Cold Weather Comfort
On this particular winter’s day in 2015, the weather was cold and miserable. I was chilled to the bone, and craved something sweet and warming, so I thought I would whip up a batch of rice pudding in the slow cooker. But then I discovered there was no milk in the house.
Searching the cupboards, I found that we had plenty of tins of coconut milk. So, after some very quick Google searches for rice pudding recipes using coconut milk, I found one which basically said something along the lines of “put some pudding rice in the pan and add enough coconut milk to just cover the rice. Cook in slow cooker until ready.”
I was famished. As far as I was concerned, I was close to keeling over from starvation so I threw caution to the wind, and poured in a whole bag of pudding rice and a tin of coconut milk into the slow cooker.
Well, that was extremely foolish! It had been some time since I had made rice pudding, and I had forgotten just how little rice you need in comparison to the milk…
I had to keep adding more and more and MORE coconut milk… Eventually, I gave up after adding three full tins…
The cooked rice pudding was really dry and chewy, and the coconut flavour was decidedly odd.
Attempting to Save the Day
The next day, I decided to try using the sticky clumps of the disastrous rice pudding to make fruit sushi. I just hate food waste, and was determined to make the most out of a bad situation.
I sliced up fresh strawberries and kiwis. Using cling film and a bamboo rolling mat, it took just a couple of minutes to roll together the coconut rice pudding around the fruit.
Once rolled, we sliced it into pieces.
Our fruit sushi looked beautiful!
But alas, it tasted dreadful. There really was no saving the ruined rice pudding, even with this clever idea.
Fortunately, our dogs, Lila and Rumo, were very keen on the fruit sushi and they gobbled up the whole lot!
