Next Steps Part II: Small Steps Continued

Just kidding!  I stayed at the same cabinet.  Oh, I'm such a jokester. Hardy Har. Har.

There's another little white basic that screams "refined!" at me just as much as salt does. Do you notice that as far as the color "white" goes, it's supposed to represent purity but more often is really representing "empty"? After all, the color white is really the absence of all color.  And in the case of food, the absense of color generally means the absence of nutrition.

But I digress. Today's post is not meant to be an art lession. If you hadn't already guessed over the course of the above ramblings, I've got a laser eye focused on sugar.  Ahhh, sugar.  Is there anything you don't make more delicious? But again, my brain asks: how Au Naturale is basic white sugar?

As it turns out, it's about as refined as table salt. It does come from sugar cane or sugar beets, yes, but after it's cleaned it goes through a "refining" process which includes, among other things, bleaching agents such as lime, phosphoric acid, calcium hydroxide and others to get the super white color.

Either raw sugar or organic whole cane sugar is your best bet if you want to go Au Naturale with your sweeteners.  Yes, it has to be refined a bit of course; you have to extract it from the plant somehow. However, these sugars, like Celtic salt, can retain some of the other original minerals that they had in plant form, such as calcium, iron, magnesium and potassium.

Careful, though: Don't confuse raw sugar, with it's brownish color, to brown sugar you've probably bought at the grocery store. That brown sugar is just refined white sugar but with molasses added back in to get the brown, "raw" color. Art lesson again! (Notice how I said "back" in? Molasses were always there to begin with, but stripped out in the refining process. How ironic.)
 
Other good natural sweetener options include raw liquid sweeteners like raw honey, agave nectar, etc. but sometimes you need the solid stuff for baking or sprinkling or whatever. And as a disclaimer, I definitely think it goes without saying (but I'll say it anyway) that any kind of sweetener in mass quantities is not healthy.  This post doesn't advocate that eating a cup of raw sugar a day is going to somehow lessen your risk of developing Type 2 diabetes any more than if you ate a cup of refined white sugar every day.  Sugar is sugar.  But if it's going to be in my body, I'd like it to be as pure as possible.

On that note.. what else, loyal readers? What types of basic elements, or staples, should I be looking at more closely besides salt and sugar? What do you substitute- or what would you like to substitute- in your own pantries and kitchens?