The Evening After

Well, I wouldn't call it the social event of the decade, but my parents cleaned their plates - my dad even asked for seconds - and we had some good laughs afterward as I showed them the cookbook I'd used and shared some of the recipes I spared them! Though I'd planned on serving a 1940s Easter menu, I decided at the last minute to serve up a medley of some of the surprisingly wonderful vintage recipes I've discovered in cooking dinner for myself over the past year. I guess you could say it was kind of like my annual report on vintage cookery.

Lima-Bean Casserole
Mashed Potato Balls
Beet Pickle Salad
Popovers
Honey Rice

Mashed Potato Balls are patties formed from cold mashed potatoes and a beaten egg yolk. Brown them in the oven with a dab of margarine on top. I added some seasoned salt to mine to give them a little kick. The Beet Pickle I used for the salad was a canned version purchased at the supermarket. (Aunt Nellie's is the brand. I like to think of her as my dear old Aunt Nellie who pickled the beets straight out of her Victory Garden last summer.) I sliced the beets and served them on a bed of lettuce with a tiny dollop of mayonnaise. Popovers are an old family favorite and the recipe in The American Woman's Home Cook Book (1945) doesn't disappoint. (Note: If you're using a modern popover pan, the batter only makes about six.)

***************************************************

POPOVERS

1 cup sifted flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 cup milk
1 tablespoon melted shortening

Sift flour and salt together. Beat eggs and add milk, shortening and sifted dry ingredients. Beat until smooth with rotary beater. Fill greased muffin pans 1/2 full and bake in very hot oven (450 degrees F.) 20 minutes. Reduce temperature to moderate (350 degrees F.) and bake 15 minutes longer. Makes 8.

***************************************************

Whew! It's been a long time since I had such a heavy meal so late in the day. My eating habits have changed so much over the last twelve months that it felt positively strange to wake up still feeling so not-hungry this morning. I guess I've gotten used to waking up with an empty tummy! I felt so full I couldn't face anything more than Toast for breakfast this morning. My sink is full, too. Full of dirty pans that needed a good soaking. My mission tonight is to finish cleaning up after the party.

Lessons learned? 1) I truly would have appreciated one of those vintage ranges with three or four different oven chambers. You can set each chamber at a different temperature, right? None of last night's recipes wanted to play together when it came to temperature. 2) My apartment is way too small to entertain more than one person at a time. And it's awful tough to serve dinner at the kitchen table when you have to ask one of your guest to stand up for a minute while you open the oven to check on your Honey Rice. (I'm thinking Dorothy Dix would not have approved.) Let's face it. Nobody should be seated right in front of the oven! Talk about a hot seat.

Intervention

You know, I'm really proud of the progress I've made over the last few months in cleaning up my diet. Because of the amount of water I'm drinking, I've been able to go from drinking 10-11 Vitamin Waters per week to 3-4. I've even had a seven-day run without any missteps on the snacking front. When I start to feel those terrible late-night cravings these days, I try to head 'em off by eating a piece of fruit or a dish of berries. Even if I'm not particularly interested in fruit at the moment. It seems to do the trick --- gives my stomach something to work on and I forget about the food I was craving. I can see myself buying less and less of things like cheese and Quaker rice crisp snacks. And I've never once in all these weeks cheated on my workout.

So I was a little disappointed to see 184 on the scale during this morning's weigh-in. That's 1 lb. higher than last Sunday's 183. My total weight loss in the 12 weeks since April 9 = 10 lbs. No time to fret, though. Onward and upward! I've got lots more work left to do --- and the monumental challenge of a week's vacation in front of me. It's going to be a battle just to keep up my walking and exercises and to stick to my new and improved eating habits. Especially while I'm traveling. (I usually relieve airport stress by eating!) This morning's results on the scale call for an intervention, but I'm going to make it a minor one. Just a few small changes...

Fitness
Did I mention that I've gone back to walking at lunch on weekdays? I didn't mind going to the rec center, but - between the workout and recovering from a stomachache from trying to eat anything beforehand - I was pretty much losing Monday and Wednesday evenings entirely. For now, I think I'd rather lose half my lunch hour. I'm going to kick things up a notch for this next mission by adding an additional five minutes to both my weekend workouts:

Walk 30 minutes a day, four times during the week.
Walk 65 minutes a day, both days during the weekend.

Reducing
I think my dessert mission is on the right track, but my dear readers have reminded me of some modern twists that might be a slight improvement on the vintage suggestions. I'm going to substitute sorbet for the sherbet. And when I need a chocolate fix, I'll make that pudding up with skim milk instead of 1%.

1/2 cup fat-free rainbow sherbet = 120 calories
vs.
1/2 cup raspberry sorbet = 80 calories

1/2 cup chocolate pudding (1% organic milk) = 140 calories
vs.
1/2 cup chocolate pudding (organic skim milk) = 130 calories

Having some skim milk around the house means I'll be able to use it in all sorts of things - from my morning coffee to scrambled eggs and mashed potatoes! I'll be back later today with a housekeeping post...

Week Thirty-three: The Mission

Fitness
This week, I'm going to add another few "limbering and stretching exercises" to my day. These exercises were included in an article by beauty expert Antoinette Donnelly in an article titled "Daily Exercise Aids Feeling of Fatigue" (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 13, 1940). Donnelly recommended that her readers begin by doing each exercise 20 times. The first will be added to my morning routine:

7. Rise up on the balls of your feet, bring your arms up overhead, stretching, stretching, stretching everything from toes up, keeping chest high, abdomen in.

The next two will be the nucleus of an evening exercise routine:

8. Take your old friend the floor-touching one, but we prefer the floor-touching one in which you turn on the waist and attempt to touch the floor back of your heels.

9. Lie on your back on the floor with your arms stretched wide at shoulders. Keep head and shoulders on the floor while you raise your right foot over and cross the left, aiming to reach with a long stretch a meeting between your right-foot toes and your left-hand fingers. Then reverse, bringing your left foot and right hand into contact. At first the meeting will be very, very formal, the pair not getting together at all. But that’s all right. You’re doing something fine for yourself, your waistline, hipline, thighs, lower back and, indeed, the upper torso comes in for benefit, too.

Reducing
I'm transforming my desserts this week. I've long since made over my lunchtime desserts on weekdays. They're almost always some sort of decadent dish of fruit - berries, usually. Now it's time to do something about the desserts I eat after dinner and at lunchtime on the weekends. Ice cream was banished from my household several weeks ago, but it's been replaced with something possibly even worse --- peanut butter cups. I winced when I turned the container over the other day and faced the fact that three of these babies equal 180 calories. Yikes! I could easily eat six to nine of them in a sitting.

An article on reducing in the October 1945 issue of Good Housekeeping has three great dessert suggestions: baked custard, lemon sherbet, and pudding. Sadly, the recipe for each of these dishes includes saccharin as the sweetener. I'm not fond of artificial sweeteners. (Splenda, in particular, rips through me like a house afire.) What I figure, though, is that - even sweetened with sugar - if I stick to the recommended serving size, I'll be making a ginormous step in the right direction if I trade one of these dessert suggestions for my peanut butter cups:

1/2 cup fat-free rainbow sherbet = 120 calories
1/2 cup chocolate pudding made with 1% organic milk = 140 calories

Either one is a heck of a lot better than 360-540 calories' worth of peanut butter and chocolate! There are lots of flavors to keep me interested and they'll be sinchy to make.

Grooming
My face is powdered, my lips have been painted --- my hair may not be in vintage order, but it's been brushed 'til it shines and parted with precision. Here's the last step in the 1946 morning grooming routine for young women:

Take a last look, to be sure you are impeccable from top to toe.

I'm going to dust off that looking glass and take a good long look at myself in the morning before I leave the house. Wrinkles in my clothing? Lint? How does my hair look from the back? It's high time I take some responsibility for what I look like below the neck!