I caught Dan Bernstein and Laurence Holmes, two WSCR radio hosts, talking about pudding the other day. “You take the banana pudding from Jewel, plop some Nilla Wafers on top, and it tastes like an upside-down banana cream pie. It is the best.”

Well, guys, I may value your opinion on whether a particular White Sox manager should be fired and the likelihood that the Bears will win more than 5 games in the upcoming season, but as for pudding, you know nothing, Lawrence Holmes.

Maybe it’s because of my history as a Jewel employee in the 1970s, but I avoid the fresh food in the Jewel deli section. No, if I want store-bought pudding I am going to head to one of my neighborhood Sunset Foods grocery stores and get a pound of their homemade rice pudding.

I sprinkle a bowl full of the pudding with some cinnamon, mix in some pieces of frozen banana and there’s a treat I can curl up in front of the TV with to watch an episode of Yellowstone or Stranger Things. That one pound is enough to get me through a week of TV melodramas.

There wasn’t always a Sunset Foods in my life. Long ago, my dad and I enjoyed a different store-bought pudding. It wasn’t from the deli counter. In fact, it wasn’t even fresh. It was a frozen treat from Birds Eye, the masters of freezer delights back in the 1960s. Called Cool ‘n Creamy, it was sold in plastic tubs that looked just like the one Cool Whip comes in today. And it was delicious.

Cool ‘n Creamy came in several flavors, Dad and I were fans of vanilla. I would eat mine plain, while he would douse his bowlful with Himbeersaft, an imported red raspberry syrup. We didn’t have cable TV or streaming service back then, but we could still sit in front of our old black and white Zenith and watch Jack Brickhouse broadcast a ball game on WGN.

Sadly, Dad passed many years ago and Cool ‘n Creamy is a long-gone relic of a different age. And I have moved on.

So Dan and Laurence, enjoy your banana pudding/upside-down banana cream pie. I’m going to be digging into another bowl of my rice pudding concoction—and loving it!.

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