Category Archives: A Year of No Sugar

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.)

A Year of No Sugar: Post 23

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Okay! I’ve done my homework and you get to be the beneficiary of that morning-long endeavor, unless of course I have got it all backwards in which case I am here to mislead you terribly. After watching Dr. Robert Lustig’s “Sugar: the Bitter Truth” on YouTube for the third time, as well as doing further slogging around on the internet, I’ve gotten to what I hope is a slightly better understanding of the “ose” question. Here is what I have come up with, which is very likely a gross oversimplification of the matter:

Sucrose– is processed table sugar in all it’s many forms: raw, white, brown etc. It is made up of both glucose and fructose and is harvested from sugar cane or sugar beets.

Fructose– This is the naturally occurring sugar present in fruit, fruit juice, honey, etc.

Glucose– This is the “breakdown product of ingested carbohydrates and the form of sugar that the body uses for energy.” Also known as dextrose.

The quotation above comes from livestrong.com which had several helpful articles on the “ose” question, which was good, because Dr. Lustig’s talk makes the assumption that his audience already knows the difference between these terms.

As a side note, I have to say that I was once again dumbfounded at what an incredible, informative and persuasive talk “Sugar” is… Maybe it’s just me, but then again it has been watched, as of today, 766,122 times on YouTube, so I guess I’m not the only one to find it compelling. And this is despite the fact that he bandies about terms such as “hepatic steatosis” and “dyslipidemia” with unsettling ease.

One of the most striking, if complicated, parts of this video is where Lustig goes through and, point by point, details exactly what happens in your body biochemically when one ingests two pieces of white bread versus a shot of bourbon versus a glass of orange juice. You might be surprised to see his very clear demonstration that the glass of orange juice (fructose) behaves in one’s body most like the alcohol, with the exception that alcohol is processed by the brain while fructose is processed by the liver. Acute toxin meet chronic toxin. As Lustig puts it:

“You wouldn’t think twice about not giving your kid a Budweiser, but you don’t think twice about giving your kid a can of Coke. But they’re the same. In the same dosing. For the same reason. Through the same mechanism. Fructose is ethanol without the buzz.”

Whoa. And that goes for fruit juice too, by the way. Pediatric patients coming to Dr. Lustig are advised to drink only milk or water. And by a funny coincidence, that’s exactly what you are left with after omitting all drinks containing either sucrose or fructose.

So the only question that I’m still ruminating on for the moment is that of dextrose specifically: is added dextrose okay on the No-Added Sugar Project as Devised and Implemented by Eve? After all, it isn’t sucrose and it isn’t fructose. According to just about everybody it’s glucose– which Dr. Lustig describes as “the energy of life.” So, does it matter that it’s added as an ingredient, rather than manufactured by my body after eating a piece of bread? Or, is it like other ingredients such as artificial colorings or preservatives, ie: better to do without, but not expressly prohibited under No-Added Sugar? And if so, does this mean my kids can eat the french fries at the skating rink again, resulting in my popularity as a mom going up by about ten-thousand points?

These are the questions that keep me up at night.