Sugarless

All right, I confess. My family eats more meat and starches than they do fruits and vegetables. I took an 8-week extension course last summer on nutrition. It was filled with lots of tips about getting one's family to eat more vegetables, such as slipping a little spinach into the spaghetti sauce.

Spaghetti is a family staple. We eat it at least once a week, and I was successful with the spinach. I probably could have gotten away with it indefinitely if I hadn't crowed, "I put spinach in the spaghetti sauce, and you didn't notice!" Now my family is on the lookout. If the meatballs are little more chunky than usual, I hear "is there a vegetable stuck in there?" If the basil and oregano stand look a little too dark, I hear "that's not little bits of spinach, is it?"

I gave it up for awhile. Until I discovered sugarless spaghetti sauce. I was so excited. I picked out 9 cans and loaded them into my shopping cart. This was difficult, because a number of them were dented. I blocked the pasta and sauce aisle for five minutes or so turning cans this way and that, finding the very best ones.

The bagger at the check-out was a newbie and a teenage boy besides. He crammed six 28-oz cans of sugarless spaghetti sauce into a single grocery bag. It wasn't heavy to him, but it was heavy to me. When I was lifting the bag out of the trunk at home, it slipped. Spaghetti cans rolled all over the garage floor. I picked them up, but guess what? They were all dented.

They were still sugarless, though. Hope for a healthier future remained. The next time I made spaghetti I used a can. Turns out that not only is sugarless spaghetti sauce sugarless, it also lacks that vibrant red quality that makes our usual brand so appealing to the eye. I got comments like: "What is this stuff?" and "Are you sure this is safe to eat?"

The time I added a few zucchini cubes to the sugarless sauce, the leftovers sat in the fridge until I was forced to throw them away. (Usually they're gone in a day or two.) "What are you trying to do? Get us to eat vegetables?" "Didn't you know Ronald Reagan sanctioned ketchup as a vegetable serving for school lunches? That makes spaghetti a meal all by itself."

I gave up on the spaghetti sauce. I still have 2 dented cans of the sugarless variety in the cupboard. (Maybe I'll donate them to the missionaries. I suppose I'd better do it quickly before they reach their expiration dates.) But I still try to make healthy muffins for Franklin's lunches.

Charlie was home from college over the holidays and helped me make a batch of pumpkin muffins, with ingredients like whole wheat, soy milk, lots of eggs and 100% mashed pumpkin. I froze a few for Franklin and left out the rest for snacks. My husband brought a few to the table for an after-dinner sweet. He took one bite, then asked "These aren't sugarless, are they?"