My Love for Italian Cheese

If you're anything like me, you have a giant sweet tooth that needs to be checked. If I'm ever to get down to my goal weight, I must must must learn to avoid every chocolate covered seductress that leers at me from the grocery and convenience store shelves. The candy aisle at Safeway is my red light district, no joke. Thankfully, I have discovered a pure and sweet path to the straight and narrow. That's right, the key to my soul's sugar salvation summed up in two words -- ricotta cheese.

Ricotta cheese is like, the greatest thing to happen to my own personal dessert menu ever. It's like the tofu of the dessert tray -- it can become anything. Unlike tofu, it tastes fabulous. (Sorry tofu lovers. I am not one of you.)

The glorious thing about ricotta is that, in the part-skim variety, it has a fraction of the cals and so on that any other dessert base (hello, dense chocolate cake, I'm looking at you) can claim, and a bunch of fab calcium and protein and yadda yadda. And because of it's lite and fluffy texture, I'm for surely eating way less of it than I would some other super rich dessert (eyeballing chocolate cake as it tries to sneak out the door...)

But the best part is that it can taste like apple pie AND tiramisu and that's just the beginning.

Despite it's name, it does not, in fact, taste like the cheese your brain is no doubt conjuring up. It tastes very much like nothing until you add delicious somethings on top of it. I've included a couple of recipies here for my most favorite ricotta concoctions, but if you want to experiment, these are my tips:

• it's smooth and creamy, so always add something crunchy or hard for a lovely contrast
• always serve ricotta concoctions in pretty dishes meant for fancy desserts, or something like (I like to use one of Shawn's scotch tumblers. They look fancy.)
• the fresh fruit you bought at the farmer's market is begging you to arrange it on top of some ricotta. BEGGING. With honey on top. Literally. 
• use cinnamon and honey for your sweeteners. But just drizzles and sprinkles, you really won't need much.
• these desserts are fantastic to make in layers. It fancies them up even more!

RECIPES ~ there are no measurements for the ingredients because I'm not Rachel stinkin' Ray. I made these up while standing in my kitchen, and everything is sort of just to taste. I trust all you ladies to adjust your portion sizes according to how much you want to eat and through trial and error, like I did. These are just some ideas for how to use ricotta to your advantage. Also, I'm not a dietitian or anything official like that, so none of this is gospel.

Enjoy!

Ricotta Concoction #1 ~ Fake Out Apple Pie

• part-skim ricotta
• pears, sliced (I used a can of pears in lite juice that I had in the pantry)
• cinnamon spice (I used my Pampered Chef Cinnamon Spice blend, I heart that stuff)
• honey
• granola

Lay down a fluffy white bed of ricotta in your eating vessel of choice. Drizzle with honey. Artfully arrange sliced pears. Sprinkle pears with cinnamon and top with granola. You're welcome.

Ricotta Concoction #2 ~ Tiramisu Triffle

• part-skim ricotta
• cinnamon spice
• honey
• sliced almonds

Again, take a scoop of ricotta and make a nice foundation for your dessert in your pretty dish. Drizzle honey, sprinkle cinnamon, and add enough sliced almond to cover. Repeat. I did two layers, so that I ended up with a layer of almonds on top. 

Ricotta Concoction #3 ~ No Fire S'more Delight

• part-skim ricotta
• honey flavor graham cracker
• Hersey's chocolate syrup (yay, fat free!)

Full disclosure, I haven't tried this yet, but my mouth is already watering. Plan ~ crumble half of the graham cracker into the bottom of my fancy dish, and layer with a scoop of ricotta and a drizzle of chocolate and repeat until chocolate is the top layer.