©2003 Ashy Macbean. All rights reserved.
I first had this pudding about ten years ago in Saudi Arabia, in a Pakistani restaurant. It's a fairly solid dish and would make a good breakfast or light lunch on its own. In Saudi I often had a portion after eating a huge plate of dhal with vegetables and chappatis. Eating was one of the few recreational options available there. It takes about an hour to make a pot of pudding but you can fill bowls, leave them to cool and set and serve them at a later time. That's what they did in the restaurant I nicked the recipe from.
I put on a fair bit of weight in Saudi even though I was jogging, swimming and going to the gym every day. I used to do two hours exercise after dark every weekday evening, but that was all. The rest of the time I was sitting in a car, in an office, drinking tea with friends or in front of the television. And I was eating a lot.
I travelled out from the UK with six other guys and although we didn't have much in common, we met on the beach for a swim after work every evening for the first few months. After the first couple of weeks someone remarked that he had begun to have difficulty doing up the button on his jeans and all the others agreed that they had noticed the same problem. That's when the exercise regimes began. A week or so later, another of the guys pointed out that we were all sending our clothes to the same laundry and asked if anyone else had noticed that their jeans were getting shorter as well as tighter round the waist.
You can use any type of rice here. Short grain is the usual type for puddings but when I first tried this pudding it was long grain rice that had been used. The recipe is fairly simple and easy to do but there is a danger of the pudding sticking and burning during the last ten or fifteen minutes of cooking so you have to keep an eye on it then.
Ingredients
1 cup of rice
3 dessert spoons of sugar
1 medium carrot
2 whole cardamom pods
6 cups of water
2.5 to 3 cups of unsweetened evaporated milk
Mix the rice, sugar, water and milk in a pot and set on a medium heat. While the mixture is heating, peel and grate the carrot and crush the cardamom pods gently (between two spoons is a good way of doing it). Add the carrot and cardamom to the mixture in the pot and when it reaches boiling point, turn the heat down to simmer. Put a lid on the pot, but leave a good space so that the pudding doesn't boil over. Stir occasionally and after about forty minutes, turn the heat down as low as it will go. It should take another ten or fifteen minutes for the rice to become very soft and the liquid to thicken well. This is the dangerous period when the pudding can stick to the bottom of the pot and burn so watch it well and stir it frequently.
When it looks ready, pour into serving bowls. You can serve it hot or cold.