Simple Rice Pudding

I love rice pud­ding. It is a com­fort food that every time I eat it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.  Plus it tastes good.  Oh so good. And it turns out the rest of my fam­ily enjoys a good bowl of rice pud­ding too. So when the mood sud­denly hit last week to eat said rice pud­ding I looked to see if I had a sim­ple and easy rice pud­ding recipe any­where around so I could make it. Turns out I did and away I went.

What You Need:

1 Cup of Long Grain Rice
4 Cups of Milk {2% or full fat}
1/2 Cup of Gran­u­lated Sugar
1/4 Tea­spoon of Salt
1/4 Tea­spoon of Cin­na­mon
1/4 Tea­spoon of Nut­meg
1 Tea­spoon Vanilla

Vari­ety of top­pings:: Exam­ples:: Almond Slices, Dried Fruit, Mini-Chocolate Chips

Makes 6–8 servings

How To Put It Together:

In a heavy bot­tomed sauce pan com­bine your 4 cups of milk with 1 cup of long-grain rice.  Add in your sugar and salt. Stir together. Bring it all to a boil. Once it is boil­ing, reduce your heat to a sim­mer, cover with a lid, and stir occa­sion­ally for about 20 minutes.

Now you can add in your spices.  If you want to change the dry spices you can, all­spice or pump­kin spice might be nice, you can also add in dried fruit at this point if you would like. Per­son­ally, I wait and serve dried fruit as an optional top­ping.  Remem­ber if you add choco­late at this point it will melt!  Which is OK  if you want a choco­late rice pud­ding, but not if you don’t.

You will need to let this cook on a low heat cov­ered for another 20 min­utes  or until the rice is ten­der.  You will want to stir occa­sion­ally like you did before adding any of addi­tional spices or other items.

Once it is ten­der turn the heat off and add in your vanilla.  I like a lit­tle more vanilla than some other folks might, you can go as low as 1/4 a tea­spoon but per­son­ally I felt this did not add enough taste.

Also, as I men­tioned I wait to add optional top­pings.  Why? Because when I make dif­fer­ent dishes which allow for top­pings I let the kids choose from a vari­ety of top­pings to their own tastes.  Of course every­one thinks mini-chocolate chips are great but I have been sur­prised by putting out dried fruit {such as cher­ries, raisins or cran­ber­ries} and var­i­ous nuts {almond slices and wal­nuts are favorites} how the kids will mix it up. My advice offer the dried fruit & nuts encour­age them make new choices.

Adapted from Fam­ily Cir­cle Sep­tem­ber 2012

Tagged as: comfort food, cooking, dessert, easy, easy recipe, food, food & drink, homecooking, homemade, pudding, recipe, rice, simple recipe