I’m in a hotel room in New York right now, enjoying my first day of spring break (it’s a Saturday so we’ll see how good I am at not working during the week). What a great day so far: breakfast at Frontera in the airport (the ORD location is much cheaper than the real one), lunch at Katsu-Hama (I try to always go when I’m in this city), and dinner at the very young (4.5 month old) Wallflower for fancy-pants date night. Thought I’d take advantage of the time difference and blog. Actually now I’m hungry… I’m going to go get some food and come back to this post later.
Sated! Grabbed a late-night falafel. I love travel-eating. Eat-cation. Speaking of non sequiturs, each week in my advisor’s secret seminar, the speaker from the week before brings treats, preferably homemade baked goods (you can guess who started this tradition…) Two weeks ago, our new and fantastic postdoc brought in a big bowl of his mom’s banana pudding. So of course I emailed him to ask for the recipe and figured I’d make it for this blog, especially since I still haven’t bought lots of baking supplies for the new place (like a mixer… we did get bowls for Christmas though!) Despite how much I LOVED my last banana pudding post, and I recommend that one if you want to make banana pudding from scratch, Mama Hull’s recipe is ridiculously easy. It’s hard to even call this semi-homemade… as Michael said, “slicing the bananas is what’ll take the most time.”
Va-ped-atin sounds like “something missing substance,” per fiance. Which is perfect, because those are all the letters missing from these to make real words (va-nilla, whip-ped cream, jell-atin). Sorry if that didn’t make sense, I’m feeling a little daze-y.
The directions for this recipe are basically: mix everything, slice bananas, layer with Nilla wafers.
I have actually never made instant pudding, so this was AMAZING to me! You just whisk milk with the powder and it turns into pudding in like three minutes! So crazy!!
Are you sure this is food?
I think I have had cool whip before in my home, as a kid. I used to be REALLY into making elaborate jello parfaits for my family, layering different colors mixed with ice cream, fruit, or whipped cream. When I was seven or so, someone in my family got me a set of parfait glasses for Christmas (I have a tendency of receiving kitchen gear for Christmas), and that spurred this phase where everyone had to pretend to like my creations. Thank goodness that’s over! (…I hope.)
Mix ALL the different and confusing textures!
Once you mix all the stuff, you really do have to take a long time to slice all the bananas!
The three phases of a dead banana’s life: whole, peeled, sliced. Not so appeeling, is it?
At first I tried to slice the bananas in the banana peel and not use a cutting board, but it’s so much faster to cut six bananas on a cutting board.
Then layering time! So pretty! I, unsurprisingly, went a little dorky on it and made a smiley face out of Nilla wafers on top. Michael’s looked much prettier with a circle of bananas on top and some crumbled wafers.
This recipe makes enough to feed about 10 people who like banana pudding a lot, based on our dinner party and the leftovers the next day. Just realized I failed at reading the recipe, which was literally two lines in an email. Sigh. Well, do whatever you like. This is delicious! Make sure you let it sit for a long time (I did overnight) so that the flavors meld and the Nilla wafers sort of melt into cake-like texture.
Yum!
I have at least one friend!
Mama Hull’s Banana Pudding, emailed from Michael Hull
Baking and Math 
2 Responses to “Spring break! Actually, banana pudding”