HopelessTwinkles Archives - Secret Recipes

April 4, 2022

Mondays & Memories of My Mom – Turning Points

Happy Monday and happy April! I love Mondays, as they’re my 52 Chances each year, in which I get to share Memories of My Mom with all of you!

#TheRecipeDetective

Every day is a new day – a turning point, a gift, an opportunity! Each one has something to celebrate! Celebrating develops gratitude, which creates “turning points” for attitudes. Likewise, it generates a greater enjoyment of what we already have. As Ava Freeman wrote in one of her beautiful paintings (circa 1980s), ‘Every new day offers many gifts… Untie the ribbons!’

Did you know that today is, among other things, National Hug a Newsperson Day? Mom worked as a newsperson and syndicated columnist for years before developing her recipe business. Every day was a turning-point-opportunity to Mom. I wish I could hug her! Her newspaper days were among the many turning points in her life that lead to her becoming The Recipe Detective^TM.

Long before that, when Mom was 10, she saw the 1946 movie, Devotion (about the lives of the Bronte sisters), which created her own personal devotion to daily journaling. That was the first turning point for Mom, in becoming a writer. As a teenager and young adult, every story she wrote, for the various contests she entered and won, usually had something to do with food. Mom accredited these to being turning points in her journey as a writer.

Another major turning point came in the early 1970s, when Mom left her job (as a columnist at a local newspaper), to go home and start her own business with her groundbreaking concept of copycat cookery. That, in itself, was also a major turning point in the food industry!

All the media exposure Mom received from newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV talk shows, were more turning points in her growth and notoriety as The Recipe Detective^TM. The most influential of all was probably The Phil Donahue Show, on which she appeared twice! Each time, the episodes were re-run around the world, with an over-whelming response!

FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…

As seen in…

Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective (Balboa Press; Jan. 2018, pp. 299-300). [A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret Recipes^TM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3^rd Edition).]

THE PHIL DONAHUE SHOW…

SURPRISE – A DREAM COME TRUE!

If you’ve ever seen 1 million letters, you know how we felt when we tried to handle the overwhelming response [from our July 7, 1981, appearance on The Phil Donahue Show, in Chicago]! It was exhausting!

Our home, which was both our office and our sanctuary, became like a factory, with people helping us to process the mail, eventually having to return thousands of the orders to the customers with our deepest regrets that we could not, in all fairness to them, delay their order.

The onslaught of mail had forced us to do this. We were all working from 7 AM until 1 or 2 AM the next morning just to open and read the mail. Our phone bill had been buried in some of that mail and in a month’s time, being something like 23 to 24 days behind in opening the mail, our phone was shut off for non-payment of our bill.

As soon as we realized what the mail was doing to us, we tried to get Donahue’s people to stop the continued scheduled showings of our appearance. But that show remained on their repeat schedule for almost a year, playing in the Panama Canal zone, Greenland, Iceland, Australia and on hundreds of small town stations.

Most of the letters requested a sheet of ‘free’ recipes that were included with the order blank for a self-addressed stamped envelope to us. The offer would have been good for us, if it had only been shown that one time – the day on which we appeared on the show – but for nearly a year afterward, the requests still came, as did the complaints and the threats to report us to postal authorities for not having sent those ‘free’ recipes, tore us apart emotionally and physically!

Some people did not include their self-addressed-stamped envelope. Some envelopes were addressed to themselves, such as Joe Smith, but in care of OUR address instead of THEIR address. It was a confusing mess! Some people wrote threatening letters that they hadn’t received their orders and were turning us over to the postmaster general as frauds!

I laid my head on my desk many a time, in tears of anguish and fatigue. The family was falling apart. We couldn’t print our books fast enough, to fill all the orders! Then the post office, in delivering the thousands of books that we DID mail out, lost some, destroyed some, and delayed and even mis-directed other orders.

I remembered what Dick Syatt, one of our radio friends, had told me about finally getting everything you ever wanted, when he said, ‘Hell is God, giving you what you thought you wanted.’ Sometimes we need to have something, lose it and get it back again before we can really appreciate what we have. I had that chance, and I am so glad for it. It was [a turning point] a time to learn and to grow.

Mom claimed that one important “turning point” in her recipe work was the influence she got from Col. Sanders, himself, during one of her radio show visits on a Dallas station. His suggestion of finding one supermarket product for his “secret herbs and spices” made her fried chicken recipe more like the one he originally developed.

Mom shared her famous imitations (as she developed more than one version) of his chicken, during each of her appearances on The Phil Donahue Show. She humorously insisted that (with either version) the Colonel would’ve been a General if he had used her recipes!

Other imitations she shared in her ‘Donahue’ appearances included her Recess Peanut Butter Cups, Gloreo Cookies, Hopeless Twinkles, Hopeless Filled Cupcakes, Quacker Jack, White Tassel Hamburgers, Big Match Sauce, Wednesday’s Chili, and Wednesday’s Frosty Drink. [See the “Recipes” tab for these.]

At one time or another, these were all on Mom’s “free sheet” – a dozen or so copycat recipes that she gave away in exchange for self-addressed-stamped-envelopes, including ordering information for her newsletters and the cookbooks she had in print.

Friday is the 29^th anniversary of Mom’s SECOND appearance on The Phil Donahue Show (1993), which SMASHED national records for transcript requests – since Mom and Dad insisted that the show NOT give out any of their contact information; creating another turning point, not only for Secret Recipes^TM, but also for Journal Graphics and The Phil Donahue Show!

Mondays & Memories of My Mom – Twinkie Day Eve

Happy April and happy Easter Monday! Additionally, I wish a very merry Twinkie Day Eve to all! Mondays are so incredibly special! I continually look forward to them, as they are my 52 Chances, each year, in which I get to share Memories of My Mom with all of you!

#TheRecipeDetective

#TwinkieDay

Tomorrow, April 6^th, is National Hostess Twinkie Day! That makes today Twinkie Day Eve – whoop, whoop! This is a perfect time for me to write about how my mom was the FIRST person (circa 1975) to develop a make-at-home version for imitating the cream-filled, golden-sponge-cake delight at home!

When I searched for “Twinkie recipe” on Google, I got back “about 657,000 results…” and Mom wasn’t even in the first two pages of results! So MANY copycats have copied the ORIGINAL copycat – and yet so FEW have actually given my mom the proper credit she deserves for being the inventor of imitating junk foods, fast foods, and other restaurant favorites at home. Mom was the trail-blazing pioneer, who carved out the “copycat cookery” niche in the food industry over 48 years ago!

However, I must note that when I searched for “Pitzer Twinkie recipe”, the first result listed (out of 22,500 results) was actually for Mom’s Hopeless Twinkles_© recipe, which I had shared in a previous blog post, on this website, in 2019! [It can also be found in the “Recipes” tab and near the end of this blog post.]

Additionally, I’d also like to give a shout-out to PressReader.com, for printing a copy of one of Mom’s Twinkie imitations, with proper credit given to her! You can check it out at https://www.pressreader.com/usa/orlando-sentinel/20121128/282398396711181! In my search, I also found the following excerpt of interest… as seen at https://www.food.com/recipe/hostess-twinkie-sponge-cake-356820/reviews/846730.

“Review [of homemade Hostess Twinkies] by Tinkerbell (4/10/2009) – NorthwestGal recommended this recipe to me & when I looked at it I was so surprised! I can’t say that I have made this exact recipe, but I can help shed some light on its origin & say that I have made it’s later version, also by Gloria. I saw Gloria Pitzer for the first time on the Phil Donahue show on April 8, 1993. I immediately called & ordered the original transcript of the show. (No TiVo back then! LOL) Gloria Pitzer, the original recipe detective, had been “cloning” recipes for 20 years but got her real jump start when she was working at a newspaper that decided to add a food page. The first letter she opened asked, “How do they make that special sauce at McDonald’s?” She went home & made & remade until she had a sauce that mimicked the Big Mac’s special sauce. After that she branched out into KFC, Wendy’s Frosty & Chili, Oreo cookies and Hostess Twinkies. But, after only 6 weeks doing the new food page for the paper she lost her job because one of her clone recipes (Share A Lease cheesecake) “stepped on the toes of a famous cheesecake company that was also a sponsor of the paper”. She made up new names for her copycat recipes, like Wednesday’s chili (I have that posted here Recipe #21936), Gloreo Cookies (love that recipe!), Big Bucket in the Sky Chicken, Big Match special sauce & Hopeless Twinkles. She first appeared on the Donahue show in July of 1981 and within 90 days the Donahue show received over one million letters about her episode. She appeared again 12 years later, in 1993, when I was lucky enough to be watching with my newborn son. After comparing this recipe with the one I’ve made from the 1993 transcript I see she did alter the recipe quite a bit. She made them on the 1981 episode and again with her new version in 1993. I’ve made the newest version from my transcript. I look forward to trying this one as well. 🙂 Thanks for posting it, Max!”

#LearnSomethingNewEveryDay

Did you know… on August 19^th, 1919… William B. Ward registered the trademark name, Hostess, for his family’s company’s breads and cakes? Additionally, it was James Dewar, who invented the Twinkie_® while working for the Ward family at the Continental Baking Company. Originally, when the baking company was founded in the early 1900s, it was called Ward Baking Company. Later, as the Continental Baking Company, it was purchased by Interstate Bakeries Corporation and renamed Hostess Brands.

For a more in-depth history of the Ward family, their baking company, Dewar’s Twinkies® and the drama that surrounded all of them, check out this fascinating article about it (as written by Bloomberg News), on FinancialPost.com, at https://business.financialpost.com/news/twinkie-history-spiced-with-murder-scandal-suggests-icon-will-survive! I’ve included, below, the short story that Mom wrote about Dewar decades ago.

FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…

As seen in…

Gloria Pitzer’s Cookbook – The Best of the Recipe Detective, (Balboa Press, Jan. 2018, p. 204)

[A revised reprint of Gloria Pitzer’s Better Cookery Cookbook (Secret Recipes^TM, St. Clair, MI; May 1983, 3^rd Edition)]

JAMES DEWAR

JAMES DEWAR STARTED OUT driving a horse-drawn wagon in Chicago and, by 1930, was manager of the Continental Baking Company’s Chicago establishment. He invented ‘The Twinkie’, a sponge-type cake with creamy vanilla-flavored filling [in the early 30s.] It has been called the ‘Grand-daddy’ of modern snack foods.

Today, the finger-sized cream-filled cake is as big a confectionery sensation as they were when Dewar first introduced his creation to American cuisine. The company that put out the Twinkie was originally called the Continental Baking Company and later became the Hostess company. At the time, he wanted to give the public something reasonably priced, for the Great Depression of the 30s brought grave times to this country.

Treats like the cream-filled Twinkies, would be a luxury to people who couldn’t afford otherwise. For decades, the appealing factor about the Twinkies national popularity has been that it is affordable! Dewar put 2 cakes in each package, selling them for $.05 a pair. For the price of a nickel, it was quite a bargain. Dewar remembered how the Continental Baking Company was selling small finger-sized shortcakes for strawberry season in the 1930s.

The pans they used to bake them in were not being used except for the spring promotion to produce the shortcakes. He, therefore, came up with the idea of preparing the same shortcake in those pans, but filling each cake with an injection of vanilla cream. The Twinkies became an immediate success!

The idea for the name, on the other hand, came while he was on a business trip to St. Louis and saw a billboard advertising ‘Twinkle Toes Shoes’, which was, then, a terrific sales pitch. The name ‘Twinkies’ was a spinoff of that shoe advertisement. From then on, the cakes took off.

When Dewar retired from Continental in 1968, he boasted often to the press that he ate scores of Twinkies every day. That’s not a bad endorsement for the critics who claim junk food will shorten your life span.

Do you remember the big run on Twinkies_®, back in November of 2012? The Hostess Brands company had announced it was going out of business and utter chaos ensued as the American masses swarmed their local stores to buy all the yummy, cream-filled, sponge cakes (and other products of Hostess Brands) they could find!

Our Canadian neighbors still had Hostess Brands in their country and were laughing at the lengths Americans were going to get their hands on the suddenly-hard-to-find, coveted Twinkies_®. Some Twinkies_®were actually being auctioned on eBay for THOUSANDS of dollars – and people were paying it! A spokesperson for Hostess sarcastically asked the media where all of these Hostess Brands enthusiasts were before they had to file for bankruptcy.

I saw a great article about Twinkies_® a few years ago that I saved in “My Favorites”. It was called “Beverly Hills Billionaire To Take Over Twinkies Maker, Hostess Brands” and written by James R. Koren (L. A. Times; July 5, 2016), explaining how the Hostess Brands company, under various names and ownerships, was saved from bankruptcy foreclosures more than once over the past century.

When the announcement was first made in 2012 that Hostess Brands was closing their business for good and Americans panicked at their sudden loss, I wasn’t worried about never having Twinkies_® again… because my mom taught me how to make my own! In fact, as the Secret Recipes Detective^TM, Mom taught everyone how to make their own at home!

Hopeless Twinkles

HOPELESS TWINKLES – an Imitation of Hostess Twinkies

By Gloria Pitzer (Feb. 1976, among Gloria’s “Original 200” recipes)

Filling Ingredients:

¼ pound (1/2 cup) butter or margarine,

½ cup Crisco or homogenized solid shortening,

1 cup granulated sugar,

¾ cup Pet or Carnation evaporated milk

1 tablespoon vanilla

Filling Instructions:

In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter for 5 minutes on medium speed. Add Crisco a little at a time. Cream another 3 or 4 minutes. Add sugar a little at a time while continuing to beat. Then add the milk (mixed, first, with the vanilla), beating and scraping the sides and bottom of the bowl. The longer you beat this, the better it becomes – but food processor preparations are also possible – timing depends on manufacturer’s directions for “creaming”. Mixture will “grow” in the bowl. Keeps refrigerated in covered container up to a month. Use as directed below with the cake “strips” for TWINKLES. Should fill about 2 dozen.

THE YELLOW-SPONGE-LIKE CAKE that I use is the same recipe that I suggest using for imitating at home the cake product from the company ‘nobody doesn’t like’ – who shall remain nameless – YOU can say it out loud… but I can’t!

Cake Ingredients:

3 large eggs

1 ½ teaspoons vanilla

1 cup whole milk

½ cup butter

1 ½ cups sugar

1 teaspoon salt

3 ½ teaspoons baking powder

2 cups all-purpose flour

Cake Instructions:

As listed, beat the ingredients in large mixing bowl on medium speed, beating 1 minute with each addition. Pour batter into 2 square, 8-inch, greased cake pans or Pyrex baking dishes (or a 13 x 9 x 2” pan.) Bake in preheated, 350°F oven for 30 to 35 minutes – for the 2 square pans – both pans in the oven at same time. For the oblong pan, bake 40 to 45 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool cake in pan on wire rack. Best to use the cake when it is slightly frozen – about 30 minutes in the freezer. Cut cake into bars – 1.5 x 3.5”. Put bottom-side of each bar facing up on waxed paper. Spread bottom halves with the Twinkle Filling and put together with an un-frosted bar – sandwich style. Wrap in small plastic sandwich bags or snack-size bags. Seal and date. Freeze up to one year – or refrigerate up to 2 weeks. Makes about 24 cream-filled cakes.

Mondays & Memories of My Mom – A Day in the Life of the Happy Homemaker

June 24, 2019June 24, 2019

Mondays & Memories of My Mom – A Day in the Life of the Happy Homemaker

Happy Monday AND happy “Please Take My Children to Work Day”! Yes, Virginia! There is such a thing!

Before my mom was the Recipe Detective^TM, before she authored all those newsletters and cookbooks, Mom penned and syndicated various “hot topic” and “homemaker” satirical-styled editorials/columns, as well as a series of cartoon panels! One of her later series of columns was called “No Laughing Matter” (aka: “No Laugh ‘N Matter”), which she continued doing for a while, even after the rise of her Secret Recipes^TM business took off in the 1970s.

Mom would have had a field day writing a column about this national “Please Take My Children to Work Day” – I can’t believe there really is such a thing! Apparently, it’s been celebrated yearly on the last Monday of June for 16 years (since 2003). This year, that happens to be today! Who knew? I could have used that when my kids were young – NOT! I can just hear my mom laughing and saying the same thing, too!

We got our “me times” the old fashioned way… when the kids were involved in school, sports, play groups, Scouts, city activities… the list goes on, including hiring a sitter for a day every now and then – or exchanging sitting favors with another mom! Sorry – but, really people – you don’t need a national holiday to devise a one-day break from parenting responsibilities! It’s a lifelong commitment. Besides, there’s already a yearly national “Take Your Child to Work Day” on the last Thursday in April!

For more information on what the “Please Take My Children to Work Day” holiday is really all about, you can check out these three websites, on which I found some interesting information; or do a search of your own, but here are some starting points:

In one of Mom’s “No Laughing Matter” columns from the 1970s (not sure what date it was actually published in the papers wherever it was syndicated), Where Have All Our Homemakers Gone?, Mom wrote: “The full-time homemaker is, unfortunately, being short-changed by today’s ‘paycheck-oriented’ society and, if Women’s Lib have their own way, ‘homemaker’ will be a 4-letter word… the women who either by choice or by circumstance makes a career out of making a home.”

Here it is about 40 years later and not much has changed. I constantly recognize the timelessness in a lot of the issues about which Mom once wrote. I guess it’s true – the more things change, the more they also stay the same!

In another “No Laughing Matter” article (circa 1970s), Just a Housewife and a Pro!, Mom wrote: “As a ‘suburban housewife’, I fail to see how anyone could classify my routine as ‘dull’! For one thing, everyone knows that the mother of an active family has no routine! We’re lucky if we can get our slippers on the right feet first thing in the morning. In fact, we’re lucky if we can even find those slippers, having to, first, plow through an undergrowth of Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs on the way to the kitchen, where we must witness testy debates over who gets the [prize] in the box of [cereal] and why a 40-year-old man refuses to take the Donald Duck thermos in his lunch…

What’s wrong with a quest for a roll of Scotch tape that’s your very own or having the phone ring and the call is for you instead of your teenager? [Margaret Mead’s] working definition [of a ‘first-class’ woman, not being a housewife or homemaker,] is a ‘trained, competent, professional woman’. Now, I’d be the last one to contradict an expert, but in defense of women who become wives and mothers… we have had training (although much of it’s on the job), are extremely competent and are professional [according to Webster’s dictionary] in that we have ‘a vocation requiring knowledge of some department of learning or skill’…

If you don’t think it takes learning or skill to varnish a complex-of-disorder with enough love and efficiency that husbands and children grow up with security and comfort, drop around my kitchen some Sunday night… no matter what they tell us [working-outside-the-home homemakers] about turning our kids over to a day care center, there’s nothing like coming home from school to know that Mom’s in the kitchen, whipping up a pitcher of Tang and a plate of Twinkies.” [NOTE: See Mom’s recipe for homemade Twinkies at the end of this blog.]

Mom often referred to our family as being the total opposites of the Brady family on TV! Here’s a take, from the early years of the Recipe Detective^TM, when Dan Martin of Newsday Wire Features wanted to come to our house in Pearl Beach to interview Mom about her bi-centennial cookbook that he had seen at The Henry Ford Museum in Greenfield Village… To hear Mom tell the story, it was just another day in the life of the “happy homemaker” – the kind of “stuff” from which country songs (or reality TV shows) are made!

FROM MOM’S MEMORIES…

When he knocked on the door that day, it was like inviting him into a Jean Kerr production of “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies”. There were a dozen baskets of ironing here and there in the large dining room, each tagged with the [customer’s] name, phone number and date… Two long tables, under the windows [along the east wall], were covered with freshly mimeographed 4×6 cards of recipes, spread out for the ink to dry. Several times a week, I printed up about 200 recipes, at 50 copies each. At that time, we sold these through our newsletter for 5-for-a-dollar or 25-cents each. We did very well with them too!

Gloria Pitzer, mimeographing in her early years as the Recipe Detective [TM]

In the living room, Debbie’s friends had gathered with their driver’s training manuals to quiz each other for the big day coming up – when those six teenagers would be taking their driving tests. In the kitchen, Cheryl and Lorie were working on Girl Scout badge projects with some of their friends. It was a mad house!

Mr. Pipersack was shuffling in and out of the side porch door [off of the utility room], trying to unplug the bathroom pipes and clean out the septic tank for us. In the back room, where the prehistoric furnace was located in the 80-year-old house, a man from the gas company was arguing with a man from [the electric] company about what was wrong with our furnace and why it wouldn’t work [and recommending that I hide Paul’s wrench!]…

Our oldest son, Bill, was hunting through the kitchen drawers for some tools… so he could get under the hood of his [car] out in the driveway and, then, let Mr. Pipersack pull his truck into the yard. Mike, our next oldest, was on the phone trying to convince a girl that the things she had heard about him weren’t true and, if he could get his dad’s car on Saturday, would she go to the movies with him…

[Furthermore,] the cat was having a litter of kittens under the sewing table and our police dog, Suzie, was about to have a litter of pups and was moping about, looking for comfort…

Had our life been made into a TV series, it probably would’ve been called ‘The Pitzer Pack Rats’! …Based purely on the unfounded talents of our five kids to keep our house looking like it was just about to be condemned by HUD! I pretend not to care for ‘The Brady Bunch’, because I envied their lovely lifestyle, where problems were solved without so much as a hair out of place or a tear shed in despair…

My husband… loved the way the Brady’s bathroom mirror never got steamed up from somebody’s shower and how Mr. Brady never had to threaten a child… for catapulting a meatball off of their fork and into [his] coffee cup the way our kids would! I liked the way their stairway was always free of common household litter and their door wall never had fingerprints on it.

Their house plants flourished and when their phone would ring, it was always somebody… who had something pertinent to contribute to the entire 30-minute story… When [the phone] rings in this house, it’s usually a lady calling long-distance, from Toledo, to tell me about an exciting new offer on my favorite… magazines at drastically reduced rates, or… my Avon lady…

Mrs. Brady lived the kind of saccharine existence all mothers of my day dreamed of, for she never had to explain why they had Coca-Cola stains on the ceiling or how she blew the food budget on a pot roast for Sunday’s dinner, or why she had to take down phone messages in the dust on the end table because she could never locate a pencil and paper when she needed it, like I did!

Her kids did not spend hours on the phone with a friend just listening to each other breathe, nor did they waste their allowances on a record album with a 3-aspirin rating! And, I noticed, the Brady kids never used a windowsill for a foot-rest, a lampshade for a coat rack or a younger brother for a punching bag.

Mr. and Mrs. Brady never argued with each other over his bowling night and her Bridge Club. Have you ever noticed how their oldest boy never stood around, cracking his knuckles when he was bored? Ours did. Everything that happened to them was an object lesson with a happy conclusion where the parents always come out on top, knowing what was best for the youngsters and proving it, too!

We always felt lucky, on the other hand, if Paul and I could only get the cherries out of the fruit cocktail before the kids did! And, while all of the Brady kids uttered adorable little sayings… our teenaged son explained how he had just initiated his new chemistry set by concocting Nitro-glycerin in the utility room.

The Brady Bunch may have lived in a Walt Disney [style] happily-ever-after world, but I did really like them… because [the story] didn’t tell it like it WAS, but how it COULD be! – Gloria Pitzer, My Cup Runneth Over and I Can’t Find My Mop (Secret Recipes^TM, St. Clair, MI; Dec. 1989, pp. 27-29)

Inspired by some of Mom’s stories and cartoons, I wrote the following parody of The Brady Bunch theme song, That’s the Way we all Became the Brady Bunch, by songwriters, Frank DeVol and Sherwood Schwartz (© Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC):

Parody by Laura Emerich, Illustrations & Photo by Gloria Pitzer

MY “DIET” UPDATE:

Friday marked the first day of summer! On the first day of spring I adopted the low-carb lifestyle (like Atkins). It has been 97 days of no bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, sugar – you know, all the good stuff! After starting out at a 20-gram-carb-limit for a few weeks, I raised my carb-limit to 25 grams a day and have kept it there so far.

I’ve recently started using almond flour to make some Keto recipes. I LOVE the 90-Second Microwave English Muffin! I turned my slices into a Monte Cristo sandwich one morning and, OMG, I was in heaven (and stuffed) for a maximum 9-grams of carbs! I’ve also discovered that some heavy whipping cream and sugar-free, flavored gelatin make awesome “carb-free” desserts!

As of today, I’ve lost about 30 pounds! My goal is to lose another 10 pounds, at least; maybe 15 pounds at most. However, my “exercise regimen” is not steady, to say the least, and I still need to change that! I don’t spend near enough time weeding my garden or going for brisk walks.

IN CLOSING…

Tag: HopelessTwinkles

Mondays & Memories of My Mom – Turning Points

Mondays & Memories of My Mom – Twinkie Day Eve

‘There really are very few recipe secrets!’ – Gloria Pitzer

‘You’ll be amazed at the number of recipes you can duplicate in your own kitchen – and those you can, at least, come close to imitating – with far more success than the advertising people give us credit!’ – Gloria Pitzer

Hopeless Twinkles

HOPELESS TWINKLES – an Imitation of Hostess Twinkies

Mondays & Memories of My Mom – A Day in the Life of the Happy Homemaker