Vanilla Pudding

American Dessert

VANILLA PUDDING

INGREDIENTS

3½ tablespoons cornstarch
⅛ teaspoon salt
½ cup sugar
2½ cups milk
1 tablespoon butter, softened
½ tablespoon vanilla extract

Serves 4. Takes 1 hour 45 minutes.

PREPARATION

Add cornstarch, salt, and sugar to saucepan. Mix with spatula. Add milk slowly, while stirring gently with spatula. Heat for 5 minutes using medium heat or until mixture thickens. Stir constantly to prevent burning. Remove from heat. Add butter and vanilla. Stir gently with spatula until well blended.

Chill in refrigerator for 1 hour 30 minutes or until mixture firms into pudding.

TIDBITS

1) Stars are made from vanilla pudding. How do we know this?

2) Stars are white.

3) Vanilla pudding is white.

4) The Sun is hot. That is because it’s yellow and not made from vanilla pudding.

5) If you were somehow able to catapult your vanilla pudding millions of light years away it would be far too small to be seen, even by the Hubble telescope

6) Indeed, you would need to buy trillions of pounds of: cornstarch, salt, sugar, milk, butter, and vanilla extract to fling a visibile vanilla-pudding star into the far reaches of space.

7) But don’t do it. Every van in the world would be needed to deliver your ingredients. The global economy would collapse. Oh my gosh, we’d have nothing left to make cake! For millions of years! What would we do for birthdays? I beg of you, reconsider this giant-star project!

Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.