Slemani sweetness

So, a couple of months back, you may remember Ariz and I doing a two-week long sugar free experiment. Now, this experience taught me two things:

1. Going without sugar is refreshing for the body, soothing for the mind, and provides a strong sense of accomplishment
2. I have a pretty severe sugar intolerance

I discovered this on the flight from Perth to Dubai, on which I indulged in a yummy Emirates dessert and one soft drink too many. I felt miserable - and not just “Ew, I’m eating sugar again,” but actually “I don’t feel well.” 

As you may have guessed, this latter lesson has been harder to grasp and take on as fact, but it remains just as true no matter how many Daim-chocolates I drool (and practically cry) over here in Kurdistan; when I eat sugar, my body is incredibly unhappy. 

This would have been a fairly easy problem to overcome in Norway or Australia, I thought when we got here, but looked gloomily at the prospect of having to survive in Slemani without any kind of sweets. Two weeks before my birthday, however, Ariz dead-stopped me at the supermarket. He looked like he’d seen a ghost, and I was irritable and anxious to move on, so didn’t really pay attention at first. 

“Synne! Look!” he exclaimed, pointing in utter disbelief at a shelf section of - you never would have guessed it - healthy foods. I mentioned last week how fatty Middle Eastern food is, and make no mistake about it: people’s attitude to food here includes neither nutritional values nor calorie counts. To find this treasure trove was like finding a laptop in Tutankhamun’s tomb. And most unbelievable of all, at the shelf’s bottom left corner, there was Steviola. 

Steviola is a sugar-alcohol product that tastes just like sugar, but contains no glucose, sucrose, fructose, or other sugar kind. In Norway it’s called Sukrin. I couldn’t believe my own eyes, and didn’t actually believe the product was real until I made lemon meringue pie with it for my birthday. In thorough disbelief, I baked the pie base, whisked the meringue, and stirred the lemon cream. Then, as I bit into a completely sugar-free deliciousness the night before the 11th - perfectly balanced in its Steviola sweet and lemon sour - I realised that I had found my life-long sugar substitute. And in Slemani, Kurdistan at that.