Dessert guilt crumbles with this pear and dark chocolate treat
My four daughters all have a sweet tooth, and I blame genetics. I can sidestep french fries, chips and salty stuff pretty easily, but chocolate makes me drool. So if you love sweets, at least know you are in good company.
But, healthy-eating friends, let’s have some straight talk about dessert: It’s full of sugar, which means we can’t have dessert every single time we want it.
In our house, we eat (real) dessert only on weekends. During the week, I serve plain fruit or unsweetened yogurt after dinner, saving the sweeter treats for family meals where we linger around the table, connecting.
Even weekend desserts, though, are not a free-for-all sugar fest. I follow one simple guideline to keep my family’s sugar consumption in check: I make all our own desserts.
There are three major advantages to this rule. First, though sugar can wreak havoc on our health, weird chemicals — fake flavors, colors, preservatives — scare me even more. If I make the food myself, I can skip the strange ingredients I can’t pronounce, and that’s a win for our health.
Second, having to cook my own treats (usually) stops me from mindlessly eating something I brought home from the store. Permission to eat anything that is homemade is simultaneously enough freedom to indulge our cravings sometimes and enough brakes to keep us from scarfing down a random box of cookies.
Last, if I make the desserts myself, then I have control over the recipe. Usually, I reduce sugar and simple carbohydrates and add protein and fiber, which all slow down the sugar rush.
For instance, this pear and dark chocolate crumble turns almond flour and oats into a tasty topping that isn’t loaded with empty calories, and a tiny splash of almond extract brilliantly tricks the palate into thinking this dessert is sweeter than it is. Splurge on some highquality dark-chocolate chips (or just chop up a bar) — you’ll be amazed how satisfying a small bit of dark chocolate can be.
Food Network star Melissa d’Arabian is an expert on healthy eating on a budget. She is the author of the cookbook “Supermarket Healthy.”