Who is ready for some lamb cake shirts????

I know what your thinking. “Ruth, that’s just not edgy enough for us. We are your mid-century menu soldiers! We deserve something really amazing!”

Well then. How about a smoking lamb cake mug?

Or a gelatin mold pillow?

Or an apron with meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!

Okay, I might be a little excited.  And, as you probably have figured out, I finally, finally opened a merch store. You can see the Mid-Century Menu merch store here, and I suggest you take some time browsing around on it. It has waaaaay more than just aprons. I have a couple of designs that are available on a huge selection of products. Shirts, hats, pillows, baby bibs, onesies, sweatshirts, cropped shirts, tank tops…the list just goes on. Want a smoking lamb cake hat? I’ve got you covered. And for the next 10 days, you get 15% off everything!!!

I also have other exciting news: I launched a Patreon!

It’s got some fun perks on it, including the ability to pick what I’m going to stuff in Tom’s face every week. And yes, the weekly posts will be back in full force very soon. Lots of changes are coming around here. TJ is starting preschool in a week or two, which is going to leave me with free afternoons to write, cook, dream about gelatin, and basically to be without kids. For the first time in….7 years. Crazy, right?  And yes, launching all this stuff now IS to distract me from the fact that my baby is going to school. And he’s going to be riding a bus!!! He just turned 3! How is that even going to work?

Ok, ok. Focus. Time for some transparency: The reason behind the Patreon is because I would really like to be outside ad free by the end of the year. Right now the blog is serving ads from a couple different places so that I can cover the costs of hosting my huge, ancient (10 years now!) blog. But more and more frequently, issues have come up with those ad spaces. And I find them really, really annoying. Also, I would really like to digitize my currently collection so that I can share it with everyone, and I really don’t want to put the recipes behind a paywall. I want them to be free. So if you enjoy reading the blog and you are planning to use the upcoming recipe archive, please think about contributing. This is a massive labor of love for me and if you would like to keep the fun going and help me to preserve these vintage recipe treasures, I could really use your help. If you can’t contribute financially, sharing the merch site or Patreon on social media is also a huge, huge help.

Anyway, enough of that. I have lots of plans for stuff, and finally enough time to do them. So the website facelift I’ve been promising forever is finally coming in about 2 weeks. The new logos in the merch store are a sneak peek of how it’s going to look (spoiler: It’s awesome) which is going to introduce the vintage recipe archive I have been promising everyone. I’m also going to get back on a punishing posting schedule to distract me from missing TJ, and I am going to be designing merch at a pretty stead pace from now on.  I think next up are some gelatin molds. After that, it’s time for Tom’s face. If you have any other suggestions for designs that you would like to see, please leave them in the comments!!!

And I would also like to thank everyone for reading this all the way through, and for all your support and love and comments, even if I don’t have time to respond to them, I read them all!  You guys have made it a great 10 years, and I am gearing up for at least another 10. With more gelatin!!!!