I try to feed my family healthy and appealing meals.  This takes the form of a lot of homemade cooking, a general preference for locally grown food, an insistence that my children befriend vegetables, and an attempt to limit sugar and excess.  Attempt does not always equal success, but, hey, I’m trying.

We almost never have dessert, mostly because I don’t want my kids to learn that the reward for eating food is to have sugar.  Every once in a while, though, I surprise them and pull out a treat.  Tonight it was a luscious lemon pie.

I planned ahead (knowing it takes hours in the fridge to set after baking), and I made this pie from scratch.  I mean, I juiced the lemons and grated the zest myself.  I altered ingredients to cut the sugar and the fat without compromising taste, hoping to treat my family without the guilt.  I much prefer cooking to baking, so this was something of a sacrifice on my part.

And my family was appreciative.  They really were.  Everyone said, “thank you” without being prompted – a mark of success in every mother’s book – and that pie was gone in a blink.

To top it all off, I received these two complimentary gems:

“Yum! This tastes like jello.”

and

“Good job, Mom! This isn’t poison.”

I’m veritably saturated with pride.