Bananas Foster Redux

It happened again. I saw a so-called diet recipe done over by a couple well-meaning home economists who obviously drank the Koolaid on the low fat road to Nirvana. So these women took a classic recipe for Bananas Foster which is simply a scoop of vanilla ice cream over a sauce made from bananas cooked in butter, brown sugar, and finished with a flourish of flaming rum and turned it into a horror made with some blue john custard made from non fat milk, egg whites and artificial eggs, enough white sugar to send you into sugar shock, then finished off with a sauce they devised in their infinite wisdom that substituted orange juice for rum. Orange juice! That liquid sugar delight guaranteed to send your blood sugar into the danger zone in about a second. Why do those ladies think orange juice is the drink of choice for diabetics whose blood sugar has dropped? To suggest to dieters that orange juice is better for them than lovely carbohydrate free triple distilled rum is beyond me. What were they thinking?

This is a perfect example of meddling with success that results in some dissatisfying excuse for a dessert that will leave you yearning for a Snickers bar within twenty minutes because its so loaded with sugar itself.

So what is the answer? Get back to basics. Start off with a scoop of sugar free ice cream, no more than 90 calories and 13 carb grams. Place that in a dessert bowl. Meanwhile, melt a tablespoon of real butter in a small skillet and add a half banana. Heat until it's limp and begging for mercy. Now you can do what you want. Add a teaspoon of brown sugar substitute, or a bit of sugar free buterscotch ice cream sauce. Let this melt together. Now the clincher is to add a shot of carb-free rum and set it alight, pour it over the ice cream and voila. A satisfying, dramatic dessert in under 20 carbohydrate grams, and bursting with satisfaction and flavor