Banana Pudding - Episode 44

How do you handle a treasured family recipe when the intended recipient doesn't eat the title ingredient?

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Transcript

Hello! Thanks for being here! I hope you had a wonderful Valentine’s Day on Friday. Mine was amazing. I got to visit my week-old grandchild and then go dancing. It’s been a full couple of weeks. This past week my daughter was visiting from out of town. She was here to welcome my new grandchild and support her brother and his wife as new parents, mostly by preparing food. She and I made chicken cannellini soup for them, as well as what my daughter decided to call Not Banana Pudding. 

Banana pudding is a family comfort food. When my fourth child was born, my friend brought me banana pudding made with her family’s special recipe. It was a tradition in her family for new moms that she wanted to share with me out of love and family feeling. The recipe includes instant vanilla pudding mix prepared with sweetened condensed milk and water, then folded with firmly whipped cream and layered with Nilla Wafers and sliced bananas. It’s particularly good after chilling for a few hours in the refrigerator. We don’t make it a lot, but often enough that my kids know exactly what it is and really enjoy it. My daughter and I wanted to share this family comfort food with my DIL out of love and family feeling in celebration of her being a new mom.

When my daughter checked in with the new mom about foods she might enjoy having brought in after the delivery, she learned that my DIL doesn’t care for bananas. When she told me this I said, “Oh!?”  It gave me pause. It was unexpected. I hadn’t anticipated that this gift would not be wholly welcome and appreciated. I was momentarily indignant. There was a time in my life when I would have been inflexible. I might have felt self-righteous and said to myself, “Well, if she doesn’t like bananas, no banana pudding for her!” And that would have totally defeated the purpose of banana pudding to show love and family feeling. I might not have paused to notice how easily banana pudding can be made without bananas. I mean, REALLY easily. All it took was picking up some berries along with everything else while I was at the grocery store. In fact, I’m now quite a fan of Not Banana Pudding. If I had been hyper-committed to being right about banana pudding, I might have missed out.

As it happened, I pivoted quickly. I decided, “No problem! Lucky for us, banana pudding isn’t actually banana pudding. It’s vanilla pudding with bananas in it. We’ll just make it without the bananas.” We made a couple of glass jars with this special version my daughter named Not Banana Pudding. Knowing that my DIL loves berries, we layered it with fresh blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, and raspberries instead of bananas. And we made a bowl of Not Banana Pudding to keep for ourselves in my fridge. It was delicious! We also made regular banana pudding for my son to share with the other members of their household. New dads deserve banana pudding, too, and he was kinda looking forward to it.

How do you make banana pudding when someone in your family doesn’t eat bananas?

Remember, there are no empty chairs.