Lowcarbezine! 29 March 2000

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Hey, Gang!

You guys are so helpful!  I got a bunch of emails from folks about my
problem with the crackers sticking, and I thank you!  I did try making
them again, this time using pure liquid lecithin (the undiluted form of
the substance which, diluted, makes Pam keep things from sticking) to
grease the cookie sheet.  This was my idea, and it did *not* work.  I
ended up chipping another batch of crackers off the cookie sheet,
although once again they made mighty tasty crumbs.  This amazed me -- I
have *never* known *anything* to stick to pure lecithin!

So, in accordance with the suggestions I've been getting, I went to
Lechter's (Does anyone find this to be an ominous name for a store that
sells pots and pans, in light of the movie Silence of the Lambs? ;-D)
yesterday to find a silicone baking sheet, and non-stick baking
parchment.  Got the parchment, no luck on the silicone baking sheet,
though they did have teflon pan liners, so I bought some of those.  I'll
give it a couple more tries, but if neither of these things helps, I'm
going to have to adjust the recipe.  The current recipe contains some
cheese, which is notorious for sticking, so perhaps I can use something
else in its place.  I'm thinking maybe sesame seeds.

I *will* come up with a good low carb cracker recipe!!!  I *WILL*.

Stubbornness is sometimes a virtue. Especially in your service! :-)

Dana

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 Thought For The Week

Is cooking still a required class in the public schools? Has it gotten
any better?

When I was a kid (approximately a million years ago), girls were all
required to take a couple of semesters of cooking in junior high school;
boys were not. My cooking classes mostly consisted of learning to pour
canned cheese soup over macaroni, to make macaroni and cheese, and some
basic lessons in baking things like muffins and biscuits out of white
flour and hydrogenated vegetable shortening -- in fact, the cookbook we
used was published by Crisco.  *Not* inspiring.  By the time my brother,
4 years younger, got to junior high school, boys were required to take
"Bachelor Living", where they learned basic cooking and how to sew on a
button.  Isn't that name a hoot?  The implication, of course, was that
no married man would ever cook.  Little did they know that the day was
fast approaching when many married women wouldn't cook, either.

I ask because I run into so many folks who seem to know virtually
nothing about cooking, and I think it's a shame.  Not that everyone
needs to be able to do fancy cooking, especially since a lot of that
stuff is nothing you should be eating anyway -- I can think of no really
good reason for you to knock yourself out learning to make puff paste,
or how to cook the crust and the filling for a custard pie separately,
and then slip the filling into the crust.  Heck, *I* never did those
things, and I've been cooking ever since I can remember.

However, being completely helpless about food will cost you in a lot of
ways.  You'll spend truly outrageous amounts of money on very basic
things -- like, say, roasted chicken, or salad dressing.  You'll eat
more chemicals and added sugar than you meant to, since you'll be at the
mercy of the food processors.  And if you want anything beyond the
basics to eat, you'll end up going out, which is *really* expensive, if
often fun, and may well expose you to hidden carbs in sauces, marinades,
stuff like that.

Still, I know that a lot of folks are very intimidated by basic
cooking.  They think of it as a complex, arcane skill, requiring great
precision and gobs of time, a feeling that is reinforced by ads for
processed food.  I remember one night twenty years ago when a group of
us, all young and broke, got together to have a little dinner party.  We
roasted a couple of chickens, and when they came out of the oven I
noticed that there were lots of nice brown drippings.  I asked, "Would
anybody like me to make gravy?"

Well!  They *stared* at me as if I had asked, "Would anybody like me to
transmute base metals into gold?"  "You... know how to make *gravy*?!"
they asked.  "Uh, yeah, I've been making gravy since I was about six," I
responded.  All those ads for jarred gravy had convinced them that this
was some terribly difficult task, but I knew the truth -- that it was,
quite literally, child's play.

Most Americans have been convinced that certain foods simply grow in
bottles, cans, or jars at the grocery store, and that's *it*.  Salad
dressing, for instance.  I rarely use bottled salad dressing; I "dress
my salad" instead.  Did you even know that that's where the term "salad
dressing" came from?  How do I dress a salad?  Well, I usually crush a
clove of garlic and pour a quarter to a half a cup of olive oil over it,
depending on how big the salad is.  I toss the garlicky oil into the
salad first.  Then, depending on what seems good, I'll add various
things.  For a Greek salad, I'll toss in lemon juice, salt, pepper, and
a little oregano.  For a mock-caesar style dressing, I'll toss in lemon
juice, worcestershire sauce, a little mayonnaise to make it creamy, and
a good shot of parmesan cheese.  For an Italian style dressing, I'll add
wine vinegar, mixed Italian herbs (found labeled "Italian seasoning"),
salt and pepper.  I'll taste as I go, remembering always that it's easy
to add more and impossible to take too much out.  It never fails to come
out tasting better, and fresher, than the bottled stuff!

Am I trying to convince you to cook if you really, really hate it?  Am I
trying to convince you to make a five-course dinner after working a
ten-hour day?  Not at all.  If you don't want to cook, I have no vested
interest in convincing you you *should* cook, so long as you can afford
the extra expense it incurs.

Nope, I'm aiming here at those of you who are intimidated by cooking;
who are quite certain you simply *can't* cook.  I hope to convince you
that plain cooking is really not difficult at all -- that it's something
you *can* do.  I just want to give a little pep-talk to all the folks
out there who have been snookered into thinking that they really should
pay the food processing industry to do this terribly difficult,
complicated job.  Hey, paying someone to cook for you has always been a
luxury.  Perfectly ordinary people have been cooking for years, and
they've done just fine.

I like to watch the Food Network on cable sometimes, partly because I
like food, and partly because I get good ideas for recipes.  (I also
like it because it's the last bastion of personal eccentricity on
television.  You see people you'd *never* see anywhere else.  There's
actually a show called "Two Fat Ladies" -- two portly, aging British
women who tool around on a motorcycle with a sidecar, going various
places and cooking.)  I bring up the Food Network because of its
undisputed star, Emeril LaGasse.  Emeril is one of the reigning chefs of
New Orleans, with not one but two of the hottest restaurants in town,
heaven knows how many cookbooks, and two cooking shows on the Food
Network.  The one to watch is Emeril Live!, where he cooks in front of a
studio audience.  Why?  Because he's so obviously having fun, and he
demystifies cooking so much.  "Now we're going to put in some garlic,"
he'll say.  The audience will ooh and ah their delight. "You like it?
Put in some more!" And he'll throw in some more garlic.  "You don't like
it so much?  Don't put in so much.  Hey, it's not rocket science.  We're
just cooking."

Isn't that great?  One of the greatest chefs in America today, and he's
telling you, "Hey, it's not rocket science.  We're just cooking."  What
a liberating attitude!

And he's right.  I make up stuff all the time.  Now, granted, I've been
cooking for a long time.  But I started playing around with cooking as a
kid, and I really didn't mess it up very often.  Here's my mantra:  If
you start with good ingredients, how bad can it be?  So long as you have
the smarts to not put, say, mustard in the vanilla custard, your results
may not always be utterly brilliant, but they're likely to be quite
edible.

Further, as a low carb dieter, you have a real advantage, since you
won't be doing a lot of baking.  Baking -- making muffins, biscuits,
pastries, breads, stuff like that -- is by far the touchiest and most
difficult form of cooking to master.  Even an experienced cook can turn
out flat bread, or tough muffins with tunnels in them.  However, this is
not your worry!

Basic cooking you *can* learn, if you can read.  You can learn, without
much trouble, to roast a chicken, a leg of lamb, a piece of pork loin.
You can learn to sauté a chop or a chicken breast in olive oil and
garlic for a fast, tasty meal.  You can learn to plunk things into a
slow cooker, cover it, turn it on, and go to work. You can even learn to
use a recipe as a starting place, instead of viewing it as immutable
law.  Like Emeril, you can learn to add more if you like it, or use less
-- or even leave it out! -- if you don't.  It's all a matter of deciding
who's in charge here, you or the food.

I know that the low carb dieters who already cook are always looking for
low carb cookbooks, but for those of you who are making your first
tentative steps into the wonderful world of cooking, these aren't always
the best cookbooks.  You need something a bit more basic; something that
will do some explaining.  You need at least one good, basic cookbook
that will define basic terms for you -- sort of an encyclopedia of
cooking..  The best selling cookbook in the English language for decades
-- with good reason, I might add -- is _The Joy of Cooking_.  It is
available at any -- and I do mean *any* -- general bookstore in America,
and much of the rest of the world. Or you can find it at Amazon.com at
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0452279232/lowcarbohysoluti .
There is also _The New Joy of Cooking_, which I haven't seen, but given
the excellence of the original, I imagine it's just fine.  You can find
it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684818701/lowcarbohysoluti
.  This is the sort of cookbook you turn to when you need to know how
long to roast a turkey, at what temperature, or how many cups of flour
to the pound, or what the heck the instructions "cream until light"
mean.  Oh, yeah -- good recipes, too. :-)

I also would highly recommend _The Compleat I Hate To Cook Book_, by Peg
Bracken.  This is a wonderful book for the novice or reluctant cook;
it's full of reassurance and down-to-earth advice.  All the recipes are
pretty simple, and while nowhere near all of them are for us, many of
them work fine for low carbing, and many others adapt very easily.
Everything I've tried from her books has turned out very tasty, which
is, of course, very important.  I turn to this cookbook for ideas more
often than any other.  It is also very funny; Peg Bracken is one of my
favorite writers of all time; I read her cookbooks (and her other books,
like _I Hate To Housekeep_ ) just for the fun of it.  If anyone knows
her, tell her I'm a big, big fan, and I only hope to grow up to be just
like her. :-)  You can get _The Compleat I Hate To Cook Book_ from
Amazon.com.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0883657945/lowcarbohysoluti .

Again, if you simply don't *want* to cook, and don't mind eating out, or
living on frozen grilled fish fillets, pre-cooked shrimp, rotisserie
chicken, bagged salad, pre-formed hamburgers,  and the like, that's fine
with me.  But if you're bored with all that stuff, and don't have the
money to eat out every night, I hereby encourage you to give cooking a
shot.

Hey, it's just food!  We're just cooking, it's not rocket science.

I think I'll go throw some chicken in the oven. :-)

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Frequently Asked Question

Isn't it important to eat a balanced diet?

Well, maybe.  The big question is, "What the heck is a 'balanced diet',
really?"  The phrase doesn't seem to have any concrete meaning.

For instance, is the government food pyramid a "balanced diet"?  It
certainly suggests far more of some kinds of foods -- in particular,
grains -- than of others.  Is it "balanced" to eat 6-11 servings of
grains a day, but only 2-3 servings of protein foods?  (We'll overlook
here that the food pyramid classes beans with the protein foods when
they contain at least as much carbohydrate as protein.)

Is it "balanced" to reduce fats to 10% of calories, as Dean Ornish
insists we should do?  Ornish also cuts protein way back.  Why don't the
critics go after Ornish for his "unbalanced" diet, especially in light
of emerging evidence that a very low fat/high carbohydrate diet
increases one's risk of breast cancer, and may worsen HDL and
triglycerides?

Low carb critics also will sometimes contest that leaving sugary stuff
out of the diet is "unbalanced", as if there were some sort of actual,
dietary need for refined sugar.  The notion that it is part of a
"healthy, balanced diet" to deliberately include a "foodstuff" (and I
use the term very loosely) that has absolutely no nutritional value
whatsoever is nonsensical in the extreme, and can only be seen as a sop
either to people's addictions, or to the food processing industry,
depending on who is suggesting it.

Indeed, one of the recent programs that is closest to a truly balanced
diet is the Zone, which advocates that you get 30% of your calories from
protein, 30% from fats, and 40% from carbohydrates -- only way it could
get more balanced would be to eat a 33.3%/33.3%/33.3% ratio.  Yet Barry
Sears has been taken to task over his "low carbohydrate diet."  For that
matter, my own Careful Carb Diet, one of the three main approaches to
controlling insulin described in my book _How I Gave Up My Low Fat Diet
and Lost Forty Pounds!_, is far closer to being a truly "balanced" diet
than anything either the government or Dr. Ornish have recommended.

The notion of the "balanced diet" has no actual scientific definition,
it is simply a reflection of how people have generally eaten over the
past few hundred years. (I have in front of me a mainstream nutrition
text that asserts "...as currently consumed, sugars pose no major health
threat..."  I find it incredible that we could increase our intake of
*any* highly concentrated substance by over 2000% in 200 years time --
the increase in American sugar consumption between 1800 and 2000 -- and
*not* have it be a health threat.  Heck, if we drank that much more
*water* it might be a danger.) Two better questions would be:  What diet
comes closest to that on which the human race evolved?  What diet makes
my own personal body work best?

We aren't entirely sure what diet the human race evolved on, but there
are some things that are quite clear.  First of all, it didn't contain
*any* refined sugar, since refined sugar has only existed for the past
several hundred years, and has only become inexpensive enough for the
masses to consume within the past 200 years or so.  Sugar is not a part
of the evolutionary diet of humankind.

Secondly, it did not contain grains or beans in any great quantity.  How
do we know this?  First of all, in order to get any great quantity of
grains and beans, one has to farm them, and farming was only invented
about 10,000 years ago.  Sounds like a long time, but the history of
humankind is estimated to be somewhere around 2 *million* years.

 Secondly, grains and beans are largely inedible without some sort of
technology.  Grains have to be "threshed" -- that is, removed from their
inedible seed coats -- and cooked, at the very least, the other
possibility being that they might be ground into flour or meal, which
takes even more technology.  Beans, too, have to be removed from their
pods -- easier to do by hand than with grains, since beans tend to be
larger -- and they, too, must be cooked.  Further, unlike grains which
can be cooked by the relatively low tech methods of either simply
parching the individual seeds, or by making flat breads on a hot rock
(note, though, that this would require some sort of milling into flour),
beans require a vessel to cook them *in* -- again, some sort of
technology was required, if only that of making a simple, heat resistant
pot.

So you can scratch large quantities of grains and beans from the
pre-agricultural, pre-civilization diet.  Oh, no doubt cave folks chewed
on a handful of grass seeds now and then, and pulled up and ate the bean
when they went after a sprout, but they surely weren't eating 6-11
servings of grains a day.

We do know that prehistoric humans were hunter-gatherers, and we suspect
that gathering supplied more of their diet than hunting.  After all,
leaves, roots, shoots, berries, and nuts don't run away or fight back.
So figure that the bulk of the diet was made up of what we now refer to
as vegetables, along with nuts (easy to gather, they store well with no
preserving, and they have a lot of calories, which is *very good* in a
pre-industrial world), and fruits in seasons.  Also keep in mind that
those vegetables and fruits would have been considerably lower in sugars
than the ones we buy in the store today; modern plant breeding has made
virtually all fruits and vegetables sweeter.  They also would have eaten
a far wider variety of vegetable matter than the average American does
today (can't speak for other nations; my experience is somewhat
provincial here), since it's likely that they ate anything they *could*
eat.  Too many of us eat a little iceberg lettuce and tomato on a
sandwich, and the occasional green pepper and onion in a fajita, and
that's *it*.

We know that prehistoric humans ate meat; indeed there is some
speculation that some species -- the North American mammoth for instance
-- were actually hunted to extinction, which is pretty impressive for a
bunch of guys with homemade stone spears, don't you think?  What sorts
of animals they ate no doubt varied with where they lived -- I have a
hunch that if you lived near the ocean, you might find it a whole lot
easier to dig for clams than to chase a deer!   We also know that
surviving hunter-gatherer peoples eat bugs, and I'm guessing that bugs
were a pretty goodly part of our historical diet  there's a lot of them,
and they're pretty easy to catch.  And just about every omnivorous
mammal finds eggs to be a delicacy, and they don't run, either, so I'm
betting that our ancient ancestors ate just about any kind of eggs they
could get their hands on -- bird, turtle, whatever.

(One of the things we don't know, by the way, is how high or low in fat
this diet was.  We do know that game is much lower in fat than grain
fed, farm raised meat -- but then, we primarily eat only the muscle
meats anymore, while we're pretty certain that our ancestors ate the
whole thing -- liver, kidneys, spleen, thymus, brain, you name it, and
many of  those organ meats are higher in fat and cholesterol than the
muscle meats.  Also, those bugs they probably ate -- many bugs are rich
in fats, as well, and of course nuts are high fat.  We do strongly
suspect that the fatty acid profile of the meat they ate was
considerably different than what we get today, since we know that game,
and even grass-fed beef,  is lower in cholesterol and saturated fats
than farm-raised meats.  What impact this shift in fatty acid profile is
having on our health is unclear.

We also don't really know how *much* game and other animals foods people
ate, in comparison to vegetables and such.  Pretty hard to tell from
this remove.)

So, we're looking a a diet of meat, fish, birds, eggs, bugs, nuts,
seeds, lots and lots of vegetables, and fruits in season, with all the
fruits and vegetables being somewhat lower in sugar than what we can get
today at the grocery.  Add to this the occasional lucky discovery of
honey, and that's about it.  Were they eating an "unbalanced" diet?
Well, if you consider grains, beans, and sweets all to be an essential
part of a "balanced diet", they sure were.  Yet somehow we survived and
thrived.

Then there's the question of what diet your own personal body runs best
on, and that's a question only you can answer.  Those of you who have
read my book know that I do not advocate one specific low carb program
for everyone, nor can I assert "You should eat X number of grams of
carbs per day, no more, no less."  I can't tell you whether you should
eat dairy, or if you're one of the people who will lose weight and feel
better without it, although I can tell you that, at least from what I've
been reading, herding started earlier than plowing and planting, so
dairy products seem to have an older history in the human diet than
grains and beans.

 I can't tell you if you're one of the many, many people whose
cholesterol will drop on a low carb diet, regardless of the amount of
saturated fat you may consume, or if you're one of the smaller group who
will need to not only cut carbs, but also to concentrate on fish and
poultry instead of beef and pork for your protein, and olive oil,
avocados, and nuts instead of butter for your fats.  I can't tell you if
you're one of the people who will do best on a Basic Low Carb diet, such
as Atkins or Protein Power, or if you're one of the few people I've
communicated with who find that they simply never adjust to such a diet,
feeling tired and mentally foggy all the time, and will do far better on
a -- dare I say it? -- more balanced program like the Careful Carb Diet.

I can tell you that I suspect that it is possible to damage one's
ability to metabolize carbohydrate foods safely by abusing the mechanism
for years and years with vast quantities of sugar and other high impact
carbs.  I suspect this is the case with my own body.  If this is,
indeed, true, then perhaps there are many of us who *could* have eaten a
diet somewhat richer in carbohydrate if we hadn't abused ourselves for
many years, but who now need an "unbalanced", low carbohydrate diet to
compensate for those years of abuse.

I can tell you that your body has *no* inherent need whatsoever for
separated, concentrated sugars, for white flour, for highly processed
cereals, and that you will do yourself no harm at all by eliminating
them from your diet entirely, no matter what epithet the world may throw
at you and your way of eating.

And I can tell you that if you feel dramatically better when you
restrict your carbohydrate intake, if you lose weight, if your energy
level is higher and more constant, if your moods are better, if your
bloodwork improves -- if, by any reasonable measurement, a low carb diet
makes you healthier -- than you are approaching a balance that is right
for *your* body, and adding back foods that make you tired, fat and
unwell to be "nutritionally correct" would be a sad and foolish thing to
do.

If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's
probably a duck.  Balance *your* diet for *your* body, not for some
abstract notion fabricated by the government, influenced by the lobbying
of the agricultural industry.

Find *your* balance.

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Reader Review of _How I Gave Up My Low Fat Diet and Lost Forty Pounds!_

Since reading this book, I have more energy now than I have had in 12
years.  I've lost 30 pounds and 8 SIZES in my clothes
 so far.  It is very easy to follow the guidelines in the book and you
never feel hungry.  I have tons of energy at night (after
 working full-time) and I have seen improvements in my hair, nails, eyes
and emotional state. My friends and family have all
 asked what I have done in these 4 months and I have referred them to
this book. You deserve to feel great so get the book
 and learn how!

Mary Jenkins
Charlotte, NC

Thanks, Mary!!  Great work, and congratulations!!

You can check out the first chapter of the book FREE at
http://www.holdthetoast.com .  And you can see other reader reviews at
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0966883101/lowcarbohysoluti

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 FYI

I get fairly frequent emails from people wanting to know if my book,
_How I Gave Up My Low Fat Diet and Lost Forty Pounds!_, can be purchased
in bookstores -- either they don't like ordering online, or they have a
friend or family member who isn't online, and wants to buy the book. The
answer is yes!  Any bookstore in America can easily order a copy of _How
I Gave Up My Low Fat Diet and Lost Forty Pounds!_ -- we're listed with
Baker and Taylor, one of the two biggest book wholesalers in the
country.  It will generally take a few days to arrive, but the cool
thing about this is that I've never known a bookstore to charge for this
service -- means that you don't have to pay shipping and handling!

And if enough people order it, pretty soon every bookstore in America
will be carrying it! (What, me?  Ulterior motive? ;-))

Just thought you ought to know.

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A Reader Responds

Yuh-oh.  Remember that website I wrote about last week, Sugar Free
Paradise?  The one with the low carb baked goods? Here's what reader
Cynthia Javernick had to say on the subject:

RE:  Sugar Free Paradise:  I got some of their stuff.  My sugar jumped
enormously despite their claims of low carb.  And another friend of mine
had the same experience.  I emailed them and called them and got no
response.  I can't prove they are lying, but nothing that is supposed to
have only 6 carbs makes my blood sugar jump 50 points.  Thought you
should know.  I NEVER RECOMMEND THEM.

Bummer.  All I can say is if you try the stuff, keep an eye on your own
reactions.  If you're diabetic, test your sugar as Cynthia did.   If
you're on a ketogenic diet, test yourself an hour after eating any
so-called low carb baked goods, and see if you're still in ketosis.  If
you're not on a ketogenic diet, are you hungry again an hour to an hour
and a half after eating them?  *Do you gain weight*?

Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but it's better to know than not
to know.  Thank you, Cynthia, for your heads-up.  I love the way my
readers stand ready to help each other!

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Sugar In The News

Interesting news item appeared today:  Apparently we've got so much
surplus sugar here in the United States that the federal government is
thinking of buying a quarter of a million tons of the stuff to jack up
the price.  According to the article, from Associated Press, that's
enough sugar to fill the Empire State Building two-thirds full of sugar!

They don't know what they'll do with it.  They've considered giving it
away, but no other country wants it, which shows their good sense.  God
forbid we should give it to starving people; it would provide calories,
but it would also rob their bodies of vitamins and minerals they can ill
afford to lose.  The best idea so far is to turn it into ethanol, to
burn in cars.  But any way you slice it, the taxpayers will get stuck
with a $100 million tab.  That's a lot of money for unwanted junk food!

The thing that's killing me is that the purpose of all of this is to
maintain an artificially high price for the sugar cane growers.  The US
government actually guarantees US sugar growers a minimum price for
their poison, and consequently sugar prices in the United States are
three times what they are in the rest of the world!

Now, I'm not saying that making candy cheaper would be a great thing,
and certainly it doesn't hurt my bottom line one bit, since I eat almost
no sugar.  But why the government is using our money to make the folks
who grow this stuff rich is completely beyond me.  It's not like the
farmers who grow nutritious things like, say, spinach or broccoli or
tomatoes get this sort of a guarantee.  It offends me that my tax money
is being used to benefit an industry that does the national health
nothing but harm.

Anyway, I may not buy much sugar now, but I sure used to.  As a
recovering sugar junkie, I want a refund!!

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Product Review

This week I tried Dr. Atkins sugar free syrup.  Those of you who have
been reading this newsletter for a while will be completely unsurprised
to learn that I tried the chocolate flavor.  Don't be confused; this is
*not* chocolate syrup like you would put over ice cream.  It's syrup
like the flavored syrups the expensive coffee places keep on hand to
flavor coffee.

How was it?  It was okay.  I found it to be sweeter and less chocolatey
than I would have liked, but then, I've long been a fan of dark
chocolate.  I had the syrup in a mock-ice cream-soda; I put four
tablespoons of syrup in a glass, mixed it with about a half a cup of
cream, and filled up the glass with chilled seltzer water.  I found it
to be pretty good, but not brilliant.  My husband, on the other hand,
liked it very well.  Said, "Now *that's* something I could have again!"

I think perhaps this would be better as a coffee flavoring; I plan to
try a cup of coffee, chocolate syrup, and heavy cream; this might make a
nice, light, simple dessert. I might also try it to "kick up" the flavor
of my sugar free chocolate cheesecake using the syrup.

The stuff ain't cheap; 12 ounces cost me $4.99, and the Atkins website
lists it at $5.99.  It's sweetened with sucralose (Splenda), so this is
a good option for those of you who are avoiding aspartame.

These syrups also come in vanilla, hazelnut, raspberry, strawberry,
"pancake" (which I assume is maple, rather than pancake, flavored), and
cherry.  None of these really appeal to me, but they may appeal to you.
If, for instance, you have been a big fan of raspberry flavored,
pre-sweetened iced tea, the raspberry syrup would be a natural for you
-- you could simply add a shot of the stuff to a glass of iced tea.  And
certainly if you like flavored coffees, these would be a product you
would enjoy.

All told, these syrups are an interesting low carb flavoring option, but
not what I would consider a "must have" product, especially considering
the price.



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Hey, it's 10:30 and I haven't had supper yet!  That's it for this week!
I'll see you again next week!

Dana W. Carpender

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