For your consideration: Arborio Rice Pudding: White, Black (or Both) from Baking: From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, pages 412-413 featured this week on Tuesdays with Dorie.Repress the gag reflex and don't yack, it's just a really crappy picture. When I first saw this recipe I was skeptical – I even halved the recipe. I was in agreement with some of the other TWDers who commented that rice pudding doesn’t exactly bring whoops of excitement into their lives. One of the news flashes was a post from Herself, stating that there was a typo regarding the cooking time: “50” minutes, not 30. Glad I read that before I started.
I followed the directions faithfully, halved the recipe and increased the cooking time and ya know what? I LIKE rice pudding. I do. The spoonful I ate convinced me that I definitely like it “plain” without the extra vanilla or chocolate that the recipe calls for. Not black, not white or both. Neither. No yin, no yang, just plain. The Tao of Pudding and my life of late or so it seems.
A bloggy friend just demanded of me “Where the hell have you been?” Sorry I’ve been absent for a while. In addition to recovering from that cold, I’ve been seriously down in the dumps and it all revolves around food, glorious food. I went MIA, only made a half batch of pudding, didn’t experiment, only ate one spoonful, and barely stirred up enough enthusiasm to take a questionably passable picture – what’s up with that, Lisa? Well, you see my lab tests came back as definitely reflecting my participation in TWD and my love of food in general. My cholesterol and triglyceride levels seem to indicate that molten butter is starting to course through my veins while expanding my waistline at the same time. Which explains the tone of this pudding post and also my conundrum. Metaphorically speaking, since I can’t eat it, my DH shouldn’t, and my kids won’t (well, except for the Messy One)…. What’s a girl to do? Needless to say this little kick in the pants has taken me a while to process offline and figure out what I want and how to get there.
I've decided that I’m gonna shake, shake, shake it off because where I’ve landed is that I’m going to re-explore the Cooking Light/Light Cooking side of the food fence. I did Weight Watchers for a few years and I know how to dance that dance. The other weight loss program that really (really) works is Take Shape for Life/Medifast. Yes, it’s true. Just like the infomercials, I dropped over 13 pounds in 2 months: after that I was feeling so great that I dove head first into a pound of unsalted butter and wallowed around in it. I'm still down 8 pounds, so that's reason to celebrate, but I want to go all the way to my dream weight. So, an actual diet and eating mindfully: those two things should help with the diet part of the "diet and exercise" mantra (yin, yang, ok so I get it already). Doing T-Tapp at home and going to classes and meeting my friend at the gym (does it HAVE to be 5:00 AM though?) are the exercise part. Yin, yang, rhymes with Tang and I love orange Tang and oranges with chocolate and those orange chocolate wham things and (I need help.)
Before I cross over to the dark side, I’ll be posting some recipes I’ve already made and photographed, but haven’t uploaded yet. Some of these are oh so bad but OH so good. If I can bring myself to revisit those pictures and stop from salivating ( just the thought of this one particular recipe is making me drool and causing tears of joy to spring to my eyes, and yes it involves browned butter sauce, and is quite possibly The Best Thing I’ve put in my mouth EVER!) (and probably the big reason for those abysmal test results), I will share those with you so you can steer clear of my wicked ways. Yin. Yang.
As for the Rice Pudding? It was good. Really good. Thanks to Isabelle of Les gourmandises d’Isa for choosing this recipe. To see what all the other TWDers did with it, check out the blogroll here. If you'd like to try making Dorie’s version of Arborio Rice Pudding for yourself, you can find the recipe on our hostess’s blog, or in Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours.
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