Comoronian Rice Pudding with Pineapple

Comoros is a group of four islands off the east coast of Africa, north of Madagascar. They have bizarre animals. The coelacanth, a fish thought to have been extinct for millions of years, but still living in Comoros. The four-foot-long “flying fox” fruit bat. The islands were once a major supply stop for ships traveling around the tip of Africa, and their mixed African-Asian-European-Malagasy population reflects that. Most of the population farm bananas, rice, coconuts, ylang-ylang, and pineapples.

This recipe is from a UN book on rice recipes from around the world.

Comoronian Rice Pudding with Pineapple
Serves 6

4 1/4 cups milk
1 can pineapple slices (including juice)
3/4 cup rice
Pad of butter
1 pinch salt
1/2 cup cream
1 Tbsp sugar
2 Tbsp brown sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Boil the milk, add the rice and cook on very low heat for 1 hour. (Stir occasionally to make sure it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan). Then stir in the cream, pineapple juice, and sugar. Pour into a baking dish, cover with pineapple slices, sprinkle with brown sugar, and add butter.

Bake for 30 minutes & serve warm.

Oops - Back to the Tour: Burkina Faso

Sorry about that. Moved to St. Louis and forgot to blog for eight months. Still going around the world, though. Here’s Burkina Faso:

Peanut Butter Millet from Burkina Faso
Burkina Faso is classified as one of the hungriest countries in the world. Almost 40 percent of the population is chronically malnourished. Their infant mortality rate is 91%.

For perhaps all these reasons, I couldn’t actually find any recipes from Burkina Faso. They eat a lot of millet, sorghum, yams, peanuts, and a kind of pounded peanut butter millet mash called Tô (rhymes with dough). So I cooked some Tô and counted my lucky stars.

It was tasty, if odd. It tasted like peanut butter and millet.

Peanut Butter Millet from Burkina Faso

1/2 cup dry millet
1 cup water
1/4 cup peanut butter

Boil the water, stir in millet, reduce heat, simmer (covered) for ~20 minutes, until the millet has absorbed all the water. Stir in the peanut butter.