Another pat of butter

Does Butter 'n Love sound familiar? How about a little misshapen bootleg Strawberry Shortcake-ish girl?

If it seems familiar, it's because you've seen this cover before, but the recipes were from a Baptist Church in Kansas.

This Butter 'n Love Recipes collection was put together by Heritage Temple Ladies Auxiliary (Columbus, OH; ca. 1979 since there's a three-year calendar starting with 1979 in the back of the book).

The book has significantly fewer crazy noodle recipes than its Kansas counterpart. Instead, this one seems to be very, very canny.

I always thought of fruit butters as ways to preserve bushels of fresh fruits picked at the height of the season...

...but here, fruit butter starts with 7-1/2 pounds of canned peaches or apricots.

If you want your own "homemade" soup, it similarly starts with a lot of cans:

Eight total cans, including one of the elusive canned zucchini.  I'm just a little confused as to why it calls for fresh carrots, when a can was just as available. (If I had to pick one vegetable besides the cabbage to add fresh, it would be peas, as the canned variety smell like old socks and the fresh ones could warm through into delightful, sweet little orbs in the last few minutes of cooking time.)

A lot of the cookbook is devoted to perfectly fine baked goods, but it does have a sad little diet section with recipes like this:

The pancake is basically an unfortunate slice of poor French toast sent through the blender.

The diet section also has this decidedly non-diety seeming entry:

With two cups of sugar and a cup of oil, this zucchini bread recipe probably doesn't belong in the diet section, yet here it is. Vickie Skaggs submitted fully 36% of the diet recipes (and 75% of the recipes with a named contributor), so I suspect somebody just put a bunch of her recipes in the diet section, assuming they were all diet recipes without looking very closely.

You know someone at some point used this placement as an excuse to eat a big fat slice of zucchini bread for breakfast instead of that sad little "pancake" and still claim to be on a very strict diet.

Now we're far enough from new year's resolutions that you can do it too. (If you have trouble finding a fresh zucchini now, though, I would not recommend trying a canned one!)