Over the weekend I was poring over assorted cookbooks trying to assemble some meal plans for my family. These were books with titles like On the Table in 10 and Easy Weeknight One Pot Wonders. I wasn’t planning a dinner party, I just want alternatives to the rut we’ve fallen into.
All of the books have a dessert section, and it started me wondering. I enjoy desserts, and I enjoy preparing them. Most evenings though, I don’t prepare anything that we slice or plate and serve seated at the table. Is that scenario pretty common? What usually happens in our house is that we eat dinner, then clear and wash up, and dessert is more “catch as catch can”. My son will typically have something like an ice cream sandwich or a couple of cookies. Sometimes, if I’ve woken up early I’ll fix Jell-O before I go to work, but we don’t eat it seated at the table. That’s really what I’m curious about, along with what your family eats for dessert. Does your family stay at the table and eat dessert as an expected course at a routine meal?
We don’t usually have dessert at all. If we have sweets around the house, they tend to get eaten during the day, like a late afternoon snack. Sweets in our house tend to be tiny - miniature ice cream bars, a single square of high quality chocolate, that kind of thing. Occasionally I’ll bake cookies or make brownies or something like that, but not very often. Otherwise, we just sit & eat them.
It depends. Grandma tends to do that. Mostly something like jello or a scoop of ice cream or at the least offers tea and cookies.
In our house it’s like yours. Maybe a cookie or square grabbed while on the move, if we have them on hand. Sometimes I or my mom will go more elaborate and then we do stay at the table and eat our jello/pie/crisp. Most of the time we just don’t bother with dessert. I don’t eat like I used to so dessert can be too much and Velociraptor will get a snack of some kind before bed anyway.
We never did it when I was growing up, but somehow I let it become a necessary part of dinner at our house. It’s always ice cream. However, the chocolate syrup and nuts are all my husband’s fault!
My parents have always had a dessert of some sort, and I did it when the kids were growing up. How else could we bribe them to eat vegetables? Once they got too old for that I stopped, since no one really wanted dessert right after dinner.
Not as a usual thing, but once or twice a week we’ll have some fruit in Jello for a sweet while watching TV after dinner. This only applies on nights when there is something decent to watch, so “not very often” is the rule.
No. We usually having some ice cream or something I’ve baked sitting around the house, but it’s eaten as an afternoon snack (me) or late evening TV-watching sustenance (husband).
Growing up we always did, and it was always home-made - lemon meringue pie, creme caramel, apple pie, that kind of thing - and always served with lashings of whipped cream. God knows why none of us were in the least overweight!
Now, though, I only serve dessert if we have company, and then it’s usually bought, as while I love cooking, I’m less keen on baking.
Usually only on holidays or special occasions. Every once in a blue moon I get the kids something just for the hell of it to surprise them, but as a matter of course, we don’t do dessert.
I usually finish out every evening with either a glass of port or sherry accompanied with a slice of cheese or a cup of tea with a little shortbread or cookie.
I’ll often have ice cream after a meal, but almost never something prepared. Thus it was also when growing up, except that the ice cream wasn’t as often, either.
On the other hand, we would sometimes have a dessert-like food like strawberry shortcake or apple cobbler for the meal itself. And of course there was always something for special occasions (Thanksgiving turkey is optional, but the pies are not).
We pretty much only have dessert if we have company or leftovers from having company, so no. Every once in a while I’ll have a bit of chocolate if I happen to have some around, but even that’s uncommon.
Now, if a glass of wine in the evening counts, I do that a couple of times a week.
How do you get kids to eat their vegetables if you don’t have dessert to bribe them with??
When I was growing up, there was always something for dessert. This was often something tame and low-prep: Mom might divide up a can of peaches or fruit cocktail or pudding, or get out the Little Debbies.
We have a candy bowl at my house (not exactly sure how that tradition got started - I think it was leftover Halloween candy, but now the bowl is perpetually replenished) and we tend to eat a piece or two of candy after dinner. We try to save bigger desserts for the weekends.
