TIME for a little comfort food. The novelty of the diet - all that detoxing and healthy eating - has worn off and it's still only January, so we're looking for a little consolation eating. Nothing too heavy or stodgy but a sort of warm-up, cheer-up food.

A friend mentioned she'd had the flu and had survived for a week on rice pudding. Just the thing. The trouble with the perfect rice pudding is that it takes time - a few hours in the Aga makes the best ever, sweet and creamy, but with the rice still identifiable as rice. Delicious - but not much good when you're falling frozen through the door and want a rice pudding now.

They've been around in tins for years. Recent years have seen them go upmarket in the chilled cabinets of the supermarket premier ranges.

Are they as good as your mum used to make? Is fresh better than tinned? On a cold and sleety afternoon, we got out the tasting spoons.

FRESH PUDS

Many of these represent rice pudding's attempt to go posh. Tesco, Sainsbury's, Marks & Spencer and the Co-op all make a version with clotted cream - Marks's version has 19 per cent clotted cream.

This should make for something super luxurious and wonderful but strangely enough, it doesn't. Our testers liked them well enough but didn't rave about them, finding them creamy but bland and stodgy. Tesco's was the runniest. And when you consider the Marks & Spencer's version costs £1 for a small pot and has a whacking 335 calories, it seems a bit much that it should cry out for a dollop of jam to brighten it up.

The low calorie version from Sainsbury's was made with semi-skimmed milk and tasted like it. Very thin and not much of a treat.

Morrisons' was made mainly with full cream milk, no clotted cream and proved to be more popular. It was also the cheapest of the fresh puddings.

CO-OP Clotted Cream (12 per cent) £2.55 for 500g

MARKS & SPENCER Clotted Cream (19 per cent), 2 x 170g for £1.99

MORRISONS 99p for 450g

SAINSBURY'S Taste The Difference Clotted Cream (12 per cent), £1.99 for 500g

SAINSBURY'S Be Good To Yourself £1.77 for 2 x 145g

TESCO Clotted Cream (11 per cent), £1.98 for 500g

RICE PUD WITH EXTRAS

MULLERICE with apples or vanilla custard, 39p for 200g

Rice pudding, but not as we know it. Strange tasting, sickly sweet. Your granny definitely wouldn't recognise it. If it has to have so many things in it to make it acceptable, why bother with the rice in the first place?

WEIGHTWATCHERS Caramel Creamed Rice

Creamed rice swirled with caramel sauce. 113 calories per pot, 0.3g of saturated fat. So far, so good. But these are sickly sweet. Practically takes your tooth enamel off. Maybe a good sweet treat for dieters - but won't do much to re-educate their taste buds.

TINS

Tinned rice pudding. How old fashioned, how cheap, compared to the new improved chilled cabinet version. Ambrosia a has been with us for ever, of course. Well, since 1917. But now all the supermarkets do their own versions - creamy or low fat or cheap and cheerful value lines. And this is where we had some surprises.

AMBROSIA Creamy Rice Pudding 63p for 425g

ALDI Creamed Rice Pudding 41p for 624g - BEST BUY

LIDL Creamed Rice Pudding 41p for 624g - BEST BUY

AMBROSIA Creamy Rice Pudding with sultanas and nutmeg 63p for 425g

AMBROSIA Low Fat Rice Pudding 63p for 425g

TESCO Creamed Rice Pudding 38p for 425g

TESCO VALUE Creamed Rice Pudding 19p for 425g

TESCO Healthy Living Creamed Rice Pudding 38p for 425g

VERDICT

Maybe rice pudding was never meant to be posh and so doesn't go upmarket very well. Or maybe our testers just happened to have particularly peasant tastes but cheap was definitely cheerful here. The luxury fresh ones were perfectly pleasant, but frankly, not worth the extra money or calories.

As for the low calorie versions, both in the tins and in the fresh puddings, they were very unsatisfactory. Very thin. Anyway, there's something faintly ridiculous about a low calorie rice pudding - much nicer to have a smaller version of the real stuff.

If you want a nice comforting treat, it need not cost you a fortune - the enormous tins from Adli and Lidl at 41p were as good and a fraction of the price of the posher versions.

Or, of course, you could make your own - very easy, very cheap, tastes much better. But you'll have to think ahead.

Paid for Christmas yet?

Probably not. In the pre-Christmas spending frenzy it was easy to ignore the sums. Now in the cold clear light of January, they are all too stark. Record numbers of people are calling debt advice lines, trying to get themselves out of the mess it was oh-so-easy to get into.

And if you're tempted to take on another debt to clear the debts you have, stop now. Before you do anything that might end up getting you into an even bigger mess, you need proper help.

The National Debtline had so many calls after Christmas that they had to take on 25 extra staff to cope. The average caller owed £15,000, but some owed more than £100,000.

A number of people have killed themselves because of debt. Last summer it was Lisa Taylor, 25, who owed nearly £15,000, largely built up when she was a student. Don't let it get that far.

There are three main charities which will help you organise your finances. They are not debt consolidation agencies. They don't advertise on daytime television. They don't want your money. They are just there to help you.

In all cases, their advice is free , confidential and impartial. If you're in a money mess, you would be idiotic not to go to one of them.

* Citizens' Advice Bureaux. A number of branches locally, all of which can offer general money advice and many have specialist debt advisors. www.citizensadvice.org.uk

* Consumer Credit Counselling. Tel: 0800 1381111 Mon-Fri 8am-8pm. www.cccs.co.uk

* National Debtline. Tel: 0808 808 4000. Mon- Fri 9am-9pm. Sat 9.30am-1pm. www.nationaldebtline.co.uk

Good luck.