Getting back in the blogging habbit, with vanilla pudding mix from scratch.

 Hello, long time no blog. I have certainly been busy, we now have a beautiful 6 month old daughter. I have been thinking for a bit about getting back into blogging. I have been doing lots of new things. Like sewing for my kids. Its fun and frustrating all at the same time. So, I am going to change up the blog a bit. I am still cooking as much as possible from scratch, gardening and canning also. Basically if your interested in any of the above things stick around. Now to vanilla pudding. Do you ever want pudding but don't want what is in the stuff you can buy at the store? Sometimes reading ingredient lists can give me a headache, and we have to watch out for certain things in food at our house. Like aspartame, it gives my husband several bad side effects from ingesting even a small amount. Certain food dyes, which upset my toddlers tummy and my 10 year olds behavior. I was on Pinterest on day (I love that site!) and found this page. At first I thought, there is no way this will taste like the boxed stuff from the store. Well, I tried it, and I love it. The only difference is that instead of using vanilla beans, I used vanilla sugar I had made. When I made vanilla extract last time I had several beans left over so I just put them in sugar. I kept the beans out of the pudding mix and repacked them in sugar for the next time I needed it. Here is the recipe in case you don't want to go to the other site.


Vanilla Pudding Mix:

1 cup granulated sugar
¾ cup cornstarch
¾ cup nonfat dry milk powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 whole vanilla beans or use vanilla sugar
In a bowl mix everything but vanilla beans, stirring well. If you use vanilla beans carefully cut them open and scrape out seeds, put the seeds in the mix. Cut the beans into small chunks and add to mix as well. Put in air tight container and shake.
To make pudding:
2 cups of milk
1/2 cup pudding mix
Place it all in a pan and stir well, heat on a medium heat stirring frequently until thickened.


I will note that it was quite thinner than I had imagined when cooking, but as it cooled it thickened nicely. Just throwing that in in case you are like me and cook it way to long thinking its not done even if its boiling, lol. It did stick to the pan that time, but still tasted wonderful. I did double this recipe for the mix, because we are a large family. It made around 1 1/2 quarts of mix. I also double the recipe for pudding every time I make it.