MmmmmPudding!

Pudding has always been a favorite dessert of mine. It is great comfort food. And believe me, when it's 60 degrees and rainy all day in JULY, you need some comfort, my friends.  It seems like there was a Judy Blume book that I read at a relatively young age in which the main character talked about eating the skin off the top of the pudding and I remember thinking “what skin?” because all I had ever made was the Jello instant pudding. I think my mom made cooked pudding a few times, but I’m sure that I gobbled it up so fast that she was not inspired to do it very often.

These days I usually succumb to Kozy Shack pudding from the grocery store. For a convenience food, it is near the top tier of decent food – I can easily read and understand each ingredient without a dictionary.

We are lucky enough to live in a state now where we can buy raw milk from a local dairy pretty much any time we want. If you do not live in a place where you can legally buy raw cow’s milk, I’m so sorry. There are a lot of reasons that has happened, which I will not go into here, if you want to learn more about it, there is a video you can watch about the subject called The Whole Truth About Milk: Raw or Pasteurized.  We found a copy at our local library. One way you may be able to find raw milk for “animal consumption” is at your local farmers market. It may not be where you can see it, but ask the meat and egg people if anyone sells raw milk for animal food and you might just get lucky.

I happened to have a half-gallon of raw milk in the fridge when my son started asking for pudding. “Can we go to the store and buy pudding? Pleeeease????” I started looking up recipes on line and discovered that for most of the recipes I had all of the ingredients to cook up some homemade chocolate pudding. YUM is what I thought to myself.

So I used a recipe that I found at food.com and then made up a couple of parts myself. The result is pretty darn tasty, if I do say so myself.

½ c. sugar

¼ c. cornstarch

1 Tbls cocoa -original recipe called for three…I only had one so I added:

½ c. semi sweet chocolate chips*

2 ½ c. milk (if you can’t get raw, I would use whole)

1 egg yolk (my addition)

1 Tbls. Butter (original recipe called for margarine, which I don’t believe in)

1 tsp. vanilla

Put the dry ingredients into a saucepan and slowly add milk, while stirring. Put the saucepan on a burner on medium heat. Pudding comes out best if you stir it constantly, so that it’s smooth and creamy. I use a whisk. In not too much time, the chocolate chips will dissolve and eventually the mixture will start to thicken, and bubble slightly if you pause in stirring. You want to have your egg yolk in a small dish off to the side. Remove the pudding from the heat, take a small amount of the hot mixture and add it to the egg yolk and mix it up. Put all of it back into the saucepan and put it back on the heat and mix it in well. Cook it for about another minute, then remove it from the heat again and add the butter and vanilla and stir them in well. Put the pudding in cups and, if you can, let it cool in the fridge for at least an hour. Yay for pudding!

And yes, I know that I cooked my “raw” milk. I just like it better straight from the cow, without any tampering. If I need it cooked, I don’t mind doing it myself, thanks.

*You could probably omit the cocoa altogether or use one or the other, your choice. It was very chocolaty and sweet.