How All This Started!
Hi. My name is Bethany, and I’m overweight, so I had Bariatric surgery in January 2025 to change that, and my mom, Darlene, decided to lose weight with me. Now, we eat smaller, more appropriately sized portions.
But there was a problem, all our beloved family recipes were well “Family Sized” 6-8 servings. Neither of us likes leftovers, let alone days worth of leftovers. So, we needed to reduce the number of servings of our family recipes to 2. We had fun choosing our favorites and scaling them down. Figuring out what works and what doesn’t, and there is a lot that doesn’t. But we were excited by what did work.
Then we ran into another problem, for convenience we used pre-mixed seasonings and spice mix packets in our family recipes but they contained extra sugar and salt that we didn’t want. We also weren’t happy using a partial packet or taking over a year to get through a spice mix. So we worked on developing seasoning mixes and spice mixes that we could make in small amounts.
We also looked into both artificial sugars and natural sugar substitutes. The natural sugar substitutes all had aftertastes I didn’t care for, Mom didn’t mind them. We really didn’t like the aftertaste of the artificial sugars and there are some health concerns with using them. So in the end we decided to not use them and just try and limit the amounts of sugar we use in our recipes for two.
So we decided we wanted to share our successful journey in developing two serving recipes. We wanted them to be easy to make, healthy, and taste delicious. That is how this blog began. We hope to continue to share wonderful recipes for two with you for years to come.
For now here are a few successes from our family cookbook: