HISTORY: Preserved

Welcome to my new series, The Diary of Mrs. X!
I feel very blessed to have come across the 1945 diary of a woman in an antique shop in Boulder City, NV. My initial flip-through was exciting and revealed mentions about the war, tidbits about her children Bev, Cheryl, and Jack, her husband Connie*, places in the Los Angeles area, and just little and big every day things. I was entranced immediately. What a wealth of information about an American woman living on the homefront during the last year of war! This wealth couldn’t go unshared, so I wanted to start this series of transcribing her diary so others could learn from this original source.
I’ll be sharing an entry once a week, but if the entries are particularly small, I’ll share more than one. Starting a new habit can be difficult, as we all know, so she didn’t write every day. There will be some large gaps in the dates, but I think that’s part of the allure of her diary. It reveals just how human and relatable she is.
I’m calling …

I've started teaching a homeschool co-op class featuring wartime rationing called History in the Kitchen - WWII, and I thought it would be fun to write about what we're learning about in class. I've got 20 students spread across 2 classes, and it's been really fun!
Class 1 - I introduced what rationing was and why it was important during the war. We also talked about how American rationing differed from any other country's rationing and why.

We made Banana Boats and Maple Sugar Graham Crackers, both of which I've written about on here before. Both recipes got a thumbs up from all the kids (except for one who wasn't a fan of maple to begin with, but he did try it, so I was proud of him!)

Class 2 - We talked about Ration stamps, books, and tokens and I brought in some originals for them to pass around. We talked about how complicated it was to keep track of ration values and how they went about paying for food along with rationing.

We made a recipe I'd…

My kids and I went to a fun museum earlier this year. I'm a sucker for vintage technology, so The National Capital Radio & Television Museum was right up my alley. Its sister museum, the National Electronics Museum, is another one we visited for a separate field trip, but I'll be posting about it later.

The NCRTV Museum is in an old house which lends a cozy feel. I had my baby in a stroller with me, and right away I noticed accessibility issues. Half of the museum is upstairs with no elevator (it is an old house after all.) So when we went upstairs I had to hold him the whole time. He wasn't a happy camper, and neither was I for that matter! Ugh. It's definitely not a baby/toddler friendly place.

I hate to start off a review with a negative, but that's really the only one! The rest of the museum was absolutely fantastic. The day was downpour rainy, so we had the whole building to ourselves, which is how I like it!

I wanted to start off with the most fun aspect …

I've really missed writing about museums. Ration cooking and vintage recipes have taken over my blog! That's not a bad thing, of course. It's what was easy for me in this recent, crazy stage of my life. Now that my littlest is a bit older, and I've had a wonderful year of posting about ration recipes and menus to celebrate the 75th anniversary of WWII food rationing in America, I thought it was time to finally post some of my backlogged museum posts.

Which leads me to today's museum exhibit review. I had seen ads for the newest exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian and really, really wanted to go see it. When my husband's and my anniversary plans changed last minute, we decided to head down to Washington DC and hit up some Smithsonian museums. It's only 1 1/2 hours away for us, so very doable!

Besides wandering The National Gallery (awesome!!!), I remembered the exhibit I'd been dying to see, so we headed over to the Museum of the Americ…

Sadly, we've reached the end of this celebration of vintage maple recipes! I had really wanted to try out a lot more of them than just one or two recipes, but such is life! I loved putting it together, because doing this kind of a series forces me to hunt through my vintage cookbook collection and pull out recipe ideas I never would've thought to look for before. I want my collection to be put to good use, and being able to share all this vintage food goodness with you is a wonderful way to do it. 
For the finale, I thought I'd pull out the rest of all the amazing maple recipes I've found in just the past couple weeks! Here are the recipes we've got in store:
- Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies - wartime version sweetened with honey and maple syrup! - Maple Sugar Cookies - Maple Fluff - Maple Nut Refrigerator Cake (Ooh! Exciting!) - Maple Sirup Cupcakes (original spelling) - Maple Sugar Pie - Maple Candy - and the one I'm really excited about... Log Cabin Upsi…