One lump or two?

Good afternoon!

We ate out at the Souplantation a few days ago. It's virtually all salads and soups. Plus breads. Plus desserts.

That sounds good, but I think it's no secret to tell you that the salads were nearly all desserts.  And probably some of the soups too.

Crunchy pineapple something salad was delicious. And sweet. Plus pineapple coleslaw. Plus most of the dressings likely had sugar in them even if you made your own salad.

The soups were not sweet per se, except for the Lime Coconut Chicken soup, which probably had sugar in it, as it was a bland, pleasant tasting broth.  Folks!  We are going to have to consciously STOP eating all this sugar.

In the best old cookbooks, meats were meats, salads were salads. There was no sugar in those dishes. If you had a "fruit salad" you could have a fruit salad dressing whch was usually a slightly thickened sweet delicious concoction with poppy seeds in it. See Helen Corbitt's Cookbook for a tasty dressing of this type.

Now, the kitchen wizards have discovered the tantalizing tastes resulting from a mixture of sweet-salty-sour.  Broccoli Salad with its mixture of broccoli buds, diced onions, raisins, and sweet dressing is an example this type of presentation. As a main dish, Sweet and Sour Pork (shrimp, chicken, etc.) is another example, as is Lemon Chicken, Walnut Chicken, and even Orange Chicken which has lots of cayenne added to it to add a fourth dimension of taste.  They are all heavenly. But any and all of these dishes are equal in sweetness to a piece of pie--which is a dessert in the old terms of the cuisine.  Honey mustard dressing is the latest big thing and has taken over from the clabberish sour "Ranch".  Honey mustard can make any stark raw wild tasting bunch of greens taste quite yummy and more easy to wolf down.

Here's the recipe for vinaigrette as I first learned it.

1 part vinegar
4 parts oil
salt, pepper
And perhaps a pinch of dry mustard.

You beat these up and beat them up and put onto your salad. You will have a salad that tastes like a salad, not a dessert.  I blame the low-fat craze of the eighties for bringing all that sugar into our daily fare.  I mean, I love sugar for its taste. But I know it is better not to kid ourselves that it is doing anything nutritious to all those greens except to make them more palatable if you like things sweeter and blander.

Everyone should read Dr. Atkins' first book now. Note that the authors of the recipes have scrupulously avoided the addition of sugar to any recipe.  When it's dessert time they do add artificial sweeteners to make us think that something's sweet.  When I did the Dr A, the only artificial sweetener in soft drinks was saccharine.  Everybody's been warned enough of saccharine to try not to overdose on it.  Not so of the newer sweeteners: Aspartame, Splenda, Ace-potassium, etc. which are suspiciously sweet to me. 

When you'd drink a soda with saccharine, you instinctively KNEW you were not getting any sugar. Your body said, "Yes, it tastes a bit sweet and that is what I have been craving," but all those little sugar-devils in your body KNEW you had not had sugar.  That's good! If the little sweetish taste of saccharine could keep your cravings at bay, those little sugar-devils got gradually weaker and weaker. Because sugar feeds sugar. And sugar makes more sugar cravings. It is true. Try it for two wracking days. You'll emerge a new person.  I have done it. I just wish I could summon  the moral stamina to do it again. YAZZYBEL