butter & sugar generation

My mother is visiting us at the moment, which means our diets have changed considerably, along with our moods. Be warned.

My parents are of a generation that cooked with butter and sugar, and salt. Everything is doused in salt before cooking and sprinkled again which it hits the plate. And there’s a table set with salt that gets passed around laden with expectation. I can feel three splashings of the tasty crystals hitting my bloodstream. It feels good.

And butter. No meal exists without a sauce of some kind. Butter based. Don’t get me wrong – hollandaise sause is one of the highlights of my existence. However, it’s a highlight for the occassional weekend breakfast, not a staple.

And sugar. Sweet tea and biscuits. Mum’s been baking, which is really lovely of her. She was horrified at the lack of a cupboard of cake tins:

“What do you give visitors?” she asked.

“Alcohol mum,” I said. “It’s similar to sugar.”

She went out and bought me some  cake tins yesterday and cleared a cupboard for them. She needed something to put the results of two days baking into. So now I have a cupboard stacked with tins of sugar moulded into new forms of temptation.

I weighed myself yesterday. In a week my mother has gifted me a kilo in bodyweight. I fall asleep on the couch watching McLeod’s Daughters (my first time) and wake up groggy and angry.

I will miss her when she leaves. When the sugar tins empty, my husband will miss her too.