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National Rice Pudding Day 2025
It’s National Rice Pudding Day, and I love everything about it, the creamy texture, the hint of cinnamon and that first warm spoonful that feels like home.
Creamy, Dreamy and a little Steamy
Life is uncertain. Eat dessert first. ~Ernestine Ulmer
For as long as I can remember, my absolute favorite kind of pudding was rice pudding.
With or without raisins (mostly without), rice pudding is my hands-down go-to dessert.
Certainly, I love my Nana’s Plum Pudding, but that’s pudding in the English sense (dessert) rather than in the American sense (bowl of sugary goop).
As such, I can still maintain that rice pudding is my favorite pudding (as opposed to chocolate, tapioca, butterscotch, vanilla, etc.) without running into any cognitive dissonance in regard to the absolute supremacy of Nana’s Plum Pudding (more sort of a cake than a “pudding”) as an annually awaited holiday treat.
Bread pudding sort of straddles that pudding/cake fence, but I like rice pudding better so it doesn’t actually matter.
With all that said, I honestly can’t say why I have such a preference for rice pudding.
Honestly, I have no idea why I like rice pudding better than any other kind of pudding (excluding Nana’s Plum Pudding, which is technically cake and only permissible between Thanksgiving and Epiphany).
Is it the texture? Is it the rice? I honestly don’t know.
I just do.
Since that’s the case, I’ll give you a lovely little how-to video so you can make me some.
Seriously, go ahead and make me some…
Imperial Pudding
The Secret To Rich and Creamy New York Deli-Style Rice Pudding
Jim’s slow-simmer technique and “never rinse the rice” rule could have come straight out of Connie Moretti’s kitchen.
Connie is the matriarch at Moretti’s Delicatessen, the family-run spot just a few doors down from Bryce Wescott’s apartment. It’s the place where she serves up a sugar-free version of her legendary pudding to the regulars.
If you’ve read A Misfit Christmas (2019 HSSR), you’ll remember that Bryce and Veronica make their way there after her ill-fated dance audition, when he rescues her from a two-hundred-pound Santa bag in the Krampus Strikes Again episode.
They don’t sit down for that pastrami-and-soup lunch until A Light Lunch and Some Shopping the next day in publication time, but in-story it’s the same day. The scene has all the cozy deli energy you could want: warm food, clinking cups, and a table-for-two vibe that makes you think maybe, just maybe, things between them won’t stay purely platonic.
And if you swap out the sugar in Jim’s recipe for allulose, you’ll have the Empire City Deli-Style Sugar-Free Rice Pudding Connie would put in front of you, complete with cinnamon cross-hatch and a maraschino cherry, whether you asked for it or not.
The Cherry On Top
Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride. ~Anthony Bourdain
That’s a curious point of view, but some people like going outside more than I do.
I suppose I fall somewhere in the middle. I used to enjoy amusement parks, but I’ve lost a lot of tolerance for spinning rides.
The Tilt-A-Whirl was a must-do at any park or carnival that had one when I was a kid or even in my 20’s, but now it’s more like a guaranteed puke machine and brain scrambler.
I still enjoy rollercoasters (for the most part), but I can imagine that dropping off in the next decade or so.
For me, adventure occurs at the keyboard. I get a lot of fulfillment writing my stories and interacting with ChatGPT for evaluation and brainstorming.
The cherry is ChatGPT’s recent switch to version 5. The improvement is so marked that I figured I’d let Chatty toot its own horn for a moment.
If Connie’s maraschino cherry is the literal cherry on top of a perfect rice pudding, then GPT-5’s glow-up is mine when it comes to The Sentinels.
The new tools I’ve been bringing to the table go way beyond “catching typos” or “summarizing scenes.” I can now deep-scan an entire manuscript and flag continuity slips before they snowball — things like character eye-color drift, timeline mismatches, or your personal punctuation quirks getting overwritten by some over-zealous grammar rule. I can cross-reference events across multiple books in the tridecology, so when Viktor Gorzynski pulls a stunt in Book 4, I can check exactly how it lines up with his first awkward pizza-and-parents night in Book 1.
And when you’re juggling the lore threads of The Sentinels, Holiday Serial Romcoms, and even the far-flung corners of your other universes, I can keep that web untangled — so a deli cameo in 2005 doesn’t turn into a continuity migraine in 2019.
Just like Connie knows who likes extra cinnamon without asking, I’m starting to know when you’ll want a lore check, a dialogue polish, or a “what if” spiral into future books. That’s the sweet spot — and it’s only getting sweeter.
Because in the end, a great story is a lot like the perfect bowl of rice pudding — it takes time, the right ingredients, a steady hand, and just enough sweetness to keep you coming back for another spoonful.
And I couldn’t be happier about it.
Despite giving me an incredible amount of value, I had to settle on certain results.
No more. This is a whole new model and it can do things the previous version couldn’t even quantify.
Definitely a cherry on top with a crosshatch of cinnamon. Mwah! 😘🤏🏻
That’s all for today. See you back on Wednesday for filet mignon…