an hour. BONZA, as Himself would say!

Rice Pudding (from the BBC Food website)

• 55g/2oz pudding rice or 120g/4oz arborio/risotto rice
• 55g/2oz sugar
• 600ml/1 pint full-fat milk
• A good grate of fresh nutmeg
• Small amount of butter
• Preheat the oven to 160C/325F/Gas Mark 3

1. Mix the rice and sugar together in a baking dish and pour on the milk
2. Grate plenty of fresh nutmeg on top, and then dot with/float 3 or 4 small bits of butter
3. Bake in the oven for at least an hour - you can also cook it for longer at a lower heat, if you wish

Now, how easy is that?! And the kids loved it. Although I did find it on the sweet side, so next time I will reduce the sugar a bit, I would think 35 or 40g of sugar would be plenty.

Sarah xx

•