Cooking: Healthy Dessert: Red Pudding

Once a week or so, I am going to try and cook something healthy and delicious. Now, being on a college students budget and time I don’t know if this will actually happen every week, but it seems like it would be a good goal to have. I’m going to start this week off with dessert. Yes, that’s right, dessert first! This is a recipe that was served to me down in Mexico and is a German dessert and absolutely delicious and fantastic and not totally unhealthy either! The dessert is called Rot Grutze, or Red Pudding and is basically a big conglomeration of berries served with some ice cream.

Finished Product looking delicious!

If you know me at all, you know I love berries, adore them and worship them. I even have a tattoo of a raspberry on my ankle. I have bags of frozen huckleberries in my freezer that I add to all sorts of food; cereal, oatmeal, smoothies, pancakes, etc. So I added a few to this, and it was a good addition. Fortunately my friends who were helping eat the dessert appreciated how much those huckleberries are worth too so they knew just what they were getting. Anyway, enjoy the recipe!
“Rote Grütze” is German for Red Pudding.

Red pudding on the stove before it starts boiling

• 2 bags of mixed berries (like the frozen ones from costco/winco)
• 1/2 cup of orange juice
• 2T sugar
• 3 heaping T starch
• enough cointreau(brand of triple sec liqeur 40% alcohol content, I just used Monarch because it’s what we had.) or cassis (cordial made from the berries of currant) to dissolve the cornstarch
• juice of half lemon (optional)

Place orange juice,  fruit and sugar into steel cooking pot and bring to boil.   In the meantime dissolve the cornstarch and pour into the boiling fruit.  Stir to mix well.  The mixture will thicken quickly.   Turn off heat and add fresh blueberries, raspberries or pitted cherries.   You can also squeeze the juice of half a lemon into the mixture.

Cool in pot then transfer to a bowl, let it cool more before placing it in the fridge.

Serve with vanilla ice cream, vanilla pudding/sauce, Creme Anglaise or whipped cream.   You can also sprinkle some toasted almond slices over this dessert.

Bon Appetit!

Red Pudding and ice cream ready to eat, yum.