Orange Surprise: the low calorie dessert with a surprise inside
I love desserts. Cookies, cakes, candy, ice cream… I have never met a dessert that I don’t like except things made with licorice… well, I still ate it, but I told people “it’s not my favorite” while eating all of it. One of the cruelties of life is: the best desserts have the most calories and never make you feel full, which is just about the worst combination for your health, your waistline, your joints, etc.
All of that is to say that I am always on the hunt for desserts that don’t hurt. Meaning yummy desserts that don’t obliterate your calorie budget and keep you wanting to eat until your liver gets stuffed full of fat. Here’s a new favorite of mine.
Orange Surprise: the low calorie dessert
1. Put an orange into the fridge and let it chill for an hour or more.
2. Remove the orange and put it on a fancy plate.
3. Peel it, and garnish with fresh mint leaves.
4. Enjoy.
Source: The Bland and Mediocre Recipe Book by (who else?) Josef Brandenburg.
The cookbook is worth checking out, and I would appreciate you picking up a copy because my sales numbers are pretty bad and it has several other low calorie desserts inside. My publisher is angry. People say the title sucks, but I wanted to be honest… sorry, too much of a pity party tangent… my second favorite recipe is a take on Ants On A Log that I call Ants On A Stick. You get a stick and put it into an ant hill, put enough fire to kill the ants, and then you eat the roasted ants off the stick. Ants are a low-fat source of protein and ant-venom. Is this my April Fool’s post? Yes 🤣.
The Power of “OK”
Besides being hilarious (I am hilarious right?), the point is that there’s no such thing as a “healthy dessert” recipe that isn’t basically “orange surprise.” Plain fat-free Greek yogurt and some berries (alone) is pretty comparable to “orange surprise” in that it tastes OK, but it is not crave-able in anyway. It is the crave-ability of a food that gets us into trouble because at some point on the “crave-ability scale” we don’t feel full (or it’s very delayed) and we keep eating until we’ve doubled the day’s calories.
Using the plain fat-free Greek yogurt example, if you add enough of your favorite granola you’re going to end up eating twice as many calories. If you switch to vanilla, full fat Greek yogurt, then your calories will go up another 50% and despite the “health halo” around the Greek yogurt and fruit, you’ll still be the same number of calories as regular ice cream. You can keep going up the crave-able scale by using steel cut oats, grass-fed butter, unrefined sugar and sea salt to make a berry crisp, which should be amazing… and while the ingredients are higher quality and devoid of questionable additives, it’s still packed with calories and uber-crave-able.
Embrace simple foods more often. Oranges, by themselves, are actually quite good. Children used to be excited when they got one orange for Christmas as their only present. One. Plain oranges are never going to be amazingly good and crave-able, but that’s a good thing because it keeps you (and me) from overeating.
Public Safety
Just in case it needs to be said: please don’t eat ants. They do have venom and that venom can be dangerous if ingested. Furthermore, eating bugs in general can be risky because their exoskeletons (the disgusting, crunchy outer part) is made of chitosan which can lead to GI issues all the way up to life threatening anaphylaxis.
Public safety portion is not part of the April Fool’s post.