Category Archives: A Year of No Sugar

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 87

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There are times when I think we live in our own little small-town Vermont oasis, cushioned from the crazy things that are going on in the modern world. And then there are times that I know we do.

Take last Friday night for example. We took our kids to a city forty minutes away in New York, because we had see the Muppet Movie… and that was the closest place to see it. We had to navigate the run-of-the-mill-mall, of course, that post-apocalyptic wasteland of crap you don’t need and stuff to eat that isn’t food. It was fine- we have yucky malls in Vermont too.

Then there was the theatre: each movie was allotted what I would call a large walk-in closet of a seating area, presumably so that they have room to show forty-seven different movies simultaneously. I was surprised to be treated to an incessant stream of commercials jabbering away on the screen, instead of the customary silence before the previews start, or the local powerpoint slide show that graces our local two-screen theatre in Vermont.

Then there were the previews. A full half-hour of them. Huh. Would they show commercials during the movie too, I wondered?

At long last we got to the part in which sky-scraper-sized containers of Coke and monster-truck-sized boxes of Sour Patch Kids float cheerfully through space, alterting audience members to something they have surely overlooked: that the football-field sized counter in the lobby- you know, that sensory assault of colors and chemicals you walked past to get in here? Yeah- you can buy “refreshments” there.

It was there, I noticed, that you can now buy a tub of popcorn larger than your head– it’s about the size of a horse’s grain bucket. To go with it, you can buy a soda of Brobdignagian proportions that takes two hands to carry.

Lucky for us, we had already eaten. But after the movie ended my older daughter Greta really REALLY wanted a drink, so I approached the neon counter and ordered a small bottle of water.

“That’ll be $4.75, please.”

??

“Yes, $4.75.”

!!

Pause.

“Greta honey, we’re going to have to have to find you a drink somewhere else.” On the way out I explained to her the definition of the phrase “captive audience.”

Is it me, or is the world just getting too obscene to believe? Since when does a bottle of water cost nearly five dollars? (The large, in case you were wondering, was $6.75) Using this principle, a shower should cost about a thousand dollars.

And speaking of general societal insanity, let’s talk about the holidays. At our house, we’ve been inundated with reams of Christmas catalogs, a good third of which exclusively feature pornographic desserts- A cheesecake composed of fourteen distinct flavors! Brownies with caramel dipping sauce! A pudding inside a cookie inside a cake! The copy features slogans like “Chocolate: Happiness that you can eat!” and “Have one of each!”

Inundated

But the craziness doesn’t end there: it’s also at school. Holiday fundraising catalogs come home featuring “great gifts” such as cheap chocolates, chemical-laden soup packets, and mixes for cakes and cookies which aren’t hard to make in the first place. Flyers supplied by the local supermarkets encourage us to buy certain name brands to “Help Our Schools!”: “Bagel Bites,” “TGI Fridays” appetizers, and “Yoplait” yogurts filled with high fructose corn syrup. I love our school, but I resent the fact that I’m being encouraged to buy crap for our kids in the name of school spirit.

How are we supposed to eat healthy when so many forces are conspiring to make us just go along with the status quo? When a bottle of water costs five dollars? When the celebration of Christmas- or anything, really- is equated with eating dessert? When getting a snack from the concession stand requires the use of a hand-truck?

It’s one of the hard questions that never goes away… how do I raise a healthy child, in every sense, in mind, body and spirit? If we focus too much on good nutrition, will it backfire? How much are we willing to pull back from society at large, in order to eat healthy? For my part, I can only hope that our Year of No Sugar hasn’t backfired terribly, turning my kids into life-long sugarholics just to get back at me for it. We’ll see.

But I have hope. Just before the movie began, as the giant-junk-food-in space floated across the screen, Greta leaned over to me and whispered with a conspiratorial gleam in her eye, “Hey- It’s Sugar Heaven!”

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 86

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Oh yeah- Thanksgiving. The mother of all quintessentially American holidays… and- not coincidentally- the mother of all gluttonous holidays as well.

Check Out Those Cranberries!

It’s kind of amazing all the different foods that we’re supposed to concoct in order to have it be “real” or “traditional.” It’s daunting. In fact, I have a dear friend whose family bags the whole thing and makes a large Thanksgiving pizza. Not just turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes- oh no!- but cranberries, gravy, and whatever other sides you grew up eating with them: maybe peas, corn, applesauce… maybe green bean casserole with the crunchy tin-can onions on top or strawberry Jell-O with little banana UFOs floating inside, or perhaps yam casserole drenched in brown sugar, butter and tiny marshmallows… No matter what, everyone seems to have a food it just wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without. (For the record, for me it is my mom’s Oyster Stuffing. It. Is. So. Good.)

So once you get through making all the mandatory foods, the “it wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without” foods, and anything special or new that you decided to throw in this year – you’ve got yerself a fairly serious Mount Kilimanjaro of food.

However, despite the fact that it was a ridiculous starch-fest (more stuffing with your mashed potatoes, my dear?) and the fact that many of those “traditional” dishes (marshmallows? Did the Pilgrims have those?) can practically cause instant diabetes, despite all that we got through the entire meal- with only minor modifications- No Sugar style.

Glucose Syrup - YUM!

Gravy is always a prime suspect- but Mom bought it at Whole Foods and checked the ingredients so we were safe on that account. She also made that green bean casserole and I was amazed to find only dextrose (!), not sugar or any icky variant thereof, in the ingredient list. Well, yay! Not that this was health food you understand, but still.

My proudest achievement of the day was my dextrose cranberries, which I had practiced earlier in the week just to be sure they would meet everyone’s Official Turkey Day Fruit expectations. I mean, these might be the only cranberries some of our guests would eat all year! In the making, I was amazed on many counts:

  1. It was ridiculously easy. Because everyone I know always buys those cans of jellied stuff saturated with High Fructose Corn Syrup, I’d gotten the impression it was rocket science- instead its about as easy as making oatmeal.
  2. I was very stressed about gaining the correct amount of sweetness and jelly-like texture. The problem was solved by cooking the berries in a mixture of boiling water and dextrose, and then adding a healthy dollop of one of my newest favorite things: glucose syrup. More on that in a minute.
  3. Did you know cranberries pop when you cook them? How much fun is that?

Luckily, I had recently gone in search of glucose syrup- thanks once again to No Sugar guru David Gillespie- in the attempt to make one of his No Sugar recipes. Glucose Syrup? It sounded scary, like an ingredient for a science experiment involving frogs and tweezers. And it sounded even less appetizing than dextrose. Hmm. But I really wanted to make his granola bars recipe, and my attempt to do without resulted in a delicious granola bar confetti- it just didn’t hold together at all.

So like dextrose, I found it online. I purchased a tiny tub of the mysterious stuff, which arrived looking more like an ingredient for my laboratory than food. It’s clear, gooey, and tar-like in consistency… it gets absolutely everywhere when you try to measure it. Yuck- this was not the kind of ingredient anyone was going to want to lick the spoon of. Then again, I reasoned, Gillespie had never steered us wrong yet.
And of course, he was right: glucose syrup is the perfect solution for anything that needs not only sweetening, but also the viscous thickening that many traditional sweeteners provide: molasses, for example. More and more lately, I’ve been using dextrose powder, to the point where I actually almost forget that I’m making any modification. If the recipe says “1/2 cup sugar” I read “1/2- ¾ cup dextrose. But there are situations where dextrose alone just isn’t going to create that thick texture you need. Enter: Glucose Syrup. Wearing a cape. The cranberries are saved!!

One GF pie by Katrina and one regular pie by Eve!

Lastly, I need to talk about the pie. Our Sugar Dessert for the month was to be our Thanksgiving pumpkin pie. But because, as I described, I’m so used to my big orange container, I completely forgot at first and used dextrose in the crust rather than actual sugar. When I got to mixing the pumpkin with the spices, I had to remind myself- go get the sugar.

The pie was delicious, as pumpkin pie always is. It only takes ¾ cup of sugar in the entire recipe, so compared to many desserts, the swetetness is fairly mild and not likely to cause us all Banana-Cream-Pie-style headaches. Actually, our monthly dessert passed with such little fanfare that it made me wonder- have we entered a new stage here, where sugar just doesn’t matter so much any more? Can it be, after eleven months of diligence, and with the help of magical ingredients like dextrose and glucose syrup, that we can get to a place where we are conditioned to be perfectly happy with a vastly reduced level of sweet? Have we really, at last, shunned sugar?

And I couldn’t help but also wonder… if I had used dextrose in the pie filling too, would anyone have noticed?

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 85

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The Sink

Here is what my kitchen looks like today.

No, these isn’t the leftover results of the fact that we hosted Thanskgiving for eleven- we cleaned all that up on Friday. This is the result of the fact that yesterday I had an absolute cooking attack. I made turkey stock. I made banana bread. I made white dinner rolls just for the heck of it. The wonderfully ironic part was that none of this was actual entree material; my husband came in smelling all these wonderful smells and asked what was for dinner and I shrugged.

“Leftovers?” I said.

Why was I baking and cooking like a maniac? Well, believe it or not, I find it relaxing. And as we all know, the holidays can be a little un-relaxing. After a truly crazy week, (did I mention I had an endoscopy on Wednesday?) my kitchen was my own again. I had a whole Sunday stretched out in front of me, and the lower shelf of my fridge was being hogged by an enormous turkey carcass that wasn’t getting any younger. Eve Translation? Time to don an apron and make a big fat mess.

Meanwhile, in the midst of these recipes in various stages of production, I came to the realization that not only had the mice paid a visit to my pantry cupboard (leaving their lovely caraway-seed-poops as incriminating evidence) but so had the flour gnats- who liked it so much they had decided to move in. Ugh. So in between and around all this cooking and baking I began frantically cleaning out my entire kitchen cupboard shelf by shelf. Everything comes out, gets weeded through, and goes back in. Admittedly, I went a little crazy with the Clorox wipes.

The Pantry

It felt good though. I filled a big bag with cans and boxes to go to the local food cupboard, and my shelves are no longer dusty and disorganized. Treasure-hunt style, I found lots of interesting artifacts: five (count ’em) containers of unsweetened cocoa, several packages of powdered milk, a small bottle of Kalua someone had left here at a party, a two year old box of chocolates, lots of jam and sweet pickles that have been simply shoved to the back of the cupboard all this year, and yes, last year’s Halloween candy.

Of course I found all my new tenants too: happily ensconced in the rye flour, the cornmeal and all the dark little crevices buggies love so much. Lucky for me, my twenty-five pounds of white, wheat and bread flours were stored in big plastic bins, or I would’ve had a little gnat Woodstock on my hands.

I spent all day in the kitchen, made a huge mess, cleaned up another one, and still got very little done in the way of actual meal-making. It makes me think about how tied to the kitchen women have been in history, how necessary it was for them to not only make the meals from scratch, but to maintain the fire or the stove, the ice in the icebox, the bins of potatoes and squash in the cellar, all the while keeping things clean and keeping the critters at bay… before they had plastic bins. The kitchen, for so many women, was where they lived.

Seen in this context, the task of simply going for a year without eating sugar seems laughably easy. As contemporary people with all the modern conveniences, we don’t have to spend all day every day making our meals. Instead, what we’re going to eat is all too often an afterthought- something else we have to do too.

The Stock

The other day I watched a YouTube video documenting a contemporary family’s kitchen in which they use a wood-burning cook stove, an ice box, and light the room by kerosene lamp. Even though it was very charming, and even though I normally love that kind of living history jazz- it nonetheless struck me as a little… silly. I have no intentions of giving up my dishwasher… you’ve seen what my kitchen looks like even with it. And even though I’ve been railing against plastic lately, yesterday I was all but worshipping my big plastic flour bins. I don’t cook dinner in the microwave, but I do melt butter in it. And don’t even get me started on my husband’s coffee machine- it rivals the Starship Enterprise.

Each person must find their own happy medium. But the important thing is, that we give it some thought. There’s no easy answer to how to live in the modern world- but for me some part of it involves making turkey stock, homemade dinner rolls and not giving up my dishwasher.