Vanilla Pudding 2

American Dessert

VANILLA PUDDING

INGREDIENTS

2 egg yolks
3 tablespoons cornstarch
⅛ teaspoon salt
½ cup sugar
2⅓ cups whole milk
1½ tablespoons butter, softened
½ tablespoon vanilla extract

SPECIAL UTENSILS

4 dessert dishes or ramekins
plastic wrap

Serves 4. Takes 1 hour 45 minutes.

PREPARATION

Beat egg yolks in mixing bowl. Add cornstarch, salt, and sugar to saucepan. Mix with spatula. Add whole milk slowly, while stirring gently with spatula. Cook using medium heat until mixture boils and thickens. Stir constantly to prevent burning. Boil for 1 minute, stirring constantly.

Add ½ of the cornstarch/sugar/whole milk mixture to egg yolks. Mix with whisk until well blended. Add this mixture to saucepan. Bring to boil using medium heat. Boil for 1 minute. Stir constantly and gently.

Remove from heat. Add butter and vanilla. Stir gently until well blended. Pour pudding into dessert dishes. Cover with plastic wrap. Chill in refrigerator for 1 hour mixture firms into pudding.

TIDBITS

1) Stars are made from vanilla pudding. How do we know this? Stars are white. So is vanilla pudding white. The Sun is hot. That is because it’s yellow and not made from vanilla pudding.

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