JUST ONE OF THOSE NIGHTS

It's 3:30 AM and I can't sleep!    Yes!  You heard me right.   Me, the Queen of sleep, is wide awake at 3 AM. 
I was asleep but then I woke up and now I can't get back to sleep. I might have something to do with sleeping till 10:30 this morning . . . or it could have been the fact that I didn't do a damn thing today except putter around the house . . . or it could be the Chocolate Walnut Rice Pudding that I created this evening and wound up eating a goodly bit of in the process.
 It is all Sharon and Bob's fault ! When they arrived a week ago I had made a roast chicken dinner with rice as a side dish. Sharon and I were busy talking and catching up on months of news while I was cooking. I wasn't paying attention and poured in twice the amount of rice that I planned on making, resulting in a pot full of left over rice in my fridge. None of the other 2 meals that I cooked (we ate out most of the time) would go with rice so I needed to find a recipe that called for 3-4 cups of rice.
Sharon and Bob left yesterday and I got to cleaning out the fridge in preparation for our next set of house guests who are arriving tomorrow . . . oops, today. I happen to know that Kathy, part of the Kathy and Jim duo, loves rice pudding. Especially rice pudding with raisons. We have known K&J even longer than Sharon and Bob. We met while we were all teaching in "C.I." (Central Islip).  We used to spend a lot of time together traveling to Cape Cod for a week right after school ended in June. We camped together, partied together and raised our kids together. Jim and Husband worked together for years running the Town Recreation Program for the Handicapped. Bottom line, we got to know each others likes and dislikes and rice pudding is on the "LIKE" list. (FYI . . . Jim loves Pistashio ice cream, but not with Chineese food. I never saw anyone so sick in my life!)
Back to the pudding . . . I had rice, I had milk and I had raisons so I had a dessert in the making for tomorrow . . . oops . . .  tonight.
Thanks to Google I came up with a quick and easy recipe for rice pudding made from cooked rice. I put all the ingredents into the pan and put it on the stove to SIMMER. Trouble was I was doing 3 different things at once, as usual, and the milk and rice burned. Just a little, but enough to weld the burned rice to the bottom of my corning wear pan and to add a nice charred flavor to the rice. Charocoal flavor is great on burgers but not in pudding. I quickly poured the rice and milk into a different bowl but it was too late. That lovely burned flavor just wouldn't go away. So . . . what to do, what to do?  Throw all the rice away? OR . . . maybe if I add a little vanilla and cinnamon and nutmeg that will mask the taste of my faux pas? I have nothing to loose except some rice and milk so what the heck, lets give it a try.
Do you know that cinnamon masks NOTHING? But seeing how cinnamon is now the new miracle cure for Heaven only knows what I had nothing to lose by adding 1/2 the jar. (Do you know you can now buy Cinnamon Pills? They had them in the pharmacy section of Sam's Club . . . No Joke!) But unfortunately even 1/2 the bottle did nothing to mask the flavor of BURN. But what if I add CHOCOLATE? Chocolate would cover the taste of burn, right? WRONG! First I added cocco powder . . . Nothing! Then I added a half jar of Nutella that I had left from when Kaelin was here. (Kaelin LOVES Nutella. She has "Tella" on her pancakes and "Tella" and cream cheese sandwiches for lunch because she is allergic to peanuts and can't eat peanut butter.)
And the final touch . . . WALNUTS ! Walnuts won't mask anything but how can you eat anything chocolate without adding walnuts?  Stir it all together and somewhere under the chocolate, nut, rasin, cinnamon rice pudding there is still a hint of burned rice.

Oh Well, we'll probably eat out any way and I can feed the pudding to H. He and I will eat anything with chocolate in it.

Oh Yea, so the bottom line to this whole story is, DON'T EAT ANYTHING WITH COCCO IN IT JUST BEFORE YOU GO TO BED!  It's now 4:30 AM and I am still wide awake. I'll probably fall asleep at 6AM and sleep till noon and screw up tomorrow night's sleep. Maybe I'll put some milk on the stove and have a cup of warm milk. All I have to do is let it simmer . . .