neg nog

The plan for my simple after-dinner treat turned into a bit of a science experiment tonight. A while back, I had received an email from LA Weight Loss with a recipe for "Guilt-Free Egg Nog." I decided to try it on the second day of Christmas. Here's the recipe:

5 cups of skim milk
1 package of sugar free vanilla pudding mix
1 tsp cinnamon
a pinch of nutmeg
1 tsp of vanilla extract (optional)

Blend for at least 2 minutes with wire whisk. Makes 5 servings. 1 serving (8 ounces) equals 1 Dairy

As I gathered the ingredients, I realized that the container of skim milk from Weigel's had less than the requisite five cups. It was time to call in the reinforcements. My son and daughter are both smarter than I could ever hope to be. It didn't take long for them to figure out that the 1¾ cups of milk I had left was 35% of what the recipe called for. All we had to do was use only 35% of all the other ingredients to make a smaller batch of diet egg nog.



My son measured the package of Jell-O Sugar Free Vanilla Pudding mix and found that it contained about 70 cubic centimeters of powder. 35% of that would be 24.5 cm³. A little bit of the leftover mix was lost during the transaction. We eyeballed the amount of cinnamon and vanilla extract by partially filling a half-teaspoon.



A good whisking created a frothy mixture that I poured into my Christmas in the City mug. Although it had a consistency similar to skim milk, the taste was a close approximation of the real thing.



I was reminded to look for the email in my inbox by a blurb in Friday's free News Sentinel. The weekly Web Watch column listed three sites. I remember one was SketchySantas.com and another was an egg nog page. I couldn't recall the exact URL so I turned to Google. It gave me the "Eggnog Recipe Collection," which didn't seem quite right. I found the Knoxville.Com section of yesterday's paper and saw that the site was actually "Eggnog World." My blog entry from last month has almost as many links as these relatively simple sites.