All posts by Eve Ogden Schaub

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About Eve Ogden Schaub

Serial memoirist Eve O. Schaub lives with her family in Vermont and enjoys performing experiments on them so she can write about it. Author of Year of No Sugar (2014) and Year of No Clutter (2017) and most recently Year of No GARBAGE (2023). Find her on Twitter @Eveschaub IG or eveschaub.com.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 38

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If I learn anything at all this year, it will be the fact that sugar has a way of popping up when you least expect it. Take yesterday, for instance.

After a morning of errands my husband Steve and I were looking forward to visiting one of our very favorite local restaurants: Steininger’s in Salem, New York. Steininger’s is one of those unassuming local places you can drive by a thousand times before you think to stop in, but once you do, you become a devoted fan for life.

Walking in, you feel like you’ve perhaps entered a cozy lodge in the Austrian alps. The walls are covered with chintz and the air smells like a wonderful soup of the day, perhaps tomato parmesan or cream of mushroom. Real table cloths, fresh flowers, and paintings of European markets make you feel that you’re not in Kansas anymore. The back wall houses an impressive display of house-made chocolates: glass cabinets for the trays of truffles and caramels, and a heavy wooden cabinet showcases holiday chocolates in colored cellophane, all displayed with that uniquely European enthusiasm for celebrating with style.

Easter was in full bloom at Steininger’s yesterday, with delicate chocolate eggs in baskets wrapped in seven different colors of decorative foil, along with a polite color-decoder sign to denote whether the dark green foil indicated a peanut-butter-chocolate egg or a marzipan one. Chocolate Easter bunnies were hard at work hauling chocolate baskets and chocolate wheelbarrows, (presumably back and forth from the chocolate mines at which they were enslaved by an exploitative chocolate overlord.) Needless to say, it was an unapologetic riot of sugar.

The problem is, I love this stuff. I love holidays, I love special celebrations, I love special food and treats. I love making my kids follow rhyming clues all around the house to find their Easter baskets like a buried treasure at the end- and I’ll stay up till one AM to do it too. I don’t mind.

I’ve been trying to convince myself that we can simply get through Easter with a special note to the Easter bunny explaining our situation, to which he (or she) will respond with a fantastic basket of treats that do not involve sugar. (In fact, word has it that the Easter bunny, who has ESP you know, is already hard at work on this problem, laying in Easter-themed videos and tiny stuffed animals in place of jellybeans and Cadbury eggs.)

But the display was so great, so totally up my alley, that I had to look away. Just not this year, I thought. And it’s only one year, I thought. Right?

I decided to focus instead on Steininger’s six page menu, at least half of which is desserts. I knew that even if I wasn’t having creams puffs or pastry, I’d still get to have a delicious bratwurst with sauerkraut, mustard and potatoes. If anyone knows how to make a filling, satisfying meal, after all, it’s the Germans.

Do I even need to tell you the next part? Or have we sung this song enough times by now? As always, I asked about the sugar content: of the sausages, the bread, the delicious smelling soup… and our waitress said yes, yes and … yes. All contained amounts, if sometimes only trace amounts, of sugar. I appreciated her honesty, her willingness to traipse back and forth from the kitchen to check multiple times- it would have been just as easy for her to appease me with an assurance that she wasn’t entirely sure of.

For that matter, I’m sure I have been served restaurant food this year that has contained sugar simply because the waitstaff can’t or won’t check further, (ie: there’s no sugar in the soup, just chicken broth! But did anyone check the broth…?) But the rule I’ve decided to stick by is I have to ask. If they say there is no sugar, I trust them. If they say there is sugar, I have to find something else- “trace” amounts or no.

So no sausages for me, and no soup. No bread either, which meant all sandwiches were off the table. All that remained was a vegetarian chef salad with fruit and nuts, and only if I dressed it with oil and vinegar, since the salad dressings all contained sugar too. Well, why was I so surprised? This has certainly happened enough times by now for me to anticipate. It’s just I’d been starting to assume that as long as I stayed away from “fast” or “chain” food it would be relatively easy to avoid sugar- this, however, blew that theory out of the water. Note to self: even “slow” food contains added sugar in strange and unusual places.

That being said, we are talking about homemade food, and trace amounts of sugar (well, except for the cream puffs). I’m not wagging my finger at wonderful places like Steininger’s, just abiding by my own rules, which are admittedly overly strict because of the point I’m trying to make. What’s that point again? Oh yeah… eating without added sugar is way way way waaaaaaaaay harder than we think.

Anyway the salad was… actually delicious! You could’ve knocked me over with a feather. Who knew cheese, fruit and greens could satisfyingly take the place of hot soup on a chilly spring day? I mean, besides the Easter bunny.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 37

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I’m happy to report a successful Third Official Dessert of the Year: on the last day of March we had (trumpets, please!) Sour Cherry Pie, which is a family favorite. Every year in June we know it’s time to call Hick’s Orchard in Granville, New York and find out if the cherries are ready for picking. This tradition began on a Father’s Day weekend many years ago when we were driving around with my husband’s parents, and we stopped in to the orchard on a whim. We picked a flat of the luscious red fruit and when I got home I found a recipe for cherry pie in my ever-reliable, broken-spined Joy of Cooking. We have been utterly obsessed with sour cherries ever since.

They’re a funny thing to be obsessed with, since there’s not all that much you can actually do with sour cherries. You can make a kick-ass pie, and you can make the Best Jam Ever, and… that seems to be it. That really is enough, though. In fact, every year we seem to get greedier, bringing home yet another flat piled high with the sweet-sour smelling orbs that require pitting immediately, because within hours they will begin to age, wrinkle, and develop icky brown-beige spots. Thus, cherry picking is an all-day event: picking is easy, pitting is hard. Well, not hard, but long, boring, and sticky,-juice-running-down-your-forearms-annoying, when you get right down to it.

Of course they make gadgets to make the job easier, which don’t. Over the years we’ve tried them all and reverted every time to the good old thumbnail technique… remember Jack Horner sticking in his thumb and pulling out a plum? It’s kind of like that, and repeat, four thousand times.

In order to minimize mess I cover the dining room table with garbage bags and clean dish rags. Every pitter gets a station at the table and a handy supply of paper towels with which to combat Sticky Elbow Syndrome. Both of our girls usually are enthused for about the first twenty minutes, at which point they wander off and find something less mind-numbing to do. Sometimes my mom is up and we’ll chat while we pit; other times I’ve sat and pitted by myself in a Zen-like, semi-comatose state until I felt encased in juice much the way I imagine a mosquito trapped in sap must feel. (My husband Steve counts himself among the champion cherry pickers of the universe, picking one whole flat for every handful the rest of us generate, and thus rationalizes his hasty escape when I start pulling out the colanders and plastic bags.)

Doesn’t matter. We all know the end result will be worth it. I carefully wash and measure out five cups of fruit per Ziploc bag and off they go to the deep freeze, until the time comes to make a pie or perhaps a nice batch of sour-sweet jam. Right now I’d guess we have about nine pies worth of cherries in our stand-up freezer, or as Steve would say, “Not enough!”

So I knew a cherry pie would be high on the family list of “Desert Island Desserts.”After having chocolate cupcakes in January, followed by chocolate mousse in February, I felt it was high time to demonstrate that dessert can exist perfectly well without chocolate, thank you.

After my pie-making hiatus, I was delighted to haul out my familiar marble rolling pin and board, drain the rich red juice from the thawed fruit, and measure out the (gasp!) sugar. Making the pie felt like greeting a dear friend I haven’t seen in so long, but who hasn’t changed a bit. Mix fruit with sugar, add ice water to Cuisinart, roll out dough, butter the pie pan. If I have time I always prefer to make a fancy lattice-top, because it seems appropriate to the specialness of the dessert. I usually swear under my breath later when I realize I put one of the dough-strips “over” when it was supposed to go “under” or vice versa, even though I’m certainly the only one who will ever notice.

This time, however, everything worked out just right: the lattice was perfect, I remembered to add the butter dots and brush with milk just before baking, and for once I even put on the “crust-protector” ring before the outer crust (which, being slightly higher, tends to brown much faster) was already irredeemably over-done.

Do I sound obsessed yet? Yes, I do love cherry pie. But I have to admit that it wouldn’t be quite the same if we hadn’t picked the fruit as a family one sunny day in June, or if I hadn’t made it so many times before, always endeavoring to make it just a little more pretty- just a little more perfect- just because. There is no doubt that for me it is a labor of love.

So often we who bake express our love for our families in the form of butter and flour and… yes… sugar. We served the pie after dinner that night still just slightly warm and topped with a scoop of silky Wilcox vanilla ice cream. After weeks of No Added Sugar the blast of FRUIT with SUGAR and PASTRY- whoa! It was complete sensory overload. And it was delicious. The sugar went immediately to my head and made my brain feel like it was buzzing for about a half an hour. But above all it was special.

I put down my fork and felt happy, a little high, and utterly satisfied. “Now I am good.” I said to no one in particular, “Now I can go another month.”

***

(Full disclosure note: with half a pie left, we most certainly did NOT throw it away. I’d sooner put my knitting in the blender. We finished it the next day, cold from the fridge, which is, believe it or not, even better than having it warm.)

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 36

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I don’t mean to be indelicate, folks, but I think the time has come to talk about one of the other consequences of eating. As one of my children’s books puts it: “just about every animal poops.” If you’re the kind of person who gets easily offended, I will completely understand if you decide to stop right here and skip this post. Consider this your official “get out of poop free” card.

Quite honestly, I never used to give poop a lot of thought. It wasn’t until I first went to a local chiropractor for pregnant-lady-back-pain about ten years ago that I was given a reason to think about the issue as a matter of health, rather than mere inconvenience or necessity.

“About how often do you have a bowel movement?” Ray asked me. Ray Foster is not only a wonderful chiropractor, but a neighbor and fellow parent. I was more than a little mortified to be asked such an unmentionable question, not to mention the fact that I really had no idea how to answer it. I had to admit- I really didn’t know. Certainly not every day, maybe every couple of days… heck, who knows? For all I knew it could’ve been once every month. Are we really supposed to keep track of such things, I wondered? Had I missed that day in health class?

Since then I’ve paid the issue a bit more attention, realizing, of course, that what goes in can be as much an indicator of good health as (ahem) what comes out. For a solid two decades of my life I was what they call a “french fry vegetarian,” ie: just because you don’t eat meat, honey, doesn’t mean you’re eating healthy. In that space of time I enjoyed more than my share of all the non-meat items on the menu: cheese, bread, pasta, more cheese. Once in a blue moon I might eat a vegetable, just for the sheer novelty of it.

At that rate, it’s probably lucky I didn’t just stop “emitting” altogether. I probably would’ve made it to my fiftieth birthday party and then, at the height of the festivities, exploded. But somehow the human body makes due with what it’s given, so to speak, and soldiers on.

Which brings me back to the No Sugar Project. I’ve mentioned that, since being on the project since January first, I have not lost any weight, the kids don’t seem noticeably calmer, nor has my hair turned green or any other very obvious side effect. I do seem to feel healthier, and I seem to not get sick as often or for as long as I might otherwise- all subjective effects which could just as easily be due to coincidence or a placebo effect.

However, one thing which is simply not subjective is poop, and I am a little embarrassed to report that- apparently- I am full of it. At first, I tried to ignore the obvious change, but the facts are as inescapable as they are mystifying to me: on our No Sugar Plan I don’t just “emit” like clockwork, I poop like a swiss freaking watch. At least once a day. If not more.

What is going on here?, I’ve wondered. Is it the lack of sugar per se? Or could it be the fact that we’re eating so many more fruits to supplement sweetness in our diet? Could it simply be the fact that we’re making so many more things from scratch in order to avoid sugar, and in doing so are also avoiding a host of other food additives and preservatives?

Hard to say. All I know is, we’re officially at the end of month three today, and my body is, well, working better than it has perhaps ever before, which is really, uh, nice. And probably a good sign of improved health. Not to be gross about it or anything.