Baby Tips Maple Butternut Squash Kugel: Recipe Redux

Maple Butternut Squash Kugel

This month's theme for The Recipe Redux is "Stick with Maple Honey Sweetness" and it's all about using maple or honey to naturally sweeten your foods.  One of the first things I look for on the nutrition facts label is Total Sugars.  The second thing I check is the ingredients for the source of sugars.  Companies try to make their products sounds healthier by putting things like rice syrup, maltodextrin, and barley malt in the ingredients.  These are just different names for sugar and too much of it will make your waist size grow.  Click here for more names of sugar.  For more info on artificial sweeteners, visit here.  


Honey and maple syrup, as long as they're the good quality stuff, are natural sweeteners.  Pancake syrup is mostly high fructose corn syrup and is the farthest thing from a natural sweetener.  Here's a comparison of calories per Tablespoon:

Sweetener	Calories (Per Tbsp)
Table Sugar	45
Maple Syrup	52
Honey	60

Since honey and maple are naturally sweeter than table sugar, you need to use less of them in a recipe.  While sugar only contains calories, honey and maple also have a small amount of nutrients.  I more often use honey as a sugar substitute so I decided to try maple for a change.  I also felt that the maple flavors would better compliment the squash dish than honey.  
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