Objective: make a nice dessert, get 2 more of my ‘5 a day’ and use up some pears that are starting to over ripen.
I noticed that we had more pears left from the week than we could use before we go away this weekend, so I thought about making a nice dessert. I love crumbles and would normally not hesitate to make a generous topping of brown sugar, oats and butter for the top and then smother the whole thing in fresh cream or ice cream when it was all gooey and cooked. But it’s instincts like that which have led me to end up in dieting hell. So I needed to try and be a bit smarter about this.
I consulted Andy’s food bible recently, the Joy of Cooking. We aren’t very much ‘recipe’ people but when faced with a strange vegetable or a forgotten technique it really does help. I had bought some rhubarb and forgot what the cleaning/prep should be when I last consulted the book. Anyhow, I had a peak at crumbles and got a laugh at this passage:
“We love the names Americans have given their homey fruit-and-dough desserts over the years – pandowdy, cobbler, crisp, brown betty, crunch, slump, grunt, buckle. “ (p. 894)
What strikes me is that I always thought the Joy of Cooking was an American cookbook – I mean they use things like cups and tablespoons and cook in Fahrenheit. But suddenly they’re being all hoity toity and condescending. I mean, if, and I still doubt this very much, the authors are british, they have a lot of nerve mocking American desserts when theirs have names like “spotted dick” and have ingredients like rice and bread instead of good old fashioned chocolate and butter.
Anyhow, for my healthy and yummy pear and apple crumble I sliced up the fruit (3 each of pears and apples), coated them in a bit of splenda, cinnamon and corn flour and tipped them into a glass baking dish. I then opened up the pantry and took out a bunch of cereals and mixed it all up for a Cup worth of random cereal mixture – there was special K, shredded wheat, rice krispies and some muesli. I added some honey and about 2 tablespoons of melted butter and mixed it all up.
Baked in the oven til the crust was brown. About 4 servings.
WeightWatchers points: about 3 points per serving
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