Year of No Sugar (8 page)

I sat in watery-eyed silence and longingly, resentfully
watched the guests at my table eat their desserts.
How
could
they?
I wondered with my pregnant-lady brain. I stopped just shy of sending my husband to announce from the balcony that there was a pregnant lady emergency and would some kind soul be willing to donate their Napoleon to a good cause?

I kid you not, I have
never
cared about a piece of food in my life as much as that untouchable Napoleon. So much of one's pregnancy is spent feeling hungry for some unnameable something that when you actually find the thing that will satisfy that hunger, it is as if the clouds have parted and the heavenly choir is singing. Then to have it snatched away? It was almost more than my hormone-addled brain could take. I was on the verge of tears in the car on the way home. I couldn't stop thinking about how deprived I felt, how I should've taken dessert with me to the bathroom, how unfair it was for everyone to have dessert but me. At that moment, it seemed as if there was a big hole in my middle that would remain hungry and incomplete—forever. All I can say is that those guests were lucky I wasn't armed.

Of course, looking back it all seems so ridiculous. Crying over a pastry? I have no idea what actual hunger really feels like, the kind that comes from genuine deprivation, and for that I am supremely grateful. At the risk of repeating myself, I know it's because our family is lucky enough to have enough food on a daily basis that we could make the privileged decision to carry out an experiment such as a sugarless year in the first place. Nobody in our family expects a medal for going without sugar cookies or chocolate bars for a year—but in this land of plenty, it is worth noting once again the amazing power food and our brain exert over us, expertly
tricking us into thinking we
need
that chocolate bar, that can of pop, that Napoleon.

I'm here to tell you that despite everything my brain was telling me that day, I—and the baby in my belly that would one day be Greta—survived fine without it. And we would survive this year too—no violin music necessary, thank you.

That being said, no one in our family had interest in being masochistic for a year either. If we could find ways to fill that little empty spot in our gut, fool our brain chemistry into thinking we'd
had
a sugar treat, when in fact we had not, why not? More than that, it was a matter of family morale and my own personal sanity. The kids didn't want to hear me paraphrasing comic book philosophy: “with great food variety comes great responsibility.”
²²
They wanted what every American kid wants: Popsicles. Cookies. Ice cream.

Lucky for us, we had inherited from Steve's father both a Champion juicer machine
and
the World's Shortest Ice Cream Recipe, which not only contains no added sugar, but also contains only one ingredient: bananas. So here it is: peel bananas, freeze on a cookie sheet, run them through the juicer. Voilà! Soft-serve banana ice cream!

_______

_______

In the early days of our Year of No Sugar, Bill Schaub's banana ice cream became our go-to lifesaver-recipe; we had it at least once a week. Its only drawback being—like so many things we would cook, make, and bake in our year—it takes
time
. One night we were SO proud and excited about our first No Sugar dessert that we tried to make it spontaneously for a friend and her kids. The consequence of not quite enough freezer time, however, ended up being that our dessert was more akin to banana
pudding
than ice cream…still, our family all ate our bowls up with vigor. Our friend and her kids, however—who apparently weren't as sugar-starved as we were—seemed less than impressed.

Still. If we were going to last a whole year without
going
bananas, we needed more than just one dessert. Clearly, the time had come to improvise. There was only one problem. I've never been very good at improvising. I am, I'm afraid, heartbreakingly literal in some ways—
especially
when it comes to food.

Just ask Katrina. She's the friend who made me realize it was perhaps—just
perhaps
—a teensy bit
rigid
to time the macaroni cooking to the second, just to make a box of Annie's Mac & Cheese (in point of fact, she burst out laughing). Have I made this mom-staple three thousand times? Yes. No matter. It took an extreme force of will to get me to dump the pasta out a few seconds early, and it would plainly never have occurred to me to dump the milk in
unmeasured
. Gasp!

In fact, up until this particular year, I had been known not to make a recipe at all for lack of a single, tangential ingredient, such as half a teaspoon of tarragon. After all, I reasoned, that might
make
the dish! And why go through all the effort to make something not as good as it is supposed to be? (Perhaps this was residual blowback from that far-off mud cake I had made as a kid without that half-teaspoon of baking powder.)

But on the No-Sugar Project, my improvising wings were forced to take flight, for better or worse. It started with me bravely leaving out a teaspoon of table sugar here, a tablespoon of honey there. And so far everything had been fine! Really!
Surprisingly
so. I baked baguettes
without
three-fourths of a teaspoon of sugar, cheddar cheese soup
without
Worcestershire sauce (couldn't find a no-sugar version), and sweet potato biscuits
without
two tablespoons sugar. I was on a roll.

So I tried making an apricot bar recipe that we had loved in the past, but omitting the three-quarters of a cup of brown sugar called for in the butter and flour crust. Now three-quarters of a cup is a
lot
more than a tablespoon, and I realized some sort of replacement would be necessary to round out the crust and provide it with the correct density and stick-together-y-ness. I ended up trying three-quarters of a cup mushed banana. I felt very adventurous and confident we'd end up with an inedible mess.

Yet, amazingly, the apricot bars were not just edible; they were actually
good
! Turns out, the banana pulp provided just the right amount of stickiness to form a proper crust and emitted a delicious, sweet smell while baking. Of course, the bars weren't nearly as sweet as before, but they
were
sweet, primarily due to the cooked apricot filling. They failed to
brown nicely on the top, but this problem was solved down the road with the addition of egg to the crust ingredients.

So far, I had yet to hack any failed experiments into the trash with an ice pick. I was astounded. Perhaps there was something
to
this winging-it approach.

I found other recipes online and continued experimenting; there was a nice raisin and apple cookie that could be a little awkwardly concocted by sautéing the fruit then adding it to the dry ingredients, and chilling it in the fridge overnight before baking. After weeks of thinking wistfully of treats gone by, I was ecstatic to simply
eat a cookie
again, although I secretly worried some aspect of the “banana pudding effect” might still be at work, to wit: it only tastes good to us because we were—to put it nicely—desperate.

No matter. I was coming to realize that treats are in the eye of the beholder. Emboldened by my first few attempts, I began altering cookie recipes that had been long-held favorites in our house: peanut butter, oatmeal raisin, Nestle Toll House chocolate chip. I tried to develop a system of sorts, a kind of No-Sugar Conversion Chart: in place of white sugar, I would use an equivalent amount of mashed banana; in place of brown sugar, that amount of chopped dates; and in place of chocolate chips, carob chips. (It wouldn't be until much later in the year that I would realize carob too was, in fact, off the table for us, being a processed sweetener itself. It would not be our first mistake, and certainly was not our last.) These experiments were simultaneously heartening and disappointing. On the one hand, they all resulted in solid, reliable, sweet, no-sugar cookies. I brought them to knitting night and potlucks, offered them to our friend's children. Even the non-sugar-starved agreed—they were pretty good cookies.

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.) The big problem with my No-Sugar Conversion Chart, however, was this: everything came out
the same
—tasting like bananas and dates. The peanut butter cookies tasted like bananas and dates. The oatmeal raisin and the carob chip? Like bananas and dates. Sure, they were serviceable recipes, but due to the fact that my sweetening agents had some rather loud tastes of their own to express (BANANA! DATE!), they only really made
one
cookie.

Nevertheless it was really,
really
nice to be able to put a cookie in each of our kid's lunches in the morning; like so many times in the past when I had sent sugar desserts, I felt like I was sending them a little edible love note. I realized sugar wasn't the only thing I felt starved of—it was also the very concept of being able to provide a treat as a sign of affection. After all, if sugar is used as a symbol of affection (which it surely is—just ask the people who sell heart-shaped boxes of candy), then what does that make the lady who imposes on her family a Year of No Sugar? The Anti-Mommy? The culinary equivalent of Joan Crawford? The Grinch?

As if this weren't bad enough, in abstaining from sugar, we were, naturally, going to have to stay away from one of the key “crops” of our many neighbors: maple syrup. We live in Vermont, after all, famous to the world for pretty much three things: fall foliage, straight-shooting but excitable presidential candidates, and maple syrup. Thus, not only were we abandoning
love
in the form of sugar, we were also abandoning
some very real component of local pride or patriotism that took the form of sugar.

If you don't live here, I think it's hard to fully appreciate the impact that maple syrup, and its related products—maple (“Indian”) sugar, maple sugar candy, maple cream, maple creemies (soft-serve ice cream), maple cotton candy, maple roasted nuts, and so on—have on the culture, economy, and collective unconscious of Vermont. Just look at our state quarter: a guy straight out of Vermont-stereotype casting, sporting a plaid jacket and sugaring with buckets the old-fashioned way. (Although metal sap buckets are still used here and there, the preferred modern method involves a much less bucolic plastic sap line, which runs from tree to tree. Come springtime, you'll see them materialize on trees like quick-climbing vines.)

Now here is some surprising advice, coming from me: if you've never had maple syrup fresh, by which I mean straight out of the boiling-down process, this is an experience you must try to have in your lifetime, because there is no other taste in the world like it. Unless you are attempting your own Year of No Sugar, I see no real obstacles for you, save getting through the almost-as-famous Vermont mud in springtime. There is some sort of magic that is happening just then, as the water is evaporated out of the sap slowly, hovered over for hours in the warmth of the sugarhouse, that you can actually taste at no other time than right then. Likely, you will have wind-burned cheeks and be stamping your slushy shoes when someone hands you a Dixie cup containing a tablespoon or two of warm, pure gold. Warning: your taste buds may very well be spoiled forever.

You may never even want to have regular maple syrup
again. All things considered, having one tablespoon of that just-born manna might be a great trade-off for all those metal gallons we might otherwise go through. In fact (and I'm going to speak
very
quietly now, so my fellow Vermonters won't hear me), after Steve devised a new-and-improved pancake recipe employing coconut and (what else?) bananas, we found we could enjoy no-syrup pancakes very well, and without that “maple-syrup crash” half an hour later.

It's tough though. I'm a stickler for appreciating culture, heritage, history. Of all the sugars on our list, maple sugar might well be the most appealing from a romantic and historical point of view. It's hard to be nostalgic about sugar extracted by machines from beets or corn. But extracting maple sap from the shady trees that dot our state is something almost anyone can do with a proper hammer and tin bucket. This appeals, of course, not only to history buffs who see continuity stretching back even to the Native Americans, but also to the do-it-yourself mentality that is so entrenched throughout New England.

We know people who sugar every year for fun, and those who do so for serious profit. We know people with sleek, modern sap boilers and those whose impossible, heaving contraptions look as if they belong in the Middle Ages. We have sat in on lengthy discussions of wood fire versus propane heating and whether or not you can properly cook a batch down on your stove without ending up with a flypaper-wall kitchen and whether you can taste the difference when some of the trees happen to grow just over the line in (gasp!) New York. We know people who use no sweetener besides maple syrup—in their coffee, their baking, in their glazed carrots and sweet potatoes.

Believe me when I say, maple syrup is waaaaaaay beyond a thing to put on your pancakes around here. It's practically a religion.

Which makes me…? Once again, the bad guy? If this were
Star Wars
, would I be the creepy old guy in the black hood in desperate need of a facial and some eye drops?