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 26

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Well, we finally had our Valentine’s Day chocolate mousse and I thought that was what I was going to write about today. Until I saw a smoking gun this morning, in the form of the March school breakfast menu.

Now, before I go any further, let me reiterate how much I love our elementary school. I adore it. I want to marry it. We’ve had nothing but fabulous teachers in every grade and have enjoyed every minute of the warm, welcoming community of learning it provides- no kidding. I wish I had gone to a school this good as a kid. In the past they have even done great things on the healthy food front such as plant a school garden and invite parents to contribute their favorite soup recipes for lunch. Currently there’s even a grant-funded healthy snack program that gives the kids fruits and vegetables in between meals.

Now the bad part: the school food, the day-to-day menu, is packed with added sugar. Even I, who have been focusing on the added-sugar issue with a myopic vengance since the turn of the year, was shocked when I sat down to really look at the breakfast menu laid forth for the month of March. In the picture you can see I’ve highlighted every breakfast item that contains added sugar. And we’re not just talking a teaspoon on our grapefruit here… when they say “Assorted whole grain cereal” read: Frosted Flakes. When they say “Nutri-grain fruit bar” read: high fructose corn syrup. When they say “graham crackers” read: crystalline fructose, (or “lab fructose”- the sweetest ingredient our food scientists have managed to come up with to date.)

To look at it another way, I count a total of 30 possible options on the breakfast menu including condiments and syrup; out of those 30 items, 18 have added sugar… more than half. But it gets worse.

Looking closer, the school menu advertises “Milk Variety is Served with Every Meal!” What does this mean? This means chocolate milk. Okay, so if we assume a child chooses chocolate milk with his or her breakfast every morning, we are now up to 24 items out of 30 possible breakfast choices, or eighty percent of breakfast items containing added sugar.

One more thing: every day children having breakfast are given a piece of fresh fruit. In fact, the fruit has fructose in it too- the only kind of fructose our kids should really be having if you follow the logic of pediatric endocrinologist Dr. Robert Lustig. Lustig’s contention, as I’ve mentioned, is that fructose acts as a poison in our bodies, (unlike glucose, dextrose, lactose, etc.) and that the preferable way to take in this “poison” is the way nature has neatly worked it out: by ingesting the “antidote” with it, which is to say the fiber and micronutrients found in the flesh and pulp of the fruit. This not only ensures we get the good stuff that outweighs the bad, but also that we consume the fructose in appropriately small amounts.

So if we are looking at the number of items containing fructose (read: poison) in our breakfast menu for March 2011, and assuming a choice of chocolate milk every day? We can now bring our total of items containing sugar/fructose to 29 out of 30, or roughly 97 percent.What is the one item left not containing fructose? Cream cheese for our bagel on Tuesday.

Now, my understanding is that the way the breakfast and lunch programs work in most public schools is that they are substantially subsidized by the USDA which lays out the nutritional guidelines and “approved brands.” The potentially good news is that over the last year first lady Michelle Obama has taken on nutrition-awareness in the nation, in which effort she is assisted by the white house chef Sam Kass, a huge proponent of local, fresh, and sustainable foods.

This morning I came across a heartening article quoting Kass as being highly critical of the state of our school meals.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/new-white-house-chef-skewers-school-lunches/

Then again, these remarks were made in 2008, before Kass was hired by the White House. Would he still speak so frankly today? Of course, everything I uncovered in my cursory search found him focusing on the positive: emphasizing the benefits of recently passed legislation (the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010) regarding the USDA’s oversight of food in schools. In terms of specifics, the proposed “before” and “after” school menus posted on the USDA website are encouraging. And hey, he reassured Elmo, so that has to count for something. (youtube video)

Meanwhile, on the recent one year anniversary of her “Let’s Move” initiative, Michelle Obama posted a website message saying that over the last year there has been “a real shift in our national conversation.” Really?

I’d like to think so- I really, really would. But so far my youngest still brings home all the wrappers from her school breakfasts that say otherwise.

A Year of No Sugar: Post 25

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Once again, I’ve been attempting too much around here (baking all our bread, making every meal from scratch, leading after-school activities, learning to bungee-jump in my spare time, re-grouting the bathroom blindfolded) and it started to get to me again. The other night I went to bed at 9PM! Which to my mind means that pretty soon I’ll be showing up for the early-bird special at the all-you-can-gum buffet. Beyond feeling old, I’m feeling incompetent too, because it seems that nothing is getting done around here except the things that don’t stay done for more than a few minutes.

Let me give you a for-instance: on Sunday I mixed up a nice batch of no-knead bread, only to have to pitch it last night when I discovered it fermenting in a soup on top of the toaster-oven, a good 24 hours after I should have turned it out onto a lightly-floured surface and let it rise an additional two hours before baking for 30 minutes at 450 degrees. Instead of a lovely loaf of crusty chewy bread, I got a slimy mess to scrape into the trash, before piling the gooey bowl on top of the desert island of dirty dishes we’ve been amassing in the sink.

Meanwhile, our family has been much anticipating our special Valentines Day dessert. Our family-agreed upon once-a-month confection being… (drumroll please): chocolate mousse! Now, I’ve never made chocolate mousse before, so this places more than a little bit of pressure on the chef… I mean, what if it turns out awful? Or deflates? Or does whatever it is that goes wrong with mousse? As one of only twelve official desserts of our family’s YEAR, that would be, to put it mildly, an enormous disappointment.

Nonetheless, I set out Monday night— after a long day schlepping to BJs warehouse to push around a shopping cart larger than a Volkswagen and read ingredients with a magnifying glass, then leading a two-hour after-school activity, and finally driving two additional kids to their corresponding homes, while picking my younger daughter up— to find the only chocolate mousse ingredient my pantry lacked: heavy cream.

Dutchie’s in West Pawlet? Closed Mondays. Sheldon’s in Pawlet? No heavy cream. Mach’s Market down the road? Yes! Heavy cream hiding on the top shelf behind the half and half… score! We hurried home so I could heat up the potato pizza leftovers from the night before and concentrate on making a beautiful Valentine’s Day dessert to show my family how much I loved them and make their tummies feel all happy and full. Despite the deprivation of the “Mommy’s idea” no-sugar project, this was one of only twelve nights this year I could indulge my affection for my family in the form of a sugar-containing treat.

That was when my older daughter Greta, in an effort to be helpful, read out loud the pivotal part of the recipe that I had somehow missed: “must chill for a minimum of two hours.” I stopped. I wilted. The dish mountain in the sink loomed at me like Kilimanjaro. The potato pizza had not been a hit the night before and was not likely to inspire more confidence on it’s second trip to the dinner table. There was no bread. No time to make dessert. And everyone was hungry.

I wanted to lie down on the couch and cry, but it was covered with a huge pile of unfolded laundry. So instead, I stood still in the middle of the kitchen and looked lost. Fortunately for me, Steve came home at precisely that moment, recognized the look on my face and took over: he took steaks down from the freezer for dinner, heated the potato pizza for a side dish, and handed me a pink bag with a pretty pink dress in it: Happy Valentine’s Day. He might as well have been wearing a cape and tights.

We all felt much better after eating dinner, despite the fact that the laundry and the dishes didn’t magically disappear. The kids were disappointed that our special dessert would have to wait, but I explained to them that- sugar project or no sugar project- there is only so much that Mommy can do.

Remind me to write that on my mirror, or my forehead, or something, would you?

A Year of No Sugar: Post 24

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Steve's Cookies

You can’t spell “A Year of No Sugar” without “cookie”… at least as far as I’m concerned. So a few days ago I decided to shoot for the moon: I printed out a copy of “the real, the original, the authentic Nestle Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe,” and immediately began to dismantle it for my own selfish purposes.

This was by far my most ambitious recipe tampering to date. Not one, not two, but in fact three major ingredients would have to go (white sugar, brown sugar, and chocolate chips), replaced by something that, ideally, would resemble them in taste, texture, and bake-ability. (When you start messing with established recipes, you get to make up cool kitchen science-y words like “bake-ability.” Also, you get to wear a shrewd, “I’m thinking about complex food algorithms right now” facial expression with your white apron.)

Since I’d already established with my apricot bars that mashed banana made a very passable sugar substitute, I figured it would do for the ¾ cup of white sugar called for; that still left the ¾ cup of brown sugar, which after some deliberation I decided in my no-sugar universe we would call “chopped up dates.” Lastly I replaced the chocolate chips with one of my new favorite health food store finds: carob chips.

You know what? They were good. I mean, not “the-best-cookie-you-ever-ate” good, but good enough that every kid I gave them to said “yummy” and ate the whole thing. (I feel kids are the most dependable taste testers because they’re the ones who have no qualms about spitting a cookie out on your linoleum, whether it hurts your feelings or not.)

Inspired by my lack of spit-out cookies, my husband Steve decided we needed to have a no-sugar peanut butter cookie as well, but he decided to make them gluten-free also, in part because our friend Katrina is gluten-free and she was coming over that night. He followed a recipe we had and used mashed banana in place of the sugar and rice flour in place of the all-purpose. The first batch was good-ish… kind of like a peanut butter flavored biscuit. I didn’t care for them especially at first, but over time I started really liking their mild, sweet cake-i-ness (see? More new words and food algorithms.)

Then Steve upped the ante. Yesterday he tried a new batch with less rice flour, shorter baking time, increased peanut butter and the addition of ground peanuts as well. He also put in a truly obscene number of bananas. The result is really quite impressive- soft and mildly sweet and very peanut buttery; more cook-y less cake-y.

It was really nice to be able to put a cookie in each of our kid’s lunches this morning; like so many times in the past when I’ve sent sugar desserts, I felt like I was sending them a little edible love note. Isn’t it funny how we can so easily translate giving them a little treat- a little something sweet- as love?

Eve’s Bizarro-Chip Cookies

2 ¼ cups all purpose flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 cup (2 sticks, ½ pound) butter, softened

¾ cup mashed bananas

¾ cup chopped dates (lightly dust with four before chopping, so they don’t stick as much)

1 tsp vanilla extract (make sure no added sugar)

2 eggs

2 cups (12 ounce package) carob chips

1 cup chopped nuts

Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees.

Combine four, baking soda and salt in a small bowl. Beat butter, banana and dates in large mixer bowl. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition; gradually beat in flour mixture. Stir in carob chips and nuts. Drop by rounded tablespoons onto ungreased baking sheets.

Steve’s Gluten-Free, No-Sugar Peanut Butter Amazings

2 cups peanut butter

2 cups peanuts, chopped

2 large eggs

2 ½ tsp vanilla

6 large ripe bananas

2 sticks butter, softened

½ tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

2 cups rice flour

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Mix butter and bananas in mixer for three minutes. Add eggs, vanilla, baking powder, baking soda and mix. Add peanut butter slowly. Add rice flour and mix. Last, add two cups chopped peanuts and mix.

Roll golf-ball sized balls of dough in your palms, place on cookie sheet and then make fork indentations criss-cross to flatten: they should be ¼ to ½ inch thick. Bake for nine minutes- no longer!!! They will dry out if over-baked. Cool completely before tasting (they are sweeter after cooling.)