Tag Archives: kids and 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 22

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“So we are being poisoned by this stuff and its been added surruptitiously to all of our food; every processed food.”

-Dr. Robert Lustig – “Sugar: The Bitter Truth”

You’d think it’d be simple to exclude sugar from your diet, right? Not easy perhaps, but at least reasonably simple. You wouldn’t have to be an Einstein. Just look at the ingredients, and then when you find sugar- don’t eat it. Simple.Yet lately I’ve been running into some ingredients that have been defying my supposedly fool-proof plan. Dextrose for one.

Flashback to last week: for several days I wasn’t feeling so well, and as a result I was behind: behind on my cooking, behind on my shopping, behind on my meal-planning. Somehow we muddled through, but one night when I was feeling particularly desperate, half-ill and starving, I hauled out an industrial size bag of frozen “Bertolli” chicken with cream sauce and bowtie pasta. Okay, the ingredient list was longer than my arm, and appeared to have been at least partially written in some unknown foreign language, but this was a food emergency. At least there was no sugar; I had purchased this on my first “no sugar” BJ’s run a few weeks ago.

Of course, silly me had to double check, which as we have already thus far learned can be a big mistake if you’d like to actually eat anytime in the near future. What I found was within the chicken ingredients of meat, water and seasoning, the first sub-ingredient under “seasoning” was: “dextrose.” Dextrose? %^&*#$!

So you know what? I felt crappy. I was starving. And there was pretty much nothing else in the kitchen at that moment that seemed even remotely appealing. I cut open the bag, dumped it into the non-stick pan, cooked it for the requisite ten minutes and we ate it anyway… dextrose or no dextrose.

Upon completing our meal my first thought was that something was amiss- what was it? I realized it seemed really odd to me how quickly our meal had come together- I mean, a meal like chicken and bow-tie pasta with spinach and cream sauce doesn’t just happen all by itself! How long would a recipe like that normally take me? At least an hour but very likely more, not to mention all the dirty dishes that would result from washing spinach, separately cooking chicken, carefully simmering the cream sauce in a pan while boiling the pasta in another pot.

So it occurred to me that this meal had been sponsored: brought to you by dextrose! (As well as its friends isolated soy protein product and sodium phosphate!) The inverse correlation was very clear: the fewer chemicals and additives, the greater amount of meal prep/ cooking and clean-up time, and vice versa.

But it had also become clear to me that there are so many pseudonyms for sugar and it’s variants that I need to do some homework. When I look up “dextrose” on the internet I find a host of confusing answers: “Better known today as glucose, this sugar is the chief source of energy in the body.” While another advertisers hail dextrose powder as “Corn sugar!” that is “30% less sweet than pure or refined sugar.” So, forgive me for being dense, but which is it? Is it something that we create in our bodies to provide energy, or is it an added sugar?

True confessions time: biochemistry was not my best subject. Can you tell? So what is sugar? What are the differences between terms like sucrose, glucose and fructose? And where the heck does dextrose come in? Are all “ose” words sugar-related? What about bellicose? Today I happened upon a website of diabetes information that listed a frightening amount of “reduced calorie sweeteners” to look out for, without so much as an “-ose” ending to tip us off:

…found primarily in packaged foods such as cookies, gum, and candy. Reduced-calorie sweeteners include sorbitol, mannitol, lactitiol, maltitol, xylitol, isomalt, erythritol, and hydrogenated starch hydrolysates.

Am I the only one who is starting to break out in a sweat just trying to define “sugar” in a list of ingredients? Probably. I don’t know too many other people who would worry whether their food contained isomalt or not.

It’s clear to me that sometimes I’m splitting hairs, because I have to. I put back a box of cereal in the supermarket because it contains “two percent or less” of molasses or cane syrup, and yet how sure am I really that the waitress in the restaurant knows there is no sugar in the tortillas? Did she check for isomalt? Or xylitol? Of course not.

So I’m off to watch Dr. Lustig’s talk “Sugar: the Bitter Truth” for the third time, in hopes of decoding the mystery of the “-ose.”

A Year of No Sugar: Post 19

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Hooray! One month down; a mere eleven more to go. I thought this might be a good moment to pause and reflect on some of the things that are working for our family so far:

-Popcorn! We’re big on snacks around here, so in addition to the ever-present bowl of apples (local) and clementines (decidedly not), I’ve found popcorn to be a reliable no-sugar option. Whereas we used to buy a box of microwave bag popcorn at the supermarket fortified with about four-thousand mysterious ingredients, now we buy popcorn kernels by the pound from Ryan- a vendor at the Dorset Farmer’s market. We pop it with a little canola oil, add olive oil or butter and salt and voila! I never used to be a huge popcorn fan, but now I’m a new convert.

-Hummus!! The kids are big fans of this chick pea and tahini dip which never tastes right when we buy it from the store- I make it myself in the Cuisinart from a can of chick peas, some garlic, olive oil, salt, lemon juice and tahini. Paired with corn chips or crackers it goes so fast around here that I have yet to put any away in the fridge for later.

-Oatmeal made with milk and topped with fruit has become a breakfast staple. Sure, it’s a pain having to turn the stove on and actually cook before I’m even fully awake, but I’m getting used to it. In the last month we’ve tried oatmeal with fresh cut-up strawberries, blueberries and frozen organic raspberries on top. Raspberries seem to lend the best juicy sweetness to the oatmeal.

-Steve’s famous banana ice cream has been a lifesaver when we’re feeling deprived and in need of a dessert option. In the last month we’ve had it at least three or four times. We’ve lucky to have the Champion Juicer in our appliance arsenal, because I’m not sure how else one would achieve that soft-serve texture that it creates from the frozen banana flesh. We’re SO excited about it that we tried to make some for a friend and her kids a few nights ago even though we didn’t quite have enough banana-freezing time, and thus ended up with more of a banana pudding- which actually I thought was almost as good. (Our friend and her kids however- who aren’t as sugar-starved as we are apparently- seemed less than impressed.)

-Raisin cookies! In my mostly-fruitless search for some genuine no-sugar dessert recipes online, I found this recipe for cookies made with raisins and apples. You have to work a little harder than with most cookie recipes- the fruit gets cooked before being added to the dry ingredients, and the mixed batter must then chill in the fridge overnight… but it really does result in a cookie! Without sugar! Okay, this might be the banana pudding effect at work again; I probably wouldn’t try to stack these up against Nestle Tollhouse or anything, but for a no-sugar dessert these are sweet and chewy and definitely cookies. I wasn’t sure how I’d make a whole year without cookies!

–Anything to not feel deprived. One pivotal thing I’ve learned over the last month is that so much of our battle is psychological: we’re often fine eating at home, but when we are surrounded by friends at school or skating or movie night at the school, all having snacks or treats we aren’t, suddenly things get exponentially harder. Therefore, when we’re at skating I make it a point to let the kids buy an apple or banana from the snack bar. No, the fruit isn’t organic, in fact it doesn’t even look very good, and yes, it is ridiculously expensive ($1.50 for an apple, anyone?) but when I suggested to my six-year-old that we could bring better fruit from home she objected immediately. “It’s more fun to buy it here, Mommy.” Okay. We aren’t buying the soft pretzels or hot cocoa or french fries or gatorade that everyone else is- but at least we can buy something from the concession stand too. And sometimes that can make all the difference.