Easy rice Pudding recipe with condensed milk

Yum

Rice pudding… Priceless memories of a childhood long gone! I still remember sitting as a child at the table of my favorite Grandma, eating spoonful after spoonful of her simple yet comforting arroz doce… as well as her Grandma’s Chicken Soup (canja de galinha).

I always intended to post a recipe for rice pudding here, but it has only been after much hesitation: I knew that I would have to alter my Grandma’s recipe! So I kept putting it off– all the way up until last week, when a regular reader asked me for a rice pudding recipe. OK, fine, so now I couldn’t give myself any more excuses…

My Grandma was one of the best cooks that I have ever known, yet she had no formal culinary education — she cooked from the heart… She learned by practicing and using what her Portuguese ancestors passed on to her. Her arroz doce (rice pudding) basically consisted of long-grain rice (a staple in Brazil, but not the best type for making the dessert both thick and creamy), whole milk, a small amount of sugar, and cinnamon. It was mildly sweet and a bit creamy. It was served often for dinner — a true treat for a child!

Well, as I grew up and pursued a culinary education, my Grandma’s rice pudding was one of the first recipes that I had to modify… reluctantly. If you read this blog often, you know that I don’t hesitate for one second to modify others’ recipes. But this was not just any recipe, it was the recipe of my favorite Grandma, Vovó Socorro! I felt overtaken by a true dilemma… My head said to make the changes to the recipe that I knew were needed as a trained chef, while sentiment said that fiddling with the recipe that she had prepared so many times with love would break my heart into a zillion pieces.