We'll start out with a nice Low-Calorie Fruit Salad and Dressing.
Arranging things artfully does a lot of the heavy lifting for this recipe. It's hard to make some lettuce, half a pear, a mound of cottage cheese, and some stray bits of maraschino cherry, grapefruit, and prunes look like an exciting luncheon platter. And then just think of the delightful flavor of vinegar-garlic spiked orange juice on those maraschino cherries, etc. It might be enough to make you lose your appetite-- which is pretty much the point, I guess.
The Tomato Sauce for Meatballs recipe doesn't sound bad, really. I just kind of wonder why it's in this particular chapter.
There's not much to set this apart from any other tomato sauce recipe. You can just tell that it's "diet" because it calls for a little liquid Sweet-10, an old-timey non-caloric sweetener. Yes, tomato sauces often include a little sugar to balance the tartness of the tomatoes, but it's so little that replacing it with an artificial sweetener isn't really going to save much calorically-- especially when the tiny saving is spread across as many servings as the recipe makes. You'll save maybe two calories per serving by not using real sugar. This recipe goes straight into the "Why bother?" file.
And finally, we have a dessert that made me laugh just because of its name.
"Pretend Peach Cheesecake" sounds like peaches are some highly desirable luxury that dieters just can't risk ingesting. Of course, it's not the peaches that are the "problem"-- it's the cheesecake. I guess my point is that I'm a language nerd and the adjective should be next to the noun it modifies-- which in this case is cheesecake! The cheesecake part is definitely the pretend element. There's not even cottage cheese to pretend it's cream cheese-- just "liquified nonfat dry milk" for the dairy element. (Wouldn't that just be... skim milk? I'm not sure I understand the rationale for using nonfat dry milk here.)
These recipes don't do much to contest my perception of home ec teachers as a bit out of touch with the real world, but I wasn't expecting them to do that. (I also wasn't expecting the Sweet-10. Now I kind of want the Spanish Inquisition to show up. But they won't-- because I'm expecting them.)
Considering that the other low calorie recipes use real sugar, and the sauce recommends being served with pasta, I really don't get the placement of that recipe in the diet section. It may actually taste better than the dressing suggested for the pears with marschino cherries.
ReplyDeleteI see that even back then low calorie diet food was code for just eat lots of sugar, but pretend that it's healthy because it comes from fruit.
There's a reason why true lifestyle changes happen when a person gets fed up with the status quo on some random day of the year. Don't worry, the first candy holiday of the year is coming up soon so everyone can forget their horrible diet food and go back to normal (if they haven't already).
There's always a market for weird and non-sensical diet recipes.
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