Pumpkin Rice Pudding

Inspired by those Tuesdays with Dorrie girls who have inundated the Internet with their chocolate and vanilla rice puddings, I have made some Pumpkin Rice Pudding. It's really good. Comforting and homey. It makes the snow that nailed us again last night seem not too bad. This rice pudding also isn't nutritionally defunct. There's pumpkin and that adds some really good vitamins. It is a vegetable after all. I made it with 1% milk instead of whole milk and there's no butter in it. I'm not sure if there's usually butter in rice pudding, but anytime I don't cook with butter it could be seen as a lighter meal.

And now there's some leftover pumpkin puree in the fridge. Which will always remind me of the time my sister M. came home after work and reached for the pumpkin in the fridge thinking it was leftover sweet potatoes. The next morning she told us that the sweet potatoes we made for dinner were really bland. We laughed pretty hard once we figured out what she was talking about. We had baked sweet potatoes with dinner. So now every time I put pumpkin in a container in the fridge I giggle and think of M.

Pumpkin Rice Pudding

loosely adapted from Pumpkin A Super Food for All 12 Months of the Year

5 cups 1% milk

1/2 cup arborio rice

1/2 cup canned unsweetened pumpkin

1/3 cup sugar

1 cinnamon stick

1/4 tsp salt

1 egg

1 tsp vanilla

Heat the milk, rice, pumpkin, sugar, cinnamon stick, and salt in a large heavy-bottomed saucepan over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until tiny bubbles form around the edge of the pan and steam rises.

Reduce heat to low and gently cook, uncovered, for about an hour and rice is tender and pudding is thick. Stir frequently (with a wooden spoon with a flat bottom if you have one.)

Beat the egg with a fork in a small bowl. Spoon some of the pudding into the egg. Slowly add this egg mixture to the pudding, stirring constantly and keeping the heat low. Cook for 1 to 2 more minutes, or until the pudding thickens some more.

Remove from heat and stir in the vanilla. Cool slightly before chilling completely.

Beet Risotto

One of the things I've been doing to occupy my time during my massive amounts of free time, has been to go through my food magazines that I acquired last year. I know that many people out there have this problem. Cooking Light is easy enough because they send me a cookbook in January that has all the recipes from the previous year in it. So I pack up my old magazines and give them to my stepdad. Bon Appetit is a little more complicated. But because I have the whole year I've offered them to both my stepdad and my sister Super G and I'm letting the two of them battle out who wants them. All those recipes are on epicurious anyway. The remaining magazines pose more of a problem. There's several Rachel Ray magazines and some Eating Well magazines and maybe some Martha Stewart like little Everyday Food magazines.

So my process has been to tear out the recipes that look really good to me and then I file them in a expandable file by recipe type. It's all very anal and silly, but I'm having the small problem that this file is starting to bulge. It occurs to me that I never cook these recipes that get stuffed into the expanding file. Well tonight at dinner I changed it all up. I cooked from a recipe that I found in a Rachel Ray magazine. kinda sorta. See her recipe was for Beet Risotto with Roasted Asparagus and Ricotta Salata. I had no asparagus and no Ricotta Salata. I'm pretty sure Ricotta Salata would be considered a hard to find ingredient out here. But I did have some goat cheese. So I made Beet Risotto with crumbled goat cheese. Rachel Ray may be super peppy and perky and far cuter than I could hope to be, but she also seems to be pretty easy going and I'm sure she wouldn't mind that I'm changing it all up on her.

It was delicious. Even the Brain, who doesn't "care for beets" ate two helpings. It was rich and creamy without any extra butter or Parmesan cheese. The color is beautiful. And it's not overly sweet like many beet dishes can be. Totally "delish"!

Beet Risotto

very loosely based on a recipe by Rachel Ray

3 Tbsp EVOO (extra virgin olive oil)

6 cups vegetable or chicken broth, kept simmering

1 1/2 cups arborio rice

4 baby red beets, peeled and cut into 1/4 inch cubes

1 small yellow onion chopped

2 to 3 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 cup dry red wine

salt and fresh ground pepper

4 oz. crumbled fresh goat cheese

Heat olive oil in large skillet or medium dutch oven over medium heat. Stir in the rice to coat with the oil, and toast for 2 minutes. Add the beets, onion, and garlic and cook until softened, about 5 minutes. Pour in the wine and cook until absorbed into the rice, then begin adding the broth by ladelfulls (about 1 cup at a time) stirring with each addition, until the rice is cooked, about 20 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Crumble goat cheese on top.