From My Grandmother's Kitchen

My wife and I recently inherited a vast wealth of recipes gathered by my mother, her mother, and God-only-knows how many ancestors prior. Flipping through these, we were amused by some (there's an entire stack of texts that treat the microwave oven like some inscrutable magic food-creation device sent to us from the heavens), but overall, we were left marveling at the fact that every single generation that had proceeded us hadn't keeled over at the ripe old age of thirty-two from massive cardiac episodes. It seemed as though most of them were designed specifically to be as artery-clogging as possible, and as we scanned through the massive smorgasbord of caloric debauchery, I found myself creating a mental checklist of the ones we'd never use. "Woah, I'm not about to fry that in that after soaking it in that," I'd scoff, then, "Hah! No thanks, I'd prefer to stave off Diabetes for at least another week or two," and then, choking down my shock and dismay, "Where do you even buy that much lard without a special permit?!"

Now, I'm aware that a lot of this can be chalked up to some of the following points of Grandma-fact:

1. Grandma didn't know that putting a pound of anything in something probably wasn't particularly the healthiest of choices.
   
2. They didn't have all this fat-free, gluten-free, sugar-free, no additives, carb-free, vegan, organic-tofu-soy-half-caf-no-foam-light-whip nonsense when she was young, and she turned out just fine, thank you very much!
3. Butter makes things taste good.
4. Back then, people got plenty of incidental, daily-routine, exercise besides just walking to the kitchen.

...and while that may all be true, we don't see any particularly compelling reason not to use the years of culinary progress that have been made since then to tip the scales (no pun intended, of course) in our favor by cutting some of those unnecessary fats and calories from these recipes.

In that spirit, we'll be culling through our mountains of recipes, and cooking them with an eye on keeping them a little bit healthier as needed. Some of them, it turns out, are already pretty lean, so we'll just tweak them here and there to suit our personal tastes. Either way, we'll post the original recipe, our revisions to it, then whip up a batch (or plate, or pot, or what-have-you), and let you know how it goes.