Sutlac (p. 463)

Sutlac is Turkish Rice Pudding, and it's the last of the desserts I need to tackle in The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook. The reason it's the last one is that rice pudding gives me the heebie jeebies. Rice? In pudding? Gross. The truth is I've never tried rice pudding before because I have an aversion to the mere idea of it.

But here we go. Rice pudding. From Turkey.

First off, a tip for you. If you need to heat a quart of milk, and you have a one quart saucepan, that's not the appropriate one to use.

I tossed in my cinnamon stick and lemon zest, walked a way for a second, and the whole thing overflowed. I dumped it into a 2 quart sauce pan instead (note to self: do this first next time) and kept it just below boiling for about half an hour. Unfortunately, I lost a lot of lemon zest in the overflow, but I had to deal with it.

While the milk was heating, I cooked the rice in water with a little bit of salt.

Once both the milk and the rice were ready, I combined them (straining out the cinnamon stick and remaining lemon zest -- plus the film that developed on top of the milk, gross) and added in a paste of water, flour, and corn starch.

And then I stirred for 10 minutes solid, which was boring. Luckily I had my current favorite show, Masterchef, playing on Hulu on the counter. Pour in some sugar and stir for another 15 minutes. I attempted to clean up the spilled hot milk and zest from the stove at the same time, and proceeded in making more of a mess. 

While the pudding was still warm, I poured it into individual cups.

And then topped with chopped pistachios before digging in.

Here's what I discovered: rice pudding isn't gross, it's actually good! I was worried that I'd have to force people to come over to eat the other 7 servings of pudding, but now I'm not even sure that I'm willing to share. Except with my husband, but only because I think he doesn't like rice pudding, either. We'll see tonight if he gives it a chance.

lemon -- $.79 (only needed the zest)

milk -- $2.00

pistachios -- $1.70

Total Cost of Sutlac: $4.49

($.56 per serving)