Some of my friends who read this blog seem to be laboring under the delusion that I am a gourmet cook. While I do occasionally go a little crazy with some super fancy cooking, I imagine that my everyday cooking is a lot like yours. I cook dinner for my family. I use what’s on special at the store, or on a good week what I’ve found at the farmer’s market. I call my mom for recipes, or look in a cookbook, or troll the internet. And usually I feel pretty lucky if I manage to get a main dish and a vegetable (or two) on the table at a reasonable hour for dinner. I just also happen to put it in a nice dish and take a picture of it.
Probably the place where my life as a “food blogger” separates from my life as a plain jane home cook is in the area of desserts. If we’re going to eat dessert, I’m not going to buy some ice cream or some oreos (the way I might have in my pre-blogging days) and satisfy my sweet tooth that way. I’m going to cook and photograph and post the recipe. And the thing is, I like it better that way. Homemade desserts are better. Fresher, free from strange ingredients, and much more likely to be worth the calories. But the thing is, you don’t have to be a gourmet cook to make dessert. My taste runs towards the simpler desserts, like warm home baked cookies, or a simple panna cotta ,(ignore the Italian — panna cotta is as easy as it gets) or what could be the most prosaic of home desserts — pudding.
When most people think pudding, they think little plastic cups full of goo. But homemade pudding is SO much better — at once cleaner tasting and more complex, with a lighter texture and sweetness. And the ingredients are pantry staples — milk, sugar, a little cornstarch. This butterscotch pudding from pastry great and celebrated wit David Lebovitz is the perfect example. The butterscotch flavor is more complex than any prepackaged product. And the pudding, while sweet, doesn’t have that cloying sweetness you find in a box. And it’s dead easy.
