Clay's Favorite Banana Pudding

Last night we had some friends over for dinner. About an hour before they were going to arrive I realized... no dessert! In our house you can't have a dinner party without dessert, in fact we might even subconsciously be having the dinner party to justify eating dessert. No offense to our awesome friends, but we (I) love it that much!

Well if my mother-in-law has taught me one thing about country life it's that you just "make it work" (I really think Tim Gunn on Project Runway must have visited Canadian, Texas pre-fame and owes my Mommy Debbie some money for stealing that phrase!) To translate- in the country you don't necessarily have a grocery store, wal-mart, fill in the blank around the corner so you just make do.

And this is my all time favorite recipe to do just that. Everything in it is stuff you have at home and it takes 15 min... not the recipe says 15 min. It honestly only takes 15 min! And it tastes 'paste-it-on-your-butt good' (oh by the way, that is my phrase, you will probably see that a lot. It means it tastes a-m-a-z-i-n-g!) The recipe is actually for vanilla pudding, which is divine by itself BUT if you add a layer of banana slices and wafers on the bottom, middle and top of bowl you have Clay Arrington's 2nd favorite dessert in the world. His 1st is red velvet cake... a little too advanced at this point in my life. My recipe for that is the bakery or drive to mom's/grandma's and pout! We often try the later. Another reason you can't live without this recipe- unless you have to go buy vanilla special... it is cheap, cheap, cheap!

Arrington Family Vanilla Pudding

1 1/3 cups sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup flour
4 cups milk
3 egg yolks
2 Tabs butter/ margarine

2 tsp vanilla

Mix all dry ingredients together. Cook milk medium to medium high heat to warm. Add dry ingredients slowly. Cook and stir constantly until thick. Beat egg yolks with fork until smooth in another bowl or cup and add about a cup of pudding to the eggs. Stir together then add egg/pudding mixture to rest of pudding. Cook 1 minute or so. Remove from heat and add vanilla and butter.

Tips: If it is not thickening up, turn up the heat on the stove top just make sure you are stirring constantly so it won't burn. Also have a spatula on hand, the milk mixture will thicken on bottom of saucepan first and you may need it to keep it from sticking/ burning on bottom. Unless you are going to eat right away, don't put banana slices on top layer as they might brown. You don't have to let pudding cool before adding bananas and wafers, you can go ahead and start. Let cool before refrigerating though or it will sweat in container, yuck! Also, I have actually never tried it this way, but if you didn't have any lying around I bet you could omit the butter/ marg, it calls for so little probably doesn't really make that big of difference (almost sinful to say, I know). And kind of milk doesn't matter, I usually use skim. Hope you love as much as us, good luck!