Year of No Sugar (32 page)

But I have relaxed considerably. I don't have to make the agonizing choice to have nitrates instead of sugar in my bacon, or to buy the kids potato chips instead of whole-grain muffins. I can be reasonable and weigh one poison against another, choosing the lesser of all present evils. I still buy and use dextrose, but by the same token if a recipe calls for one tablespoon of sugar, I may very well put it in. Or not. Most of all, I find we avoid the mindless sugar consumption—the crappy store-bought sheet birthday cake, the supermarket cookies someone puts out at the board meeting, even homemade stuff I know I won't
really
love. We save actual sugar for the “worth it” stuff, stuff that is truly meaningful—for birthdays, at special occasions, that wonderful piece of chocolate after a meal. Who knows? Maybe a perfect, shining piece of Napoleon will one day come my way. If it does, I don't want to be sated with Cocoa Puffs and Snapple—I want to be
ready
.

Meanwhile, we've made our way into the theater, and we're seated in the ridiculously plush reclining theater seats and watch as the room darkens. The screen illuminates a scene intended to make us feel we are on a roller coaster: the virtual car the audience is in rides disembodied in space; it ascends into a star-filled night, dropping dramatically, and whips around corners to be abruptly confronted with Stonehenge-scale versions of items available at the concession stand: Giant Cokes! Living-Room-Size Boxes of Sour Patch Kids! Gargantuan Packages of Junior Mints!

Yep
, I think.
Those folks on the roller coaster really
are
us
.

We would never have made it through our Year of No Sugar without a few key recipes that came to the rescue time and time again. Fortunately, I have an embarrassingly large cookbook collection, so when we were in need of, say, a no-sugar tomato sauce, I turned to my most dog-eared volumes for a recipe I could warp and mangle to meet our needs. Sometimes this was surprisingly easy. Other times it took a little bit more finagling. I offer this section not so much to claim any genius as a chef—(Yes!! I invented hummus! That was
me
!!)—but rather as one more piece that fills in the picture puzzle of our year.

A few months in, we were delighted to discover David Gillespie's subscription website
howmuchsugar.com
, which is filled with no-sugar recipes, most of which David credits his wife, Lizzie, with devising. I personally think Lizzie should have her own cookbook, reality cooking show, and James-Beard-themed bouncy house. Her recipes are reliable, delicious, and so well-crafted that no one I served them to ever suspected for a moment that they were enjoying a dessert that lacked sugar. Two of my favorites, Coconut Cake and No Sugar Shortbread, are reprinted here by permission.

Some recipes simply come from my bedraggled binder of ripped-out magazine pages, Internet tidbits, and handwritten family favorites. In these cases, I have altered directions here and there to reflect how
I
make them. I hope you will adjust them too, to find what works best in your house.

Even if you aren't going fructose free, every little bit we can get away from added sugar—every sandwich we can eat without sugar-containing mayonnaise, sugar-glazed cold cuts, and sugar-fortified bread—is some kind of progress. Every cookie we eat that
doesn't
contain granulated sugar, fruit juice, molasses,
or
honey, it all helps by putting just that much less toxin in our bodies. And who knows? We may even start to
like
it. You never know.

Kids love snacks, but snack time can be difficult on No Sugar: granola bars, vegetables with store-bought ranch dressing, fruited yogurts and juice are common “healthy” options that all get ruled out. To solve this, for after-school snacks, we alternated between big bowls of homemade hummus with vegetables, fresh fruit and cheese, and fresh-popped popcorn (sprinkled with olive oil or butter and nutritional yeast).

Puree all ingredients above in a food processor until smooth. Add between 1 and 2 tablespoons water and continue to puree until you reach a nice, creamy consistency. Put in a bowl for serving with vegetables or crackers. (Note: Crackers can be unexpectedly dangerous for the sugar abstaining, but we favored Triscuits—the original plain ones—which have no sugar and a wonderfully short list of ingredients as well.)

Optional:
To up the “pretty” factor, drizzle with olive oil and/or sprinkle with a dash or two paprika. In my house, the bowl is usually licked clean before I get to this part.

Tomato sauce is a perfect example of a store-bought product that virtually
always
contains sugar, yet is very simple and cheaper to make at home without sugar
and
it will taste better to boot. This recipe makes about 4 cups of sauce, which can be used in everything from lasagna to soup.

Cook oil and garlic in a medium saucepan over medium heat until it smells good, but before the garlic begins to brown. Stir in all the tomatoes with their juice. Let simmer until thickened, between 15 and 20 minutes.

The main trick to avoiding sugar in your salad dressing is not to buy the premade stuff at the store. In Italy, I loved that they
always
had oil and vinegar, salt and pepper on the table—voilà! Salad dressing. Our friend Fabrizio once showed us the proper order for dressing one's salad: olive oil first, then salt and pepper, and finally drizzle the vinegar on top. There was a logic to it that I can't quite recall: Was it that the oil protected the lettuce leaves from the vinegar's acidity? That the vinegar dissolved the salt? Whatever the rationale, he was right—it always tastes best in this order.

In place of vinegar, a delicious alternative I used often at home is a healthy dose of fresh-squeezed lemon juice.

Store-bought sandwich bread is another item that is nearly
impossible
to find without sugar. If you aren't lucky enough to have a
real
baker in your neighborhood—one who makes bread from ingredients you can count on one hand—this is an easy-to-make standby that I bake about once per week. I got this recipe, handwritten, from our friend Randy, the one who raises 52 chickens every year. (I substituted barley malt syrup for the originally called-for honey.)

In bowl of mixer, put the cup of oats. Pour boiling water over oats and let sit one hour.

At one hour, sprinkle the yeast, salt, and olive oil on top. Add the barley malt syrup and mix with dough hook. Stir in whole-wheat flour. Stir in 2 cups of all-purpose flour. Then stir in 2 more cups of all-purpose flour, 1/2 cup at a time, mixing in between each addition.

Turn dough out onto a floured surface for kneading. Use final cup of flour to add to dough whenever it gets sticky. Knead for five full minutes, until dough has absorbed most of the final cup of flour and feels smooth. Place in a bowl and allow to rise for one hour.

Butter two loaf pans and heat oven to 350°F. After the hour has passed, turn dough onto counter, cut in half, and place each half in a bread pan. Allow to rise another 30 minutes.

Bake at 350°F for 33 minutes. Remove bread from oven and allow to sit five minutes before turning loaves out and letting cool on a rack.

Another tough one: Mayonnaise. You just
can't
find No-Sugar Mayo at the store, but we certainly weren't prepared to go a whole year without it. I was intimidated. Wasn't homemade mayonnaise one of those things you had to be a real
chef
to make? Not so. If you have a Cuisinart, you will be amazed at how easy it is.

Place all ingredients except oil in food processor. Process 15 seconds. With the motor running, add the oil in a consistent stream. (If you are using a Cuisinart, there is a hole in the white plastic plunger designed just for the purpose of funneling in oil at a nice steady pace so your mayo turns out perfect.)

Fresh, homemade mayonnaise lasts about three days.

My earliest experiments with No-Sugar Baking all involved dried apricots, dates, and bananas. This got old pretty quickly, with everything starting to taste the same. These bars, however, by far stood out as the best of the bunch. They're sweet, cakey, and great for hearty snacks or lunchboxes.

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Place dates, apricots, lemon juice, and water in a saucepan. Cook on low heat—covered and stirring occasionally—for 10 minutes. Remove from heat and set aside.

In a bowl, cream together the butter and dextrose. Add egg and continue to mix. Stir in salt, flour, and baking soda. Finally, add the oats and mix with your hands. Press two-thirds of the crumbly dough into a greased 8- or 9-inch square baking pan. Spread fruit mixture over the dough. Take remaining dough and crumble over the top. Bake for 30 minutes. Cool in pan; cut into bars.

This is my dad's all-time favorite cake, the one I made for his birthday in August—just slightly modified to use dextrose powder instead of sugar. (It goes very nicely with the cream cheese frosting in the following Coconut Cake recipe, but you'll want to make a double batch.)

Soak poppy seeds in milk for one hour.

Heat oven to 375°F. Grease and flour two 8-inch cake pans. Cream butter then gradually add dextrose until fluffy. Add the milk and poppy seed combination. Add vanilla. Stir until evenly mixed. Sift dry ingredients together and then stir into the liquid ingredients. Mix until smooth. Carefully fold in the stiff beaten egg whites.

Pour batter into two cake pans equally. Bake in 375°F oven 20 to 25 minutes. Cool in pans 10 minutes and then remove.

Vermont people love potlucks. LOVE them. And after discovering this cake, I took it to
every
potluck we were invited to. My idea was twofold: one, provide the only dessert my family could eat at the event (and head off any temptation otherwise) and two, take advantage of the anonymity of the potluck buffet to do some market research:
Would
anyone else eat it?
Could
it hold its ground against actual sugar desserts? Without fail, I returned home from each event with a
very
empty platter—not a crumb remained. Once, this cake went so fast that my kids didn't even
get
any and I had to promise I'd make another one when we got home!

Both the cake and icing come from David and Lizzie Gillespie's
howmuchsugar.com
.

Heat oven to 325°F. Soak the coconut in 1/2 cup of the milk for one hour.

Cream the butter and dextrose together until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, one at a time. Beat in the vanilla. Gradually add in the coconut mix.

Sift flour and baking powder together. Add half of the
flour to the butter mixture and mix only until combined. (It's important not to over-mix.) Add last 1/4 cup of milk. Add last half of flour. Pour into a buttered, square baking pan.

Cook in the oven for 50 to 60 minutes. Let sit for 5 to 10 minutes before turning out onto cooling rack.

Beat cream cheese and butter until light and fluffy. Gradually beat in the dextrose until smooth. The consistency should remind you of peanut butter—if it is too thick, add a tablespoon or two of hot water. When cake is done cooling, frost cake on all sides.

Another treasured recipe from David and Lizzie Gillespie's
howmuchsugar.com
, and it's excellent for snack time and dessert time alike.