Family food - Rice Pudding

Me and The Bairn are loaded with another Stinking Cold, and since it's October (it's not! It's actually July! I know! Couldn't believe it either. Can Prince Charles please come back and do the BBC weather again? I'm sure he got it right when he did it. And I'm sure he made June weather appear for June. I love the monarchy. Aren't they fab? Especially Her Jubbly the Queen. Anyway, I digress....) here's a winter warmer type affair.

Mam (My mam, not the Queen, though I hear Her Maj gets annoyed when people call her Ma'am and not Mam. My mam could be Queen. She is majestic. Am I overdoing the brackets? (I like grammar.)) has been making rice pudding since me and my sisters were wee. Probably since the dawn of time - though I can't imagine who'd be consuming it. Depends on your belief system I suppose. Therefore her customers were likely a diplodocus and a pterodactyl. The current day incarnation of her historical rice pudding is flipping awesome - I've toned down the sugar so it's baby friendly-er. You'd probably not want to serve it up at lunch and dinner, every day for a week, or your precious infant may start to take on the appearance of feather-duster wielding scouser himself - Ken Dodd, in the dental sense.

Rice Pudding

Ingredients

1 pint of full fat milk

1 1/2 oz of short grain rice (pudding rice or arborio rice)

3/4 oz of caster sugar

Optional cinnamon, nutmeg, dried fruit (small pieces, and for older babies)

1. Pre-heat oven to 150 deg Celsius.
2. Butter up a pudding tin, pie dish or something like that. Mine was about 8" by 6" roughly.
3. Heat up milk in a pan or microwave for a minute or so.
4. In the bottom of the dish, scatter your (washed) rice, sugar -and I like a tiny pinch of each nutmeg, cinnamon and a handful of raisins.
5. Put on a baking tray in the middle of the oven for about an hour and a half. After an hour, check every 10 minutes.

Et voila! When the "skin" (sounds horrific, but actually delicious) is this gorgeous golden colour, get a fork in and have a taste of the rice beneath. It should be creamy and very soft. After its been left to cool for a bit, it'll congeal, turning very thick and rich. It apparently freezes well, but I've not tried that yet. I have heated it in a microwave which dries up a bit. If you give it a good stir and mix it with full fat milk, its good as new. If you've made it plain, you could try adding fruit purée to it (or jam for adults), but it's delicious in its most basic form.

Mmmmmm.... skin......