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Rice pudding is comfort food.

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Pineapple Rice Pudding

Serves 6

Comfort food is like being wrapped in a blanket, early morning by the campfire, a hot cup of Joe, traces of pine in the air, the scent of the wood fire, sunlight filtering through the leaves … then your valet and three footmen, who set up camp a discreet distance away, bring you eggs Benedict. That is so comforting.

My footmen never bring me anything. To comfort myself, I make rice pudding. It has the rich velvetiness of ice cream, but with more substance … like kicking back on Cloud Nine with a really good book. And you can easily kid yourself into thinking it’s good for you. You’ll find that this particular recipe has an intriguing tang that registers more as a background sensation than a flavor.

Ingredients

¾ cup Arborio rice
4 cups whole milk
½ vanilla bean, split and scraped, OR 1 tsp vanilla extract^[1] ¼ cup^[2] sugar
Pinch of salt
¼ cup heavy cream
1 teaspoon freshly grated lime zest
1 fifteen-ounce can crushed pineapple
5 marshmallows^[3]
Whipped cream, maybe

Directions

1. Place the rice in a large frying pan, and turn the heat to high. Immediately add 2 cups^[4] of canned pineapple juice, about 1/2 cup at a time, allowing it to absorb the way you would if you were making risotto. Once all the juice has been absorbed, add milk^[5], vanilla bean and seeds, sugar, and salt. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat; reduce heat and simmer, stirring often, about 30 minutes. To prevent scorching, stir more frequently as it gets closer to being done^[6]. 2. Off heat. Remove vanilla bean; stir in zest and heavy cream. 3. Dump the pineapple into a sieve to drain. While that’s going on, cut a marshmallow in half. Then, cut each half in half. Finally, cut each half-of-a-half in half. You should wind up with 8 equal-size pieces of marshmallow. Yes, they resemble mini marshmallows … but you can say their hand-made now! Do the same to the rest of the marshmallows. Stir the marshmallows into the pudding. Stir in the pineapple. 4. Add dried cherries? And support the people who charge out the ass for them? No fucking way! Spoon some of the cherry mixture from Sweet Cherry Highballs (look for it in Sunflower) atop each serving. Or, you could always stir in some maraschino cherries, if you’re planning to serve this pudding to a harlot. 5. Rice pudding is as delicious at room temperature as it is chilled. Give it a dollop of whipped cream if you feel like living on the edge, you rebel.

Notes

[1] Vanilla and Food Co-Ops: Using a vanilla bean would leave you with those attractive little black speckles. But look what it could do to your cost! Real vanilla extract isn’t much less expensive than a bean. But don’t let artificial flavoring be the solution. Fortunately, there are other options. Never buy vanilla beans from the supermarket spice aisle. Buy them only where they’re sold in bulk. Don’t buy a ton of them at a time, mind you; buy only a few at a time. Bulk spice vendors have prices that are so much better, that you’ll be downright astounded. I’m not kidding. Your jaw will drop. Where do you find bulk spices? The first place I’d look’d be a food co-op, like ELFCO, People’s, Oryana, or Dill Pickle. You’ll make friends as well as find food – often very interesting food … often very interesting friends. Or else, I’d look for a specialty bulk retailer such as Country Corner or The Spice House. I often run into good prices on spices at ethnic food stores such as Edgewater Produce. Farmers markets? Sure, if you can find one that really is a farmers market, and not just a low-overhead grocery. I mean, unless you live in Hawaii, you have to wonder how the farmers at your market grew those pineapples. I suspect booths like that are covertly staffed by Wal-Mart. Speaking of Wal-Mart, some supermarkets offer bulk spices packaged in-house at a decent price, and as far as I know, Wal-Mart isn’t one of them. And then, of course, there’s Whole Foods. I usually expect Whole Foods to be the most expensive bulk option. I go there anyway, now and then, just because it’s so fucking awesome. But then I see people at a wine bar in the middle of Whole Foods, and people with cartloads of stuff that I’m sure will ring up to something like $10,000 at the tail end of an apparent recession, and the store is teaming – practically rioting – with shoppers eager to buy whatever they’re buying at absolute top dollar. That’s when it dawns on me that some people weren’t as affected by this recession as others. In fact, for some it was a goddamned gold rush. But you know what? Fuck them. I make my own, handcrafted, incredibly delicious vanilla. And in my book, “doing” trumps “buying.” Don’t mistake that for an ideology. I’m just pointing out that “being” is closer to “knowing” than it is to “having.” (OK, maybe that is an ideology.)

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Breaking News: The new Mariano’s on Lawrence has a whole wall of bulk spices. It’s so amazing, so beautiful, vaulted ceilings, all kind of natural lighting, such a spectacular space … that I want to have a flash mob wedding there! No, not a proposal, an actual wedding, like where we’re shopping and I’m like, hey, what’s on sale over there, and all of a sudden there’s this guy picking out cucumbers who starts dancing and next thing you know, the whole produce section is ablaze with all our family and friends, doing a number choreographed by Emmy-winning Derek Huff, and Derek Jeter shows up, just because we asked him to on Twitter, and then there’s a priest, and confetti, and next thing you know we’re saying out vows right under the organic nutmeg along that wall of spices. And then our video goes viral, while we’re on our flash-mob honeymoon, which is kind of flash-mob porn, but in a good way, but when we get back we start to argue about how to leverage all our YouTube hits and it gets kind of ugly and next thing you know I find out that you’ve been having a thing with both the Dereks from our wedding, and that it probably started right there at Mariano’s, so we have a bitter divorce and I wind up drinking a lot and go on a quest to sleep with all of your friends from college just to fuck you over but it only leads to hep C and I lost my job because of all the drinking and now I don’t even have insurance. You know, come to think of it, I hate that Mariano’s. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming, already in progress.

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Hand Made, Man-Made, Ideologically Superior Vanilla

You can use vanilla beans to make your own hand-made, man-made ideologically superior vanilla extract. It’s shockingly easy (which you can feel free to mention to the people in the spice isle at Whole Foods, or not, depending on how you want to play this). The hardest part is that you need a bottle made of dark glass. No, I do not mean glass with powers of dark magic. I mean to tell you that vanilla extract is sensitive to light. That’s why it’s sold in brown bottles. Although, if you do come across a bottle made of glass with exceptional dark power, why the hell don’t you just conjure some goddamned vanilla and get on with! I, being non-magical but somewhat blessed, found some groovy dark-brown bottles at an antique market. Gave them a thorough cleaning and let them dry completely. They didn’t have caps, so I bought cork stoppers for them at a craft store Home Depot, on the way to a sports bar, after a football game. Yeah. To make vanilla extract, pour a cup of vodka into your bottle. Quality isn’t critical; although, if you use absurdly expensive vodka, you’re kind of defeating the purpose. Compare your bean to the level of vodka in your bottle. You’re going to want the bean to be completely submerged, so you’ll have to decide whether to slice your bean into shorter segments. However, you don’t want to chop the bean up more than necessary. Whatever you decide, start by slicing the bean in half lengthwise to expose the seeds. Then, segment or not, as desired. When you’re done, pop the bean into the bottle. Give it a good shake. Store the bottle in a place where it’s unlikely to be directly exposed to direct heat or light. In a couple of months, you’ll have a decent extract. In a couple more months, you’ll have a fantastic extract! To use it, just give it a good shake and pour it right out of the bottle into your measuring spoon. A few seeds may come out, but that’s awesome! The husk should stay in the bottle; that’s why I suggested that you not chop it up more than necessary. (You can always strain it through a coffee filter if you need to.) When you’re done using it, cork it back up and put it away. As far as I can tell, you can let your vanilla just go on steeping away indefinitely and the extract will get better and better and better. You can actually let it steep for years. If, as you use it, the liquid level the in bottle gets low enough that the beans are no longer submerged, add another bean (sliced and perhaps segmented) and top it off with more vodka. After many delicious years, you may build up a critical mass of beans; use up the extract, dump the beans, and start over from scratch. (The husks are edible. You can mince them and throw them into a batch of chocolate cupcakes, if you like. They kind of meld into the cupcakes in a pleasing way.) I keep two bottles of vanilla going. I use one of them while the other one steeps. When the first one needs refreshing, I do so and swap the bottles.

[2] Sugar: You could get away with using 50% more sugar if you want your pudding to be very sweet.

[3] Marthamallows: If I were Martha, I’m sure I’d add “preferably homemade” to my call-out for marshmallows. But I’m not Martha. So, I recommend you use the marshmallows that have been sitting in your cupboard for so many years, you’re not really sure. (You think she has time to sit around and make marshmallows? She probably has interns who do that. I don’t have an intern. I use Jet-Puffed.)

[4] Pineapple Juice: Why two cups? Because that’s what I happened to have. The resultant pudding had an attractive-but-pale pineapple flavor, like a beautiful pastel watercolor. And never forget about the sex benefits of pineapple juice!

[5] Ratio: If you want more pineapple flavor, you could experiment with a greater pineapple-to-milk ratio. You might think that with less milk, your pudding will be less creamy – and it will – but remember that the rice itself is contributing a great deal to that creaminess. You’re adding cream in the end, as well.

[6] Done: When is the pudding done, you ask? First of all, the rice has to be tender. Beyond that, it depends on how thick you want your pudding to be. Realize that it will thicken as it cools, so you want to stop cooking while the pudding is still looser than you want it to be in the end. I suggest that the pudding is done when it resembles really loose, wet, scrambled eggs. This will produce a soft pudding. If you want it really thick, though, cook it until you can drag a spatula through it and count to three before it backfills.

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Curious to know what’d happen if you used regular rice, or brown rice in a recipe like this? Leave a comment!

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