Rice Pudding with Butterscotch Apples

Random Recipes is now going into it's third year and to celebrate Dom at Belleau Kitchen is kindly allowing us to choose our book our own way.  We still have to pick a random recipe from it to celebrate our love of recipe books and those wonderfully talented people who write them (with apologies to Dom for paraphrasing!).

The book I chose for my Random Recipe was The River Cottage Year by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.  I picked this up  recently for £2.99 in a discount book shop.  The randomness of my recipe choice is relative since I decided to go with the chapter for February, on the basis that the recipe was likely to be suitable for this chilly time of year, but I promise that I did choose the recipe in the February chapter quite randomly, just by identifying the beginning and end of the February chapter and then opening the book randomly to find...

Rice Pudding with Butterscotch Apples 

Serves 6
For the rice pudding
50g unsalted butter
100g pudding rice
500ml whole milk
500ml double cream
50g caster sugar
Fresh nutmeg (optional)
For the butterscotch apples
4-5 firm, tart, eating apples (about 400-500g)
50g unsalted butter
50g light brown sugar

Heat the oven to 140C/gas mark 1 and butter a deep ovenproof dish. Melt the butter in a saucepan over a low heat and add the rice, stirring until coated with butter (it shouldn't fry or even sizzle).
Mix the milk and cream together and add to the saucepan. Stir in the sugar until dissolved.
Transfer to the ovenproof dish, grate a little nutmeg over the surface (if using) and cook for 3-3½ hours. Every 30 minutes, stir gently from bottom to top to separate the grains and work the surface skin back into the pudding, until the rice has expanded to fill the dish and is quite tender (2½-3 hours should do it). For the last 30 minutes, leave to cook without stirring so a golden-brown skin forms, turning the oven up to 170C/gas mark 3 for the last 10 minutes.
Peel and core the apples and cut them into 1-2cm dice. Melt the butter in a large frying pan and fry the apples very gently. After 2 minutes, sprinkle with the sugar then gently toss and fry for 12-15 minutes, until tender and glazed. Serve immediately with a  generous dollop of the hot rice pudding.

 I'm sure my regular readers will not be surprised to learn that I made a few changes!  I buttered the dish, put all the rice pudding ingredients into the dish including the knob of butter  and baked the pudding in the oven for the required time.  I also used a little more milk and a bit less cream.  

This was undoubtedly a treat, the butterscotch apples were gorgeous and a perfect foil to the rich creamy rice.

I am also entering this recipe for Tea Time Treats as the theme for Feburary is 'pudding' and it's being hosted this month by Kate at What Kate Baked as I think Karen at Lavender & Lovage is lying down in a darkened room to recover from the massive round up of Tea Time Treats from January!