Home Cookin Chapter: Recipes From Thibeault's Table Creamy Coconut Cardamom Rice Pudding ==================================== adapted from Kate Zuckerman's The Sweet Life makes about 6 cups, serves 8-12 Rice: 1/2 cup + 2 tbsp jasmine rice or basmati rice 1/4 cup sugar 1 (13.5 fluid oz) can coconut milk 1 cup whole milk 1/4 tsp salt Custard: 16 cardamom pods 1/2 cup + 2 tbsp sugar 1 cup whole milk 2 cups heavy cream 5 egg yolks 1 egg 1 tsp vanilla extract 1. Cook the rice: Preheat the oven to 325F. Place the rice in a strainer and rinse with cold water. Place the rice in a heavy-bottomed medium-sized saucepan with 2 cups cold water. Bring the rice to a boil and immediately remove the pan from the heat. Strain the rice and discard the starchy water. Place the blanched rice back in the pan and add the sugar, coconut milk, milk, and salt. Bring to a boil, remove from the heat, and cover the pan with aluminum foil or the lid. Place the pan in the oven and bake until the rice expands and absorbs all liquids, 30 minutes. If the pan is not oven proof, transfer the rice to a metal or glass baking dish and cover with aluminum foil. If there is still runny milk in the pan, continue to bake, covered, for another 5 to 10 minutes. When the rice is done, remove it from the oven, leave it covered, and set it aside. 2. Make the custard: While the rice is baking, make the custard. Using the bottom of a small frying pan, crush the cardamom pods to split them open. (*I used a mortar and pestle.) In a heavy saucepan combine the cardamom pods and seeds, 1/2 cup of the sugar, milk, and cream and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Remove from the heat and allow the cardamom to steep for 10 minutes. In a mixing bowl, combine the egg yolks, egg, and remaining 2 tbsp of sugar and briefly whisk for 1 minute. Using a ladle, slowly whisk some of the hot cream into the egg mixture to warm it. Gradually pour the warmed egg mixture into the hot cream, whisking the cream constantly as you pour. Cook the custard over medium heat, stirring continuously and scraping the bottom with a rubber spatula or wooden spoon, until the custard thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon. Remove from the heat and strain the custard to remove the cardamom pods and seeds. 3. Combine the custard and the rice: Scoop the rice into a large mixing bowl. Pour the hot custard over the rice and, using a whisk, slowly whisk until all of the rice granules are dispersed evenly and the mixture is thoroughly combined. Add the vanilla extract. Allow the rice pudding to cool completely. This pudding will keep, refrigerated, for 3 days. Variation: "Brulee" Spoon pudding into ramekins and chill. Sprinkle sugar over top of custards and place under the broiler or use a torch to caramalize. . My Notes: Substituted a vanilla bean for the cardamom pods. I split a vanilla bean and scraped the seeds into the milk and cream, along with the sugar, brought to a simmer and left to steep for 10 minutes.

My grandmother did not get into Horchow very often, nor did she buy her clothes at Neiman-Marcus. She made lye soap. She washed her clothes in it and those of my grandfather, their 8 children and many of her 56 grandchildren. She cleaned the butcher house with that lye soap, a house where certain things occurred that some of the delicate-minded would consider murder, but it was survival, food for building muscles for those who worked hard, so that they could live. Fortunately, for her she did not live long enough to witness all this PC madness. She died from working in the cotton fields that had been sprayed with insecticides, bathing with lye soap and putting gray wash water on her garden. They farmed hundreds of acres and since there was not enough water from the pots that held gray water, my grandaddy transported water via horse and buggy. Poor horses. They were fed food from all those fields that were treated with insecticides. He too, died, before all this madness. My grandmother died at the tender age of 89 from emphysema and incidentally she had never smoked, was not married to a smoker and none of her children smoked, and none of their friends back then smoked. They were very pious and pure, no alcohol and no tobacco, and had no idea about drugs. My grandfather was killed by a young protester, high on pot, who lost control of his vehicle, and hit my little grandaddy as he was driving to start his day and open up his little neighborhood grocery store that he had been running for years, when at the ripe old age of 99, he died. It's a shame they used all those insecticides and lye, or they might have lived to see the downfall of this country.

Well, I can see you are "pups"! Rueing your lost youth when you are forty?! Wait until your sixties! Then fears and worries are replaced by a sort of dreary grim reality. I admire those women ahead of me who are teaching me by their example how to age sucessfully and live their life fully to the last gasp. I chuckled yesterday in reading the obits ....one beautiful woman was remembered as "leaving this life full of the grace and dignity with which she had lived". Beautiful. Yet I couldn't imagine anyone saying that of me....more probably: She left this life kicking and screaming , trying to wring out the last drop from it! It is especially disturbing to feel that perhaps there are few dreams left to realize.....and worse, that those which have been realized have crumbed to dust through the use and abuse of days. There's an answer out there somewhere.....and I'm not going until I fully understand it!! LOL.

A few days ago I mentioned to a friend who has been my guest that I intended to read All the Light We Cannot See. "Oh, oh," she said, "you have to read The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah." She brought up Amazon on her device and let me read the synopsis and reviews. It gets five stars from 85% of the over 20,000 reviewers. All the Light also has over 20,000 reviewers with 72% giving it five stars. I listened to my friend rave about Hannah's book for several minutes, so I told her I might give it a try. It was a polite brush-off because, frankly, I was skeptical. Imagine my chagrin when my friend presented me with a brand new copy of The Nightingale as a thank you gift. I appreciated her thoughtfulness, really I did. She departed and I put the book on a shelf, giving it no further thought, I'm afraid, until my friend emailed me to ask if I had started it yet. She is anxious to know what I think. Well, I girded my loins and began. Oh dear, I was right to be wary. This book and other novels similar to it with the WWII French Resistance as a backdrop and excuse for a plot are doing to this time period and worthy subject what a few years back novelists were doing to the Tudor time period -- overusing the heck out of it. Blah! The Nightingale is essentially a romance novel, but it's not a particularly good one in spite of what the ravers say -- my opinion, of course. If the reader is young, I could probably forgive her for naïve enthusiasm. The Resistance probably does seem wildly romantic to a novice. Are the Amazon reviewers mostly youthful? I suspect so. But my friend is my age and I'm scratching my head and don't know how to respond to her. Perhaps the only thing to do is what Martin said above: maybe sometimes a polite lie will suffice. ;-(