Monday, July 05, 2010

Stevia

Overall, we eat too much sweetness, and sugar-substitutes are not the answer. The answer is to not succumb constantly to our desire for the sweet.

I ran across a jar of stevia at Trader Joe's a while back. I've been interested in trying stevia for quite a while, but the price was prohibitive. Now that it's becoming trendy, more people are growing it and selling it, and the price is no longer something that will give you a heart attack. (Now it's come down to just "very expensive".)

I've discovered a good use for stevia. I have too much craving for sweetness to eliminate all my sugar-fixes. I don't have enough money to make a full switch to sugar-substitutes that aren't harmful: honey, maple syrup, stevia. But when you're sick and are imbibing in many, many cups of hot tea, and when the illness means you really shouldn't be consuming sugar, the stevia allows you to keep "sucking down Darjeeling" without gobbling up many tablespoonfuls of dissolved sugar daily. And the stevia doesn't have the chemical taste that saccharin and aspartame do.

I should learn to drink tea and coffee without sugar.

Really, I should. (And you know my brain right now is drooling over Southern Sweet Tea.... Well, at least my mouth isn't drooling.)

5 comments:

  1. Haven't tried Stevia yet, as I can't bear to have my tea without honey. I've read that using local honey is actually good for you. That's my excuse anyway :)

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  2. My friend has used Stevia for years. She has experimented with it and now makes all sorts of things with it and as she says, "well placed sugar" so that the dish is yummy. When she visited last week, she brought a 3 layer chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and a nut filling between the layers. She said she used probably a cup or so of sugar in the whole thing.

    She also shared with me a fabulous drink which we now call Cranberry Lemonade. I'll post it to my blog one day soon.

    Oh and she also says that Sweet Leaf Stevia is the brand she has found that has the best taste. I can buy it at our grocery store for just over $8 for a .4oz bottle that says it has 400 servings. She says a little is all is needed.

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  3. Have you ever thought of growing your own Stevia? Back in Saskatchewan, my family had a plant which mom used often.

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  4. No, Heidi. That hadn't crossed my mind. I should look into it. Was it perennial or annual?

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  5. I make iced tea with 1 each tea bag of black, green, mint, and lemon tea bags. The combination and I don't put sugar in my iced tea. Try experimenting with different kinds of tea instead of just black tea and maybe you won't feel the need for sugar in your tea any more.

    I also have been reading labels and not buying anything with HCFS. I have a recipe that I make in the summer a lot that takes italian dressing. I could make my own, but I make this recipe so often that it is a lot handier to use a bottle from the store. I had almost given up on finding a bottle that wasn't from a health food store until I discovered Wish Bone has stevia. Wish Bone isn't perfect, but for when I'm in a hurry it's better than the other ones on the shelf in the local grocery store.

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