Have you heard of the movie, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants? It’s a charming movie revolving around a pair of secondhand jeans that follow four girlfriends as they graduate high school and their lives take them in different directions. The glue that keeps them connected throughout their individual journeys is of course, the pants.
On a whim, sometime in 2012, I decided to adopt my own spin on that movie. Rather than jeans, however, I would circulate a handmade apron, an empty recipe binder, and some blank recipe cards to anyone signing up on my website. We’d call it The Traveling Apron Recipe Swap and if lucky, a couple of people would sign up to swap recipes with me. If I was really lucky they’d share some family favorites. And if I was really, really lucky they’d also live outside of Louisiana just to keep things interesting.
5 people signed up. 10 people signed up. 20 people signed up. So many people were signing up that the submission form had to be taken down the very same day and by the next morning the apron was headed to Illinois.
As they say, the rest is history. In 2014, after traveling some 20,000+ miles, the original swap was turned into my first cookbook. We would swap two more times thereafter and just when it appeared to be time to hang up the apron strings, the Rachael Ray Show featured The Traveling Apron in an episode on “Ultimate Swaps”. The show crashed my website and sent in request after request asking me to circulate another swap. And so…. we continue to swap. The apron is currently living it up somewhere in Oregon.
Since the creation of The Traveling Apron Recipe Swap, the sweet and simple mission has remained the same; to connect a community of women around shared recipes. I’m delighted to introduce you to some of the participants and to share their recipes with you here on the blog.