Brown Rice Pudding

With the weight of two weeks of mid-term papers and exams off my shoulders, my body let its guard down and succumbed to repressed exhaustion. Lazing around this afternoon, I flipped through my favorite cookbooks searching for inspiration and came across Terry Walters brown rice pudding recipe (p. 273) in Clean Food. Yes, exactly… I thought. Pudding. My body and brain felt like pudding this weekend, and the visit from my amazing parents melted me into a gooey warm paste. I made a few adjustments to the original recipe primarily because I didn’t have all of Terry’s ingredients on hand, plus I omitted the maple syrup for some meaty dates I picked up at the Farmers Market that I think gave it a subtler flavor.

You’ll need:

• 2 ½ cups cooked brown rice
• 10 ounces extra firm organic tofu
• 1 cup almond (or rice) milk
• ½ cup brown rice syrup
• 6 medjool dates, pitted and chopped
• 1 tsp nutmeg
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• ½ tsp ground ginger
• 2 tsp vanilla

(plus) nuts, cinnamon, and brown sugar for sprinkling

Preheat the oven to 350’

Before you actually start to assemble the pudding, give yourself about hour to cook 1 ¼ cup brown rice in 2 ½ cups water ( based on package instructions). When the rice is cooked and still warm, combine with chopped tofu and non-dairy milk in a food processor. Slowly add brown rice syrup, dates, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, and vanilla until pureed. Oil a 9 x 12 pan and pour in mixture. Lightly dust with cinnamon and bake in the oven for 45 minutes. Enjoy while it’s still warm, sprinkling some raw walnuts, cinnamon, brown sugar, and even a little cold almond milk atop to send it home.

** Two days later… heated this up this morning with blackberries and almond milk, oh my. Protein perfect breakfast :)