Over 25 years ago I went with a friend to her parent's house over the 4th of July. Her mother served warm vanilla pudding and raspberries one of the nights we were there and I fell in love with the combination.
Years later, after being able to plant my own raspberry patch, I started making vanilla pudding to eat with raspberries for my housemate and myself.
It's been over 13 years since the last summer I made pudding for the two of us. Every summer I make vanilla pudding, pick raspberries, and remember two very good friends.
2 cups of milk + 2 tablespoons cornstarch + 1/3 cup honey heated until thickened. Boil for 1 minute.
Pour half of the milk mixture into the eggs slowly to temper the eggs and then add the egg mixture back to the rest of the milk and cook for one minute.
Remove from heat and add a good splash of vanilla.
The most important things to remember about making pudding from scratch is to stir most of the time and to be careful to temper the eggs so they don't scramble. To borrow a phrase from the children I work with, it's "yucky" when that happens.
I've been sorting through old photos, deciding what to keep and what doesn't need to be stored. (Clockwise from tiny puppy, Lola: a photo I took when I was nine of one of my grandfather's ponies, Briar and a neighbor's puppy playing, 2001; baby Briar on her pillow, at my grandparent's in Northern California, probably taken sometime in the 80's). These are all keepers.
Photos are funny things. I have very few photos of Lola as a puppy. I wasn't very good about backing up photos around that time so when my first computer crashed I lost just about everything I had. What I realized from that experience is that it really isn't necessary have multiple photos of pretty much the same thing.
I've been thinking a lot about memories, how we hold them in our minds...objects and photos can spark a memory, but they really live within ourselves.