My Favorite Flavor

If you know me, you know I am a sucker for weird holidays. Did you know that March is “National Peanut Awareness” month? According to Peanut Allergy Facts, about four percent of teens and adults have peanut allergies. Peanuts have always had an important role in my life. Another little-known fact about me: My family, and by extension I mean “I”, owns a peanut farm.

My whole life, I have always said “my family” because I never felt part of that equation. I have always felt far removed from that scenario as it never seemed possible t that I would inherit the farm; the farm would never make it past my mom’s generation. Then, my mom died, and now I own half of a farm.

Going back generations, my family had always been farmers. My mom even grew up on the farm until my grandparents moved permanently to town when she was in college. That was when they allowed someone else to farm their land for a share of the profits. The farm grew other things besides peanuts depending on the season and who was in charge of farming it. Somehow, though, the farm was always there in the background. We visited it during crop seasons, and my grandparents dealt with the taxes. 

Growing up, I have many memories involving peanuts. Mid-fall, whenever the crop was harvested, my grandmother would receive bags of raw peanuts that she liked to shell herself. So, I would sit with my Maw Maw and shell peanuts; I began to hate peanuts.

As I mentioned in my last blog, I grew up poor. A staple in many less-fortunate households is peanut butter and white bread. Peanut butter is pretty sustainable and if you are hungry, it can be satisfying on the cheap. Aside from peanut butter sandwiches, we ate peanut butter and saltine crackers almost every day. To this day, my grandma still likes peanut butter and saltine crackers for an afternoon snack and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner.

After I moved out, I didn’t eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because they reminded me of my childhood and poverty. Then things changed. Three years ago, I had a life-changing surgery that altered the way that I eat and taste food (watch for a blog post in the near future). If you ask me to name my favorite thing to eat, my answer now will be peanut butter (or any kind of nut butter, really). Why? Quite simply, my taste buds changed, or adapted, since I started my weight-loss journey. Despite my earlier disdain, I am obsessed with the flavor. It no longer represents poverty but protein, and protein is life-sustaining. Nuts and nut butter were among the few things my stomach could tolerate post-surgery, and I enjoyed a bite of peanut butter as a “sweet escape” if I wanted something to curb my cravings.

It’s funny how we tend to avoid certain things that remind us of our childhood. It’s not like peanuts held a particular trauma for me. I may have simply not enjoyed the taste. I’m thankful now that I can look back at unshelled peanuts and be reminded of my Maw Maw but I will always buy them shelled in the store.

My favorite ways to eat nut butter:

• Perfect Bars™: Perfect Bar™  is an organic, gluten-free, high-protein bars made out of nut butter. They offer many different flavors at your local grocery store, but my favorite will always be the dark chocolate chip.
• Spread on a keto waffle: One of my favorite things to make is a Birch Bender’s® keto waffle. You can buy waffle mix or ready-made frozen waffles. I like to pair my waffle with Fix and Fogg Everything Butter®.
• Keto Peanut Butter Balls: I use this recipe from Beaming Baker, and I like to use Swerve®, sweetener, and 365 Organic Creamy Peanut Butter®.
• Keto Fat Bombs: I recommend this recipe from That Low Carb Life using Swerve® and Lily’s® baking chips.
• As a dip with Cauliflower Pretzels: My favorite cauliflower pretzels are From the Ground Up®.
• Keto Peanut Butter Pie: I found this recipe from All Day I Dream About Food using the same keto ingredients mentioned above.
• Keto PBJ: My favorite keto bread is Chompie’s®, and my favorite sugar-free jam is Good Good®.
• Smoothie King Keto Champ Coffee™: I love a good protein shake and this smoothie features almond butter.
• Premier Protein™  Chocolate Peanut Butter Shake: I can’t leave this out because protein shakes are a part of my everyday life now.

I also want to give a small-business shout-out to Spread Happiness Nut Butters and their keto-butter products as well as Ten Berries and their low-sugar jams. I first ran across these businesses at the Denton Community Market a few years ago when I moved back to the area.

I want to hear from my readers. Do you like peanut butter? What are some of your favorite peanut recipes? E-mail me at modernmusingsmmc@gmail.com and share your recipes with me.

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A Sugar-Free Twist on a Classic Cookie

In our podcast this week we talked about sugar-free recipes for the holidays. This is a subject that hits close to home in numerous ways. When I was in middle school, my dad was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes and when I was in high school, my mom was diagnosed as well. For most of my life, I tried to remain conscious of that fact. My family does not have the best genetics. We have a lot of health problems, but I’ve always considered myself lucky that I don’t have many health problems. The doctors always told me that it wasn’t a matter of if I have diabetes, but a matter of when. I don’t believe that to be true. I may not be able to stump genetics forever, but I can slow down the inevitable outcome.

In high school, I actually stopped drinking sugary drinks and switched to sugar-free sweeteners. While I wasn’t gaining weight, I wasn’t losing weight either. In fact, sugar substitutes can sometimes do more harm than good if they are not consumed in moderation.

In general, I avoid sugar substitutes because I just can’t stand the taste. However, a couple of years ago, I started cutting the carbohydrates from my life, which included refined sugars. It’s hard to cut sweets if you have a sweet tooth like I do. So, I went on a mental and spiritual journey to find a great-tasting sugar substitute to appease my sweet tooth. In the end, I found Swerve.

My favorite candy is a Reese’s Cup. In fact, peanut butter is what I crave most. My ex-husband used to make the best three-ingredient peanut butter cookies, but they were incredibly high in sugar. Last year, I resolved to find a keto-friendly recipe so I could enjoy my favorite cookies while eating low-carb. I wanted something sweet(er) that I could eat that was more than just peanut butter out of the jar with semi-sweet dark chocolate chips mixed in. I found a keto twist on the classic peanut butter recipe on the blog The Big Man's World.

The cookies came out great! With all sugar-free sweeteners, the taste is not going to be exactly the same. I’ve found that Swerve does not taste as artificial to me as other sweeteners. The taste is very similar to real sugar. Check out the recipe conversions below.

Unfortunately, cutting sugar and trying to make it taste the same is not going to be an exact science. I am still working it out. Swerve has been a life-saver. I use the brand in most of my low-sugar recipes. It even tastes great in my tea! I took these cookies to a birthday party thrown by a friend on the keto diet and they were well-received. If you love peanut butter as much as I do and you want a cookie or two, don’t feel guilty about this recipe.

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Let me know what you think in the comments below if you’ve tried this recipe. Also, if you have any sugar-free recipes to share, e-mail us at info@modernmusings.net.

Sugar-Free Baking: Converting a Family Favorite

If there’s anything I’ve learned about trying new recipes, it’s that it is always a good idea to have a backup plan. Especially when you are experimenting with sugar-free baking. Especially when I am the one doing the baking. Because I can never be satisfied with just finding some tried-and-true sugar-free recipe...I have this insane desire to make all the recipes I love into a sugar-free version. And sometimes it just doesn’t work.

I remember well the early days of sugar-free baking. My younger sister, Patsy, was a Type 1 diabetic and dependent on insulin. This was back in the days when we called it “Juvenile Diabetes”, and doctors thought the main difference was the age at which you developed it. It was a lot harder to control back then, and there weren’t a lot of options for diabetics with a sweet tooth. Almost everything had a chemical aftertaste, and it was always either way too sweet, or not sweet enough. I almost gag every time I think about that pie my mom made one time using a can of sugar-free pineapple pie filling. It was so gross.

These days, there are lots of sugar-free products out on the market, and you can find hundreds of recipes on the internet, but so many of them still lack that special “umph” that a well-seasoned family recipe brings to the table. Store-bought sweets are dull by comparison, and when you’ve enjoyed every Christmas eating a big pile of cinnamon oatmeal cookies, well...Voortman’s brand of hard, dry, oatmeal wafers just don’t cut it.

It wasn’t long after I found out I, too, was diabetic, that I started playing with my family recipes in hopes that I could still eat them. I’ve dabbled with quite a few, and some have turned out much better than others.  Take, for instance, the age-old “Jell-o Cake” that I’ve been trying to perfect. It’s never just a matter of swapping sugar for artificial sugar...sometimes it changes the recipe completely. A sugar-free apple pie will wind up too watery because the artificial sweetener doesn’t caramelize while it bakes, and a sugar-free glaze on top of a cake will turn back into crystals when it cools, rather than stay moist and syrupy. So you have to have a bit of knowledge about the chemistry of baking before you begin, and backup options are always a good plan.

And that’s exactly where we’re going with today’s blog post. So, I had a plan to remake my mom’s moist and delicious Jell-O cake using sugar-free Jell-O and the newly discovered, Duncan Hines Keto Yellow Cake Mix. It sounded like it would be easy. The original recipe called for “any” yellow cake mix, combined with the ingredients listed on the box, plus one small box of Jell-O, one extra egg, and an extra ⅓ cup of cooking oil. A sugar-free/Keto version should work pretty much the same, right? Not so much.

If you want to see all my mistakes, and the numerous variations I’ve tried when I made this recipe, head on over to our YouTube channel, but for the sake of brevity, let’s just say there were way too many variables, but I did finally figure it out. In the mean time I had to come up with a backup plan….

Since I promised a sugar-free recipe for the holidays, I thought I’d take a step back and talk about a really yummy sugar-free dessert I made for another holiday...Easter. One of our favorite desserts at Easter has always been my mom’s Banana Pudding, and I never dreamed I would be able to make it sugar-free because it contains a key ingredient that is absolutely not sugar-free -- Eagle Brand Sweetened Condensed Milk. It’s nothing but milk and sugar, right? And I have never seen a sugar-free version of it in any store, so I just assumed it couldn’t be done. That is until I ran across this recipe from Arman Liew at The Big Man’s World. This simple recipe has changed my sugar-free baking forever and has allowed me to cook up many of our family favorites without the worry of too much sugar or carbs. It uses just 3 ingredients and has only 1 net gram of carbs per serving. We’ve tried it with ice cream recipes, Magic Cookie Bar recipes, and, of course, Mom’s delicious banana pudding. 

The first time I made this recipe, I had to swap out several ingredients to keep it sugar-free, but they were easy swaps, and did not affect the flavor or consistency of the dessert, so it worked very well for our needs. However, once I sat down to write this blog, I found that one of the key ingredients, Murray brand Sugar-free Nilla Wafers, was no longer available for purchase. There are some sugar-free and/or Keto Nilla Wafers on the market, but I haven’t tried them yet, so I cannot make a recommendation. I also found this simple-looking recipe for homemade Keto Vanilla Wafers that looks like it might be worth trying. In the meantime, if you’re okay with a little sugar (less than 10g per ½ cup serving), you could make the recipe as written above and use the regular Nilla wafers. You could even substitute another type of sugar-free cookie or skip the wafers altogether…the cookies were never my favorite part anyway….

But conquering the sugar in a recipe isn’t the end-all of making our family desserts healthy. A more thorough examination of the nutrition facts revealed that it still wasn’t quite as low-carb as I thought it would be. And that’s one of the hard facts about sugar-free baking -- just because it’s sugar-free, doesn’t mean it’s low carb or even healthy at all. When made to Mom’s specs, I estimate that a ½ cup serving contains about 7g fat, 26g carbs, 195 calories, and almost 3g protein, but when I made it sugar-free, I wound up with 13g fat, 13g carbs, 188 calories, and less than 1g protein. Yes, it was ½ the carbs, but it was still almost the same calories and it had twice the fat. The extra fat came from the homemade condensed milk, and, unfortunately, after the condensed milk, the banana itself was the biggest contributor to the calories and carbs, and what would banana pudding be without the bananas? 

At any rate, I’ve included the recipe below. Make it sugar-free, make it fat free, make it the normal way, I think it will still be delicious no matter what you do. Just keep in mind that often when you swap out sugar, something else, like fats are added to make it still taste good, and it’s best to keep a close eye on the nutrition facts before you decide to chow down on the whole bowl. 

So the point of all this is to say, sometimes cooking sugar-free is an easy swap that tastes great, and sometimes, it’s more trouble than it’s worth. I will say it was totally worth making the sugar-free version of Mom’s pudding because it was delicious and in the process I discovered the Keto condensed milk recipe, which has made it possible to bake a lot of other things. So my advice is to give experimentation a try. Calculate the time, the expense, the carbs and all the other details to see if it’s worth it and go for it! You never know whether you’ve found the next great family recipe until you try it. And if not, well, hopefully, you made that backup plan….

And now, without further ado, here is Mimi’s Banana Pudding (the almost sugar free version), and I hope you enjoy it as much as we do!

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* For the record, I do not know the origin of this recipe. My mom got it from my Aunt Dena, who has long since passed, and we have no idea where she got it from. If you know the original source of this recipe, please send an email with links so I can give credit where credit is due!

 

Sugar Free Recipes for the Holidays

One thing I really enjoy about this time of the year is the baking. My mom and I spend quite some time together in the kitchen. Even my daughter Reyna enjoys partaking in this holiday tradition. There is usually a great deal of laughter, a little swearing, at least one bickering session over techniques, and a lot of bonding that goes on. Each year Mom and I sit down and pre-plan out what sweets and treats we will be making, and the cookies, candy and holiday bread start churning out of the kitchen shortly after thanksgiving is over. Most of the candy is shared with others, but that doesn't mean there isn’t a mountain of candies on the countertop at both of our homes. We make these sweet treats to enjoy and share but too much can be dangerous for our health. 

Cindy and Christen making Fruit Cake Cookies 

also known as Christmas Crack

You might not be aware, but my husband is diabetic as well as my mom. I am also working hard on maintaining my own healthy diet, as I am very close to being diabetic myself. I had weight loss surgery in 2018, and I need to keep a close watch on my carb and sugar intake. It is a real challenge when the winter months come around to stick to our diets because we all want warm fulfilling foods, and to top it off the sweet tooth really seems to come out too! In the past, Mom and I would just make lots of candies, and not be concerned with the amount of sugars we were consuming. As the years have gone on, and we are more self aware, we realized that some changes need to be made so that we can continue our baking traditions, but not kill ourselves and our family with all the excess sugars and carbs.

One thing I want to specify is that there is a wide spectrum of food, recipes and replacement sweeteners out there. You will want to watch things closely; just because something is sugar-free does not mean it is low in carbohydrates. I am not a health food expert or nutritionist by any means. Infact, I regularly depend on others' expertise to make sure that I am making healthy choices and selecting the right products. I have been learning some tricks though. It seems that this past year especially, Mom and I have been exploring various family recipes that we have enjoyed over the years, but with a twist. We will take one of the ingredients (like the sugar) and convert it to a sugar-free substitute, or exchange the flour for a lower-carb or no-carb option. We have even tried some keto recipes that were very similar to some of our all time favorites. 

There have been some successes and some major failures. My best advice I can give you at this time is to try it at home for casual dining first to ensure that it tastes good. Don’t volunteer to make someone’s birthday cake and then try to make a keto cake from an unfamiliar method without trying it first. Sometimes you will be blown away by the similarity, and other times gravely disappointed. For example, we made a keto dump cake while camping a couple of months ago, and it was a little disappointing. I was just glad that it was only our family eating it, and not something we had to take to a potluck!

The absolute best recipe conversion that we have done to date was an old favorite of mine since I was a kid called “Mexican Wedding Cookies”, also known as “Russian TeaCakes” and “Snowball Cookies”. I think I have seen them called “Danish Cookies” as well. Mom and I have made these cookies time and time again. They have a short ingredient list so the taste is very specific and consistent year over year. This is a simple recipe if you want to try something sugar free and are still on the fence about the taste of sugar free desserts. It's also a great way to bake and give someone the gift of a sugar free dessert, which would be totally awesome, because you can ask anyone who is restricted to sugar-free options and they will tell you that there is hardly ever anything sugar-free for dessert.

So bust out your apron, you will want it for this delicious sugar-free recipe below:

Be sure to listen in on the Podcast on Wednesday and we will be taking a deeper dive into sugar-free baking. If you would like a printable version of the recipe click here.