Blame It on Dear Old Mom

I was introduced into wholesome plant-based food early on at the hands of an amazing chef – my mom. She never medaled in any sport, but she routinely whipped up “three square” for eight people like clockwork. Always an avid gardener, Mom’s vegetables were picked or canned at their prime and as central to her meals as the meat entrée (though her “saurkraut” never was my favorite).

She believed in raw juice – even in January in the 1950’s! – and purchased day-old oranges to make a quart with her glass squeezer, one half cup for each of us. After my five sibs were gone on the bus, I played at drawing, illustrating, or later printing from her dictation, the recipes for her bread, pies, cakes and garden dishes onto my beloved blackboard. Since our Catholic school did not have kindergarten, I also spent hours outside gathering eggs or convincing Dad to take me fishing.

Our Lakeview Farm was ahead of its time for self-sufficient, organic gardening and sustainability. Dad rotated about 60 acres of soybeans with field corn and oats that fed his cows, chickens, and even hogs briefly. All of us helped with the chores of milking, tending the animals, cultivating and then hoeing the fields, picking the berries, and tending the bountiful garden. The boys did get out of most of the housework, lucky stiffs, but they did help “us girls” with the cooking occasionally.

During wrestling and basketball season, there were no equivalent sports for girls, so dabbling in the kitchen became my competitive event. It started in second grade. My brother challenged me to bake snickerdoodles by myself for the first time, and to make it a triple batch to boot.

When the relatives came to help bale the hay, combine the beans or butcher the cow or pig, we had to feed them well. I used those meals as opportunities to try out my “Learn To Cook” book experiments on them. They liked the “Shepherd’s Pie” well enough but the 21days of different cream pies ranked the highest!

The 1960’s revolutionized both our politics and our food coffers when our college sister brought back big city trends: “pizza” and “tortillas” and “whole wheat bread.” Then in 1974, Dick Gregory rocked our U of I world and our food vocabulary grew again: “sesame milk” and “dulse” and “pumpkin seed meal.”  My future husband would not even pass his green salad to my roommate or me the very next day!

Four kids and 36 gardens later, we have stayed true to Mom’s plant-based regimen. Both vegans and ovo-lacto’s sat at the same table all these years. Now the circle is complete and I am “milking” with a machine not cows but almonds, making coconut cream pie not with dairy but with cashews, preserving tomatoes in a dehydrator not a canner, and juicing not with a glass squeezer but with a Champion. And eating hemp seed and not… Oh, never mind!

WELCOME TO TRIED AND TRUE PLANT-BASED RECIPES FOR FIT FOLK! This is my very first EVER and I intend to share our family's journey with both anecdotes and recipes, and I welcome you to share yours!  So please do tell - what brought you here? Trust me, we who forsake mst or dry or eggs or soy are NOT mainstream! 

What, pray tell, led you to this page...Hmmm?