Mid-carb crisis: I'm doing just peachy, thanks

Politely decline the bread basket at lunch and explain, also politely, that you are on a low-carb diet, and your table companions tend to have two reactions: sympathy or thinly-veiled horror, as though you might club the lowest-moving server and eat him raw. I can understand it. It sounds like a bleak existance. No noodles. No fries. No doughnuts. No joy. Just...meat.

My husband started it first. He just wanted to try it, and he did it! He really did it! Despite the proof that you could go on living without potato chips, I dug my heels in for a year, siting the well-documented psychological benefits of chocolate as possibly the only way to get through the year we were all having. But get through it we did, and I jumped on the wagon with him.

The reality is that I'm not actually doing the "low-carb thing" really. I like to think of it as "mid-carb," because while I might be able to give up bread and rice and french fries, grudgingly, this Mommy cannot live by bacon alone. So while breads, rice, pasta, potatoes, and sweets are off the menu, pretty much anything else is fair game. I am too lazy and too averse to pain to quibble over whether that cooked carrot is grounds for dietary self-flagellation.

The biggest challenge, of course, is that I simply cannot live in a world without sweets. One of the things I hate about low-carb diets is the whole sugar substitute question, and you can use Splenda all you want, but you have to be better at self-deception than I am if you don't think it tastes a little like tires. So I experiment with baking. Like, a lot. And as I've said before, when you use recipes as only a guideline, you cannot be afraid to fail. Because you're going to. 

So when I bought a box of gorgeous late-season peaches at Costco only to discover that they were California (blah) and not Eastern (Hallelujah!), I found myself with a golden opportunity to experiment with a low-carb cobbler-type thing. I decided to go with a few spoonfuls of Truvia sugar blend for the filling, which combines the real stuff with some sugar alcohols and other things not made of Splenda. Yes, it does have carbs, but only 1/4 of what regular sugar has, and it's also magically sweeter, so you use less. Also, it doesn't taste petroleum-based.

For the crumb topping, I used ideal brand brown sugar sweetener and almond meal, which is just peeled, blanched almonds ground into a powder. You can buy it already prepared or you can do it yourself (...if you're a masochist). There are other low-carb flour alternatives out there, but many of them either taste super weird or turn your large intestine into the Hindenburg. Or both!

Materials:

• 6-7 ripe peaches, peeled and sliced (or about 4 cups frozen. I think this would also be great with blueberries)
• 3 tbsp Truvia baking blend 
• 1/2 teaspoon apple pie spice
• 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/3 c. ideal brown sugar sweetener
• 2 cups almond flour
• 1 stick butter

Method

• Preheat oven to 350.
• Spray a 9x 9 dish with cooking spray
• Add sliced peaches and sprinkle with Truvia, apple pie spice, and ginger. 

• In a large bowl, with a pastry blender or your fingers, rub together the almond flour, butter, and ideal until it looks kinda like wet sand. 

• Sprinkle almond mixture evenly over peaches and bake for about 30 minutes, until it gets brown in spots.

Conclusion

I was very pleased with how this turned out! It's not too sweet, but when you haven't eaten sugar in 2 weeks, it's dreamy. Add some sugar-free vanilla ice cream and you can almost, almost forgive it for not having more carbs. But at least it has butter, right?