Cold Comfort Food

This is a kiddie fave, banana pudding pie, right before baking.  

Avoiding grocery shopping and using up everything available to eat?  Make something cold and tasty and sweet and nutritious.  

This is a marriage of a stove top cooked blanc mange pudding with a baked egg custard, depending more or less on your available milk/eggs, and uses up as many ripe bananas as you like.  

Because it's ant season, I have been hastily using up all of my sugar/molasses/maple syrup/honey, so I finished off the sugar with this one too.  

Not only did I have ripe bananas on hand, because my daughter who does not eat bananas does my shopping, and when I put bananas on the list, she thinks we can stock up for several months....in stocking up on "comfort food" treats to maintain coffee break variety for my adult children working from home, I had purchased FOUR POUNDS of animal crackers.  

This was overly optimistic because the novelty wore off after a handful.  We crumbled them on ice cream or yogurt.  I crunched them up and used them as the "crust" and topping for our banana pudding pie.  

Line the pie tin, bowl or baking dish with a layer of crumbled animal crackers, (or graham crackers, yeah we have four boxes of those too), or vanilla wafers.  

On the stovetop cook:

About a quarter cup of flour or cornstarch 

About a cup and a half of milk

2 Tablespoons butter

A cup of sugar 

Cook on low, stirring, to cook off the flour taste and thicken the pudding.  This is the blanc mange part.  

While you simmer, whisk up a little of the hot milk mixture into a small bowl of two egg yolks, and then add back to the pot, continuing to stir.  

Add 3-5 ripe bananas, sliced.

Pour the pudding onto your cookies, crumble some more on top to cover, and bake in a 350 degree oven about 15 minutes.  That's the custard part.

Chill and then eat. 

Another way we used up the animal crackers?  In the best granola bars we've made yet!  My family loves these, and they are even better the second or third day as the flavor ripens.  

Mix your choice of (I used all these):

2 cups crumbled animal crackers (or graham crackers, or skip this altogether)

peanuts

walnuts

chopped figs

raisins

dried cranberries 

3 cups of old fashioned or quick cooking oatmeal

ground flax seed (1/4 cup or less)

poppy seeds (a tablespoon)

orange zest

cinnamon

ground cardamom

peanut butter (I had just a quarter cup)

maple syrup (I had about 3/4 cup)

2 eggs

I did not salt, but add if you like

Line a 9x13 pan with parchment paper, spread mixture and bake at 350 for 15-30 minutes, until dry to the appearance and touch, and just beginning to brown.  

Let cool and cut into bars.

Ok, one more cold comfort food with the overstocked survival shopping you completed:  

Swiss Miss Ice 

My daughter does not drink coffee but likes hot chocolate from an instant mix.  She is sensitive to some dairy products but finds the dried nonfat milk in hot chocolate mix works for her.  Because my kids were going to be trapped at home for awhile, and because ingredients including milk were kind of hard to find at the beginning of all this, I sprung for a package of Swiss Miss in the canister, so I could scoop out the cocoa/sugar/milk mixture to use for her, and for....things.  Baked goods, maybe.

Except the delivery of one unit of this Swiss Miss included about five years worth of hot cocoa servings.  I have about 10 lbs. of it.  I have the canisters tucked away everywhere!  

So we made hot cocoa ice last night.  I followed the directions for a cup of cocoa and made a quart of it, with boiling water.  Then freeze!  Mix occasionally while freezing, or use your ice cream maker, we did.  Return to the freezer until hard, then run your spoon over the top and collect the chocolaty ice shavings in a paper cup.  Better than Rita's!