Despite the fact that it is 94,000,000,000,000 degrees outside, I have been really craving good, old-fashioned comfort food. Not stuff like fried chicken or potatoes or anything savory like that. What I've been craving is sweet gooey stuff mom used to make.

Mind you, she was never much of a cook per se, but boy could that woman bake!

One of the things I was looking for was her rice pudding. Her rice pudding was SO good that I could never eat any of that Cozy Shack stuff, or anyone else's recipe. It has to be made a certain way. Lucky for me, I have the photo album that she wrote down all her recipes in. As I said, she wasn't really much of a cook, so the book is small, but what is in it holds the key to my sweet tooth.

I got out the recipe this evening, and was a bit surprised about what was there. For example, this recipie called for "1 pint" of water. I had no idea what the hell a pint is. I mean, I knew it was a liquid measurement popular in the UK for serving beer, but that knowledge wasn't very helpful. I found the answer though, in the old Betty Crocker cookbook. A pint is two cups.

Then the recipe wanted two cups of whole milk - not a pint of whole milk. So I had to go to the dictionary to be absolutely CERTAIN that two cups was the same as a pint. Rest assured, it is. However, I don't use whole milk. I use the fat-free kind. So already, this isn't the same recipe. Then a stick of butter? No way José. Ok, rice and raisins and secret ingredients (I'm not giving this away!) .. and in the oven it goes for an hour.

Mom didn't write down whether or not to cover this stuff, so I did - because you cover rice when you cook it, right?

Well, after about an hour, I went to check in on the pudding. The rice was still hard, the liquid wasn't thick at all... nothing happened. Talk about being pissed off. I know it wasn't the lack of fat that made the difference, not at this stage of the game. The oven was on, heating up my little condo, but the pudding was not doing its thing. So what did I do? I went over to the phone and started calling my mother . Talk about desperate and confused: my mother is quite dead. I don't have a Ouiji board, so I guess I'm out of luck there....

Plan B was to take the lid off the casserole and let it go for awhile. My oven is brand new and freshly calibrated, so I figured the sacred recipe must be flawed. Unfortunately, or fortunately, I can't decide which, plan B worked just fine. I now have wonderful, creamy perfectly textured rice pudding. The omission of fat did absolutely nothing to change the texture, either. So the answer is, cook the stuff for two hours, and don't cover the casserole.

MMM.. that's good eatin'!