Tag Archives: kids and sugar

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 92

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Maybe I should’ve known Aunt Carol’s house would be the hardest of all. Why? Because Aunt Carol is great. She is the kind of relative who not only bakes fourteen different kinds of cookies for the holidays, but she bakes enough to give every relative who’s in town a huge sampler plate of them to take home as well. She’s been known to make her own chocolates, and to decorate kid’s birthday cakes so elaborately they might do for a small wedding reception.

Greta's Plate

I identify with Aunt Carol in this respect: food is an expression of love. And up until this year, I too brought a sweet gift for all the relatives that I had made in my kitchen… some years I brought homemade jams, others I made little cakes in canning jars. In the years when our kids were really small and making something myself wasn’t happening I brought locally-made gifts like maple sugar cotton candy and maple cream spread. Sensing a theme here? If food can equal love, than I guess sugar can equal Christmas.

Because of this, I always knew the holidays would represent our greatest sugar challenge. This year we are spending them in Michigan with my husband’s extended family, as we do every other year. A good eleven-hour drive from home, this area is a suburban ocean between the city-shores of Toledo and Detroit, and there’s just a lot more of everything here: people, convenience stores, fast food restaurants, chain restaurants, billboards, freeways, parking lots, sirens… coming from our little Vermont town of a thousand residents the contrast can create culture whiplash. Then again, there’s more variety here too: we can’t get authentic Greek or Lebanese or Indian food in Vermont, but we can get it here.

But back to Aunt Carol. Since long-before I ever happened upon the scene, my husband’s family has been getting together to exchange gifts on Christmas Eve. This year Aunt Carol had volunteered to host again so we all arrived in our Christmas coats and fancy shoes at 6:05 on the dot.

Immediately, it was a problem. Greta took one look at the usual spread- cookies on the counter, fudge in a pretty glass basket, local Dietsch’s chocolate samplers open on the sideboard- and quickly came to the conclusion that this was going to be the worst Christmas ever.

Ilsa- by comparison, is easy. She asks, “Can I have this?” and when the inevitable answer is no, she shrugs it off and runs off to go play. It may be that Greta just has a bigger sweet tooth, but more likely I think is the possibility that she has a pre-teenager’s burgeoning need for independence and to make her feelings known by all in the immediate vicinity. She, unlike Ilsa, spent a good portion of her Christmas Eve pouting and making meaningful, tragic faces in my direction.

This Year's Treats

Dinner wasn’t much easier. As she has other years, Aunt Carol had lovingly and graciously provided a buffet for all of us, and, ungrateful wretch that I am, I couldn’t eat most of it. There was store-bought pulled pork and chicken, white and whole-wheat buns, baked beans, applesauce… of course, sugar to one degree or another in all of it. I don’t know if it was intended for our benefit, but I was extremely, extremely grateful for the one large tray of mac and cheese that evening… if not for that we would’ve been stuck eating olives for dinner and I’m pretty sure Greta would’ve gotten enough mileage out of that to extend her extreme pout-fest well into her thirties.

None of the relatives said much about the sugar project, probably because they think I’m loopier than the Cocoa Puffs bird for talking my family into it in the first place. But they all were nice enough to ask about my recent health issues, so I guess they still like me.

And then, thankfully, the present opening began. Greta and Ilsa were fully diverted for the remainder of the evening opening gifts, trying things on, helping the babies and toddlers, and creating a Bionicle masterpiece with cousin Donovan. That sour, Grinchy frown disappeared from Greta’s face, and it was replaced by the happiness of being a kid at Christmas. Thank God.

Granted, eating right next to a plate of forbidden chocolates and cookies on Christmas Eve isn’t ideal. But it was, I think, the biggest challenge we’ve had all year, and we survived it. I’m proud of that- and proud of my family. And profoundly grateful for them. A good way to feel on Christmas, I think.

So what did I bring this year? Sweet things from my kitchen, of course! Over the past few weeks I’ve been experimenting with “quick breads” of all kinds- banana, apple, pumpkin pecan… all made with no fructose; just fruit and good old dextrose. I wonder if anyone will notice.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 88

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Let me tell you- this whole Christmas in a No Sugar household business? It is not for the faint of heart.

But before I begin, I’d just like to issue a formal declaration to all friends and family members: you may not, repeat NOT use the following information as ammunition to forward your argument that I am off my gourd and have been for the last, oh, say, eleven months or so. If you are helpfully wondering if I would like to talk about this, the answer is no. If you make the ill-advised decision to taunt me with quotes from this essay, I promise to sing “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” loudly until you cease and desist. Listening to me sing, as many of you already know, does not promise to be a very pleasant experience. You have been warned.

But… the holidays are coming– and I mean this in the most ominous way possible. Sometimes, it feels like we’ve been in training for the month of December this entire year. Christmas– the mother of all sugar holidays, the most fructose-laden of them all: more than Thanksgiving, which is a limited, one-day-only gluttony, more than Halloween, which focuses almost exclusively on the kids, more than birthdays and Easter and Valentine’s Day combined… As the dozens of mail-order catalogs arriving at our house every day clearly confirm, Christmas, for many of us, is about celebrating the birth of Jesus through a month-long marathon of sweets, treats, cookies and cake.

Greta's Journal

But that’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is the dread that my children are already expressing at the prospect of facing a sweet-restricted Christmas. Sure, we’ve discussed that Christmas itself will be the day we have our “special dessert” for the month, and that otherwise we can use dextrose to make versions of our favorite traditional treats… but on this account my daughter Greta refuses all attempts at consolation.

“Oh help me… I feel so helpless like I have know will or say in anything,” she wrote in her journal tonight. “Like my mom’s & Dad’s say & will com(e)s first and overpowers mine.”

Oof.

Her entry goes on to lay the blame for her situation on David Gillespie, the author of Sweet Poison, from whom I’ve derived so much inspiration. (Sorry David!) As we were getting ready for bed I tried telling her that Mr. Gillespie is actually a very nice man, and remind her that he has six children of his own who also avoid fructose, including one daughter just her age. But Greta isn’t having any of it.

“I hate it! I hate it! I hate it!” she explodes, pounding her fists on her mattress. Her eyes are shining with tears.

Now, you may not be aware of this, but my eleven year old has a bit of a flair for the dramatic. (Perhaps it’s our retribution for naming her Greta- as in Garbo.) But, believe it or not, this is by far the most displeasure she has expressed with our No Sugar Year to date, and I have to admit I was a bit taken aback. Of course, I hate the idea that “my” project is causing them angst, sadness, ridicule at school… but I knew there had to be that side of it, didn’t I? Didn’t I?

While Greta’s outburst worries me, Ilsa worries me more. Ilsa is six. The other day we were buying sandwiches at a local shop when she reached out her hand curiously to touch a bowl of something on the countertop near the coffee carafes. When Greta suddenly warned her “That’s sugar!”, she actually flinched.

Then tonight, as she was using a magazine for a craft project, she showed me an ad for Haagen Daz ice cream. “Mama, I’m glad we’re not keeping this.” she said. “It hurts me.”

Oh. Shit.

“Really, honey?” I stopped what I was doing and looked at her closely.

“Yeah.” She looked at me a little seriously, a little incredulously, as if to say, What, you didn’t know?

SO it’s been a busy night around here tonight! (What with me color coding my Mildred Pierce coat hanger collection and everything…) Directly following the “I hate it” episode, I took a de-e-e-e-e-p breath and asked both girls to look at me from where they sat, half-tucked into their comforters in their parallel beds, each with it’s own sizable coral reef of stuffed-animal life-forms.

“Listen. I want you to know. I know this year has been really, really hard. And I want you to know how much I appreciate the fact that you’ve gone along and done this project with me all year long. And it’s almost over- the really strict part. It’s almost over.” I feel like a broken record, even though I mean it. Is there really nothing I can do to assuage this sadness/anger/pain I have willingly invoked in them? Will words- in which I put such complete faith- really fail me?

Suddenly, as if on cue, Greta raises her index finger in the air, in a dramatic professor “Aha!” pose.

“My First Biography!” she declares with an impish grin that has- at least for the moment- erased her tears. “My Terrible Childhood!”

I smile. Now, that’s more like it.

A Year Of No Sugar: Post 84

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If you had asked me to define “Game Supper” before I moved to Vermont 14 years ago, I probably would’ve guessed a potluck involving Scrabble, or possibly Bridge. Not only was I a “city mouse,” but I had been a devoted vegetarian for over a decade. To me, “game” meant only one thing: Monopoly.

I can imagine how horrified that version of me would’ve been- the me who insisted that our sit-down wedding dinner for one hundred consist entirely of vegetables and fish- to encounter the amazing annual phenomenon that is the local Game Supper.

Lucky for me, I’m a carnivore now. These days our whole family looks forward to enjoying the spoils of the hunt even though we didn’t get up at the crack of dawn to go sit in a cold tree stand sprinkled with deer urine for several hours. Then again, who knows? At the rate we’re going, maybe in another ten years we’ll be doing that too.

Pawlet Game Supper

Every November (read: deer season) each town around here has their own Game Supper benefitting deserving local causes such as the volunteer fire department and the sixth grade annual field trip to Boston. We’ve been to the Pawlet Game Supper for the last few years and the menu is reliable: Moose Meatballs (the whole reason to go), Bear Steak (to say you’ve had it), Chicken and Biscuits (for the very squeamish,) and Venison, Venison, Venison. Venison Stew, Venison Steak, Venison Sausage, and if you’re in luck maybe Gib made his famous Venison Salami- only one piece per customer please, supplies are limited.

Of course there are sides- mashed potatoes and squash- if you have any room left on your plate, which you won’t. Salads, rolls and paper plates filled with cocktail-sized blocks of Vermont cheddar wait on the tables once you’re done running the buffet line. And if you’re still hungry- which you won’t be- and still eating sugar, there’s always the football-field sized dessert table, with slices of apple, lemon merengue and chocolate pie making kids drool from all the way over by the fire exit sign.

But the word on the street was that “Rupert’s Game Supper is better.” So this year it was time to check that one out too. Which is how I came to try beaver. It’s also how I came to spit beaver out into my napkin .0395 seconds later.

Rupert Game Supper

If anyone ever asks you to define what “gamey” tastes like, you should send them to try a nice dish of beaver. One friend remarked that eating beaver is like “eating an oil slick” and I have to say I couldn’t agree more. But I tried it.

Rupert: Ze Menu

Another key difference between Pawlet and Rupert’s suppers is that they wear funny hats at the Rupert Game Supper- antler headbands, chicken hats, sombreros- you name it. Nobody I asked knew why.

This year, however, I had a whole new appreciation for our Game Suppers as the one local event we could attend with confidence in our Year of No Sugar. The distinctions were crystal clear, with one or two exceptions: the meat was on one side of the room, and the sugar was on the other. After all the back handsprings we’ve done to ferret out fructose this year, the clarity of this division was quite comforting.

Which returns me to an increasingly familiar refrain: the idea of going back in time a bit in order to avoid the health impacts our over-processed, over-convenient lifestyle has bestowed upon us. There is a point at which all these hippy-dippy themes- no sugar, no plastics, no pesticides, eat local- start to converge; suddenly we begin to see what it is we’re driving at- what great-grandma used to cook. And much of it looked a lot like the Game Supper.

Although I’m pretty sure Great-Grandma never wore a funny hat.