"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing..." -Helen Keller
 
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Water. Lemons. Oranges. Love it.
 
I love sugar. With a lack of dentists who seem to actually know what they're doing, however, it's time to lay off the sweets. Instead, we've been eating more savory snacks, such as popcorn, China-style beef-jerky, and homemade soft-pretzels. This is great, but there's just one tooth that's left incredibly unsatisfied: THE SWEET TOOTH.

A few months ago, we apparently sent out the request for sugar-free pudding to a bunch of gift-imparting friends and families at the same time and ended up with a supply that could last us a year. (No complaints!) So the other night, when wanting to make a healthy sweet snack, I grabbed a package of sugar-free chocolate pudding and whipped up a sugar-free chocolate banana shake (sugar-free except for the banana's natural sugar, of course).

Ingredients:
3-4 bananas
1 package sugar-free chocolate pudding, prepared
1-2 additional cups of milk

I just hit the "on" button on the blender and moments later had a nice, thick shake. Rich in calcium, rich in potassium, and, most importantly, rich in a good sweet taste.
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The timing was perfect. We'd just been given a huge watermelon by some friends who were running out on vacation. The next day, three students showed up for an afternoon together, two of them presenting more large watermelons. Now I, not being the biggest fan of this half-hearted, lightly sweetened, sad excuse for a fruit, thought, "What on earth am I going to do with these melons?"

It seemed like a great time to open up the freezer. Move aside, frozen meat, rock hard-bread, tray of ice-cubes: a watermelon's comin' on in! I showed that ridiculous wanna-be fruit who was boss, chopped it up, and tossed it into the freezer. And that was the beginning of the watermelon-mango citri-slushy experiment.

Ingredients:
1 small watermelon cut into chunks
1 large mango
1-2 lemons or limes
1/4 cup water with 1/4 cup white sugar dissolved in it

Freeze the watermelon for about 2 hours, until it's hard, but not like a rock, more like a bunch of ice crystals. Now for those of us working without a blender, here's how this goes:
Put the now-frozen watermelon chunks in a big bowl.  Peel the mango and slice it into as small of pieces as possible, adding the small pieces and resulting juice into the watermelon bowl. Add a ladle-full of the sugar water, squeeze in the lemon juice, and just start slicing. Slide the knife repetitively through the chunks of watermelon, breaking them down and mixing the contents until a slush-like, evenly mixed slushy is created. Sip and enjoy.

Now, about those other two watermelons...
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An Original Recipe