Vanilla Pudding

Last night I decided I wanted some kind of dessert to reward myself for having to choke down the mess I made on Monday. I flipped through my handy dandy Betty Crocker cookbook and found that I had the ingredients for vanilla pudding.

Oh yes. It was pudding time.

Seemed pretty straightforward, didn't need a double boiler or anything fancy, just some eggs, flour, sugar and vanilla extract. So, I got to work.

Now, I know you folks think I'm screwing stuff up all the time, that maybe I'm not following directions or I'm taking shortcuts. This isn't the case. So I took pictures of each step so show you what was going on. Some of the pictures were re-created after the pudding was done, because there's a time for stirring the pudding and there's a time for taking pictures, and those two don't always coincide. Some were taken as I was cooking, because there are some things that can be done one-handed, and done well. Amiright, fellas?

Fist up: dry ingredients. Flour, sugar. Easy peasy:



Add three cups of milk:



Cook until bubbly, then cook for two more minutes. I don't really know what they mean by bubbly. The reasoning was, if they wanted it boiling or simmering, they would have said that. So I figured they meant when the little bubbles come up around the edges, like so:



Add one cup of this mix to two beaten eggs.





Done. Add this mix back into sauce pan. Got it. So, add one tablespoon of butter or margarine and 1 1/2 tsps of vanilla extract:



Pour it into a bowl and chill for four hours.



Yeah, that looks pretty gross. But it doesn't really look any worse than the picture in the book, so it must not be so bad.

Well, as we all know, patience is just another virtue that I don't possess, so I took a taste of it before I got it in the fridge. It wasn't very tasty. Kind of bland, really. I didn't have anything interesting or appropriate to put in it, so I broke up and melted a Reeses cup and cooked it in there.



It didn't taste any different at all, so I put in two more. I was feeling pretty good about this idea, but it still didn't really taste different, so I just put it back in the bowl and back in the fridge.

Two hours later I decided to try some.



Mmmmmm.

I got about halfway through what I had there in the bowl and started getting sick to my stomach. Way, way too sweet. Still didn't taste like chocolate at all, or peanut butter. It tasted like sugar free, fat free, generic pudding mix that might have passed its expiration date.

The good news is, I put some Parmesan/Romano cheese stuff on the mess I made on Monday, and it tasted fine.