Year of No Sugar (20 page)

⁴⁶
As a vegetarian-of-some-kind-or-other at that time, I skipped the trip to the butcher.

⁴⁷
During our No-Sugar Year, this meant I carried a lot of Larabars, the ones that are composed entirely of nuts and dried fruit: Apple Pie, Lemon, and Peanut Butter being our favorites. Of course nuts and unsweetened dried fruit always worked for portable snacks, as did the Super Cookies by the brand GoRaw, which have three ingredients: coconut, sesame seeds, and dates.

After the roller coaster of trying to keep everyone on the No-Sugar bandwagon in Italy (It's easy! It's hard!), it was lovely to return to the relative safety and comfort of home with our steadfast and simple rule: one dessert per month.

There will be those who will balk at this, I know, and perhaps with justification. “
How
can you have a Year of No Sugar
with
sugar?” they will ask. “How can you justify even one dessert per month? Does this
truly
count as a No-Sugar Year then?”

As I've mentioned, we're a
fairly
normal family. If this yearlong project had been a snap, then that would have been an entirely different book. (Maybe even a very short book: “We didn't eat any sugar. It was easy. The end.”) I knew I'd never keep my hungry family of four on board a project of this magnitude without something,
something
to look forward to. “Don't worry, honey, you can have a birthday cake
next
year!” simply wasn't going to cut it, and for all my sugar bashing, I wasn't ready to do that to my kids as a parent, either. None of us was at all sure we could truly make it through this year, but if we knew we had just one special treat we could
look forward to every other fortnight, it might just make the difference between success and giving up entirely.

Also, I was intrigued. I wanted to get back to a time, not so very long ago, when having dessert indicated a truly special occasion. As the story goes, the hot fudge sundae was so named because you could only order it on
Sunday
. (What? You mean, I can't have it on a Tuesday at 2 a.m.? How un-American is
that
?)

Of course, as it turned out, there was the aforementioned yet unforeseen benefit of the “sugar check-in” to see how our tongues and the rest of our bodies' reactions to fructose were changing over time. That turned out to be an intriguing saga in and of itself.

And lastly, I was just plain curious: what
would
we choose if we could only have twelve desserts in a year? What would be the best of the best? The desserts you'd want to take with you to that proverbial dessert island? The things
worth
, you know, consuming a little poison for?

_______

_______

It's interesting to see how the dessert parade played out—much differently, I think, than if we had sat down and planned it all in advance. Knowing me, I would have attempted a fairer cross-section of the dessert spectrum and would certainly not have allowed such a preponderance of pies, for example.

Then again, we did manage to get at least one instance of
several different dessert types. In addition to the usual suspects of cake and pie, there were cookies, pudding (chocolate mousse), and ice cream (peach gelato), and even a dessert beverage in the form of the root beer float. We never repeated a dessert (except that technically, the Turning-Six Chocolate Cupcakes and the Sour Milk Chocolate Cake were made from the same basic cake recipe), and everyone got to pick a dessert
all by themselves
at least once.

Nine of the desserts were homemade, seven of which were made by me. My friend Katrina, horrified at the thought I might make my own birthday dessert, very generously made the peanut butter pie for me, and who better to make Grandma Sharon's Christmas cookies than Grandma Sharon? This left only three desserts that were store bought, representing a spectrum of sources: root beer floats from a fast food purveyor (horrors!), peach gelato from a restaurant, and the Mardi Gras birthday cake from a bakery. I feel like it's about time to make up a bar graph and calculate some percentages, but I'll attempt to restrain myself.

Instead, here are a few Monthly Treat Highlights:

Certainly, I was the most apprehensive about the
first
month's dessert, not just because it was the very first one, but more importantly because it was Ilsa's birthday in January, and I was pretty sure I'd never forgive myself if I screwed up something as important as my six-year-old's birthday cake. She's not going to turn six
again
, you know!

But really, what was there to mess up? I mean, Ilsa gets to pick the dessert—that one, special, once-per-month deal—I make it, everyone eats it, end of story! What's so nerve-wracking about
that
? Here was my problem—what we'd traditionally done for kid birthdays in our house is to have
two
celebratory desserts: one for the family party on the actual “real” birthday, followed by the “kids'” dessert at the kids' party that inevitably followed on a weekend.

Mind you, we don't even get
into
bringing cupcakes in for the class at school…nor do we put candy in goody bags for party guests to bring home. And then there's the fact that one
can go to a kid's birthday party and have a meal consisting of pizza with sugar in the crust, sugar in the tomato sauce, and a big glass of sugar to drink, by which I mean fruit juice. By the time we get to the overt sugar of dessert, we parents often don't realize how much sugar they've
already had
. To sum up? Kids' birthday parties = sugar minefield.

But back to my problem: what
were
we going to do? Here we were, just beginning our project, on the veritable cusp of our No-Sugar Year, and already I was feeling pressure to compromise in the name of Not Being a Crappy Mom. Because this was only
two weeks
into the project, I had yet to conduct my infamous date-cookie experiments yet. I had yet to discover David Gillespie's recipe website or the wonders of dextrose. We
couldn't
have two January desserts, and we couldn't
not
serve dessert at the kids' party, so
what
were we going to have on Ilsa's actual sixth birthday? Unsweetened applesauce? Wouldn't the candles sink?

Then I had an idea. We would capitalize on the one No-Sugar dessert we had in our arsenal at that early point: frozen banana ice cream.

Following our traditional birthday meal of English muffin pizzas (after digging up alternative, no-sugar brands of English muffins and marinara sauce, of course) paired with some sautéed spinach, we stuck a candle in what I fervently hoped would be a delicious grand finale: banana splits: bananas halved, banana ice cream, topped with strawberries soaked in balsamic vinegar, whipped cream (minus the called-for sugar), and a fresh cherry on top. P.S.
No added sugar.
⁴⁸

Sure, it looked pretty decadent, but I was petrified. What if it was awful? What if it tasted like wallpaper paste? I took a bite. Hey—wow! Happily, the girls were exclaiming as they ate—the banana ice cream was the key—perfect and sweet all on its own, creamy like the best soft-serve, and the cream and strawberries made it just the right amount more colorful and complex. I sighed a
huge
sigh of relief, and I began to think maybe, just
maybe
we'd make it through this project after all.

I know what you're wondering. Did I tell her? Did I tell Ilsa that her special birthday dessert had no
actual
added sugar in it?
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Just to add to my fret list, I worried on this account too. I am not a fan of lying to my kids and avoid it at
almost
any cost. I can truthfully say I did
not
lie to Ilsa about her birthday dessert. Thankfully, she never asked.

Next up? Valentine's Day. To mark the occasion, our family's agreed-upon confection would be…chocolate mousse. Now, I had never made chocolate mousse before, but I have this unfortunate tendency to be ambitious in the kitchen at all the wrong moments. (The President is coming to dinner? Why not try grinding our own sausage for the occasion?) And because this was only our second dessert of the year, I was still in the “let's keep everyone on board!” mode—anxious to make our monthly treats fascinating enough to make everyone forget about sugar for the next four weeks. But I worried: What if it turned out deflated? Or did whatever it is that goes wrong with
mousse
? As it turned out, what was memorable
about the chocolate mousse wasn't the night we had it, but rather the night we were
supposed
to have it.

That Valentine's Day had been a looong day. After schlepping to BJ's Wholesale to push around a shopping cart larger than a Volkswagen and read ingredients with a magnifying glass, I came back home to unload, put away, turn around, and troop back off to school and lead a two-hour after-school activity. Finally, late that afternoon, the girls and I, all exhausted, set out to locate and purchase the only chocolate mousse ingredient my pantry lacked: heavy cream.

Dutchie's? Closed Mondays. Sheldon's? 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, and I was going to enjoy it, no matter how tired I was.

That was when 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
.” What??

I stopped.

I wilted.

The dish mountain that, of late, had been growing rather ominously in the sink now 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 its 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 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,
⁵⁰
but I explained to them that—project or no project—there is
only so much that Mommy can do.
Remind me to write that on my forehead, will you?

I think I may have mentioned that I'm an admitted, and only semireformed, control freak. When my friend Miles told me that she didn't just want to
make
the floral centerpieces for her own wedding, but she wanted to grow the flowers first
from seed
,
pick them
, and
then dry them
before arranging them in baskets (which I would not have put past her to have woven herself while hanging upside-down blindfolded) did
I
tell her she was crazy? No, I
completely
understood.
That's
the kind of control freak I can be.

So when the opportunity arises for me to not only make a pie from scratch, but to pick, pit, wash, and freeze the fruit myself in preparation for said pie, my first thought is not
What a lot of work!
but rather
Ooo! Where do I sign up?

Take our family's favorite sour cherry pie. Every year in June, we know it's time to call Hick's Orchard in Granville, New York, and find out if the cherries are ready for picking. This tradition began on a Father's Day weekend many years ago when we were driving around with Steve's parents, and we stopped at the orchard on a whim. We picked a flat of the luscious red fruit, and when I got home, I found a recipe for cherry pie in my ever-reliable, broken-spined
Joy of Cooking
. We have been utterly
obsessed
with sour cherries ever since.

They're a funny thing to be obsessed with, since there's not all that much you can actually
do
with sour cherries. You can make a kick-ass pie, and you can make the Best Jam Ever, and…and…that seems to be it. That really is enough, though. In fact, every year we seem to get greedier, bringing home yet another flat piled high with the sweet-sour smelling orbs that require pitting
immediately
, because within hours of picking, they will begin to age, wrinkle, and develop icky brown-beige spots. Thus, cherry picking is an all-day event: picking is easy; pitting is hard. Well, not
hard
, but long, boring, and sticky-juice-running-down-your-forearms
annoying
when you get right down to it.