Banana cream pie, sans the bananas

This week I thought I'd experiment with a recipe I've used before for coconut cream pie, but make it banana instead. I tried another recipe in the past for banana cream pie, but the custard was too mushy, and the layer of banana slices at the bottom looked like Pikachu exploded on my pie.

The following is an Emeril Lagasse recipe. Yeah, I know. It's actually very Julieta-friendly, considering Emeril is into the fancy cooking and the coq-au-vin and a bunch of dishes with names I can't pronounce.

I have to say, though, when I was a kid I went through a Food Network-watching phase with my parents, and we always laughed at Emeril's signature "BAM!" whenever he dumped spices or garnish on his dishes. It was around that time my dad, who usually has a good taste in gifts, gave my mom a wooden salt and pepper grinder for Christmas. I know he meant well, but my mom did not look too happy.

Anyway, courtesy of the Food Network, this is the recipe, with a few tweaks to suit my purposes.

Ingredients
1 graham cracker crust
3/4 cup of sugar
1/4 cup of corn starch
3 cups of milk
4 egg yolks
1 tbsp. butter
1 tspn. vanilla extract
1 tspn. imitation banana extract
1 tube of Cool Whip

Mix 2 3/4 cups of milk and the sugar in a saucer pan and heat it up. In a bowl, combine the yolks, the corn starch and the leftover milk and mix well. When the milk is boiling, pour the egg mix into the saucepan and stir for three minutes until mixture thickens (it's cool how it goes from
liquid to pudding in seconds!) Turn off the heat.

Stir the butter, the vanilla and banana extracts into the custard. It looks and tastes a thousand times better than instant Jell-O pudding. Pour the custard on the graham cracker crust and move it to the fridge. I tried a regular flour pie shell when I first made this, and cookie is better.

Let it cool for two or three hours so it's solid enough for consumption. Spread Cool Whip on top.

There's nothing better than bananas than fake banana flavor. No dead Pokemon on my pie this time.

This week's groceries

1. Pepperidge Farm cookies - $3.39
2. Albertsons strawberry lemonade $1.19
3. Schepps milk - $2.09
4. McCormick's banana extract - $4.19
5. Graham pie shell - $3.19

Total= $14.15

P.S.: I had a lot of the ingredients lying around in my kitchen, so I didn't spend that much in groceries this week.