Serious Eats
Ed Levine's Serious Diet, Week 12: A Prayer for a Real Treat Is Answered
When you're dieting, real treats are important. How do I define a real treat? Something that makes your eyes grow big as plates when you peel or unwrap it. Something crazy good that doesn't break the bank calorie-wise (less than 200 calories) and that doesn't send you into a guilt-induced food coma. Something creamy, crunchy, and delicious (for me it's something that's also chocolaty). Something substantial enough to savor through a full half-inning of the new baseball season.
A sweet-and-spicy though not very juicy Golden Nugget Mandarin orange, my current favorite citrus fruit, is delicious, wonderful even, but it's not a treat. A perfectly ripe banana with lots of light brown speckles on its skin is a beautiful thing, but it's not a treat. A small bag of lower fat baked potato chips doesn't qualify as a treat either, because although they might be perfectly fine, they're not the real thing, and I know exactly what I'm missing in every pleasant but not great bite.
Until last week I had never found a treat that fit all my criteria, until a plain white box was delivered to our door at Serious Eats that was literally the answer to my prayers.
The good folks at Häagen-Dazs sent us a box of their brand-new snack-sized coffee almond bars. I say my prayers were answered because a couple of weeks ago I had decided that what my serious diet-life needed was a smaller-sized Häagen-Dazs ice cream bar. I even thought about writing Häagen-Dazs to suggest they start making them, but like most people I never got around to doing it. So imagine my surprise and delight when a box of my dream treats arrived at our door.
The regular Häagen-Dazs bars, especially the vanilla with dark chocolate coating, are my favorite readily-available-in-a-freezer-case-near-serious-eaters-everywhere treat of any kind, but they just have too many calories (300 to be exact) to eat guiltlessly.
But the snack-sized coffee almond bars fit the ball. An entire bar is less than 200 calories, 190 to be exact. It is crunchy from the almonds and the toffee on the milk chocolate coating, it's creamy because it's made with Häagen-Dazs' regular high-butterfat vanilla ice cream, and it's substantial enough so that I managed to make it last through a short inning during the Yankee game last night.
Now when I get on the scale this morning, we'll see if my body agrees with my assessment that I'm going to be able to eat one of these every other day at least.
The problem with today's weigh-in is Häagen-Dazs also sent along pints of four new flavors, vanilla honeybee, fleur de sel caramel, pomegranate chip, and vanilla honey with granola frozen yogurt. A pint of any one of these wonderful frozen desserts simply offers me too many access points to too much deliciousness. The portion control thing goes out the window when I'm faced with a pint of extraordinarily good ice cream. If that shows me to be weak, so be it. I tried to resist the siren call of those pints, but I have to admit I dirtied more than one spoon in the course of the week.
Anyway, here goes. I lost a pound. I'm down ten pounds to date. And I've found my real treat for dieting. My prayer has been answered. It's a good day in the neighborhood.