Cooking With Mama #3: Nothing-Like-a-Mud-Pie

It was a late Saturday morning. Ma mère and I sat down at the kitchen table to decide what to cook for dessert. There were an abundance of recipes from magazines, newspapers, websites - you get the idea. We had options. Boy did we have options - everything I learned about "Hey! this recipe looks great, I better save it in case I run out of ideas" - I learned from my mom. We just may have had too many options, but it was a fun time picking it out.

One thing we learned? Pudding is not a good substitute for cream cheese. Here's what we started with:

http://www.kraftfoods.com/kf/recipes/recipedetail.htm?recipe_id=108697

Seeing as how I also learned all of my "surely, we don't really have to follow the recipe" habbits from my mom, though...we substituted pudding for cream cheese. It tasted good - not great, but good - but boy, it did NOT hold it's shape when we cut into it. Which is why you will only see pictures of the whole product.

Take my advice: Use cream cheese.

Nothing Like A Mud Pie

3/4 cup crushed honey graham crackers

1/2 cup finel chopped walnuts

2 Tbsp butter, melted

1 package (4 servings) sugar free instant vanilla pudding

1 pckg (4 serrvings) coconut instant pudding

1 pkg (4 servings) cook and serve chocolate pudding

1 tub whipped topping

5 cups cold skim milk, divided

Preheat oven to 375F.

In a 9" pie plate, combine cracker crumbs, walnuts and butter. Press into bottom and sides of pan.

Cook for 10 minutes; cool.

In a medium bowl, combine vanilla and coconut pudding mixes. Add milk 3 cups of milk and whisk to thoroughly combine. Refrigerate until set.

In a medium saucepan, whisk together remaining milk and chocolate pudding mixes. Cook according to package directions and refrigerate until cool.

Stir 1/2 tub of whipped cream into the coconut/vanilla pudding. Spread into bottom of pie shell.

Spoon chocolate pudding on top, and spread evenly.

Refrigerate until ready to serve.

Just before serving, spread remaining whipped cream on top.

Makes 6 servings.

Notes:

We had leftovers of both puddings. My mom - being a genius - pulled out her tuperware (rubbermaid?) parfait dishes and made a few parfaits. Being an extra-genius genius, she pulled out some gingersnaps, crushed them and made a couple of parfait layers out of them. I didn't eat one of them, but I'm willing to bet that was the second best part of this whole experiment.

The best part? Cooking with my mom.