Indian Peach Rice Pudding

We attended a birthday potluck yesterday, with an Indian food theme. Now, I can't eat out Indian (ghee being a mortal enemy of mine) but I love Indian food, and it's easy enough to cook Indian at home. I made the delicious samosas recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance, which are pretty time consuming, but totally worth it (you can shorten the prep time by making a samosa pie instead of individual samosas...)

Anyway, we were brainstorming on what desert to bring and my husband found an Indian peach rice pudding recipe online that looked really good, so I modified it! It's called Peach Phirni, and you can indeed make it without corn starch and without cow's milk. I made a double batch, but I'm going to post the single batch recipe, since doubled it makes a LOT of pudding.

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup rice
• 3 cups almond milk
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 15 oz sliced fresh peaches (blanched and skinned)
• 1/2 teaspoon arrowroot (or corn starch)
• 1/8 teaspoon cardamom powder
• 1/8 cup sliced almonds
• 1/8 cup raw cashews
• slices of peaches for garnish
• mint leaves for garnish

Wash the rice and soak it in water for fifteen minutes or more. Once the fifteen minutes are up, drain the water and put the rice and a little almond milk in the food processor and puree to a fine texture. Set aside. Blanche the peaches in boiling water for 45 seconds, peel and slice. Set aside slices from one peach for garnish. Put the rest in the food processor with the arrowroot powder and puree. Set aside.

Boil the almond milk on medium high heat and let it simmer until milk reduces (the original recipe says to reduce from 3 cups to 2 cups, just watch it and make sure it reduces by about 1/3.) Take about 1/4 cup of hot milk and mix it with rice paste and mix. Add the rice/almond milk to the boiling almond milk slowly and stir continuously, making sure rice does not become lumpy and the almond milk doesn't burn. Add the almonds and cashews and stir.

Cook for about 20 minutes, the almond milk with reduce to about half it's volume and the rice will look and taste cooked (even though it's in tiny bits, you will be able to tell when it's cooked- looks almost like cooked tapioca.) Once the rice is cooked, add the sugar and cardamom and cook for about 4-5 minutes- make sure the sugar is completely dissolved and the cardamom mixes in completely. Turn off the heat. Mix the peach puree with the cooked rice and transfer to a serving bowl

Chill in the fridge for a few hours and then garnish with the peach slices and mint leaves! Enjoy!

Delicious Teriyaki Noodles

Delicious Teriyaki Noodles, a photo by zombie amelia on Flickr.

This was an easy and amazingly delicious hot weather meal... it was still 95F at 7pm when I was making dinner, this was a nice refreshing dish. I had prepackaged Wildwood Teriyaki Baked Tofu, but I guess I like more Teriyaki flavor than then, because in my head, that sounded kind of bland. So, I harnessed the power of Google and found a delicious and very easy Teriyaki sauce recipe on Veggiebelly.com (which I doubled from the original, except the amount of ginger):

8 tablespoons soy sauce
8 tablespoons brown sugar
4 tablespoons mirin
4 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 tablespoon powdered ginger

For the rest of this recipe, you also need-
about 6 oz rice noodles I had half a package of Thai Kitchen rice noodles) 
2 stalks broccoli
baked tofu
half an onion
half a cucumber

Place the sauce ingredients in a pot and bring to a gentle boil. Reduce heat and simmer for about 2 minutes or till the sugar dissolves and sauce thickens slightly. Take care not to boil the sauce too much and burn the sugar. Taste the sauce, and adjust sugar or rice vinegar if needed.

In the meantime, I boiled water and soaked the rice noodles- rice noodles are so easy, all you do is boil water, dump them in (off the heat) and let them soak and soften while you're preparing the other things. Once they're soft, you rinse them in cold water to stop them softening. You end up with delicious, cold noodles.

While the rice noodles were "cooking," I cut up the tofu, and sauteed with onion (browning slightly, since I hate soft, soggy tofu) and then added teriyaki sauce to the pan, cooking the tofu and onion mixture a little in the sauce. I then added the broccoli and put the lid on the pan for a few minutes to steam the broccoli a little, before stirring it in with the tofu and adding more teriyaki sauce.

Cut the cumber into strips and set aside.

Once the tofu and broccoli are ready, put the rice noodles in your individual serving bowls, and spoon the tofu/broccoli mixture on top of the noodles. Add the cut up cucumber to the dish and serve! It's a delicious sweet teriyaki taste, and the pairing of the cold noodles and the warm tofu was fantastic.

I also used the remaining teriyaki sauce as a dipping sauce for the frozen vegan pot stickers I made to go with this. YUM!