Something Sweet

Years ago, when I was an impressionable young woman, I worked with a girl named Michelle. She was in her mid-20s, fairly thin, and was always talking about food. Though I thought it was a bit obsessive, I remembered specifically two cool things from her. One was that the amount of meat that you eat should be able to fit in the palm of your hand. For me, that's about a 4 - 6 oz. filet mignon. The other was that she said she always had to finish a meal with something sweet. A Hershey kiss, a Tootsie Roll. Something. It didn't have to be cake, or a cookie, just something little.

I'd never done it before, or even thought about it until that point, but for whatever reason, it stuck in my mind. Years later, I read in a magazine that if you are hungry for something sweet, you could kill the craving by eating something salty or vice versa. So her sweet trick suddenly made sense. And I adopted it as my own.

Usually, after W and I go to our favorite diner, where I have what my friend Mandy calls, the Tiffany salad (garden salad, green peppers, cucumbers, feta, with well-grilled chicken and Mina's homemade dressing), I stop at the smoke shop next door for one medium size Tootsie Roll. It's about the size of a finger, so it's big enough to be satisfying without being outrageous.

At home, after a meal, I have a handful of rainbow sprinkles. 20 calories and it makes the meal feel complete. Sometimes, I will have a few Panda licorice pieces. Now, my new favorite after dinner sweet is a s'mores marshmallow. Just one.

Plush Puffs are riDUNKulous and 100% natural. Low calorie, too.

I bought them, I believed, for my son. I got him hot cocoa and saw these gourmet marshmallows in different flavors and thought they would be great for him. Everytime I made the cocoa though, he wanted me to make him a baked apple to eat with it, so he always passed on the option for a marshmallow in his cocoa. He left me no choice but to open the bag and try them for myself.

Well...

I found my new sweet snack. Five marshmallows are 80 calories, that's just 16 calories for one. Which is hard to believe because they are so rich, and have chocolate chips in them. Better still, they have no high fructose corn syrup. (Have you noticed how those four words dropped from our vocabulary the minute the corn growers started the "it's the same as sugar" campaign? It's not. It's a bad thing.)

I checked the website for more information, and guess what? They sell them as some Whole Foods (but none in New Jersey) and select stores. The only store that sells them in New Jersey is Dash of Thyme Gourmet, where I got mine. They've been featured on the Food Network's show, Unwrapped; on the Today show, and on the blog, Daily Candy.

I can only imagine what they might taste like floating in a cup of hot cocoa...