Creamy Orange Wheatberry Pudding

Creamy wheatberry pudding. Creamy vanilla orange rum wheatberry pudding. Spiked vanilla & orange wheatberry pudding. Creamy orange rum wheatberry pudding. Guys, I just spent 15 minutes trying to decide what the heck to call this thing.

Let me summarize: Uh-mazing. Epic. Creamy. Vanilla-y. Zesty. Dessert. Breakfast.

Take your pick.

The flavor is so intensely vanilla you’d never know this lone bean has been shoved in three different pantries for the last 3 years because I refused to throw out the $7.32. I bought it from Whole Foods when we lived in Florida. The sell by date said 2007. Somebody call Hoarders, I bet that right there would qualify me.

How I didn’t slice a finger off scraping out that vanilla bean goodness from the dry as a bone bean is a complete miracle but totally worth the risk. I didn’t have to use any sugar, just a drop of maple syrup (which in retrospect you could totally omit) because the vanilla flavor from the bean was so sweet. Such a good use of 3 years of patience and $7.32.

Why wheatberries? Well why the heck not?

If you’ve never tried them, get yourself to a bulk bin ASAP. If you’re dying to make this and have none on hand, I’ll allow for a one time brown rice substitution, but only once! Promise?

I’ve decided wheatberries are my favorite grain. It was a toss up between millet and them for awhile but this sealed the deal. Their chew is just fun and they’re so versatile. I cooked up a big batch of them when I made this and ate them in cereal, yogurt, mixed in with oatmeal, used them in a salad…the possibilities are endless. Can’t really say the same thing about rice, can you?

Oh, and then there’s the orange and rum I mentioned in the title I finally decided on. Those are like the best supporting actors ever.

Zesty, fun and boozy. Kinda like Haymitch.

And everybody loves a fun drunk, don’t they?