Z turns into her Mother

"I'm turning into Grandma" I said dramatically to my daughter at the weekend. She was alarmed. It's the fear of our lives that one or both of us is becoming like my mother. Though fine and lovely in many ways, they aren't the ones that creep up on one all unbidden, are they?

The whole family had always been bemused at the range of vegetables she served up. Each in its own dish, they took ages to pass round and the meal was nearly cold by the time we all started eating. My sister and I often wondered why she had to serve half a dozen different ones when two plus potatoes would all have been cooked at the same time and could have dished out quicker.

Now I know. It's because eating a little of lots of things is more satisfying than eating a lot of one thing. On Saturday, we had roasted shallots, garlic and butternut squash, sprouting broccoli, carrots, parsnips, onions, baked potatoes and courgettes. I ate the cores of the parsnips raw, as I wasn't sure I had enough carrots to steal before the meal. We had a socking great loin of pork too, but I only had one smallish slice, enabled to do so because of all the vegetables, which gave me as full a plate as everyone else.

My mother watched her weight assiduously all her life. When I was a child, she weighed 10 - 10 1/2 stone and was a size 14 - 16 (yes, I know, but clothes were much smaller then. Now at that size she'd be a 12 at most - she was nearly 5' 6" tall.) When my father died suddenly, she stopped eating for a long time and lost a couple of stone and kept her weight at around 8 stone 4 pounds after that, which was slightly thin for her build and I suspect was much of the reason she lost several inches in height in her 60s and 70s. Ironically enough, in the last few years of her life she had dietary problems and could not put weight on.

Anyway, when I was younger I couldn't eat the high protein diet she preferred, it just didn't suit me. Carbohydrate and vegetables did me nicely - not that I didn't eat meat and the rest, but I never thought of it as the basis of my diet. But now I'm older, I seem to need more protein. And I cook and eat all these vegetables. Oh, and she chomped whole lots of ricecakes. Like I now do.