Year of No Sugar (19 page)

I sat back and marveled at my children. How many six-year-olds, I wondered, would have felt similarly after being served unshelled shrimp so tiny and leggy they looked like large bugs? Certainly, we weren't the only tourists in the room—we heard a fair amount of English as we traipsed back and forth to bring our used plates to the dish window (another custom here) but ours were the only children.

At last, it was time to round out this fantastic culinary parade. Greta returned from her four-dozenth trip to the kitchen window to report that they were serving ice-cold glasses of dessert.

“It's…peach gelato,” she said tentatively, avoiding my eyes.

“And we are going to have it!” I added with enthusiasm. Greta's and Ilsa's faces lit up like they had been plugged in. Looking back, this was the best decision I made on the trip; as far as I'm concerned, everything else could have fallen away—but for that one joyful evening, magical meal, and sweet, perfect, peach gelato.

After that, there was still more in store for us. The tables, which had seated perhaps one hundred “cultural circle” members, were whisked away and the room was filled with the sounds of scraping chairs and multilingual chatting as our dining room transformed into a performance hall, facing a modest stage at the far end of the room. We learned that the show tonight would be a Cuban trio accompanied by dancers.

For me, it was all like a very, very happy dream. As I sat there in the audience, wonderfully full of perfect bites of food and gulps of red wine, deeply breathing in the robust strains of guitar, I had one of those heartbreakingly rare moments
when you feel that something has gone, somehow, incredibly, inexplicably, perfectly right.

Sometime later, Ilsa made one more comment to me on the topic of travel. “It's just that food around the world is
so good
!” she exclaimed.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

_______

Later, on the plane coming home, I had a major attack of ambivalence. How had it
really
gone? Had we passed the No-Sugar tests reasonably enough or failed miserably? On the one hand, you
could
say we did pretty well. We drank cappuccino while everyone around us had gelato. We drank water, water, and more water. When, during the second half of the trip, we met up with relatives in northern Italy, they were kind enough to make special requests for us at restaurants and to engineer no-sugar versions of things like barbecue sauce for us when we ate in. We held fast to our individual exceptions and steered clear of so many fun European treats we would've
loved
to have: Nutella, flavored yogurts, those funny little snack cookies that Europeans do so well. We looked the other way repeatedly when passing elaborate shop windows filled with pyramids of chocolate truffles, fancy meringues, and exotic-looking candies.

And, as I mentioned before, sugar is infinitely easier to separate out in a place like Italy, easier to spot than in America, where its presence is so much more insidious and pervasive. It's true that ordering water instead of soda is actually considered a respectable option in Europe, whereas in America it's somehow slightly looked down upon as slightly odd or cheap. (“Oh, you're
just
having
water
?”) And sure, I was well
supplied with my big bag of Snacks For Emergencies, including coconut cookies and any fruit we managed to pick up along the way. Not to mention that we guiltily threw away more sugar than I care to think about—those complimentary Swiss chocolate bars, those chocolate
Baci
, and that tub of tiramisu ice cream.

And yet…

Like some sort of mutant slime from a cheesy horror movie, I kept feeling sugar creeping
back in
…around the ancient marble doorframes and through the windows' bulky wooden shutters, following us like shadows along the tourist-jammed streets. Small things, mostly. Once, Steve accidentally came home from the supermarket with a large vanilla yogurt rather than plain. Once, while staying the night in a B&B, I put granola on my plain yogurt in desperation to avoid the Nutella and sweet yellow cake that constituted the other breakfast options, all the while looking the other way while my kids ate cornflakes. (
Cornflakes
! Horrors!) Once, in a cafeteria across the street from Florence's famed Duomo, we picked out what we
thought
were strawberries and plain yogurts for the girls' snack, only to discover all that white stuff was
whipped cream
, not yogurt. Once, while having our unsweetened cappuccinos for a snack, we were sufficiently crazed with peckishness that we ate the hard little gingerbread cookies that had thoughtfully been placed on the saucers. Yes, these were the things keeping me up at night: whipped cream ambushes and postage stamp–size complimentary cookies.

Then again, other transgressions were bigger. Twice, our whole family succumbed to the siren song of gelato (only once, in my opinion, was worth it: that heavenly peach at the Teatro del Sale, with teeny little bits of skin throughout).
With an average of ninety-five degrees each day in Florence, and an average of fourteen tourists slurping a cone for every ten you passed on the street, keeping it to
only
twice was a Herculean effort along the lines of Superman reversing time.

Once, I heard our affable waitress describe the tiramisu as “
buonissima
” and I—swept away by the joy of a delicious meal and the fact that I was understanding far more of the Italian conversation than I had expected to—impulsively ordered two for the family to share…only to have it
not
be all that
buonissima
after all. Phoo.

Once, the girls and I partook of thin slivers of a delicious
crostata cioccolato
which was the birthday dessert of our eight-year-old cousin whose family we had met up with. This I justified as an implementation of the birthday party rule, which made sense except that it wasn't supposed to include
me
. Ahem.

This was the Dolomites, an alpine region of Italy so far to the north that prior to World War One it had been part of Austria…and, as it turns out, also a very dangerous place in which to send my husband off to the bakery. The first time he stumbled inadvertently upon the bakery, as if in a trance, wafted in on the scent of a fresh apple strudel, which he promptly bought—helplessly—only to then give it away to the relatives we had met up with. The second time he came home with a combination of sweet and savory pastries—speaking neither German nor Italian was a plausible excuse for his ingredient ignorance. But by the
third
time—when he was arriving home with little marzipan hedgehogs and delicately wrapped bars of chocolate embedded with animal crackers or hazelnuts—I knew we had to get out of there,
quick
.

Nonetheless, it is worth noting that none of these “sweet”
treats, when tried, yielded that sugar blast Americans are so fond of…While an apple strudel or chocolate pie in the United States wouldn't be considered worth its salt if it failed to make your teeth ache, the things we tried in bites here and there truly surprised us: apple strudel actually tasted like…
apples
; the birthday chocolate pie tasted of pastry and cream. No explosion of sweet; no King Kong–size portions. When we saw a Ben & Jerry's in Florence, I smiled ruefully and wondered what the Italians thought of ice cream flavors like Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough and Phish Food (which has marshmallow, caramel,
and
fudge in it) when juxtaposed with the elegant subtlety of, say, a lovely peach gelato. Do they think we've completely lost our minds? And are they right?

Back in Florence, on the last night, after very kindly being served complimentary biscotti as we tried to pay the dinner bill (help!), Steve and the girls had a good-bye treat of yet another gelato (that's three, for those keeping score) while I abstained. By that time, I could feel the ground moving beneath me. I agonized as I packed my suitcase. We had had
so
much more sugar here than we would have at home, yet
so
very much less than we would have had if not for The Project. What did that
mean
? Had we been good? Or
not
so good?

Both, I imagine. In fact, I suppose the answer was that we were human.

_______

Once we returned home from our travels, I was happy to notice that my kids were more interested than ever in
food
: in ingredients, in the garden, in recipes and improvisation. The fact is, my kids were insisting to be let into the other side of the equation: they wanted to
cook
…and they were not
taking no for an answer. This is great, right? In theory. But in practice, you get into things like sharp knives, hot stoves, and the fact that Mommy can't supervise right now because if she doesn't get some laundry done you'll both be going to school tomorrow in bathing suits. Kids cooking is wonderful if not always terribly convenient.

_______

_______

And also, if I'm entirely honest with myself, there's the fact that I often enjoy cooking alone—the peaceful meditation of chopping, kneading, mixing, and preparing has become a quiet pleasure I look forward to when I'm not in a frantic rush to produce sustenance NOW. It's not unusual for me to plan a more complicated meal some afternoon when I know I'll have a few hours to spend pulling it together and to look forward to it as me time. This had become even more the case since beginning the No-Sugar Project—as if to compensate for the lack of sweets, I seemed to focus more and more on the homemade, which may be simple but is definitely not always expedient.

Fresh pasta is a quintessential example. What could be more delicious? What could be simpler? What could be more
of a pain in the tuchus? Inspired by our recent trip, I had been wanting to find an afternoon to make fresh gnocchi, which I learned to make a few years ago and have only attempted here at home a handful of times. (By the time I forget the consequent mountain of dishes and the several hours of work, it's usually about time for me to attempt it again.)

This time was different, however; this time the kids wanted to help.
Demanded
to help, actually. It was one of the last few summer days before school began again and I was savoring the luxury of spending the afternoon with them with no place to rush off to—no soccer practice, no ballet class, no library board meeting. And yet I felt conflicted…What if they screwed the pasta up? What if hours of work resulted in a gloppy, unpalatable mess? Then—panic attack—
what would we have for dinner
? (Remember, between living in the country and being on The Sugar Project, there weren't very many quick-fix options open to us when dinner goes suddenly, horribly wrong.) Now, there are times when me being such a relentless control freak has its benefits—this was not one of them.

I took a few deep breaths and decided to get over it. If we're going to teach our kids about real food, we are going to have to let them learn how to make it, now aren't we? I knew it was time to put my money where my mouth was.

Boy, I'm glad I did. They were amazing! In fact, after making the dough—kneading together fresh boiled potatoes, flour, and egg—the kids did all the work while I sat back and watched. And this is not an inconsiderable amount of work, either. Greta carefully sliced bits of dough from the large dough “loaf,” rolling each one out into a long, quarter-inch diameter snake. Ilsa would take over at this point, cutting
dozens of tiny gnocchi from the snakes the size of Tootsie Rolls; each tiny island of dough carefully kept separate on the cutting board so as not to have the pasta bits stick together. This was not Kraft Easy Mac. This took a
long
time. I was amazed at their tenacity, their patience.

Did everything go perfectly? No. At one point, in what will hereafter be referred to as the Great Gnocchi Massacre of 2011, Ilsa accidentally knocked the wooden cutting board—filled with little cut-up gnocchi—just off the counter enough to dump a good three dozen onto the kitchen floor. The three of us gasped. We were hushed for a moment, staring at the floor and thinking about the hard work that—
poof!
—was gone just like that. Then Ilsa ran off in tears.

Now, some people have a Little Devil on their shoulder. I have a Little Control Freak. The Little Control Freak whispered in my ear “See? Told you so. All that work. What will you have for dinner
now
?” Fortunately, I listened instead to the Mom Angel on my other shoulder who said, “There's still plenty of pasta left. Nobody died. It's fine.” And of course, it really was. Soon, I managed to convince Ilsa of that fact as well, and we were back to the pasta factory.

In fact, it was better than fine. We had a lovely dinner that took us all afternoon to make and, boy, were the girls proud! And it was delicious—even if they weren't as ridiculously careful about it as I would have been. I mean, it's just potatoes, egg, and flour, right? Real, homemade food is desperately important—to our health, to animal welfare, to the environment—but fortunately for us, most of the time it's not rocket science. It just takes a little time. And patience.

 

⁴⁴
This would be our second visit to Italy as a family—the first was that trip when Greta missed the third-grade lesson on fractions.

⁴⁵
In fact, the Slow Food Movement began in Italy—did you know that? Legend has it that in 1986, it began as a protest against a McDonald's slated to open at the foot of the Spanish Steps. And in fact, I've
been
to that McDonald's with my kids, which is to say, we used their convenient public restroom.