See this cool vintage apern my Chicken-Raising Seester put me in the way of finding a couple of weeks ago?
With it's hand-worked smocking...
...and careful little cross stitches?
And see this cool vintage apern that my Cookie Seester added to my collection at Christmas?
With it's hand embroidered scene of a pig blissfully roasting...
...a relative?
I'm thinking these aperns were made a few years after this cookbook (which was given to me by one of my dotters-in-love for Christmas) was published.
In the introduction to this book I discovered something important.
And here it is.
I grew up as one of the tail-end baby boomers.
Back when sugar was becoming America's best friend.
Now, Me Darlin' Mither espoused no such philosophy as the one this cookbook implies; my earliest memories include mental snapshots of her sitting in front of the big plate of steamed vegetables she called her dinner, and today, at 85, she is still in almost perfect health and is long, lean, lithe, and lovely.
But the world around me loved, and still loves, sugar.
And though I have heard of others battling the bulge, I have outright wars with both sugar and the bulge(s) on a regular basis.
Which is why right now, when I am avoiding most sugar and trying to keep all food 'in submission', my weekday lunches sometimes come in the form of a frozen lunch.
The kind I used to eat when my co-workers and I were in the process of collectively shedding hundreds of unwanted pounds.
It makes me lonely for my co-workers.
Which is why today's mail looks like this:
I want them to know I still love them, and still hate the bulges.
But at least I know now what went wrong.
All those years ago.