Puddings Galore

We made brown rice for dinner last night, using a new method I had not tried before.  It involved boiling the rice in a ton of water, like pasta, and then draining it and letting it steam for the last 10 minutes of cooking time.  It turned out...okay.  Recipes that involve boiling don't work terribly well up here (we live at 9000+ feet), without significant modification.  Next time, I'll add a good 10-15 minutes to the boiling process.  The rice did turn out fluffy, though (just a little hard in the middle).

I know from experience that plain rice does not get eaten enthusiastically as leftovers in our house.  So I made rice pudding for the first time.

I have been experimenting with various homemade puddings and custards ever since discovering Einstein's affection for the store-bought variety.  Reluctant to feed my little darling modified food starch and monoglyceride (whatever that is), I went on a great pudding quest.  On foodtimeline.org, I found a pretty sweet history of pudding that I wasted a good couple hours reading.  It seems there are 3 main types of pudding: those made with mostly grains (more like porridge), like rice pudding, bread pudding, and Yorkshire pudding; French custard-types, with eggs and cream; and, of course, the boxed instant type, which must have seemed like a miracle to housewives tired of stirring eggs and cream at low temperature for hours and hours.

Well, my porridge-type pudding will definitely be a repeat in our home.  Unfortunately, this batch was made with the aforementioned under-cooked rice and ended up a little...chewy.  Does anybody know what consistency rice pudding is supposed to have?  Should it be fairly toothsome, like oatmeal, or more mushy, like tapioca?  I know not.

In other pudding news, I recently found a fantastic-looking purple sweet potato custard recipe at meta-mom.com that I'm putting on my "try soon" list.