Before I turned ten, I knew how to fry chicken. Frying chicken together, I thought, was the way mothers and daughters across the country bonded: over a "fry daddy", flour spotting our aprons like sawdust. I remember the sound of hot grease popping from the kitchen and Vince Gill on the radio. I remember caramel cowtails from the gas station and Pizza Hut on TV trays.

And then, I couldn't remember, because it stopped happening. Not because we wanted it to, but because sometime around the new millennium, we, as a family, stopped neglecting our metabolisms.

Then, at 3702 N. Walnut Street, we began having orange slices for snack instead of Zebra Cakes, and friends stopped coming over with the intent of raiding our pantry for snack food. My eleven-year-old friends wanted Skittles, not almonds. They wanted a fun afternoon with fun games and fun people and fun food.

Since then, we've done our best to call back to memory all the food we miss eating: all the syrupy things, all the fried things, and all the chocolately things, and we revise them so we can eat them. The trial-and-error of it is a puzzle, a mathematical equation: dividing the calories without sacrificing taste. Sometimes the result is a flop: we laugh at ourselves, throw it in the trashcan and promise to never speak of it again. However, when we create something worth eating again, we talk about it for weeks, to people we know and people we hardly know. We are successful and we are creative. We are the Julia Childs we always thought we'd be.

I'm dedicating this blog to my mother: the Zumba-enthusiast, Dr. Oz-worshipping, health food nut that she is, for teaching me there ain't no shame in sugar-free ice cream. Because, if it looks like ice cream and (for the most part) tastes like ice cream, then it must be ice cream.