Year of No Sugar (33 page)

Heat oven to 300°F. Sift flour, rice flour, and dextrose together. Rub in the butter and then mix/knead into a smooth paste. Press into a single, flat layer, about 1/4 inch in thickness, in a buttered casserole dish or rimmed cookie sheet. Prick with a fork in regular patterns.

Bake for 45 to 60 minutes, until coloring slightly. Remove from oven and cut while still warm. Shortbread will harden as it cools.

Pancakes are a BIG favorite in our house. We eat them pretty much every weekend, and if there are leftovers, I refrigerate them (or freeze them with a piece of wax or parchment paper between each one) so we can heat them in the toaster oven on a school morning during the week. Using banana and coconut is just one way of upping the sweetness, but you could try any number of different added-fruit combinations.

Whisk together flour, dextrose, baking powder, baking soda, powdered buttermilk, and salt in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, whisk together egg, melted and cooled butter, and water. Add to these wet ingredients the mashed banana and shredded coconut. Whisk the egg and butter mixture into the dry ingredients until mixture is just incorporated. Don't overmix; a few lumps should remain.

Heat a skillet over medium heat and use small amount (1 tablespoon) of butter or canola oil to cook the cakes and add more as you go as needed. Use a 1/4 cup measure to scoop batter onto hot skillet. Cook until bubbles begin to appear and then flip pancakes, cooking until they are nice and golden brown.

We made a
lot
of cookies this year in an attempt to curtail our collective family sweet tooth. This recipe got the biggest raves of them all, from kids and grown-ups alike. Be sure to make them nice and big!

Heat oven to 325°F. Whisk together in a small bowl the flour, baking powder, salt, and nutmeg.

In an electric mixer, beat together the butter and dextrose on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 4 to 5 minutes. Beat in the eggs one at a time until combined, about 30 seconds, scraping down sides as needed. Reduce mixer speed to low and slowly mix in flour mixture until combined. By hand, mix in oats, apricots, and raisins.

Working with 1/4 cup dough at a time, roll dough into balls and lay on parchment-covered baking sheets (I use a Silpat), spacing them about 2 1/2 inches apart. (I get about six cookies per cookie sheet.) Flatten cookie tops with your palm.

Bake until the tops of the cookies are lightly golden, but
the centers are still soft and puffy, 22 to 25 minutes, making sure to rotate and switch baking sheets halfway through. Let cookies cool on baking sheet for 10 minutes, then serve warm or transfer to a wire rack to let cool completely.

This recipe was the Very Best No-Sugar Brownie after we tried several variations—we brought these to Greta's fifth grade class and they didn't leave a one uneaten. We enjoyed them most with carob chips until we realized carob was yet another processed sugar (whoops!). Anyway, they're great without chips too, and of course, you could always add some toasted nuts or maybe even raisins.

Preheat oven to 350°F. Lightly grease a 9-by-13-inch pan.

Melt butter over low heat, then add dextrose and stir to combine. Crack four eggs into a bowl and beat them with the cocoa, salt, baking powder, and vanilla. Add the hot butter mixture and stir until smooth. Add the flour, and stir until smooth. Spoon batter into greased pan.

Bake for 35 to 40 minutes. Remove from oven and let pan cool on a rack before cutting and serving.

Once, in an effort to assuage some tears from one of my children who had missed a birthday-bread-making-Martha-Day, Martha gave me a copy of the recipe…and it is one of my treasured possessions. It's one of those wonderfully vague recipes that assumes you know how long to knead the dough by the feel of it and how to tell when your bread is done by the look of it. Like most bread recipes, it called for a few tablespoons of either sugar or honey, but I substituted dextrose here, which I have found works equally well in bread dough.

Add yeast and dextrose to the warm water and let stand 5 minutes. Add salt, oil, and flour a little at a time until you can work the dough with your hands. If sticky, add more flour. Knead.

Roll into ball shapes, letters, snakes, etc. To stick pieces together, brush with a little bit of water. Place on a cookie sheet and let rise 10 to 20 minutes. Bake at 350°F for 20 to 30 minutes, depending on the size of your shapes.

And for the Throwing-Caution-to-the-Wind crowd…

A small number of our One Per Month Treat Desserts we enjoyed during our Year of No Sugar were
not
made by us at home. Others came from my favorite cookbooks, which I detail at the end of this section for those who are curious.

The three recipes listed below are the ones that are unique to me and our family—the kind you have tucked away on a stained index card in God Knows Whose handwriting and calling for weird things like hot water with baking soda dissolved into it. I treasure them, even as the called-for hunks of Crisco and mountains of powdered sugar now make me cringe. Nowadays I modify all my dessert recipes to include either no sugar or significantly less sugar, my favorite compromise being to substitute exactly
half
the sugar with dextrose. But here they are in their original form, as I made them on our monthly dessert days.

(January/April) (aka Ilsa's-Turning-Six Chocolate Cupcakes/Greta's Eleventh Birthday Cake)

Heat oven to 350°F. Butter two 8-inch cake pans, cover bottoms with waxed paper cut to fit, butter and flour the wax paper.

In a mixer, cream shortening. Add vanilla, sugar a little at a time, cocoa, and eggs. Add sour milk and mix. Sift flour and salt together; add gradually to batter and mix. Lastly, add the hot water with baking soda, mix. Pour into two cake pans, dividing evenly.

Bake at 350°F for 30 to 35 minutes, until the cake begins to pull away from the sides of the pan. Cool on racks before removing from pans. Cool completely before icing.

(enough for one 8-inch two-layer cake)

With a mixer on slow speed, combine all ingredients. Increase to moderate speed and beat until smooth. If frosting looks too thin, add more sugar to thicken.

(May)

Cut the stick of butter into 8 tablespoons. Put all the ingredients except ice water in work bowl of a Cuisinart. Process 5 to 10 seconds.

With machine running, pour ice water gradually through the feed tube in a slow stream. You may not need to use all the water. Watch the dough, and when it is the right consistency, it will form a ball. You will need two batches of this dough for the rhubarb pie: one for the shell and one for the top crust.

Heat oven to 450°F. Roll one batch of the crust dough out, place in a 9-inch pie pan.

Sift together the sugar, flour, and nutmeg. With a fork or pastry blender, work in the tablespoon of butter as thoroughly as possible. In a separate bowl, beat the two eggs, then add to mixture.

In bottom of pie pan, place rhubarb on the crust, and pour egg mixture over the rhubarb. Cover with either a flat or lattice crust, remembering to add vents if using a flat top. Brush all pastry tops with milk or cream. Sprinkle all surfaces with sugar.

Bake at 450°F for 10 minutes. (At this point, I like to put a crust protector or a layer of tin foil over the top of the pie in order to prevent the highest parts of crust from getting overly done.) Reduce temperature to 350°F and bake 40 minutes more, or until pastry is browned.

(December)

Heat oven to 375°F.

Cream butter and sugar together. Add eggs and vanilla; beat until light and fluffy. Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt, and stir into batter. Chill dough thoroughly.

Roll dough out 1/8 inch thick (the thickness is key!) and use cookie cutters to make shapes. Bake 8 to 10 minutes or until just
faintly
beginning to brown at the edges. Cool on racks. Decorate with icing or sprinkles as desired.

Chocolate Mousse
(February) and
Pumpkin Pie with Whipped Cream
(November) came from
America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook
.

Oh-My-God Sour Cherry Pie
(March) came from
The Joy of Cooking
by Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker.

Emeril's Banana Cream Pie
(September) came from
Emeril's New New Orleans Cooking
by Emeril Lagasse, but using the pastry cream from
Martha Stewart's Baking Handbook
.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie
(October) came from
www.evilchefmom.com
.

 

⁶⁷
This pie crust comes from a tattered scrap of paper in my recipe collection. It's the only pie crust I ever use—very easy, and I always get compliments on it. It works equally well with dextrose substituting for sugar.

So one day, back in 2010, a very dangerous thing happened. I had this
idea
—which was the beginning of a long journey that ends with this page, more or less. First of all, I have to thank my daughters, Greta and Ilsa, who surprised, amazed, and inspired me, even while I quietly fretted I was ruining their lives. Now that a little time has passed, I have greater confidence that, in fact, our Year of No Sugar will be merely added to the list of “crazy things Mom made us do,” which is likely to be very long, indeed.

I have to thank my friend Katrina Farrell, who I will always love for the fact that, when I told her about my idea of a No-Sugar Year, immediately volunteered to have her whole family do it right along with us. (Alas, being simultaneously gluten-free
and
sugar-free might just be harder than attempting to juggle feral cats. It was not to be.) She, along with her daughters, Stella and Lucy, spent a whole lot of our No-Sugar Year with us and gave us the gift of total acceptance.

Special thanks to my team of Super Friends who read this book's initial drafts and told me their honest-to-God-opinion-no-matter-what: Rhonda Schlangen, Robin Kadet,
and Noreen Hennessy. You all steered me where I needed to go. How lucky am I to have you as friends?

I would be remiss not to thank the folks at school who helped me track down truly ancient data for the “school absences” chart: thank you so much to Mrs. Waterhouse and Mrs. Nelson.

I never would have made it through 2011 without the insight and support of David Gillespie, who has my deepest admiration for the work he has done promoting the facts and the message behind No Sugar. His book
Sweet Poison
appeared at an opportune moment in our year and gave me the desperately needed assurance that, in fact, I might just be the only one in the room who was
not
crazy. Also, his wife Lizzie deserves a Lifetime Achievement Award for that Coconut Cake alone.