I was reading Gluten-Free Girl’s blog posting, food blogs being my fave after yoga blogs. She’s getting a book published (yaye GFG!). And she included a bit from her book proposal about real food and how the current generation think that packaged pudding and boxed cereal are real. It took her realizing she’s sensitive to gluten to start making *real* food from fresh basic ingredients. Now she’s a better, happier person – with a book deal.

It was the pudding comment that twigged me. I’d googled homemade pudding recipes a couple weeks back because I thought the toddler in my house would like it. I don’t want to feed him the mush in the plastic containers with the unpronounceable ingredients (shiver). I’d found a bunch of interesting recipes and then promptly forgot about them.

I know, you’re saying “Corilee I only eat raw broccoli – pudding? are you crazy??” And I hear ya’, it’s good to eat healthy food, but sometimes you need food that’s gonna feed your soul too. And Luna bars and hard cold raw veggies sometimes just don’t. So read on.

Making pudding from scratch didn’t just occur to me out of the blue. My Mom is a great baker. When I was growing up we had dessert after dinner probably more than half the time – can you imagine? And I started baking with her from the time I could stand on a stool and get my finger into a bowl for a lick.

Puddings were part of her repetoire too. She had this great little paperback cookbook, I think from one of the food companies, published in the sixties. It had great stylized illustrations of women baking with big hair and high heels. Yeah, that was life at our house too – not!

Last Saturday was damp and dreary. I tracked down the recipes and made Banana Pudding. It’s ridiculously easy. You just need to keep an eye on it while it thickens so the milk doesn’t burn (you don’t need a double boiler). A little burning actually adds some flavour so no worries. It’s vanilla pudding and when it was done I put it into bowls and sliced a banana into it. The banana bits get soft in the pudding. We each ate a bowl of it warm, with digestive cookies. The toddler ate *all* of his *and* could say the names of the ingredients. Yeah it’s made from milk and eggs and sugar, but it’s real food. And it was the most satisfying thing I’ve eaten in a long time.

Next I’m trying chocolate.