an adventure in fructose

After having been off the sweet stuff for 7 weeks or so I was intrigued to see what would happen when we went out for a degustation menu for my sister-in-law's birthday. It's the first meal we haven't been in control of for all that time. Anyway, I was interested to see how far we've come.

We ate at Matteo's. The food was beautiful. It included a lot of asian fusion dishes. Our favourites were the kingfisher sashimi and the tea smoked duck. Fortunately no one item was too substantial but there was a fair few fructose laden ingredients in the savoury courses (watermelon, hoisin sauce, plum relish etc). 

The big kicker was the dessert of course. Apart from a minimal amount of ice cream and cake that I've made we haven't really indulged in much dessert the last 2 months. And certainly no fructose laden desserts. So I was a little nervous about the dessert course. Here's what was on the menu:

Sorry mood lighting made photography difficult, but et voila, the dessert:

Well it was delicious and more so because we don't eat this food all the time. It really was a treat. I loved the ice cream (it reminded me a little of Maggie Beer's burnt fig jam, honeycomb and caramel ice cream) and the berry tartlet was beautiful too. The most interesting thing was that I just could not eat the chocolate ganache. IT WAS TOO SWEET. I guess white chocolate was always going to be a shock after eating 100% cocoa chocolate. But I don't think I've ever turned dessert away for being too sweet.

The other issue I was concerned about was that I'd be starving the next day or have huge sweet cravings. But everything was completely normal. Now I don't think this means that I could do this more often. But it was nice to know that on a really one off special occasion I could cope.