Category Archives: A Year of No Sugar

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 69

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Perhaps the most lasting legacy of our family’s year-long sugar abstinence will be the fact that my children will never entirely forgive me. That they will never again trust me not to take away something as beloved as sweet treats, when they least expect it. Or perhaps they’ll grow up to institute an “all candy, all the time” program in their households, just to balance their childhood out.

This is what I worry about, when I worry.

However, for me, one of the greatest legacies of the No Sugar project will be coming to realize the incredible resilience of my children. I know- I’ve talked before about being blessed with children who are, most of the time, pretty adventurous with food. Greta, my eleven year old, likes to brag about having eaten snails in Paris, and is impatient with the kids’ menu at most restaurants, choosing instead a flank steak or French onion soup or Penne alla Vodka from the adult menu. Ilsa, who is six, is if anything even more enthusiastic: in Italy, where kids menus are nonexistent, we could order her a cheese plate or a “crostini misti”- which includes chicken liver pate- and she’d be happy as a clam in butter.

I’d love to take credit for all this culinary open-mindedness, but honestly I’m not sure: are fussy eaters born, or made?

So here’s the thing: lately my kids have been insisting to be let into the other side of the equation: they want to cook… and they are not taking no for an answer. This is great, right? In theory… but in practice you get into things like sharp knives, hot stoves, and the fact that mommy-can’t-supervise-right-now-because-if-she-doesn’t-get-some-laundry-done-you’ll-both-be-going-to-school-tomorrow-in-bathing-suits. Kids cooking is wonderful, if not always terribly convenient.

And too, if I’m entirely honest with myself, there’s the fact that I often enjoy cooking alone- the peaceful meditation of chopping, kneading, mixing and preparing has become a quiet pleasure I look forward to when I’m not in a frantic rush to produce sustenance NOW. It’s not unusual for me to plan a more complicated meal some afternoon when I know I’ll have a few hours to spend pulling it together, and to look forward to it as “me” time. This is all the more so the case since we began the No Sugar Project, as if to compensate for the lack of sweets, I seem to focus more and more on the homemade, which may be simple, but is definitely not always expedient.

Fresh pasta is a quintessential example. What could be more delicious? What could be simpler? What could be more of a pain in the tookas? Inspired by our recent trip to Florence I had been wanting to find an afternoon to make fresh gnocchi, which I learned to make a few years ago and have only attempted here at home a handful of times. (By the time I forget the consequent mountain of dishes and the several hours of work, it’s usually about time for me to attempt it again.)

This time was different, however; this time the kids wanted to help. Demanded to help, actually. It was one of the last few days before school and I was savoring the luxury of spending the afternoon with them with no place to rush off to- no soccer practice, no ballet class, no library board meeting. And yet I felt conflicted… what if they screwed the pasta up? What if hours of work resulted in a gloppy, unpalatable mess? Then- panic attack- what would we have for dinner? (As you can imagine, between living in the country and being on the sugar project, there aren’t very many quick-fix options open to us when dinner goes, suddenly, horribly wrong.) Now, there are times when me being such a relentless control freak has it’s benefits- this is not one of them.

Another recent kid concoction... sugar free apple sauce!

I took a few deep breaths and decided to get over it. If we’re going to teach our kids about real food, we are going to have to let them learn how to make it, aren’t we? I knew it was time to put my money where my mouth was.

Boy, I’m glad I did. They were amazing! In fact, after I made the dough- kneading together fresh boiled potatoes, flour and egg- the kids did all the work while I sat back and watched. And this is not an inconsiderable amount of work, either: Greta carefully sliced bits of dough from the large dough “loaf,” rolling each one out into a long, 1/4” diameter snake. Ilsa would take over at this point, cutting dozens of tiny gnocchis from the snakes the size of Tootsie Rolls; each tiny island of dough carefully kept separate on the cutting board so as not to have the pasta bits stick together. This was not Kraft Easy-Mac. This took a long time. I was amazed at their tenacity, their patience.

Did everything go perfectly? No. At one point, in what will hereafter be referred to as the Great Gnocchi Massacre of 2011, Ilsa accidentally knocked the wooden cutting board- filled with little cut up gnocchi- just off the counter enough to dump a good three dozen onto the kitchen floor. The three of us gasped. We were hushed for a moment, staring at the floor and thinking about the hard work that- poof!- was gone just like that. Then Ilsa ran off, in tears.

Now, some people have a Little Devil on their shoulder. I have a Little Control Freak. The Little Control Freak whispered in my ear “See? Told you so. All that work. What will you have for dinner now?” Fortunately, I listened instead to the Mom Angel on my other shoulder who said “There’s still plenty of pasta left. Nobody died. It’s fine.” And of course, it really was. Soon, I managed to convince Ilsa of that fact as well and we were back to the pasta factory.

In fact, it was better than fine. We had a lovely dinner that took us all afternoon to make and BOY were the girls proud! And it was delicious- even if they weren’t as ridiculously careful about it as I would have been. I mean, it’s just potatoes, egg and flour, right? Real, homemade food is desperately important- to our health, to animal welfare, to the environment- but fortunately for us, most of the time it’s not rocket science. It just takes a little time. And patience.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 68

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It seems appropriate that we are hunkered down here in the house today, like everyone else we know, waiting out the rain and wind of Hurricane/Tropical Storm/Rather-Wet-Zephyr Irene. I’m perfectly happy to sit still for a while- for the last few days we’ve been racing around at a breakneck pace trying to squeeze ten pounds of summer into a one pound bag and frankly, I’m bug-bitten, sunburned, and exhausted.

Among other things we managed to squeeze in a visit to the Washington County Fair. Although it’s a hallowed, end-of summer tradition around here, we’ve never been and in fact, I realized, I’ve never been to a county fair of any sort. But now I’m hooked.

It’s hard to explain what is so compelling about the whole county fair thing: barn after barn of impressive, almost regal animals- from looming oxen to preening roosters- each one unique, each one cleaned, brushed and shining, ready for their fifteen minutes of fame. Everywhere you go you encounter that familiar, homey smell of manure and hay. Young children look oddly serious in their white shirts with paper numbers, purposefully leading their animals here and there. You have to stand back and be grateful for a moment that such an old fashioned-seeming event as this is going strong in the age of “I don’t have time for that.”

Because of course what this event celebrates is time. You can’t have an animal and care for it properly without time. And appropriately, this reminds me of food and how, as a culture, we supposedly have no time for that either, anymore. This connection makes sense: every one of these animals originally gained it’s position on the farm as either a direct provider of food or to aid in the production of it. Wandering around the goat and sheep pavilion it gave me pause to read the signs above the brilliantly groomed animals detailing their names, the intricate names of their breeds, and then that their job was: “Meat.” To a modern sensibility this seemed incongruous- isn’t meat a lowly thing, not to be named or well cared for, but to be shunted to a back lot, fed a diet of mud and antibiotics, slaughtered in secret, before being shipped anonymously out, to be consumed without a thought?

Pardon me- as a former twenty-year vegetarian I tend to get a little melodramatic on the subject. Today, as an enthusiastic meat-eater, I am no less concerned with the animal’s well-being and the obvious relationship that holds with the fact that we are then putting that animal as food into our bodies. After all, they taught us in elementary school that “you are what you eat,” so who wants to be a poor, miserable, doped-up, factory-farm creature?

But we just don’t have the time or money to worry about that- that’s the cultural message we hear from all around us- our society needs to make progress, move forward, spend more time interacting with technology and less and less and less time worrying about the Hot Pockets (Now in “Nuclear Waste Flavor!”) they we are putting in our mouths.

I know. I’m sounding evangelical and I apologize. The funny thing is, that even at this event which seemed to celebrate the very point that I’m ham-handedly trying to make here- ie: that good, healthy food connects to a longstanding agricultural tradition of good, healthy animals- even here we were simultaneously confronted with the equal and opposite message- namely: eat crap! It’s delicious, cheap and fun!

You know where I’m going with this. As we made our way further and further from the animals and closer and closer to the midway, we encountered an astounding array of junk for our perusal: buckets of fries! Giant bags of Kettle Korn! Slushies that glow in the dark! Sodas too large to carry!

My kids were anxious to get to the rides, and were impatient with me stopping every thirty seconds or so to take pictures of the gastronomical Sodom and Gomorrah. I couldn’t help it- what has happened? I wondered wide-eyed, what have we come to? In his interview with Nightline, Dr. Robert Lustig compared our modern food court to an opium den; here at the carnival this unsettling image of debauchery and debilitation seemed entirely too appropriate.

Likewise, the audience in attendance that day showed ample evidence of enjoying a diet closer to the midway side of the fair than to the 4-H side. Being substantially overweight was not the exception, I realized looking around, but the norm. It made it easier than ever to believe the recent prediction that by 2030 half of Americans will be obese. Not overweight, mind you: obese. Are we worried yet?

Earlier that morning as we prepared to make the forty-minute drive to the fairgrounds, I had quietly grumbled to myself, annoyed at the work involved with preparing a picnic lunch to bring and lug around with us all morning. It took time. It was heavy. All I wanted to do was leave– why couldn’t we just be normal? I whined to myself. Why did I have to torture our family with this No Sugar Madness? Wasn’t I just being selfish and pushy and fanatical?

But let me tell you how happy I was to have that lunch when we started to get hungry… which wasn’t very long after we had arrived and meandered through a few exhibits. Already we were famished. We sat on a picnic bench under the shade of a big pavilion and devoured our cheese and tomato sandwiches, crackers with peanut butter and a small basket of plums like it was air- we breathed it all in. And after eating? I felt really, really good.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 67

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We all have some funny coincidences in our lives. Personally, I happen to have a lot of birthday coincidences: my husband and dear friend Katrina share the same birthday… three of my bridesmaids were all born in February… my younger daughter was born just one day after my mom’s birthday… and so on. Perhaps the oddest coincidence of all is that in August my dad’s birthday falls just one day before… my mom’s boyfriend’s birthday. Ahem. Now, I don’t know much about astrology, but it seems to me that there is something going on there.

So this year the girls and I traveled to celebrate both of these birthdays, and fortunately for us my mom and dad don’t live too far apart for that to be possible. But if you’re like me you’ve already realized the unique conundrum this posed for us this year: birthday cake.

Dad's Dextrose Poppyseed Cake

Yes, what would be our August dessert? I pondered this. My brain resounded with the immortal wisdom of Highlander… “There Can Be Only One!!” What would we do? Uh…could we eat a half a piece of cake at each celebration? Would we skip dessert at both celebrations? Certainly we couldn’t shun dessert at one birthday- that would be like choosing sides, and worse… be tantamount to Birthday Treason. (They might be forced to read us our Birthday Rights- “You are under Birthday Arrest. You have the right to remain loud and silly. Anything goofy you are photographed doing can and will be used against you on Facebook…”)

I mean, these are two people I love in very different ways. They are apples and oranges. I’m grateful at least that their birthdays had the decency to fall one day apart so I always have the opportunity to celebrate everyone- but this cake thing presented a new, unprecedented problem. For the first time in our entire Year of No Sugar I had a choice to make: whose birthday got celebrated with sugar, and… whose did not. Ack!

Ultimately, I used my understanding of the two birthday honorees to figure it out. My dad is pretty adventurous when it comes to food, and always willing to question tradition in the interest of trying something new. I know he is interested in our family’s No Sugar project- we’ve had a series of conversations on the subject of what-the-heck-we’re-up-to.

On the other hand, John, who has been with my mom for the last twenty-five years or so, is more of a person who knows what he likes and likes what he likes. For his birthday dinner, for example, we were going to the Italian restaurant that has been his favorite for the last few decades. He also has a very live-and-let-live philosophy- he is entirely neutral on the subject of our No-Sugar adventure.

Then there’s my mom. Like Dad, Mom is supportive of our family project in spite of the fact that I’m pretty sure she’s worried I fell on my head before coming up with the idea. Mom’s the one who reads all my posts practically before I can even press “publish.” Yet, she’s also the one from whom I got my love of celebrations, and my implicit understanding that there are just certain things you do to celebrate a birthday. You have a special meal. You have decorations and presents and sing the birthday song. And you have a fabulous cake.

So it was decided that Mom would order a fabulous cake with a New Orleans theme, and that would be our *official* August dessert. Meanwhile, I was planning to make dinner for Dad at his house, so I would make him his longstanding favorite for dessert: poppy seed cake.

With dextrose.

God help me if it turned out awful. I know Dad wouldn’t mind, but I’d feel terrible.

But you know what? It didn’t turn out awful. Dad loved it. Everybody loved it. I was astounded. No one even asked if there was sugar in it! Afterward I told everyone that there was, technically speaking, no fructose/sugar in the cake at all. It was Dad’s turn to be astounded. My seventeen year old brother’s reaction was along the lines of “uh, yeah, whatever.” He didn’t care. Does it taste like cake? Must be cake. What I cared about was that he had eaten the whole piece- everyone had.

Now, truthfully, the cake wasn’t quite as “floofy” (that’s a technical term) as usual, but I think playing with the amount of dextrose might fix that. And while we’re being picky, the cream cheese frosting seemed, if anything, a bit too sweet to me- another thing which could be tweaked. All in all, I counted it a success.

John's Real Deal Cake

And of course, the next night we had cake- again! Except this time it was the real-sucrose-deal. We picked up the gorgeous confection from the Riviera Bakery where they are famous for fun things like Dr. Seuss-inspired shapes, edible candles, and cakes that look like giant hamburgers. John’s New Orleans cake was a vision in purple, green and gold, complete with white-chocolate Mardi Gras masks, and Fleur de Lis. Inside, three thin chocolate layers were interspersed with “cookies & cream” filling. It was literally a work of edible art.

Perhaps predictably, it seemed overwhelmingly sweet to me. I was surprised to find that I couldn’t finish my slice, and then noticed that neither could the girls. It was very good, but good in the way candy is good- you only need a few bites and it’s enough.

So in the end we were able to participate fully in both birthdays… apples and oranges. And we certainly got our fair share of cake. Thank goodness.