Sugar Free Delight
With so much coffee in office that keeps the body machine running through the day (and week); the sugar levels tend to go up for any working professional and so the advice these days from docs is to get the diabetes check done every quarter once you cross 30 (I remember the number being 40 just about 10 year ago).
Additional suggestions are to keep the sugar intake limited. Can't really control the sugar intake in office coffee since it is either machine made (too much sugar or no sugar unfortunately) or made by our 'office boy' who is unfortunately 100 years old (at least it seems so) so any suggestion to alter the composition of the tea or coffee falls on deaf ears (literally). So either u get sweet (cross that, make that very sweet) coffee or you get 'no sugar' coffee. So as bad as machine made coffee
So I am left with controlling sugar intake in terms of 'sweets' intake.
As an indian, I am sure you will appreciate how difficult it is to avoid 'sweets' in the second half of the year which is full of festivals and good mahurat for marriages. Festivals also result in a lot of sweets being made at home and how can one NOT consume home-made mommy-made sweets in copious amounts. That's as necessary for survival as the coffee in office
So the alternative is to go sugar-free for home-made sweets and thankfully even the sweet-shops have sugar-free ones on offer now.
Its not easy to convince Mom's to use sugar-free instead of sugar or jaggery so I decided to make something myself … just as an example for mom to try and get confidence.
Since I had to make it, I looked for a fairly simple recipe that would use no or very little sugar and I could readily replace the sugar with sugar-free. To be on safer side and avoid comparison, I even avoided the usual indian desserts/sweets so that the taste would not be compared with the ones mom would make and be given a low rating … so heres the recipe I tried using Sugar Free Natura and I must say, the results were good and Mom was impressed.
I decided to make some Banana Cookies
Ingredients needed were few and simple:
3 ripe bananas – mashed in a large bowl
2 cups rolled oats
1 cup juicy dates – chop them nice
1/3rd cup vegetable oil or melted butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Sugar Free Natura !!
Note: You can replace the dates with 1 cup raisins and dried apricots and voila … a different flavored banana cookies. You can experiment with different dry fruits to get an assortment.
The making … its damn simple actually. As simple as A B C or 1 2 3
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
Take the large bowl and mash the bananas in it.
Gradually, stir in oats, dates, oil, and vanilla. Mix well, and allow it to sit for around 15 minutes.
Add some Sugar Free Natura. Go light on it as the banana will act as natural sweetener and you need sugar-free just a little bit.
Drop by teaspoonfuls (depending on the cookie size you want) onto an ungreased cookie sheet.
Bake for 20 minutes in the preheated oven, or until lightly brown.
(well, that's actually twice the number of steps I thought)
Let it cool and its ready to be enjoyed. Its healthy and pretty tasty.
As simple as that
Some helpful tips:
Go for small sizes. The banana cookies are chewy so small bites are better.
Keep some in the jar in your cabinet and keep some in the refrigerator. Both of them offer different experiences and you never know which one will you enjoy more.
You can also experiment with adding greater quantity of Oats (take 3 instead of 2 cups). A couple of times and you will get the proportion as per your taste and texture preference.
You don't like dates. Go for raisins or dry apricot or other chewy dry fruit or you might even drop them out completely.
It is a very flexible recipe so feel free to experiment with ingredients.
ENJOY ...
Here is the link to the Sugar Free Natura website for more information http://sugarfree-india.com/
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