At My Family's Urgence

How This Has Come To Be:
My daughter has been hounding me for some time about having my personal cookbook published.  I've collected recipes both from my family and via cookbooks and various internet sources, as well as created many, many of my own over the years.  I never manage to make a recipe as shown - to me there is always just the little tweak (or sometimes big ones) that will make it my own creation or change a recipe to something new altogether.   So I have loads of cookbooks that I use mainly for inspiration.  I tend to cook what I have on hand, what's fresh from my garden or from what I may have canned the previous summer.

Quite a few years ago I typed up all my recipes and collected them into a file, which became my family cookbook.  A few Christmas's ago I even made copies of the entire thing, indexed it all, bought binders and passed them out to about 10 family members who were always asking me for my recipes.  I made a copy to have up at our summer home in northern Wisconsin.  Copies went to cousins and my kids, my mother and my best friend.   Now I find that my own collection has probably tripled from that initial volume, so I need a way to share the recipes I use and find with family and friends without printing up those whole volumes again. I will ALWAYS cite the inspiring recipe's author, if known.  And I'm going to attempt to categorize them so the recipes I'm asked for most frequently will be easy to find.

Et voila, my little food blog is born.

The Name:
When I was a young girl, I learned to cook at the elbow of my maternal grandmother, who was a fabulous, intuitive cook from Slovakia.  (My mother is also a wonderful home cook). She always had an apron on, but never one from a store.  She made them from my grandfather's worn dress shirts.  My mother also wore them constantly as I grew up, and I've found over the years that when I'm home and puttering around in my kitchen or cleaning, I wear one too.  At first they were those old blue dress shirt aprons that Grandma made.  I still have one or two of them, but now for sentiment rather than use.  I began to collect aprons, particularly with french provincial patterns.  (Williams Sonoma is a favorite source).  I've found them from the south of France, to Disneyworld, in antique shops, and so on.  And A LOT of them are blue patterns - my favorite color.  So most days when I am home I can be found in my kitchen, den, laundry room or most anywhere wearing one of this collection. It's a bit of a joke in my family that I've always got one on.