Orange Custard Pudding

So one day, Kyle came home with a large bag of oranges from the Nearly Dead cart at Meijer.  Neither of us are big orange eaters, so I searched high and low for tasty orange recipes.  Orange custard pudding was the winner, and conveniently it also took care of all the egg yolks leftover from making macaroons.

Here's the thing about making cheese.  You're basically stuck in the kitchen for a few hours but not really doing that much.  So while I was making cheese, I was also making...several other things.  Because what's the fun of being in the kitchen unless you can have everything go wrong at once?

Orange custard pudding, cheddar cheese, macaroons and almond milk...It was a busy day!

Ingredients:

½ cup of sugar.
¼ cup of cornstarch.
Pinch of salt.
1 ½ cups of orange juice.
3 medium egg yolks, beaten.
1 cup of plain yoghurt.
2 tablespoons of margarine.
2 teaspoons of orange peel, finely shredded.
2 cups of fresh orange segments.

Directions:

Combine the sugar, cornstarch and salt; then stir in the orange juice.
Cook and stir until bubbly.
Gradually stir 1 cup of the mixture into the yolks.
Return to the pan and cook for a further 2 minutes.
Remove from heat and stir in the yoghurt, margarine and shredded orange peel.
Cover and chill.
Stir in the orange segments before serving.

So here's the thing about oranges:  they don't have much juice in them.  They must use a different variety of oranges to make juice.  Three oranges yielded 3/4 a cup of juice.  Not great.

Everything in the kitchen was so perfectly timed so that when the pot of cornstarch, sugar and juice started bubbling, the macaroons timer went off, and then the cheese was ready to be drained.

The good news was that I had all the rest of the ingredients waiting in the measuring cup so the custard was disaster-proofed :)

The custard turned out great.  I brought it to my parents house as a dessert/side, and mom had also made a wonderful pear crisp, so we combined them for dessert!  So fancy and fantastic.

Side note: since I zested all the oranges before I juiced them, I ended up with a small container of orange zest and put it in the freezer.  That worked out great for a recipe I used later!  Frozen zest is nearly as good as fresh and definitely better than dried.