Is dessert offered at every dinner in your house?

[battlemaiden]

my dh grew up with a mom who always had a dessert prepared at dinner- of course sometimes he didn't eat well enough to get it, but it was there.

 

I grew up with a mum who rarely had desserts in the house.

 

My dh's parents are slim and trim. My parents carry a little extra.

 

I go back and forth but

i'm curious what you do.

 

Jo

[KidsHappen]

One of my favorite sayings is: Eat dessert first. Brownies for breakfast but nudity is entirely optional. :tongue_smilie:

[Kate CA]

No. It is pretty rare that we have them and it makes it special when we do. :D

[Zelda]

I grew up in a house where desserts were served never. Somehow the kids always end up having some kind of sweetie after dinner. Not sure how it evolved but it did. We don't have weight issues and the kids eat pretty well overall but I'm not sure I approve.

[Emmy]

I have dessert every night for my kids but 5ish out of 7 nights it's fruit or applesauce. The other 2 nights it's ice cream, cookies, pie, etc. I do not expect them to "earn" the fruit by eating other items, I just hold it back in hope that they'll eat more of the other items.

[st_claire]

We have deserts for special occasions, or when someone gets a big craving and makes something (usually me ;) )

 

I grew up the same way, but if I wanted a sweet I just had to ask and my parents would get it for me. I usually got some sort of sweet in my lunch everyday. Most days it came home again. Because I knew that sweets could be had anytime, I had no need to eat them for fear they wouldn't be there later.

[Peela]

No, we dont do desserts usually- certinaly not daily. However, there usually are sweet foods around, like ice cream in the deep freeze, and fruit and yoghurt, so if the kids have a sweet tooth they will have something sweet sometimes.

 

I am not against dessert though. A good homemade dessert can be very satisfying.

[Laura Corin]

I don't normally make desserts.

 

Laura

[Guest Lorna]

We always had a pudding after dinner when I was growing up. I was so used to it that my husband says I have a separate 'pudding tummy'. I can feel quite full but always have room for afters.

My husband never had pudding but he was allowed sweeties whenever he liked. We were only allowed sweeties on a Saturday.

As a result, we occasionally have pudding here but I rarely actually bake a pie or steam a pudding as my mother did. When we do have it, it is a yoghurt, some ice cream and perhaps home-made cake or biscuits.

We just have sweeties on a Saturday.

P.s. I apologise for this post being riddled with Anglicisms. That's the way I talk....

[TCoppock]

We do not have dessert with dinner. DH and I both grew up allowed to eat what we wanted, when we wanted, but that is not the case in our house today. DS is a little chubby and we want to set a good example for him on healthy eating habits. We have occasional treats but not every day.

[gandpsmommy]

I really struggle with this because of the way I grew up. In my childhood home there were always sweets available, and we were allowed to eat as many as we wanted, as often as we wanted. So my mother didn't prepare a dessert very often (usually just on holidays and special occasions), but there was always something sweet (candy, snack cakes, cookies, etc.) to eat after a meal. As a result, I ate way too many sweets as a child and became quite addicted to sugar. When I was in college I began to realize how unhealthy my eating habits were and began to try to change them, first by giving up pop and then by trying to start eating better. But I still had a huge sweet tooth.

 

When dh and I first got together he was such a healthy eater. He wasn't used to eating many sweets. He didn't even like chocolate! His favorite snack was baby carrots, which he could eat by the bag as if they were potato chips. He did like ice cream now and then, but he wasn't really into too many desserts.

 

Sadly, my family corrupted him. He began eating miniature candy bars whenever he was at my house, and slowly became accustomed to eating candy. But he still has much more of a take-it-or-leave-it kind of mentality toward desserts than I do. If I have made something and it's there, he will eat it and enjoy it. And very infrequently he will really have a craving for something and request a certain dessert, but mostly he could survive without sweets. And because his body wasn't used to all of the sugar, he has a much lower tolerance for richness in desserts. I could easily eat a very large portion of decadent desserts, while he could maybe only eat a few bites. And he is much more reasonable about portions. He will eat one or two brownies, while I'll eat half the pan!

 

I also start to feel panicky if there isn't something sweet in the house to eat after our meal. And I'm afraid I've passed this tendency on to my children. In fact, I'm just now trying to figure out how to undo it. It is not as bad as my childhood was because we do serve a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables, we never have pop in the house, we don't buy sugary cereals on a regular basis, and we keep healthy snacks around, as well. And the dispensation of sweets is regulated. But we still do usually have something sweet after meals nearly every day. On Monday I made banana nut muffins, Tuesday I made chocolate chip cookies. And there were leftovers of both for Wednesday. Today I'll probably bake the rest of the cookies, since I saved some of the dough.

 

I decided a week or two ago to not buy any sweets or the ingredients to easily make desserts at the grocery store that week, thinking that if we didn't have it, we couldn't eat it and we would just eat healthy snacks. But, if we don't have something in the house, then the children are begging to go to the golf clubhouse down the street to buy a candy bar or to go to the gas station a few miles away to buy a snack cake. I really, really need to work on this one. We are doing much better than we did at first with dd. When she was a toddler, I was still very much entrenched in my childhood way of eating and thinking about food. We always had some kind of candy bars or chocolate treats in the house, and we always shared with dd. As she began to get a little older and ds joined our family, I realized how horrible our eating habits had become and tried to improve. We have made great strides, but we have occasional relapses (like recently) when we have to try to do better.

[Ellie]

Almost never. I do when we have guests, but not regularly with family. We just don't have much of a sweet tooth :-)

[hsmamainva]

Almost never. I do when we have guests, but not regularly with family. We just don't have much of a sweet tooth :-)

 

Ditto!!

 

Unless we have company over....or it's someone's birthday, we don't usually have dessert either.

[Lizzie in Ma]

Occasionally I let the girls make brownies and we do have ice cream in the summer once in awhile. But mostly not.

[JudoMom]

Nope. Only when we have company.

 

My dh isn't a desserts kind of guy. I am a desserts kind of girl. That combination is deadly for a girl who is able to put weight on just by thinking about desserts.

 

I do keep little treats on hand (right now I've got some fun size bags of mini-oreos--please don't tell the food police) that I'll give to my boys with their lunch (not every day) but it's rare that we'll have something after dinner.

 

Now, during the month of December I usually bake like a crazy-woman. I actually really like to make cookies and desserts, so I use the excuse of taking cookies to the neighbors as a reason to bake.

[lynn]

More now than in the summer. The summer was occasional ice cream or jello something. This time of year I love making cobblers, cookies etc so yes we have dessert most nights here. Monday they had brownies and pumpkin cake since it was bunco night and I made extra for the my family.

[ThelmaLou]

No, dessert isn't offered every night. Probably about once a week I'll make a special dessert like cookies, banana bread, brownies, cake, cobbler, etc. It's usually gone in 24-48 hours, depending on the size. My five boys and husband inhale baked goods.

 

My biggest problem is what to feed them after meals. They load up on whatever I'm serving and then want something else afterwards. When I tell them to get more of whatever I'm dishing up, they say they want something different:pretzels, goldfish, fruit, yogurt, applesauce, granola bars, chips, you name it. I think I spend as much on snacks as I do on main courses.

 

Yesterday I made two loaves of pumpkin cranberry bread. They'll finish it off at breakfast today. We also go through two loaves of homemade sandwich bread in just two days. Help!

[Mom0012]

We don't have any sort of special dessert, but the kids really look forward to having a treat in the evening and I will make kettle corn or they will have a couple of cookies or a couple of pieces of candy.

 

Lisa

[Danestress]

I would not choose to have it that way, but my husband is pretty dedicated to dessert, and if I don't plan something, he and the boys will find something. I don't cook dessert a lot - it's often ice cream or "Skinny Cow" low fat ice cream sandwiches, but they want their sweet.

 

None of us is overweight, but DH has high cholesterol, so I am trying to make desserts that are lower in bad fats and empty carbs, but I don't really have a good set of recipes yet for that.

[Ria]

Always, but we don't eat it right after dinner. Usually we have dessert about an hour or two after dinner. But yes, we always have something, even if it is just ice cream. The usual desserts are homemade cookies or cakes. Mind you, I'm not the one making these things. The boys love to bake, and I give them free rein to do so.

 

I will say that this summer when all the boys were in Canada we rarely had dessert.

 

Ria

[Janet in Toronto]

I'm not sure what you mean by dessert....we have fruit and cheese or yogurt after our main meal every day. Sometimes we have a sweet course as well - fruit crisp or pie, cookies, ice cream. The lads will often have ice cream a couple of hours after dinner if they didn't have any at the table. (I keep ice cream and frozen yogurt on hand most of the time.)

 

We typically had something sweet after dinner growing up, but didn't regularly eat fruit at dinner. My mom has British heritage/Father was Jewish. DH grew up in a Lebanese family and lived in France for five years before coming to Canada. They're big fruit/cheese/yogurt eaters after dinner and we have appropriated that custom.

[WTMindy]

Dh and the kids have some small dessert after dinner every night. They are very slim.

[jamnkats]

We have never had dessert. We do, however, have special treats frequently and they go along with whatever is being eaten at the time. For example, here in Mexico the panaderias are making up all kinds of "dead" treats so I picked up something new last night with dinner prep and we had it (tiny croissant filled with something yummy and topped with slivered almonds) along with our salad and nuts and cukes, etc.

 

Edited to add: here the tradition is sweets for breakfast (pan dulce) so maybe that's why - but even when we lived in the US we never had dessert.

Edited October 23, 2008 by jamnkats

[Jenny in Florida]

The only time I plan and prepare a dessert is for a special occasion. For example, I always make an apple crisp on Thanksgiving. I usually do some kind of cake or goodie on various birthdays. And every couple of weeks or so, we'll decide to eat a batch of popcorn while watching a movie on a Friday or Saturday night. But for just plain Tuesday? Nope.

 

With that said, there are usually a few goodies in the house, and anyone who wants one is welcome to get it. For example, my son is a big fan of chocolate Tofutti. So, there's usually some in the freezer, and he will have a scoop a few evenings a week. My husband likes cheesecake. He buys himself a two-slice package maybe once a week. I usually have a box of sugar-free popsicles in the freezer in case a craving for something sweet hits me during the evening.

 

So, I'd say dessert and snacks are available to those who want them, but I don't plan them as part of the meal.

[dangermom]

We only have dessert when we have people over. My waistline can't take any more than that!

[JFSinIL]

My dad always made sure there was a fresh-baked cake or pie or something (hot fudge sundaes, perhaps?) as he loved dessert!

 

I married a guy who sneers at sweets. :glare:

[Tap]

We don't always have a formal dessert but we always have a small treat after dinner. Ice cream is the hands down favorite, but sometimes it is cake or a pie. We don't eat large servings though. A scoop of ice cream, a small piece of cake....

[Miss Peregrine]

Hardly ever but when we do it is part of the meal, not something we hold as ransom for eating their dinner.

 

We tend to have treat stuff when we are out and about during the day: A mocha at Costco, pretzel at Target etc .:001_smile: