Fruit Salad and Chocolate Pudding

[livingdeb]

Due to my success in eating fruit on the cruise, I decided to eat more fruit at home, too.

So last time I went shopping, I looked for fruit that was on sale (and thus probably in season?) and ended up with an apple and a mango. Then I also got two bananas because they're my favorite. To keep those and the apples from turning brown after I cut them up, I got a lime to squeeze over them. I looked in the frozen fruit section and it was pretty much cleaned out, but I got some frozen pineapple. (Apparently pineapple pie or cobbler is not a traditional Christmas treat.) Then at home I added some canned tiny orange slices and a small bag of (unsweetened) coconut, chopped things up, mixed it together and ended up with edible fruit salad. (The mango seemed unripe (crunchy). The pineapple was much better than canned but not quite as good as fresh.)

I did not mix in anything creamy. My Grandma Dotty taught us to mix mayonnaise in which sounds disgusting, but sadly is not. Still, if your fruit is good enough, you don't need any sauce, right? Nor do you need marshmallows.

So anyway, unlike on the cruise ship where someone served me one course at a time, I choose the timing of my own courses. And I generally am more in the mood to eat my other food than to eat my fruit, so I tend to eat the other food first, and then I may or may not get around to eating the fruit afterwards. I'll have to work on that.

Today I was good at lunch and had fruit salad and whole-wheat pita bread with hummus. At 5:00, I had a craving for a double cheeseburger. But instead I ate a pita bread pizza with low-fat pepperoni (but no fruit). Then I had a craving for chocolate.

So I asked myself which is better for me, hot chocolate or pudding? (Neither. I know. Hush.) Hot chocolate: it has a much higher milk-to-junkfood-ingredients ratio. But I was really more in the mood for pudding. So I tried cutting in half the recipe for my mom's chocolate cream pie filling and leaving out the egg yolks and butter. And salt. I've always wondered if pudding would work without adding butter at the end. And using just egg yolks and leaving me with egg whites? That's not my favorite either.

It might be helpful if I learned a bit more food chemistry.

Still, milk is the base and corn starch is a thickener. Cocoa, sugar, and vanilla (and maybe salt) are the flavorings. That could work right?

It actually seems to have! It's thick and chocolaty (and still a little too hot to eat).

Maybe I should have a side-by-side taste test to see how noticeable any differences are and thus better gauge how appropriate this would be for company. But I'll give you my recipe now.

Low-Fat Dark Chocolate Pudding

1/2 cup sugar (I used Sugar in the Raw = turbinado sugar; Mom uses Splenda)
1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 cup cocoa powder
[1/4 teaspoon salt]
1 cup milk (I used skim)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Measure dry ingredients into a medium-sized saucepan and mix with a wire whisk. Add the milk and whisk continuously over low heat until thick. (Or you could use a double-boiler and not have to be so careful.) Remove from heat. Add vanilla and stir.

Comments

[indigo-rose99.livejournal.com]

But how did the pudding taste?