Baked Coconut Rice Pudding with Owl Sounds
If you are like me, you have been in bed all day listening to the rain and wondering if the owl that was out in the carport last night will come back tonight. Hoo! Hoo!
I do hope he or she will return to chant his or her woodsy mantra behind curtains of midtown rain again tonight. The sound of the rain and the sound of an owl together is oddly delicous. I know this now. I describe it as odd only perhaps because I had never thought of the two together. But I cannot be the only one to have not thought of it, right? I am sure many others have not either. The makers of the white noise app on my phone, for example. It offers over thirty different kinds of rain sounds. There is even a shih-tzu snoring option, but no owl in the rain. I am certain if any of the developers involved in that project knew how wonderful that is to listen to, it would be an in-app purchase.
It is not.
If the owl does not come back this evening, I think I will want to put on an oversized sweater and listen to something with woodwinds because there is comfort in that also.
Anyhow, if some chilly weekends you find yourself snowbound or just preferring to stay inside. Where I live it snows at most a couple hours each year. That is hardly enough to snowbind anyone. One way to break the monotony and warm the house up a bit is to cook something.
Why, you could make a big pot of rice right now.
You probably will not eat it, but did you know you can work up quite an appetite doing nothing all day long? It is true. So go ahead and eat it if you like. If you do not that is fine also because for all you know next weekend it may be raining even more and you will be back in bed hoping for another owl and thinking about how hungry you feel.
If that happens, you will probably be thinking: Well I cannot make another pot of rice.
What if you had some baking to do? Why not make a baked rice pudding with all that rice you did not eat all week? Here, I will help.
Baked Coconut Rice Pudding with Owl Sounds
- 1-2 cups cooked rice
- 1 can evaporated milk
- 3 eggs
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 1/2 cup unsweetened coconut flakes
- cinnamon
- nutmeg
Preheat oven to 325 F.
Mix together eggs, evaporated milk, salt, sugar, and vanilla.
Coat a 9-inch baking dish with butter or cooking spray.
Cover the bottom of the baking dish with one cup of the rice. Pour in the milk and egg mixture. The mixture should just cover the rice. If there's room and there's a lot of liquid, add more rice until the two are even. Distribute the coconut evenly over the top.
Sprinkle with cinnamon and nutmeg.
Bake for 90 minutes.
After that amount of time has passed, test your pudding for readiness by poking it with something pointy, such as a toothpick. If that comes out clean, you are good to go. If you think you will enjoy it more if you wait until the coconut on top toasts a bit more, leave it in a while longer because as with so many things in life you will definitely enjoy it more with a toasty coconut top.