30 Before 30 - #19 Complete

 This one was harder than I thought it would be.  Number nineteen on my 30 Before 30 list is find a food I've never eaten and try it.  Bonus points if I cook it myself.  :)  I obviously went for bonus points hehe.  The hard part was finding something I haven't eaten before.  I am willing to try almost any food (nothing raw or weird stuff like caviar).

I finally decided on sweet sticky rice cake.  It's a really popular Asian dessert that I'd never tried.  The problem is I couldn't find sticky (glutinous) rice anywhere, so I finally ordered some online.

Hubby surprised me with an early birthday present (because I had to do this before then obviously) with an authentic Thailand sticky rice steamer!

How cool is that??  The water goes in the pot and the rice is wrapped in cheesecloth and put in the basket.  When the water boils it steams the rice.  :)  Here is a link on how to make it.

In my excitement I soaked the rice for six hours, wrapped it in the cheesecloth and put it in the basket.

 Put a lid on it and let it steam 45 minutes.

It actually looks really yummy when it's done and it's SUPER sticky!!  They aren't kidding about the stickiness of this stuff lol.  I tasted it plain and it had a good flavor. Tt doesn't taste sweet like the name implies, but I'm a rice lover so that didn't bother me at all.  To me it needed salt, but I'm a salt-a-holic so that's not surprising.  Once it was done cooking I finally realized that the rice isn't cooked in the rice cake recipe!!!  Oops!!!!

So I looked up other things to eat with sticky rice (it had to be eaten lol).  Most of the suggestions were things I didn't already have, but I found one that suggested fried eggs and soy sauce.  Sounded good to me and luckily I had gluten free soy sauce already on hand.  :D

So hubby fried up some eggs for me (I suck at frying eggs).

I put them on the plate really pretty for the pictures...

... but to eat it I chopped up the eggs in the rice, covered it in soy sauce and mixed it up.  It was DELICIOUS!!!  Seriously I could eat it every night it was so good!

So the next day I started over with soaked, but not cooked rice for the rice cake.  Here is the recipe (LINK).

First step was greasing the pan with coconut oil and then spreading the soaked rice in the pan.

Then I mixed up the coconut milk, brown sugar, vanilla, salt and eggs in a bowl.

Jackal is my cooking partner.  He politely lays in front of the fridge and watches, hoping clumsy me will drop something (I often do... seriously I'm clumsy... he knows to wait permission though so it's not like he's going to eat something he shouldn't, I pick up poisonous stuff like onions or chocolate).

Then I poured that over the rice and stirred it up.

Then I put it in the oven at 350 for 35 minutes.  While that was cooking I started on the topping.

I put the rice flour, coconut milk, egg, salt, brown sugar and vanilla in a saucepan over medium heat.

I know this part is boring Jackal.  :)

Then I whisked and whisked and whisked until it started to bubble.

Then I turned the heat to low and whisked for two minutes, then I took it off the heat and whisked some more... thought my arm was going to fall off lol.  It gets THICK very quickly.  Once it was smooth and thick I put it in a bowl to cool while the rice layer finished cooking.

Pulled the rice layer out when it was done (you can see where I didn't whisk the egg white enough).

Spread on the topping.

Stuck it back in the oven, over a pan of water (one inch of water and put it on the bottom rack under the cake) and cooked for fifteen or twenty minutes.

Pulled it out and tada!  Sweet sticky rice cake.  I let it cool a little before cutting it.

To be honest it isn't my favorite dessert.  It's not very sweet at all (I guess I was expecting sweeter?) and it has almost a bread pudding texture (or soggy quiche) that I'm not fond of.  The flavor is really good though (just not sweet... oh and you have to like coconut, which I do).

The cool thing is this recipe can be modified in a million different ways so I can always try again.  :D

So I had a lot of fun with this and I'll definitely be making sticky rice and fried eggs again!!