Thai Iced Tea and more

I’ve been ordering a lot of thai iced tea lately and finally decided it might be easier (and cheaper) just to learn how to make it on my own. I found this recipe and went to the Indian grocery store to see if I could find some thai tea, but the closest I could find was some loose leaf orange pekoe.

After making it the first time I cut back on the sugar to 3/4 C, but I might cut it back even a little more next time since the evaporated milk is sweet too.

It’s not just tasty, it’s pretty too!

Rice Pudding

I’ve been getting better at avoiding food wastage. It means needing time to cook, but also time to evaluate what’s going bad soon and running out to get other ingredients that will work with it. Sometimes I get lucky, though, and already have stuff around the kitchen that will work.

The other day I had some leftover rice and nothing to eat it with so I decided to experiment with rice pudding. As usual I looked up some recipes online, but mostly ended up just doing my own thing. I added the rice and a can of sweetened condensed milk to a pan and let it simmer for a while. It seemed like there was way too much milk so I ended up boiling up some more rice and adding it to the already simmering rice and milk mixture. Well unfortunately, I think I underestimated just how much I would have to simmer the rice so it could soak up a good amount of milk and make it nice and soft.

After storing it in the fridge overnight it had soaked up most of the milk and was more solid than pudding-like so that night I simmered it some more just adding skim milk here and there. I learned not to turn it up too high after I smelled burning and had to toss the first batch out. Fortunately, I was only experimenting with a small amount of what I had made the night before. During the second try I kept the stove on low and checked it frequently.

I probably could keep simmering it forever and it would get softer and softer, but I think I finally got it to a point where it makes quite a nice rice pudding. In the end, I think it was a good thing that I had to add skim milk because it would have been too sweet with pure sweetened condensed milk. When it was just about done, I added some cashews bits, let them simmer for a bit too and voilá!

Chocolate Covered Goodness

Thank you Costco for having large cheap containers of berries to feed my addiction. They have these enormous gorgeous red raspberries. As I was admiring them I couldn’t help imagining what they would taste like covered in chocolate. Can you imagine?! Why just imagine, though, when you can mess around in the kitchen, make a mess, and see what happens? I don’t know a lot about melting chocolate and I don’t have a double boiler, but I remember once following a recipe (for what escapes me) that involved melting chocolate chips with butter. Dave and I ended up doing it again since it seemed to melt so nicely and we dipped tortilla chips in it because we love chocolate covered chips, but didn’t have any plain potato chips in the house at the time. Well, they turned out surprisingly good so I thought, “why couldn’t I do the same thing with raspberries?”.

I melted some chocolate chips in the microwave with a healthy pat of butter, mixed it up and poured it over the raspberries I had set aside in a small dish. I refrigerated the dish to harden the chocolate and did a taste test a while later. It didn’t turn out exactly as I had planned, since the chocolate was a little thick and overpowered the raspberry flavor, but it was a good start and an interesting experiment. What may be best is just to eat the raspberries immediately after they’ve been dipped in the chocolate, while it’s still warm and thin, like fondue.

I did enjoy using the leftover chocolate to dip bananas and peanuts later. The chocolate-covered peanuts worked so well they may even end up surfacing again later if I’m bored and find myself with the urge to play around with melted chocolate. I’m also considering making some frozen bananas a la Arrested Development. There’s an idea for a theme party! Arrested Development and frozen bananas, complete with melted chocolate and chopped nuts for dipping! We’d even have unlimited juice so the party would be off the hook!