Year of No Sugar by Eve O. Schaub

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!
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    â€¦we had dessert a couple nights ago. Maybe I’d better explain. We had homemade banana ice cream. Homemade ice cream you can make without sugar. Or some people might call it cold puree. But I say, if I might have a say, I think it’s ice cream. All it is, is frozen bananas put in a machine and out it comes—no sugar. So we aren’t naughty. Yet.
    â€”from Greta’s journal
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    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.