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For the past several weeks I've been experimenting with having no fructose except what comes in whole fruits and vegetables; no fruit juice, no fruit juice concentrate, no added sucrose or fructose, god forbid no high-fructose corn syrup.  So I've gotten interested in stevia.  Here are the stevia books I'm considering:

Rita DePuydt: Stevia: Naturally Sweet Recipes
Jeffrey Goettemoeller: Stevia Sweet Recipes
Lisa Jobs: Sensational Stevia Desserts
James Kirkland: Low-Carb Cooking with Stevia
James Kirkland & Tanya Kirkland: Sugar-Free Cooking with Stevia
Nicole Kurland: Naturally Nutritious
Jan London: Coconut Cuisine Featuring Stevia

Are any of these worth investigating?  Is there even one with decent recipes?  Or is this whole stevia thing a blind alley and I should go back to developing a sugarless cheese cookie (which I've actually been working on, no joke).

As a side note, I can tell you that after a couple of weeks of no added sugars, no honey, no maple syrup, nada, fruit starts to taste amazing.  Amazing!

xxx, mcvl

Having had no sugar or sweeteners since January, I really agree with your side note. I did not know a single strawberry could taste that amazing.

However, personally I decided to do without any sweeteners at all, as I have come to feel that sweetness is supposed to be a signal to your body that sugar is coming. So if you are giving your body a sweet taste and no sugar, you are basically lying to it. Apart from this being not a good thing in general, there are two particular reasons I think artificial sweeteners are not a good idea: 1. There have been experiments that suggest using no-cal sweeteners may affect your willpower adversely. 2. There have been other experiments that suggest any sweet taste will increase your insulin levels and therefore facilitate fat accumulation.

So, I am not going to experiment with stevia. I also find most low-carb recipes and cookbooks disappointing, because either they are really artificial, imitations of high-carb food, or they are old news. I find taking a good look at the cookbooks I already own is much more rewarding. But if anybody here has good suggestions for sugarless cooking, please tell.

An update: Several stevia books are now on order, one has arrived, I'm going to wait and look at them together.

Sunday was my birthday, so we decided to have a special treat, strawberry & toasted coconut ice cream; we've made ice cream a lot and feel comfortable improvising.  I used 2 teaspoons of sugar rather than the half a cup I would have added before; in other words, 10% of the sugar we'd consider normal.  The ice cream tasted sweet enough.  The texture was a little different, harder; I might use the trick of adding a little alcohol to keep it softer.  We like ice cream fresh off the dasher, not cured in the freezer; that's one of the reasons we like to make it ourselves.

Today we went back to no sugar and had bananas and leftover strawberries for dessert.  The bananas and strawberries tasted amazing.  So it seems possible to reap the benefits of eating very little sugar without having to eat absolutely no sugar at all.

We've decided to have two made desserts a month, one at home and one out at a restaurant.

I got a box of NuNaturals NuStevia packets. Each packet has a minuscule amount of stevia with maltodextrin for bulk and “natural flavors.” Stevia is very sweet-tasting, some say 300 times as sweet as sugar, so to make it easy to use NuNaturals combines in with maltodextrin, a polysaccharide produced from starch by partial hydrolysis, usually from corn (alwats the corn!). “Natural flavors” are chemical copies of what you and I might prefer to think of as natural flavors, flavors found in nature.

In other words, NuStevia is a highly processed food, and I’m unlikely to add it to my permanent diet. It does, however, pique my curiosity.

For my very first stevia experiment I used NuStevia in place of sugar in a red-wine syrup from John T. Ash & Amy Mintzer’s Cooking One on One (Clarkson Potter, 2004). Besides red wine and sugar, the syrup calls for orange peel and star anise, and I thought the licorice-like star anise would combine with any licorice-like flavors in the stevia.

How was it? It was OK.

 But both my husband and I immediately went on to eat some ordinary plain strawberries. Who needs red-wine syrup?, our taste buds cried out; give us some of those strawberries, please.

I've been following this thread w interest mcvl as I'd never tried stevia before.  A local coffee shop had some on hand over the weekend so I picked up a pkg and tried it on my oatmeal this morning.  I wonder if some folks are more sensitive to it than others because I found the bitter aftertaste to be quite overwhelming.  I actually couldn't finish my oats . . .  ; - (

I'll be interested to read more about your "stevia journey" and see how you make out including it in your recipes.   I hope you have terrific results. 

This morning my husband used a dash of NuStevia, the stuff that has a tiny amount of stevia bulked out with maltodextrin, in a sort of delicious breakfast glop he concocted based on this recipe.  Pleasant sort of background sweetness, nothing too pronounced, and no aftertaste at all.  The experimenting continues.

More on stevia.  I filled a quart jar with filtered water (our tap water tastes terrible), added a teaspoon of loose stevia leaves, and put it in the refrigerator for 24 hours -- that's how I "brew" tea for iced tea, and it eliminates most problems with bitterness.  Run through a tea straineer to eliminate the leaves, the resulting beverage was very pleasant.  Not sweet at all on entering the mouth, but with a delightful sweet, round aftertaste.  No bitterness, no licorice flavor.  My husband liked it too, and he has much more of a sweet tooth than I do.