Lifestyle: Black rice pudding recipe.

In case you just asked, 'what on earth is black rice?' let me take you to class for a minute ????. Black rice which I recently discovered whilst actually looking for Ramen ingredients, has been documented as coming originally from ancient China.

It was then called 'The Forbidden Rice' or 'Emperor's Rice' as it was reserved only for the Chinese royals. Woe unto you if you were caught with a single grain. Thankfully, we all can enjoy Black rice which has been touted to be extremely rich in the antioxidant anthocyanin, a color pigment which gives the grain its purplish to black colour. This same pigmentation is what gives blue & black berries their darkened colours. The nutritional value of Black Rice ranges from being high in amino acids, iron, vitamin E, fiber, essential amino acids etc ( Source: Wikipedia) Black rice is also much healthier than brown rice.

Class is over. I must say I was pretty curious when I saw this variety of rice especially when I had just bought local brown rice just the other day which by the way is sensational! White fragrant rice is seeing the last of my kitchen. So I bought half a kilo to 'try' it out. I am all for fiber rich foods for the benefit of my digestive tract ????.



After doing a bit of reading about my find, I decided to make a pudding out of it; what we call Rice Water. I washed it out and soaked it overnight to reduce the cooking time the next day and thanks to some food blogs I read, not doing so will lead to about an hour's cooking time. Ain't nobody got time for that ????.

The next morning, I discovered that the water had taken on a purplish hue. Mind you, this water can stain your clothing like how the red Brofo Nkatie ( local almond nut in Ghana) can stain your blouse and have you crying for days. Yep. So be careful when dealing with the liquid.

I boiled one cup of black rice to 3 cups of water to get the grains well cooked through. I added half a teaspoon of salt for flavour. There's a lot of stirring that goes on when making Black Rice Pudding. My aim was to get that soft cloudy texture of Rice Water. My husband came by the kitchen and peered into the saucepan, "It looks like burnt rice. I am going to tweet that you have burnt the rice and claim you are cooking black rice." ????????

It took about 15-20minutes and it was done! I taste a teaspoonful and my mind was just blown! It was almost sweetish with a slight nutty flavour behind it. I wasted no time at all in serving it up. Hubby abstained for some reason. Fearo. I chopped up some banana, splashed on a bit of honey and milk. This was the exact moment when I wished I had coconut milk instead ????

I did finish my meal with gusto, hubby got a bit of taste and he realised it wasn't that bad either. Too late, I finished it all! At GHC16 for half-kilo it's not cheap rice. But healthy foods are rarely inexpensive and to eat healthy you got to invest in your own health, right?

You can top the pudding with any fruit of your choice. Mango will be great to give it that sweetish sourish taste of heaven. There's so many different ingredients in foreign supermarkets to create a fusion recipes just to make the dinner table a bit more interesting from the norm.

I recently met a young married woman who said something funny but had some truth around it. She said, 'as wives we need to find interesting and new ways of cooking or else our husbands will leave us.' I agree with trying to recipes to make home cooking more fun and creative but would it really lead to our husbands abandoning us for cooking the same old yam and palava sauce? I will leave that for you to comment on.