Food Experiments: Dessert Month and "healthy" strawberry pie

I love food. Going along with that, I love cooking and playing with new ideas.

So, in defiance to everyone else's more intelligent new years plans for being healthy, losing weight and eating well, I'm going to start a food experiment challenge to myself; each month I'll pick a theme and make at least one new experimental recipe each week. To start, I'm going to tackle desserts (and let's all hope and pray that I can survive the wrath of everyone with more healthy resolutions). Because I came up with this plan in the middle of the month and because I really love dessert, I'm going to declare the rest of January and all of February as dessert month.

Yesterday's challenge was to create a birthday dessert for a joint birthday party. The catch? One birthday person was diabetic, and the other was lactose intolerant. Yep. You try to come up with a tasty cake recipe to meet those guidelines! (Really...I wouldn't mind any ideas!)

So instead, I found a recipe for sugar-free strawberry pie. This was super easy and, in spite of being completely sugar free, very delicious. It is also quite healthy, so I'll survive the new year's people for at least another day. According to the website where I found this recipe, if you make this "pie" without a crust, it's only 55 calories for a fourth of the recipe.

Sugar Free Strawberry Pie Recipe
This can be made with or without a crust, depending on your preferences! The original recipe had no crust and obvioiusly had fewer calories, but I put it within a pre-bought shortbread crust.

Ingredients

• 1 small box Jello sugar-free Cook and Serve vanilla pudding
• 1 small box strawberry sugar-free Jello
• 2 cups water
• 12-16. oz sliced strawberries

Instructions

1. Mix pudding mix with water in a saucepan; heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture boils.
2. Remove from heat and add strawberry Jello mix.
3. Let cool to room temperature. (I forgot this step and poured it into the crust still warm...it still tasted fine, although I bet it would have looked nicer if I'd let it cool!)
4. In a glass pie dish, add the sliced strawberries to the bottom (or over the crust if you choose).
5. Pour pudding mix over strawberries. Refrigerate pie at least an hour, until set.