Friday night I had guests for dinner and committed a cardinal sin: I made a recipe without testing it first.
The recipe was for peach crisp. Apple crisp is an old favorite of mine, but did I use my tried and true recipe and just substitute peaches? Nooooooooooo! Instead, I took this one from a 1997 Taste of Home annual. Now, granted, food from the heartland isn't known for being the most healthy -- but peaches, for goodness sake! They're good for you.
As I was making the dessert, I frowned at the amounts of sugar the recipe called for. In fact, I used one quarter less sugar in the filling, and a quarter less in the topping (1/2 cup less sugar in the whole recipe), and since the filling called for the syrup from the canned peaches (and I made the mistake of buying peaches in heavy syrup, I dumped half of said syrup down the drain and substituted water. The result -- a dessert that was still far too sweet for me to really enjoy.
Mind, you, I LOVE dessert -- and it shows. (I've got a conference to go to in a month, and starting today, I've hit the treadmill in an effort to lose a few pounds.) The truth is, we rarely eat dessert just because we eat too much of everything else. (And, in fact, my favorite "dessert" is actually a graham cracker.)
It's doubtful I'll ever make this recipe again. But if I should -- I'd knock out at least another 1/2 cup of the sugar -- and ditch the heavy (made lighter) syrup. No wonder there's a diabetes epidemic in this country.
