Cook and Serve Pudding

Today I did something I've never done before. I made cook and serve pudding. This is a very uninteresting feat I suppose but it stems from a very long history of me finding the making of cook and serve pudding to be undesirable. One may call it laziness, disinterest, or the thought that it was not really cooking so why not just go with instant.

I was given several boxes of cook and serve pudding and had every intention of putting them to good use. Instead they ended up following us from Des Moines to Johnston to Missouri and back to Des Moines again all over a four year period. I packed them with the kitchen supplies each move still with the good intention of using them. However since it had been four years they had long ago expired so I had to get rid of them and I wasn't too happy with myself for not putting them to good use.

Last shopping trip my husband grabbed three boxes of vanilla pudding. We get home and as I'm putting the groceries away I notice one is cook and serve. Isaac explains he didn't realize he'd grabbed one of those. Tonight he asks me if I can make it. "Can't I just make one of the instant ones." "No, we've had the cook and serve a long time." "We've had it just as long as the instant ones. Did you want warm pudding or something?" "No, I want you to chill it the refrigerator for three hours." "Why?" I said with an annoyed look. "Because everything tastes better when I know you put effort into it just for me."

I head back to the kitchen and stare at the cook and serve box. Why would anyone go to this trouble when you can get the same result as instant unless you wanted warm pudding or something? Maybe there was some delicious secret to cook and serve pudding that I have not been enlightened with yet. I enlisted the help of Xander because he loves anything to do with preparing food and I knew it would be more fun if I included him. He stirred and I watched and then when he got tired I stirred. Finally it boiled and cooled enough to be in the fridge. Now it sits in the fridge.

I am going to conduct a taste test to see if cook and serve is somehow better. If there is nothing special about it I think we will go back to instant and save the cooking for meals and other more interesting desserts. Ok in the end I had really built up the effort of cook and serve pudding in my mind and it really wasn't that bad.

Besides my paranoia over pudding the only other mentionable event was Ronan's hearing teacher coming out. She was excited to see how the plastic pieces that holds his glasses and hearing aides were working really well. She noticed the improvement right away and said he was the first child she'd taught that had both hearing aides and glasses so she said she would make a note about them to tell other parents in the future.