Noodle Pudding

I have been a very bad blogger lately. I apologize. But of course, I'm always ready with an excuse. I'm working on a BIG, food-related project that resulted in my hands looking like this:



If you can't tell the palms are dyed red. Not a good look on me...or anyone really. I'll post the project this weekend. (Hopefully.) But if you're curious, it involves baking, layers, and obviously a lot of food coloring.

Another reason for my lack of blogging is that several of my recent dinners turned out to be better in theory than in reality. Such as the chicken stroganoff I made to use these egg noodles with in the first place. But it was pretty horrible, so I decided to repurpose the egg noodles. This is a great recipe for an cooked, leftover pasta that uses things you probably have on hand already. It's not a very fancy dessert, but it doesn't have too much sugar in it (and I used skim milk and low-fat sour cream) so it can be a pretty good treat for the middle of the week.

This recipe is really flexible. I reduced the amount of milk in the original recipe to add the sour cream, but you can use two cups of milk and no sour cream. You can use raisins instead of dried cranberries, or any other dry fruit, or no fruit at all. But that would probably taste pretty boring. You can change the spices. Next time I think I'll try adding some cardamom and white raisins.

Now I'm going to go make some chicken soup and watch reruns, because I've come down with a nasty little cold.

Noodle Pudding
Adapted from The Minimalist column in the NYT, written by Mark Bittman (I know I need to start reading other people's recipes)

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups milk
2 tbs. unsalted butter
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup low-fat sour cream
1/2 of a 1 lb. box/bag of pasta or noodles, cooked (about 4 cups)
1/2 cup dried cranberries
2 eggs

Directions:
-Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
-In a small saucepan over medium-low heat, warm the milk, butter, sugar and spices. When the butter is melted, remove from the heat, and whisk in the sour cream. Let cool.
-While the milk heats, butter a small baking dish. Put the noodles into the baking dish with the dried cranberries. Toss the noodles and the cranberries to combine.
-When the milk mixture is cool, whisk in the eggs.
-Pour the milk mixture over the noodles.
-Bake for 45 minutes or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.