On The Ration

The post-war ideal home

2010-10-15T08:34:00.000+01:00

I've been decorating. Me! All butch, up a ladder with a paintbrush and everything.

It's October and this project is starting to come to an end. British vegetables are becoming harder to get hold of as winter sets in and I really, really can't face doing what I did last winter, with a subsistence diet of cabbage and leftovers.

Also, I want to have people over for Christmas and not present them with minced 'beef' made of 1/3 mince, 1/3 finely chopped mushrooms and 1/3 porridge oats soaked in gravy. Although, it must be said, nobody has ever noticed that they're getting that instead of 100% minced beef; and people seemed to like my mashed potatoes made with milk rather than butter.

This all means that post-war life beckons, just as Britain's government starts to unpick the last parts of the Post-War Consensus of Beveridge and Keynes. And, to do it right (and skip the whole people-almost-starved, bread-and-potatoes-rationed, American Loan 1947 experience) I've taken my previously functional, whitewash-and-woodchip living room and spent a week turning it into something the householder of the 1950s would've been proud of. Very proud, actually, given the 42" plasma TV, but we'll leave that aside.

So here it is. I present the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition winning room for 1955 (with 1963 unaccountably appearing on the TV):

Meanwhile, I had a decorator in to do the front room. And because I'm contrary, that's becoming a pre-war, 1930s library-cum-dining room. It's finished, but there's nothing to show until all 10,000-or-so books have been moved into it.

Watch this space.

Veg boxing

2010-09-26T12:00:00.001+01:00

Something I planned to do before I moved to Merseyside was order a weekly veg box from one of the many online suppliers of such things. But I'm lazy and I kept putting it off. Also, having a local greengrocer lets me buy my own choice of fresh, local produce without worrying about wastage.

However, I only need to look back at last winter's entries on this blog to be reminded that the random shortages at the greengrocer and at Morrisons supermarket to realise that I'm really, really not looking forward to doing that again at the end of this year.

Then Scott mentioned on Twitter that he'd also been thinking about it. Others replied to say that they'd only got good things to say about having a box delivered, so he signed up. His first box sounded very nice, and never one to let a bandwagon pass without jumping on it, I also signed up.

I got my first box on Friday, and I'm impressed. I got some lovely, crispy broadleaf spinach; some of the best looking tomatoes I've ever seen; crunchy, fresh celery; muddy potatoes; very very sweet onions - almost sweet enough to eat like an apple; earthy, fresh carrots and a beautiful Chinese cabbage.

There was an irresistible freshness to it all, making me realise how the supermarket food is picked, transported in a chilled van to a depot some miles away, stored for a day or so, transported in chilled lorry to a supermarket many many miles away, kept chilled out back of the supermarket for a day or so, then put on the shelves and sold as "fresh". The vegetables in this box had clearly been in the ground the day before. They still had mud on them, so hadn't been washed and chemically treated before undergoing a trek around the country. All-in-all, irresistible.

In fact, so much so that I made a quick salad of a tomato, some spinach leaves and a celery stick, with some salt and a dash of wine vinegar and crunched my way through it there and then - at 10 in the morning, no less.

So that was Saturday's meal decided: a big version of that little salad, while the veg is still alive and bright. I doubt there'll be any leftovers, but if there are, the cold weather brings notions of soup, so they'll go in a broth.

Next week it's chard, lettuce, more tomatoes, a gem squash (I've never cooked squash before - that'll be a fun challenge and this looks lovely) and more potatoes and onions. So it's another salad at the very least. I'm very happy.

The way to love butter is to realize that it might be lost

2010-09-25T09:30:00.000+01:00

Okay, so I'm slightly misquoting GK Chesterton, but the point still holds: be careful with your butter ration. I've been being even more sparing than usual in order to save up butter for a fat-rich weekend meal with my herby potatoes as a main feature. Done properly, they take a lot of fat, so saving up is good.

I didn't count on how the smart the stupid dog could be. Our two Border Collies, Rosie and Jen, are chalk and cheese. Rosie is a typical Collie - obedient, smart, quick to anticipate and always ready to round up sheep, other dogs and the smaller of the humans and keep them penned.

Jen, however, is about as untypical a Collie as you can get. Not only will she not round anything up, she also won't obey, can't anticipate and, when she's not sure what to do, will roll on to her back to have her belly rubbed. If we got burgled, I'm sure that she could easily be persuaded to help pack up our belongings by a quick belly rub.

But some of this is an act. After a walk, the dogs sit in the utility room to dry off - they usually play in the sea for a bit. The utility room has a purpose-built gate across the entrance to keep them there and stop random shaking-off-of-water occurring anywhere else.

Jen dislikes unexpected loud noises - thunder, fireworks, the doorbell - and has learnt to hurdle the gate when such a noise occurs. She has no idea what to do after that and has usually forgotten the noise by the time she's over, but it's a good trick nonetheless. What CJBS hadn't anticipated was that, having learnt to jump the gate, she had actually learnt to jump the gate.

CJBS and the dogs got in soaked. He put them in the utility room and headed to the shower to warm up. I continued to work. My first clue something was wrong was the sound of something metallic falling in the kitchen. I got up, went downstairs as was confronted with a scene of devastation. Jen had leapt the gate, headed straight for the kitchen and, being greedy like all dogs, made her way along the counter tops dislodging anything edible on to the floor and eating it.

In those few seconds, she'd had all the remaining bread, foolishly not put back in the bread bin and, most importantly, my hoarded butter ration. 8oz of butter were gone, much of it to be found around her mouth. And she wasn't prepared to stop there, continuing to lick out the butter dish even as I dragged her away, finally stopping when her fear of my annoyance overcame her greediness. Then she ran for it, attempting to find somewhere to hide.

Oh, but I was annoyed. Annoyed with the dog, although she was just being a dog, annoyed with CJBS for walking away from the gate without realising the trap he'd set and annoyed with myself for only telling him four or five times that she was now willing to jump the gate unprovoked. Why oh why did I not nag him more about this? I should've been bringing it up at mealtimes and during favourite radio programmes, leaving him small notes and sending him text messages - you know, the standard "nag+" way of getting a man to remember stuff.

The butter, once gone, could not be replaced until the next rationing week, but CJBS has never let the rules of this project get in the way of a happy life and he bought me butter anyway. So now I had butter in but couldn't use it until next week. Worse than that, rather than buying the cheap, tasty and multi-useful butter I get, he "treated" me to some expensive branded butter that has no taste and is only good for cooking. So my hot buttered toast treat was not just gone for a couple of days, it was gone for the entire next week as well.

And he didn't understand why I didn't thank him, so I had him making hurt puppy-dog eyes at me every time I mentioned it. Which, frankly, I did a lot.

That was last week (I'm still not over it) but today, once I've waited in between 9am and 7pm for a delivery (it'll come at 6.59pm, unless I pop out before then and come home to a card saying "we called but you were out, please drive to Plymouth to collect your parcel") I'll finally get my new, edible fat ration. And then I shall eat hot buttered toast in front of him and look smug, whilst he will have forgotten the whole incident.

Read all about it

2010-09-10T09:58:00.000+01:00

There has been a decidedly autumnal nip in the air in the last few days. Summer is clearly drawing to a close and with it, no doubt, my happy three or four months of salads.

In the last few weeks, there's been a real choice of home-grown goodies. In spring, I was falling upon the odd limp British lettuce with joy at having something green. In August, I was choosing from 3 types of British lettuce. Slowly, this is sliding back to just the one. Soon, lettuce will go off the menu entirely.

So it's time to start planning for the limited menus and random shortages that made last winter so hard to deal with. Luckily, I've got help.

On my monthly trip into the office in Harrogate, one of my colleagues had found her mother's cookbooks in the back of a cupboard. One, entitled something like 'Eat What You Grow' didn't sound promising but was actually full of the most tempting winter recipes. The other, a wartime cookbook sponsored by Stork margarine, had some the staples I was already used to, enlivened by putting a spoonful of Stork in, on or over the food before, during or after cooking. Why are these sponsored cookbooks always so naked in their attempt to get you to heap great big piles of their wares into your cooking? Even vegetables, getting their usual British "quick boil" of 15 minutes or so, would be improved by having Stork boiling in the pan with them, as well as melting over the top of them at the end. And this awful substance, Stork, was rationed!

I took photocopies from both books of likely looking recipes. The Stork book had a chapter at the beginning that I loved: what to do with your cooking when the air raid sirens sounded (basically, turn off the gas and come back to it after the All Clear, when it will either need further cooking or reheating).

A day later and we were in that London, to have dinner with Jonathan and Kate to celebrate our up-coming first wedding anniversary. It was also a good opportunity to have an expensive shop for non-rationed goods at Fortnum and Mason's in Piccadilly - something possible even during the war, as the shop specialises in dressings and sauces and side-of-plate extras that were never rationed and rarely subject to shortages, but entirely useless with nothing to put them on. You can't make a main meal from Ginger Confit and Hungarian Paprika, try as you might.

It was also a good opportunity to nose around a museum, something we could both pass our lives doing, me at speed, CJBS as slowly as possible. So we went to the National Portrait Gallery at St Martin-in-the-Field in order to look for and at people I'd heard of. It was very interesting and I think we'll go back to look at the people I haven't heard of in the older galleries.

CJBS cannot visit any building with a cafe in it without having a cup of tea, so we stopped off in the basement cafe to be charged a small fortune for some warm water and a bag of assorted leaves. This meant - clever, clever curators - going past the NPG's bookshop. I can't resist a bookshop. Ever. So we paid an even greater fortune for a pile of books that we then had to lug back up north with us.

Still, one of the books was the Eat What You Grow book, in the form of a reprint of the 1941 edition "Food Facts for the Kitchen Front". This is a good little book, much better than the Marguerite Patten stodge I've been living with for the past year.

It starts with a useful, if not entirely accurate, chapter on how you need at least one item from each of three "food value groups" in each meal: energy foods (fat, sugar, potatoes); body-building foods (meat, fish, dairy, wholemeal grains, potatoes); and protective foods (vegetables, wholemeal grains, potatoes). Yes, there's something of a tuber-based theme here.

It then goes on to explain calories, proteins, vitamins and mineral salts - suggesting that half a pound of potatoes and a quarter of a pound of cabbage would get you your day's Vitamin C (and sod all else, I'd wager).

The good bit of the book - the rest of it, in fact - then follows. Alphabetically, with no nonsense, it runs through each vegetable and presents some ration-friendly and (surprisingly) delicious-sounding ways of cooking it. The it does the same for potatoes, salads and herbs; then on to fish (still all white fish, with a detour into trout), meat and meat-substitution and nine pages of quick soups; bread, fruit and quick sauces to disguise poor menus; and finishes with a chapter on slow cooking. And it has an index! (The number of cookbooks without a useful index is disturbing; those chefs need to stay in more.)

Artichoke soup! Hot tomato salad! Eggless mayonnaise! The latter made with icing sugar... ugh. Sheep's Head Roll! (no, no, no). Despite the odd misfire (liver dumplings, anybody?), this book will be keeping us fed as winter draws on.

Meanwhile, by the way, I catered for TWO dinner parties the weekend before London. It was ration-stretching (in other words, it required a fiddle, assuming that I was getting coupons and points from the guests; although in reality, that was exactly what people did when entertaining during the war) but nobody noticed that they were getting rationed fare.

The first meal, a chicken salad, was made by slow-cooking chicken fillets in mustard and honey, so took no precious fat. Dessert was Eton Mess, but I saved on sugar by buying a bottle of cherry beer and reducing it to a sauce.

The second meal was roast lamb. That really was ration-stretching, using up the best part of a month's saved meat rations from both of us for a small joint. Plenty of vegetables, gravy and mint sauce hid that the meat wasn't in huge quantities. Still, I managed to get three days of further meals out of the scraps of meat left on the bone, then made stock from the bone itself, which became two days of French onion soup. Finally, the bone went into the dogs, who are grateful even now.

Ultimately, I made my dinner party rations stretch over 17 individual meals and two dogs without feeling any shortages. Of course, I'm now meatless for the next two weeks but this is survivable, thanks to my Food Facts book and the last days of the salad.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

2010-08-22T14:14:00.002+01:00

One of the things that makes rationing easier (or even easy) for me is that I only eat one meal a day.

Yes, I know this is probably a huge dietary nightmare, but I've never eaten breakfast - I can't stand the thought of food first thing in the morning - and I gave up lunch, without missing it, when my thyroid died. One of the side effects of having no thyroid is the body's ability to turn any food eaten straight into fat deposits. If I ate two meals a day, I'd be gargantuan - and I was until I gave up on lunch.

This of course means that my main meals can be a bit more generous with rationed items, as they don't need to be spread over 3 meals in a day. But I'm having to reassess this policy when it comes to CJBS. His doctor is worried about Type II diabetes, and although the diet sheet he filled out for them was so good that they didn't believe it was true, they've spotted a change that must be made. He must always have breakfast and lunch.

The breakfast is easy. Porridge oats with semi-skim milk and cinnamon doesn't impact on rations. But providing a fat free, carbohydrate rich lunch is very difficult, especially when his shift work sees him rising at 4am one week, 8am the next and noon on the third. To cap that, it needs to fit in with rationing.

He came back from the unholy GP-dietician-nurse trinity clutching a big pile of leaflets, booklets and novellas given to him to help him plan a new diet. And here's where I fall out with the NHS that I otherwise love to bits.

What I need is a simple guide to what food need to go into him when. The NHS, however, has taken a more Big Brother approach. They don't supply that information. Instead, they've merged the diabetic advice with their "Healthy Eating Agenda". That would be fine, but this bit of meddlesomeness, which has included television, radio and press advertising along with leaflets through the door in an orgy of spending over the last 5 years, treats the recipient of the advice like a lard-arsed idiot.

I search in vain for a simple guide. Instead, the advice attempts to browbeat me into ceasing to be a pig. Stop eating so much chips! Eat less pies! Put down that cheeseburger, fatty! Where do you think you're going with that cake, lardo? Can you still fit through the door of Greggs, chubbs? The problem here is that CJBS, and me for that matter, would kill for chips, pies, burgers and cake. We almost never have them. The advice sheets, however, are designed to get you to reduce having them. So if I actually followed them, CJBS would be getting chips two or three times a week - a great reduction from the 7-days-a-week the leaflet assumes that diabetic Northerners are cramming down them, but a 1200% increase on what he currently gets. The same with the pies and the burgers. And as for cake, well, CJBS loves cake but I prefer to use the egg rations on something I can make that won't be be both burnt and undercooked at the same time and might possibly rise without spilling over the edges of the tin, if at all. The leaflets are throwing cake at him compared to the current level of "never".

I've therefore effectively got to guess what I should be feeding him and when. With official advice recommending that he eats vastly more fat and sugar to cut down on fat and sugar and with their idea of stopping the snacking he doesn't do by feeding his face with biscuits - biscuits! - at every opportunity, the NHS's help has been no help at all.

One thing I can do is go by instinct and by what Nella Last was making for her boorish husband during the second war. If you've never read Nella Last's War (now usually sold under the name of the TV drama it became, "Housewife, 49") then buy a copy now. Nella was a fascinating lady who took to World War II as something of a release from her dull, depression-ravaged existence until then. Tucked away in its pages are examples of how she eked out the rations to make wonderful lunches and dinners, all the time hiding from her husband that she was scraping by (like many men of the time, he both had no clue whatsoever of how shopping and cooking under rations worked and also sought to direct her shopping and cooking because he was A Man).

From her, and her kitchen garden, I see that she did a lot with roast vegetables, served hot, warm and cold. Small amounts of meat and fish could be made to go further by mixing them into the roast tomatoes and celery and other such things. The husband never noticed that he was basically eating lots of veg and pasta and very little meat. She was also very good at making stuff in a batch at the start of the week and creating smaller lunches from it over the next few days.

If she could do that, then, with my fridge and deep freeze, both things she never owned, I could do a lot more. So I've been making cold pasta salad and a version of potato bravas, locking them in tupperware and decanting a bowlful, complete with the fabrication of choice, whenever CJBS declares that it's lunchtime in his body clock zone. The pasta salad is easy: roast mixed seasonal vegetables in a medium oven for under an hour with a sprinkling of herbs, garlic and Maggi. Boil some wholewheat pasta, drain, stir the veg through the pasta and refrigerate. Make it something new with diced spam or tinned fish to keep it fresh-feeling. It keeps for about a week in the fridge.

The potato bravas is nothing like the real version. Boil new potatoes in stock. Chop an onion and some pepper. Fry those off in a tiny bit of butter or oil. Add passata, chopped tomatoes or tinned tomatoes depending on availability and points (passata is best), bring to the boil and then simmer until reduced by about 10%. Add the potatoes to the tomato mixture (or, if you've got the fat, fry off the cooked potatoes in a little butter, allow to cool and then add them) and store in the fridge. Again, it keeps about a week.

By alternating between the two and supplying bread on the side, I'm keeping up his carbs, keeping down his fat intake and not particularly bumping up my workload. He'll be sick of both after a month, I'd imagine, but until then I've think I've beaten the system. And beaten the NHS at its own game.

The shocking truth about rationing

2010-08-15T09:30:00.000+01:00

So, what happened in the interregnum? Well, as I said in the last post, the project continues, and there's not much I can add to that. The rhythm of rationing is something you start to feel as well as think after a few months, so coming up with recipes gets ever easier. In fact, I don't think I've opened a Marguerite Patten in months - I've become very adept at just making food on the fly with what's available, and even planning the future of the leftovers in advance.

What I have done is taken Tanya's excellent advice (not on Yorkshire puddings yet, though) and headed off to the Imperial War Museum to see their exhibition on rationing in World War II.

I've always liked the IWM, both in London and the newer one in Salford in the north of England. The Salford one is the more educational-feeling of the two, sort of like being in a university lecture but with objects to look at.

The original one in London, operating from the old infamous Bedlam lunatic asylum in Lambeth, is much more for the kids - here's a spitfire, there's a V1, here's a tank, there's a cruise missile and so forth. This is in the "free" part of the museum. All state museums in the UK are free (although for how long with the current shower in charge, who knows) with special exhibitions being the only place they can charge for entry. The rationing exhibition was a chargeable thing, but that didn't stop me.

Of course, first I had to find it. Now, the worse museum in the entire world for finding things is the Victoria and Albert in Kensington. When we went there to see a Modernism exhibition, we managed to get hopelessly lost within 10 yards of the front door. The person in charge of the signage was either drunk or a psychopath (or both). We followed the signs, where provided, for the Modernism part for three quarters of an hour. At the end of that time, the signs had taken us back to the front of the museum without actually passing the exhibition at all. Later, we went to the famous V&A cafe. Or we tried to. Following the signs again, we got completely stumped at one that said:

<--- CAFE --->

Still, it was good to have options. Eventually, we followed enough arrows to get us to the cafe. Well, to the exit to the cafe, so we had to push backwards down the tight queue of people, most of whom weren't buying food but were actually just wanting to ask the lady on the till where the promised toilets and exit were (answer: follow the signs for the cafe but don't actually go to the cafe. Helpful!)

At the IWM, some text on a beam in the roof said "Rationing exhibition - BUY YOUR TICKETS HERE". Underneath was a tank. It did not contain tickets. Upstairs was a clearly marked doorway that said "Rationing exhibition - TICKETS MUST BE SHOWN BEFORE ENTRY". Finally, there was a cafe, with a sign saying "Rationing exhibition - TICKETS HERE". Into the cafe we barrelled. Up to the till. Attempt made to buy tickets. Not sold here. Okay, but where? Follow the signs. Uh huh - that's why we're here.

Now, if they're so precious about their tickets, the easiest way to be told where they can be bought from would be to march in without them - a security guard can be relied upon to guide you smartly to the right place. So in we went, and a security guard guided us smartly to the gift shop at the exit to the exhibition.

Right. So we have two signs telling you to buy tickets here which actually mean buy them anywhere else but here; we have a sign saying that you cannot pass the sign without tickets which you must walk past to get the tickets; and we have tickets actually on sale at the exit to the exhibition you haven't yet seen. Is this just me, or is someone at the IWM just trying to play with my mind? And succeeding!

Aw, but it was worth it. An excellent, informative exhibition, well curated to be in a logical order, with everything well-spaced and given room to express itself. Nobody in costume to engage you in stilted conversation; quiet but appropriate music and the multimedia not surround by hundreds of ill-bred and unwashed children with their sticky fingers pressing every button in an attempt to get away from the sheer boredom of it all. Perfect.

Did I learn anything? Well, thanks to the research for this project, not really. I know how the system worked and I know the ways round it and the ways to eke out meagre supplies (shopping at Morrisons, you have to know this anyway, rationing or no rationing). It made me miss the possibility of growing my own vegetables, but with no garden and my inability to even keep a spider plant alive for longer than a month, I'm not missing out really.

I came away with two important bits of information. First: why do no wartime recipes contain mushrooms? Answer: because they weren't farmed at the time. People had to forage for mushrooms, and with so many being deadly, you didn't want to encourage people not in the know from picking up any old fungi. So mushrooms were left for those that already collected and cooked with mushrooms before the war.

The second thing I got from it was actually a recipe for making sticking to rations harder. The British palate has only really developed within my lifetime. Before the 1970s, people had a fixed idea of what "real" food was. And it was basically something boiled and green, something boiled but another colour and something burnt that once had been meat. And quite a lot of the burnt meat, if possible. For a change, they liked burnt fish instead, again with the boiled stuff. A salad ("cold collation") was inadequate as food, and it would still be inadequate as food, since a salad was, literally, a lettuce leaf, a beef tomato, some processed cheese and a dollop of watery mayonnaise.

All this I knew. But I got more of a shock than you can imagine. Try this: fish remained plentiful for the entire war. There was more of it than could be sold. Yet people queued for hours for the sporadic supplies. Why? Because the fish that was available was tuna. For the Great British Public, that was not fish. Fish was white and flaky and best served deep fried. They would not eat the pink and red stuff (well, salmon in tins, with vinegar, as a small treat). Something I've long thought seems now proved: snoek, the tinned fish introduced at the end of the war but rejected by the public, was not nasty and foul as is remembered. It's just like any other tinned fish. But it wasn't tinned salmon with vinegar, so it wasn't really tinned fish.

Likewise, the shops remained well stocked with ersatz food, like soya and tofu, that people would not eat. There was plenty of soft cheese and blue cheese available, usually not even on points - but people didn't touch soft cheese or blue cheese (clearly off and poisonous, respectively). There was yoghurt plentifully available, but nobody ate it, whilst craving something to put on their dessert... like yoghurt.

In typing this now, I've realised something else. In my research, I noted that the posh restaurants and the gentleman's clubs of London stayed open and well stocked throughout rationing. I wondered how this could be, and thought dark Socialistic thoughts about how rich people can get their hands on anything they want. The government came to believe this as well, putting a price cap on restaurant meals to try to make them look fairer.

But there actually wasn't unfairness. What there was was culture: the fine eateries of the big cities were cooking things that only the rich would eat. They were making things like mussels for starters with tuna steak and salad (real salad, not cold collation) and a dessert of fresh fruit in yoghurt followed by a cheese board with brie and gorgonzola - a standard(ish) meal now, but not what the vast majority would consider having for dinner.

The wartime propaganda had to start from a low base. For many, especially in the north, the prewar diet was entirely inadequate (and rickets and scurvy stalked even the lower-middle class neighbourhoods of Leeds and Manchester) and close to starvation levels. Many people actually did starve. When the war came, the previously inadequately fed were suddenly hundreds of times better fed, with all the right vitamins and minerals and price caps on the most nutritious food. But the Ministry of Food had to start from there, teaching those people how to cook such previously unheard of items like carrots and fresh peas. That job, linked to the one of getting the middle classes to replace the meat they'd always had access to with something else, had to come first. Attempting at the same time to get people to eat tuna, tofu, yoghurt and brie might have been too hard a job and was barely (whalemeat and snoek, both replacements for other foods rather than actual new ones) even tried.

And that's a shame, for British cuisine as much as anything else. It's also a shame to discover that, if you cut back on meat, eggs, cheese and fat, virtually everything else that you can still buy was available back then. That doesn't help when it comes to trying to live like it's 1943.

Highs and... meh

2010-08-14T08:30:00.000+01:00

Ah, the joys of having a thyroid gland that doesn't work. You get free prescriptions for the levothyroxine to make a pretend thyroid and for the statins and blood-pressure reducing pills you need to for the side effects of the levothyroxine. And then there's the big red pills that I don't know quite what they are, but they undo the side effects of the blood pressure pills. But they're free too, and I'm, er, careful enough with my money to grab anything that's free with both hands.

On the downside, the thyroxine pills are not as good as having a working thyroid. With a working thyroid, your body has a nice chain of squirts of different chemicals that stimulate other squirts of chemicals that stimulate other squirts of chemicals that stimulate your thyroid. With the pills, you get a blast of thyroxine. It's not quite the same thing.

For a start, it means you have to have highs and lows. Both are terrible. The highs are like periods of mania, as if I was bipolar and on an up-swing. I can't STFU for love nor money, nor can I stop doing anything else - working and cleaning up like I'm possessed, unable to sit still, just always on the go. For the lows... well, meh. The first clue that a thyroid low is happening is my eyebrows falling out (it's such a good look, having a tiny smudge of eyebrow near the nose - and no, the bit that drops out isn't the bit between the eyebrows, that I still have to shave or pluck, lest I have one ordinary-size eyebrow in the middle of my face like a moustache that got lost in the dark).

From then on, for a week, or, like here, two bloody months, meh. I wake up tired, I plod through the day hoping that no one ever under any circumstances will ask me a question (how am I supposed to answer? I neither know the answers nor care what they should be), I go to bed early, sleep through and wake up tired. And all food tastes like nothing, so eating becomes a refuelling exercise. Yes, eating! Eating becomes dull! Cruelty, it is. Just cruelty. And I gave up editing Wikipedia, reading blogs, watching the news and doing anything else that would require me to think in anyway, because thinking... meh.

So the silence here is explained. The project continues (for me anyway; CJBS has become very relaxed in his interpretation of the rules and I've not had the oomph to protest; that will change) but the blank screen simply hasn't been able to get any words from me on it. What was I supposed to write? Do I care enough to write it? Meh.

Yesterday, I woke up and noticed for the first time the state I'd let the house get into. I thought "tomorrow's Saturday, I could buy some bleach, get my bucket and some boiling water and make the bathroom sparkle! Yes I'll do that!". At that moment, I realised something down the chain was back giving its feeble little squirt of chemicals somewhere. This morning, I'm raring to go: bleach, an array of cloths, various pungent disinfectants and scary-looking scouring pads have been purchased and this house will sparkle by tea time. This feels so very good, and I'm looking forward to getting on with it.

Please don't let this be the start of a thyroid high.

Stock post

2010-06-23T18:29:00.000+01:00

Oh, celery, how much do I love thee? Let me count the ways... chopped, shredded, boiled... well, three ways then.

Making stock is an excellent use for all leftover vegetables, whether they're whole and unused or trimmings from some other recipe. I've taken to an anachronism of late, freezing the results rather than keeping a stock pot going, despite nobody - almost literally - owning a deep freeze in the 1940s in the UK. But it is possible to keep a stock pot running without the freezer.

The essence of a stock is basically just raw stuff boiled. It's probably easier to use cubes, but they're usually more salt than anything else. Homemade stock doesn't need salt in advance, allowing you to regulate the amount in the cooking itself. CJBS, at 58, watches his salt intake like it may turn on him at any time, despite having normal levels of cholesterol in his system. At 35, I'm less good at this, despite having hypertension and swallowing bucketloads of statins every day (oh, the joy of having a thyroid gland that no longer works).

A "live" stock pot, with no freezing, needs managing. You start it off with the trimmings of any root vegetables you've got, including the skins. Onion skins are brilliant here, giving the stock a lovely golden colour. Put the trimmings in a big pot, pour on boiling water to cover and bring back to the boil with the lid on. If you bring this back to the boil - vigorously - every day, you can keep adding vegetable matter to it and topping it up with more water each time you use it. The Ministry of Food encourage everybody to do this during the war. In theory, you can get a month out of this before it starts to go bad despite the boiling (it starts to smell sweet, and as soon as this happens, throw the entire lot away and throughly wash the stock pot). I've found that actually three weeks is more likely than a month.

If you add green vegetables, reduce the amount it will last by more than a half. It'll taste even better with green or leafy vegetables, but it simply won't survive as well.

Adding the bones of any meat you've had also reduces the amount it lasts, and adds the issue of the unattractive globs of fat on the surface. There are three ways to deal with this: don't get them in the ladle when you decant the stock; warm the stock and attempt to dab the top with strong kitchen paper (this never works very well), or decant the stock into a bowl through a muslin towel (this is more trouble than it's worth).

A stronger stock is got by the repeat-boiling method, and if you're using the deep freeze, it's still worth keeping the pot going for a couple of days at least before decanting it. I label up the stock with the dominant ingredient (judged by smell) and freeze it in useful-sized amounts. The results go into soups, stews, curries, gravy - anything that I'd put a stock cube into if they were freely available to me (they're a points item, so I need to be careful with them).

If you're waste-neutral, the multi-boiled trimmings at the end compost very very well. Any red meat bones you may have will also go very well with your own or a local dog, judging by our two. Poultry bones can't go to dogs, but a cat will secretly plan to murder you in the night to get hold of them, if our late, but uniquely wonderful, cat Freddie was anything to go by.

Having got hold of some (not very fresh) celery at my not-very-local Co-op branch (I had £12 in dividend to spend, making it worth the train trip) I used plenty in recipes and chucked the rest into my latest stock pot. It's just had its second of three boils, then I'll freeze it against the day when the local supermarket goes back to selling higher-margin celery flown in from Spain, Morocco and Egypt.

Buttering up

2010-06-22T17:53:00.000+01:00

Morrison's do a range of "fresh" pies that I never buy. On a stand by the deli, they sit in rustic-style paper bags. It's the general stodge - meat and potato, chicken and mushroom, cheese and onion. For all of the mentions of "fresh", they're mass produced slop that is delivered every other day and cooked on site in industrial ovens. As I say, I never buy them.

At the store the other day I saw something called "butter pies". There was a small gaggle of little old ladies (LOLs) gathered around, speculating on what these could be. They called over to a staff member behind the deli. This being Morrison's, he pretended not to hear them, then when that wore thin, pretended to be too busy to help. Eventually, his customer service training compelled him to v e r y s l o w l y trudge over and see what the damn pests wanted.

To be honest, I was enjoying this display of customer service #fail, so I continued to eavesdrop on the off chance he'd swear at them and be sacked (or promoted). It was worth it. The LOLs asked about the pies and he explained in the strange, faltering "English" that young people talk in these days. "They're, like, potato pies, like, we only calls them butter pies coz it sounds better than potato pies, like, coz that's like boring, innit, it's a war thing that they had in the old days, like, in the war, so it's just potato and nothing else like."

After I'd translated the stream-of-conciousness and screened out the awful, high-pitched Scouse accent, I was very happy with the result. Back when I was planning this project, I thought that shortcrust pies filled only with mashed potato would work very well, providing bulk, using little rations and going well with anything. But I couldn't find any proof that such a thing existed, then or now, and worried if it would be too bland.

But here they were: butter pies, potato pies, which I could buy to try. I did. And it works. You need salt, or gravy, or a sauce of some sorts, but it works! Of course, the mass-produced nature of the pies meant that the pastry was made with hydrogenated fat rather than margarine and water, so it was greasy and unpleasant and my body rebelled against it mightily (I had dry toast for dinner that night as it was all I could face).

My own version was far better. I boiled and mashed (without fat) plenty of potatoes, then made a cold-water shortcrust pastry. This is 2 to 1 flour to fat (I had butter rather than margarine in for this week's fat ration) rubbed together (I did 8oz to 4oz), a pinch of salt and then adding cold water until you get a dough that holds together but isn't wet. Put this in the fridge for 20 minutes to get it cold, then roll it out and line a pie tin with it. If I did it again, I'd save more fat by adding mashed potato instead of half the fat and slightly more water.

Spoon the mashed potato into the tin, then top. I was making two, so I put chopped spring onions on top of one and a crumbled ounce of cheese on the other. Top off with pastry, brush with milk and bake in a moderate oven for half an hour.

The first one I served with onion gravy and steamed vegetables. For the second, I turned an ounce of cheese into a lot of cheese sauce by bulking with single cream and soured cream in addition to some milk and served this on top of the pie and some more steamed vegetables.

Oh, but it was lovely. A proper pie, good cold as well as hot, and very low in fat. It was so good we didn't end up with the planned leftovers - it was very hard to resist going back for seconds.

Royal cooking

2010-06-14T18:15:00.000+01:00

In the last few days, it's been a fairly generic salad time here at On The Ration. Salad stuff is plentiful (still no celery, mind) so it makes sense to dive in and get as much fresh, uncooked, leafy vegetable matter into us as possible.

But that's not to say I haven't been able to be a bit chef-fy with the meals. A good mushroom soup made an on-going starter for a few days, whilst a break from salad came with a (comparatively) low fat risotto. This was a filling meal in itself, but even better for CJBS with a topping of poached smoked haddock.

For the risotto, heat some fat in a heavy-bottomed frying pan. Fry off some onion, and when they're half done, chuck in some mushrooms and some crushed or powdered garlic. Once the onion is translucent and the mushrooms are softening, add your rice - two handfuls per person or thereabout, to make plenty. The rice will suck up the remaining oil. When the rice starts to stick, start adding stock.

Two ways of doing this: if you know in your bones how much water the rice will suck up, add that amount, put the lid on and walk away. If you don't, start by adding half a pint, keep stirring and add another half pint when it's gone. Keep doing this until the rice just isn't taking any more up (what's left will boil off anyway if you keep the lid off).

With the stock in, you can now add veggies that you like. Peas are always nice in risotto (cubed spam can go in at this point too). I like tomatoes, so I put quartered ones in. If you like bell peppers, put some in. You get the idea.

When the rice is done, you've got a basic risotto. For a creamy version, stir through low fat soured cream or crème fraiche. For a richer, but fattier, version, add some cubes of butter and let them melt through, assuming you've got the butter. For the traditional Italian flavour, add some hard cheese (Parmesan, ideally), assuming you have cheese. We had butter available, sort of, but no cheese.

For the poached smoked haddock, put a couple of bay leaves, some dill and some raw onion into a saucepan. Put the fish on top, then top with milk. Bring the milk up to the boil, then immediately take it off the heat. It's done, but you can leave it in longer to cook in its own heat if you want it to be flaky. Lift it out with tongs and serve it on top of the risotto.

Reserve the fishy milk: use it the next day to make fantastic (I'm told: I don't eat fish) mashed potatoes.

To explain the missing cheese earlier, I was inspired by this bit of gastropub-ism, and fortified with olive oil on points and some sausages, I decided to make something very very chef-fy for CJBS the next day. I don't have a name for it, but here it is:

Slice some halloumi cheese (the Greek, rubbery one that isn't feta) and scatter it on the bottom of a baking tray. I've got some very nice but hard-to-use bottled peppers in. These are baked or grilled, then preserved in vinegar or oil. The best bit about them is that they're surprisingly mild and beautifully brightly coloured. Lay a pepper slice on each piece of cheese. Add some garlic (powdered, flakes or fresh chopped/crushed) on top, some chopped spring onion and half a dozen thin sausages. A splash of oil, and into the oven until the sausages are cooked (15 mins at 180C, say). Serve with chopped basil leaves on top.

This was probably a waste of (almost) two people's cheese ration for a week, but CJBS ate it in seconds with a loud "nom nom nom" sound, so it was well worth it.

He also nommed his way through the quick tiramisu I made (I told you I was in chef-fy mood). I'd made some chocolate cupcakes earlier in the week, forgetting I had a rhubarb crumble on the go. The cakes went stale, despite CJBS's heroic efforts to cram them into his mouth. I made a cup of strong coffee, mixed a tablespoon of icing sugar into it and added a big glugg of cheap cooking brandy. While this cooled, I whipped 150ml of single cream and 250g of mascarpone cheese together with 3 tablespoons of icing sugar, some vanilla essence and a smaller glugg of the brandy. Then I sliced up the stale cakes and dipped each one in the coffee mixture for half a minute. These are then layered: cake slices, mascarpone, cake slices, mascarpone until everything's used up. Dust the top with cocoa powder and store in a cool place for as long as possible (it just gets better as it ages).

Now, back to the salads. There was a reason to have so much salad, an excuse that I grabbed at. Jersey Royals,¹ the best potatoes ever ever, have a season of about 25 minutes. When they come in, I buy preposterous amounts and shove them in everything I cook. As a "new" potato, they're theoretically best just boiled and served, and that works very well on the side of a salad, hot or cold. But they also make superb potato salad with soured cream or with mayonnaise, in a vinaigrette, or boiled in stock.

But my favourite is to really really make them work for their money. I boil them for 15 minutes, drain, then slice them into thick slabs. Heat some butter in a pan, add some garlic and lightly sauté them batches. I saved my butter ration for this (and the risotto - dry sandwiches and marmite on unbuttered toast are worth it). Put the sautéed Jerseys on a baking tray, then roast them for 20 minutes in a hot oven. These can be served anyway you can think of: with a salad, with grilled meat, with mayonnaise... you name it, they work.

Tonight, I'm making a big bowl of them with some crème fraiche and spring onion on top. In front of the TV, with my feet up and feeling very very relaxed.

1 Yes, I know Jersey was occupied in the war, so this is an anacronism. I don't care.

Bulk handling

2010-06-05T15:48:00.001+01:00

CJBS wanted cottage pie. Mainly because I put the idea into his head. £1.32 doesn't get you much beef mince, even the fatty cheap stuff. I bought the expensive lean mince, so my money got me about 8oz - 200g. That's for the entire week, remember, and wasn't even enough for one cottage pie of any size. But wartime rationing involved a lot of bulking out and the tricks become second nature after a while.

The cottage pie got three forms of bulking. First, cook off the mince with some onion until it has browned. Soak up the fat with gravy browning and dilute with stock until there's a useful amount of gravy. To that, add porridge oats, about the same amount as the beef. This swells up with the gravy and has the same texture as the mince - instant doubling of the meat content.

Next, finely dice some mushrooms - about the same amount as of the original mince. Add that and it'll take on the gravy flavour, whilst the texture won't be all that different either. So now the mince has been tripled, and, as a by-product, has got much heathier, with the oats removing much of the cholesterol.

Finally, add a chopped onion, a chopped carrot and a chopped parsnip. These don't turn into anything else, but they add bulk and taste very nice in and of themselves (except the parsnip, obviously). From 8oz of mince to start with, there's now 2lbs or so of the stuff. It'll reduce down somewhat, so perhaps a pound will be left. Mashed potato on top, into the oven and enough food to last three days for one person is ready. I did exactly the same with my vegetarian soya mince, to the same results.

The only flaw is that this all needs slow cooking, both on the stove and in the oven, and much too much stirring as bloody usual. Doesn't half save money, mind. Also, whilst CJBS doesn't mind having the same thing three days running, I start to find it dull. So some vegetable side dishes are recommended.

Enough of my boasting: I'm off to make a cauliflower cheese from a week's worth of cheese ration. Now that will need some bulking...

A little Blitz

2010-05-31T18:31:00.000+01:00

Do you believe in luck? For all my atheism and scientific rationalism, I'm still a superstitious person, in so far as I believe there's a limited degree of luck in the world and sometimes you have lots and sometimes none. Also, luck comes in flavours, ranging from extremely good to extremely bad, via a sort of crappy middle. "Cheese" is the analogy I'm trying not to make.

Image by marfis75 on Flickr: Creative Commons licensed BY SA 2.0

Today, it seems, is the crappy middle good luck. I woke in a good mood, bounced out of bed and started my busy Bank Holiday Monday. Having done all the ironing and washing that had built up on Saturday morning, had a fabulous food n' laughs filled evening over at Scott & bf's house for the Eurovision Song Contest (Britain came very very last, if you missed it) on Saturday night and had a lovely lazy (and hangoverless, oddly) Sunday with a great tomato, basil and olive soup, I had reason to be cheerful.

Today was to be a deep clean of the bathroom, a tidy and bleach of the kitchen (I'm a bleach queen: little satisfies me more than massacring germs that dare to lurk in corners using environmentally damaging chemicals and boiling water until my hands are red and shredded) and an exchange of sweaty bedlinen for lovely "lavender-style" scented freshly washed stuff. This was to be followed by another soup and the assembling of something in the slow cooker for tomorrow night's dinner.

I started in the bathroom, squirting bleach spray everywhere, scrubbing down the tiles, dissolving the (oddly pink) limescale from the grouting and other intense sparkling activities. I washed the tiles down with the shower, turned it off and went downstairs for my grapefruit-scented antiseptic wipes.

From the kitchen, I could hear running water. Frantically running water. Hmmm, odd. This was joined by the sound of urgent dripping much nearer. I went back upstairs to find the shower running. Strange. Looking closer, it wasn't running. It was gushing. And from the back of the shower unit. The main flow of the water was clearly running into the false wall and from there through the ceiling into the utility room. That explained the urgent dripping.

Now, I'm good in a crisis. I think fast and can usually see not only all the options available, but the consequences of each one and therefore the best action to take, all in a second or so. I pay for this by never being able to make any non-urgent decision at all, unless the person asking is actually on fire.

Electric shower, running water. Right, item one: isolate the electric mains supply. Thought and done. Item two: water still running. Isolate gas boiler then find stopcock for the water supply. Grab phone, out of back door, into The Cellar for the first ever time. Terrified of spiders, and this is where they filmed Aragog's scenes in the second Harry Potter movie. It's this or drowning. Into The Cellar, despite being in flip-flops, shorts and nothing else. Call CJBS and ask where is the stopcock, exactly?. Lefthand wall. No stopcock. Where on the wall, EXACTLY? Am I in The Cellar? Yes. On the wall on the left. No, no it isn't. Go into The Cellar, walk through the cobwebs, go through a doorway covered in cobwebs into a pitchblack subroom filled with cobwebs. It's on the lefthand wall in there.

Now, over the last two years, we've had building work done, generally by the cheapest and uselessest builders we could find. Except for the house not actually collapsing, everything else they did has broken, fallen down, peeled off or remained unfinished when actually inspected. To that list we can now add "didn't bother with a skip for the rubble, broken glass and other unwanted items". It's all in The Cellar. And it's all piled up in front of the doorway into the subroom. And covered in cobwebs.

So, in cheaply made, given-away-free-by-Merseyrail flip-flops, shorts and nothing else I climbed over the rubble and the glass shards, walked through about three billion cobwebs and turned off the stopcock. The torrent stopped. I climbed back over the rubble, broken glass, razor wire, bear traps, used needles and scorpions^{(note: some of this may not be actually true)} and called the insurance company's plumber.

He came over urgently, 4 to 8 hours later, turned another stopcock off (behind a secret panel under the bath, who knew?) and opened the shower unit. This is where the crappy good luck kicks in. There's a plastic clamp holding the water pipe in place. It had sheared off and could've gone at any time. Like in 3 weeks when we're in London for the weekend. Or in 4 when we're in Belgium for a week. That it went today, when there was someone in the house and I wasn't working... very lucky. Just crappily so.

Of course, being a plumber from the insurance company, he couldn't repair the shower, since he had made it safe (turned the tap off) and we have alternative facilities (the bath). So a real plumber and a part will be needed. Until then, we're bathing instead of showering. I'm tempted to draw a line around the bath, as people did in the war to ration hot water (including the King and Queen, as noted with amazement by Mrs Roosevelt, but excluding Mr Churchill, who did a lot of speechwriting whilst immersed, to the distaste of his dictation secretaries).

This little crisis was followed by a trip to the shops, which had mostly closed early because of the Bank Holiday so I missed them. In the supermarket, a plague of locusts must have been through, as there were almost no vegetables to be had and random shortages elsewhere.

So, for the purposes of this project, I'm going to pretend we got caught in a little Blitz (explaining the state of the bathroom, the dust and cobwebs on my clothes, the unchanged bedding and the food shortages). And we all know what that means: chips from the takeaway chip shop for dinner tonight.

Soup n' stock, rock n' roll

2010-05-28T18:49:00.000+01:00

I had a clash of leftovers vs tastebuds this week. In the leftovers department, I had celeriac (aka celery root) and garlic-infused olive oil from the earlier salads. In the tastebuds department, it was tomato soup I wanted. How to combine these unlikely things?

Huh, not much of a cliffhanger question, that, is it? Tomato and celeriac soup seems the obvious answer, but there was little or nothing online. Time to invent a recipe!

I started by halving my tomatoes, putting them in a baking tray and pouring the garlic olive oil (I got olive oil on points and just put half a dozen smashed-up garlic cloves in some for a few days) on top. Some sea salt and in the fan oven for an hour at 150C. Meanwhile I peeled and diced the celeriac and made a standard soup base with stock from my pot - and re-used the oil from the tomatoes to start it off, which pleased me no end.

To the soup base I added the baked tomatoes and the celeriac cubes. I also chucked in a carrot to please Lord Woolton and a diced potato. When everything was soft, I separated the lumps from the base, blended the lumps and reunited the two. The result was lovely, although I really couldn't taste the celeriac.

The leftover celeriac peelings went into my stockpot, with the ends of the carrot. My last stockpot having gone whiffy through ill-use, and the celeriac making the stock smell glorious, I've decided to use a cheat not available in the 1940s. I've taken the stock and put it into plastic tupperware and they'll go in the deep freeze for later use. Marguerite Patten is clear that a well-used stockpot can be kept almost indefinitely by making sure you boil it daily (unless you've got anything green in it - that reduces it to a week). I can get the stockpot to go for 3 weeks or so with daily boiling, but after that it starts to smell musty, and then sweet: a very bad sign.

I'll start a new stockpot the next time I've got leftover vegetable matter, but the hurry to do so is lessened by having some in the freezer. And the multiple boiling produces a lovely, flavour-heavy, golden stock that reduces the need for salt as a flavour enhancer.

Meanwhile, the craving for tomatoes has not gone away, despite spinning the soup out for three days between the two of us. I decided that I wanted pasta in a tomato sauce for tonight, so wandered around the dreaded Morrisons buying mushrooms, basil and pasta. Eventually I remembered the tomatoes. Having bought them earlier this week, I was shocked and annoyed to find that the four types of domestic tomato had been reduced to none. It was Spanish, Dutch and Moroccan all the way... and all off-limits to the project.

I had to buy - on points! - two tins of tomatoes instead. This is a terrible waste of points, especially when I've spent freely on the olive oil earlier. It also does for my bake-to-intensity plan for the tomatoes. I'll just have to carefully reduce the canned tomatoes on the stove with a stern look on my face and the occasional tutting noise.

And the rock n' roll? Well, I voted for the Netherlands in the Eurovision Song Contest semi-final yesterday. They didn't get through, despite having the campest entry ever ever. So tomorrow I'm either voting for Cyprus (because they're Welsh... don't ask) or Greece (on the basis that they don't know they're so homoerotic).

It's mostly about cheesecake

2010-05-24T22:38:00.000+01:00

Getting back on rations is actually proving difficult.

It's not the actual rationing. As far as I can tell, I'm fully ration-compliant. It's just that I've not got round to doing the usual trappings yet: printing off coupons, making lists, keeping up with the admin that makes sure that I know I'm on track.

The problem is, I know I'm on track. It's become a reflex to me. Run out of butter? That's okay, I can buy some more in X days. CJBS wants bacon for breakfast? That's okay, he can have 3oz now, and 7oz if he waits two days. Team meeting at work with lunch provided? That's okay, I'll just not have any cheese for 3 weeks and then I can grab a sandwich.

This is actually all one big #fail because I'm putting weight on again. I've just got this down to a fine art and seem to be making a glorious pig of myself all the time, yet still have slack. I've said before, and Michelle also noticed, there's a knack to rationing. Once you've got it, it's actually easy (although when people ask me about it and I tell them, they cringe and look appalled and start talking about exceptions and food parcels and ways I could use a modern version of the black market to get round the restrictions, so it's clear only I think it's easy).

Yesterday was my birthday (it turns out I'm 35. I'd miscounted somewhere and thus had my second 35th in a row. This is a Good Thing). I made a glorious birthday tea. Lashings of domestically-grown salad, a cheesecake with strawberry toffee topping and some champagne. And I did it within rations and without noticing that I was doing it. This keeps happening. I suppose if I did the admin, I'd find I was going wrong somewhere, but I don't think so: CJBS complains enough about the shortages to make it clear that I'm not being lavish or anything near it (he's actually taken to begging for extra cheese, despite having left untouched the last 6oz of his ration over 3 weeks without complaining about not having it whilst it was waiting for him) and I'm just not buying enough of the restricted groceries to make it likely.

Of course, the hot weather we're now getting makes this easier: salad requires no points and is easily available locally, albeit still with no celery, and hot weather and salad go perfectly together. In fact, I just had to ditch an unused stockpot that had gone whiffy, although I started a new one immediately, even knowing I was just as unlikely to use that either.

I'm probably going to have to make this project harder if I plan to keep blogging about it - it's dullsville of late, I know. Making it harder would also do something for my body's amazing ability to put weight on even when I'm not having any fat, although it would make a tad more joyless.

In the meantime, here's the cheesecake recipe. Soften an ounce of butter and two ounces of margarine. Smash a dozen biscuits (Belgian Speculoos are good for this, but ginger biscuits in general are okay and digestives will do it). Mix the fat into the biscuit crumbs and push together until it's like dough, then push it into the bottom of a cake tin. Put the tin into the freezer for an hour.

Take a good blob of mascarpone cheese and slightly less thick double cream and mix together. You can add some jam or marmalade if you like it sweet, or the zest of a lemon if you like it tart. Slop that into the tin on top of the biscuit base. Put it in the fridge.

Put a cupful of water into a heavy saucepan with about 8oz/250g of sugar and turn on the heat. You want the water to slowly boil and you want to swirl it rather than stir it. When it starts to boil, reduce the heat. Now take a punnet of strawberries (washed and halved, don't huile them, it's just waste) and drop them in. Add a quarter of a teaspoon of baking powder. Continue on a low heat, swirling occasionally. Don't leave the pan: if it burns, you'll be sorry. Let it reduce down to a thick tar-like liquid.

Take it off the heat, let it cool a bit, then pour the pan contents on to the cheesecake and put it back in the fridge. You now can't lose: if it stays liquid, it's cheesecake with strawberry coulis. If it gets very thick, it's cheesecake with sticky strawberry sauce. And if it sets, it's cheesecake with strawberry toffee. All of these are delicious. And if I have no sugar for cups of tea for the next two weeks, it was worth it.

During the hiatus

2010-05-14T19:09:00.001+01:00

I'm not yet back on rations, but I'm still making use of the things I've learned during the project.

For General Election week, I pulled out all the stops. Paul arrived on Tuesday afternoon and that night Paul, CJBS and I went out with mutual friend Tony to one of West Kirby's excellent Indian (Bangladeshi, actually, I believe) restaurants. The three of them, friends for longer than I've been alive, have charted the fate of several Indian restaurants in the town, seeing them open, spawn new branches and pass to the next generation. Tuesday night's meal had insanely surly service, but the meal was very very good as usual. And I'm not just saying that because I'm British and Indian food is our national dish.

On Wednesday morning, I made CJBS and Paul breakfast - kippers with scrambled eggs. I can't face breakfast - food in the morning is the devil's work - which they scoffed down.

Wednesday night was time for my speciality dish: roast lamb. I don't think we ever had this when I was growing up (although we had lamb chops) but for some reason it has become my adult signature dish. It's actually something of a cheat: it's local, hung free-range organic salt marsh lamb from our excellent local butcher, Graham Clarke, so it's impossible to get it wrong. Lamb can be fatty, although salt marsh lamb not so much, but the fat can be dealt with with my recipe.

A bag of dried apricots is the key. Split them and put a spring of rosemary in each ine. Then soak them for as long as possible in white wine. Take the lamb and get it to room temperature. With scissors, make V-shaped cuts in the skin of the joint all over. Push the apricots into the the cuts. Let it stand for an hour or so.

Roast as normal - 220C for 30 minutes, then 160C for 40 minutes per kg. When changing between the two temperatures, pour the remaining wine used for soaking over the lamb.

The apricots will go black and burnt. Don't worry - we're not using them. Through some process, they soak up the fat and give up their sugars in return. Perfect, I'm told - I'm still a happy vegetarian and think this is all barbaric nonsense.

I served it with the usual trimmings: mint sauce bought at Fortnum and Mason earlier this year (horrifically sweet), peas and carrots, roast potatoes, broccoli and asparagus. The asparagus was special: 5 spears with two anchovy fillets in-between, tied together with smoked streaky bacon, drizzled with lemon juice and melted butter and baked for 10 minutes. This was for CJBS, Paul and Tony - Tony was off swanning around the country on the Orient Express for the actual election, so we didn't see him for the actual night.

Thursday morning was scrambled eggs made with smoked salmon and toast. Thursday night - election night - was a running buffet. We pulled an all-nighter: I went to bed at about 0630; CJBS didn't at all; and Paul had a nap from about 8am. Various finger foods and sandwiches were made, packed into Tupperware and served as needed. I had plans for Friday brunch and dinner, but it never happened: I got up in the early afternoon, pottered about and went back to bed in the early evening. Not that I wasn't excited: a hung parliament is a good thing, especially since our voting system isn't proportional and isn't designed to reflect what people wanted when they cast their vote (for the record, I voted Labour nationally, despite not liking them but I dislike them less than the hideous gargoyle of a Conservative candidate; and I voted Green locally. For my pains, and like 65% of voters around here, I got a Conservative in parliament and... a Conservative locally. My votes, like 65% of people around here, were entirely wasted).

Saturday saw me back on form: a full cooked breakfast - bacon, eggs, sausage, beans, tinned tomato - for Paul and CJBS. Paul got his train back to London afterwards and I demanded that CJBS provide for me for a change - which he did by going to Flame and Wok for a gourmet Chinese takeaway meal. For which I paid half.

At this point, my never-reliable memory goes to hell. We had leftover buffet one night. Chips from the chippy another night. Something else for one night. Any how, I still had leftover lamb. Some of it went into sandwiches for CJBS to take to work. The rest I curried in the slow cooker, leaving me with the bone that went into the dogs - exactly zero waste! One night of curry with soured cream and one night with the plain curry and we've reached tonight.

Tonight I've got the remains of the jus from the slow-cooked curry and some remaining curried veg and lamb bits. I'm making this into a mulligatawny, by draining the jus, blending the bits and putting the lot into a standard soup. I'm having bagels with hummus.

And the rationing? Well it will be restarting soon. I'm actually looking forward to it. In fact, my stomach will positively welcome it: the rich food of late hasn't suited me and the weight I've lost appears to have piled back on.

Partly politics

2010-05-02T17:02:00.000+01:00

April is at an end, so we get a pause in the rationing. With the UK general election this week, the rationing is off for visitors who will be getting the full smorgasbord of fat, cheese and meat we've lacked for a month.

I'm coming back to the rations next week, as the challenge is fun and the diet is very healthy. But I have to say that this isn't as much fun as it was: I've got the cooking down to a fine art, seemingly able to make a great meal out of next to nothing, to turn leftovers into fresh meals two nights running without breaking a sweat and take a lack of fat and still make a dinner with all the trimmings.

There's a knack to rationing and once you've got the knack, you can deal with anything. It shows how, in the UK at least, when rationing petered out in the mid-1950s, people continued to cook rationed food, just with more fat and cheese in it. The British gained a reputation for stodgy, cautiously-flavoured food that we're only now starting to shake off, because the favourites of rationing (pies, bakes, one-pot stews) remained the norm. The portion sizes got bigger, and the trimmings reappeared, but the food stayed the same.

This is ideal for CJBS. Born in 1951, he grew up with no memory of rationing, but his food at home and at his private school (boo, hiss) was just what Patten and the other wartime cooks would recommend, almost always cooked too long and dripping with extra dripping. Rationing for him hasn't meant discovering new food: it has meant rediscovering the food of his childhood, only served hotter.

For me, the project has been different. I've become a smarter shopper, caring about where my food comes from. I've worried over the vitamins and protein content of ordinary dishes. I've looked for ways of making rich, satisfying food without fat. These are things we should be doing. So much of food is just refuelling, filling a space in the stomach until it's time to sleep or fill it again. We've substituted salt for flavour, hydrogenated fat for quality preparation, making ingredients hot for actual cooking. And we've done this whilst buying ever more recipe books and watching ever more television programmes about how to make good food - and watched the latter with a microwaved ready meal in front of us.

Partially, this is the fault of the politicians. In the 1980s, seeking to save money as usual (in order, it turns out, to spend it on themselves) the Department of Education decided that Domestic Science (once called "cookery") wasn't needed any more. It became optional, then it disappeared altogether. An entire generation - my generation - grew up without the basic skills that cookery lessons give you. Watch Come Dine With Me (if you must) and see people marvel over how skilled someone is because they can make a roux. We see people feeling guilty over using frozen pastry - because they can't make pastry. Pastry! And they do feel guilty, for not having been taught the basics.

To digress, the same thing happened at the same time with English. Politicians - and trendy teachers - decided that we didn't need to know the rules. Written English was going to die out, thanks to the wonder of the telephones and videophones and other such advances. Nobody predicted the internet and how we'd all be being asked to comment and review and give our two-penn'thworth on blogs and forums across all possible subjects. So people now happily type "i saw there sign that was telling us wear to vote and i fort that they was saying i should of vote's for tori'es when i wants to vote for labour's party". If you tell people they're doing it wrong, they often feel guilty... for not having been taught there (the salt shaker is over there) their (it was their salt shaker) and they're (they're concerned about your interest in the salt shaker), how to make plurals and possessives and how to spell (the latter was the biggest flaw in my education).

We've paid the price for deciding English didn't need to be taught in depth. And we've paid the price for deciding cookery didn't need to be taught at all, with obesity in our kids and basic - really, really basic - food hygiene thrown away (clues: wearing gloves doesn't help if you wear the same gloves when moving from vegetables to raw meat to cooked meat - can you hear me, Subway? - and if you need to be told that raw meat is generally poisonous until cooked thoroughly throughout, as did the guy who sued a supermarket for selling him burgers that he poisoned his kids with by not cooking them properly, then you're not ready to breathe without help, let alone cook food).

Three months on rationing and I'm as good a cook as I'll ever be. Of course, I had a good grounding in it - my mum is, after all, a top-class chef in her own right, so it shouldn't be a surprise; but my knowledge of the chemistry and physics of food has gone to a new level. I now know with certainty how ingredients combine and interact, how meat benefits from being cooked on a low heat for a long time but vegetables need a high heat and a short time, and why this should be so.

I might still not produce the best presented food in the world - it tends to sit in a heap on the plate rather than looking like something out of the Sunday supplements - but I think rationing has made me produce the best food I can and will produce. For that reason, the project is worth continuing next week.

Celery, salad and soup

2010-04-27T15:47:00.000+01:00

Whilst the flights might have resumed, the pause in air freight would seem to have temporarily paid off for local produce: I managed to get both domestic celery and spring onions for the first time this year.

The celery went straight into a cream of celery soup. I'm very fond of this soup, which Heinz seem to have stopped doing. It's a standard white soup (onion, roux, milk, stock) with roughly chopped celery in it. The longer you can leave it to simmer with the celery in it, the tastier it gets, although like all white soups, watch for it catching - especially if using household (ie dried) milk.

This was meant to last two nights, but we fell upon the saucepan and devoured it all in one sitting. So I had to quickly come up with something else to bridge the gap. This was leek and potato soup - again, just a white soup, with big lumps of potato and leek in it. Very filling, so this did go over two nights.

Sunday was a salad. This is where the spring onions come in. Now, celery is lovely in a salad, but having eaten all I could get in the soup, I'd none left and the Egyptian stuff has displaced the local stuff. Still, not having celery doesn't ruin a salad. Two salads, in fact, as I made salad niçoise for CJBS and a cottage cheese salad for me.

This salad spread well into Monday, with the addition of fish fingers (and fake fish for me) for a little change.

But now it's back to soup. I've got some potatoes and some cabbage leftover from the salad, so I'm going to make a cream of cabbage and potato soup. That should stretch to two days, too.

Eyjafjallajökull pie

2010-04-20T08:00:00.000+01:00

The sporadic blogging continues, with my apologies. There's also less soup than you might imagine for a soup month.

Saturday was a rare, and expensive, Chinese takeaway with a marathon of TV shows I loved as a child remade to modern standards (Doctor Who: this episode okay; V: meh; The Prisoner: brain damage).

Sunday was fish for CJBS. This being sporadically available in wartime, we've made it sporadically available by requiring it being bought from the fishmongers, who have the most remarkably variable and unpredictable opening hours of any shop you could think of.

I made cod in breadcrumbs: blitz 6 slices of brown bread, add a chopped up slice of smoked bacon, a chopped tomato and a chopped onion, place the cod skin-side down on a glass baking tray, cover with the breadcrumb mix (pack it down a little) and bake in a medium low oven for 45 minutes. I served it with mashed potato and some steamed broccoli. I had fake fishfingers. No fat was used!

For Monday, I had leftover mashed potato. That suggested something pie, with a mashed potato topping. At the supermarket, I was able to get a large slice of braising steak for half the week's ration of red meat. So that's a steak and ale pie, I reckon. This type of steak is like leather, but it can be made tender with some work. First, make sure it's at room temperature. Sprinkle with some salt and a little garlic powder, then, with a rolling pin or one of those scary pointy mallets, bash the hell out of it. Turn it over and do the same. Then dice it.

I melted a tiny amount of CJBS's remaining margarine in a frying pan, getting it very hot, then added the beef cubes. When it has browned all over, add a chopped onion and let the two cook through together.

When the onion is cooked, add some gravy browning or gravy granules to soak up the fat and add a small glass of Guinness. Then add a chopped carrot and some chopped mushrooms. Stir it in and add more Guinness. A dash of Maggi or half a teaspoon of yeast extract, a stir, and some more Guinness. Eventually, just under a pint of Guinness has gone in, thickening and reducing all the time. Take it off the heat and cover.

If you've got enough fat for pastry, a shortcrust base is nice. I had pastry I'd previously frozen and I cheated by microwaving it back to being malleable. I lined a pie dish with it, poured in the steak and ale mix and then spooned the leftover mash on top. I forked the top of the mash, then brushed it with milk, then forked it again: this stops the mash being dried out, but also creates a crispy top.

Into the bottom of a low oven for an hour and a half (the meat really needs pampering) and bake.

In the meantime, I made my equivalent: a vegetable pie. I fried off an onion in a tiny knob of margarine, then made up a roux into a white sauce. To that I added a chopped leek, a chopped carrot, some chopped mushrooms and some of the leftover uncooked broccoli from Sunday. Let that simmer slowly (beware, it can catch very easily, so stirring is very much on the agenda) for 10 minutes, then put it in a pie dish and cover with mashed potato as before. Into the top of the low oven for 45 minutes and you're ready to serve both together. Which I did.

We're having this again today - there was plenty - so Wednesday will be my next soup. With the volcanic ash disrupting flights, Morrisons is starting to run short of the stuff I'm forbidden by the rules of the project from buying anyway. I'm hoping this means they'll source a bit more locally (no celery so far this year because it's all Spanish, Israeli and Egyptian) to increase my choices. Certainly I'd expect my greengrocer to go back to offering more local produce - they got sloppy over the winter with too much exotica, including stuff they could've got from just down the road.

If the ash makes for an increase in local food, I'm going to really enjoy the two weeks of soup-making. It'll be very nice to be spoiled for choice for once. Although they're talking about lifting the flight ban for freight, alas and alack, but there still might be a couple of days with fresh soup made from domestic ingredients.

Organising a pea soup

2010-04-15T19:46:00.000+01:00

This stupid virus (well, it's now a bacterial chest infection, but I'm an asthmatic smoker so I've brought that upon myself) has slowed my cooking and blogging down to a dribble.

This is no use when trying to remember what I've made recently: my memory is dodgy at the best of times, but when ill I can (and have before now) forget my own name. Vaguely, I recall making a pea soup, although details are hazy (like, what day).

The pea soup was fun to make. CJBS has entirely appropriated both of our fat rations (cheerfully) but I snuck a spoon of his margarine and fried off a small onion and a leek. I made the roux with a small pot of single cream, made it up with stock and then added an (anachronistic) bag of frozen peas. I brought this to the boil, then took it off the heat and went to bed to feel sorry for myself.

The next day, I strained the liquid from the solids, blended the solids and recombined. Brought back to heat and served, this was lovely: sweet without being desserty, a lovely colour (many recipes require adding green food colouring - ignore them unless you wish to channel Fanny Cradock, in which case pick a colour other than green) and a fascinating texture. I had two bowls. Then I went to bed to feel sorry for myself.

The next day (no, I don't know which days these are) I didn't have seconds. CJBS went off to the late shift with tinned sardines, toast and the fat ration. I went to bed to feel sorry for myself.

Today (possibly), CJBS ate the rest of the soup. He tried a spoonful, then heated the rest up and ate it much in the manner of Cookie Monster. So it was clearly very good. I made myself a vegetable chilli, but picked at it and in the end gave up and opened a bag of Fox's Glacier Dark, bought on points. I've been craving aniseed for the entire time I've been ill and aniseed balls would've been ideal... but impossible to come by. These liquorice-aniseed boiled sweets are not the same thing, but they're doing for the craving nicely. I'd still like a bag of aniseed balls, though.

My policy is to never ignore a craving, especially if it is truly odd: I trust my body to know what it wants and to ask for it. Previously when ill I've craved blue cheese (I hate blue cheese) but a cube of it has been all I can think of. I suspect there's penicillin in them there veins (or equivalent, as I'm told I'm allergic to penicillin, according to childhood medical notes). A craving for aniseed fits this pattern (although I love aniseed normally... but, just to be contrary, dislike black liquorice and hate Ouzo and Pernod) and I've been obsessing about aniseed in my fever-dreams, so this is obviously going to do me good.

And it was worth taking the bag of sweets out of the sugar ration, even if it does put me back on the Camp coffee-substitute in a week.

Stewing

2010-04-10T14:54:00.000+01:00

Soup month continues, albeit with some alterations due to circumstances beyond our control (and we apologise for the disruption this may cause to your journey this evening).

As previously detailed, I made minestrone soup on Monday. That was excellent and lasted two days. On Wednesday, I went out drinking, very early for me, with Scott and CJBS (and had a great time: must do that again soon), so I made up a stew in the slow cooker to be ready on getting home. This departs from the soup plan, but only slightly (it's only an unpureed vegetable broth, after all).

I've always loved stew, especially stew with suet dumplings. But suet comes out of our fat ration and that requires husbanding, so this was stew without it. A selection of diced vegetables, some pearl barley, a dash of dried herbs and cover with stock. On high 8am to 3pm, on low until we ate at 8.

That lasted two days as well. On Thursday, I started to come down with something virus-y and nasty. By the evening, I was decidedly unwell. Like a wounded animal, I'm best left to get on with being sick alone. I don't do sympathy and people floating around me looking concerned. That's lucky, because CJBS was away at Aintree, making the trains run on time by barking orders at the drunken racegoers there for the meeting that culminates in today's Grand National.

That means he needed feeding on getting home at 9pm, a time when I wanted to be in bed slowly dying. Fortunately, there was still plenty of stew left; but it must've started to look a bit dull. I thought so anyway, although CJBS was game enough to keep on at it. I decided to liven it up a bit for him by drawing on his meat ration. I bought a sliver of nasty-looking frying steak for £1.29 and did my best to enliven it.

This, first of all, means letting it get to room temperature. Then I gave it a good rub with salt and Worcester Sauce and heated a non-stick pan to very hot without any fat. The steak went in and I browned it both sides, then took the heat down and added, in stages, half a pint of Guinness and a few dashes of Maggi. That was all allowed to reduce until the steak was cooking in a thick oil-like liquid. I diced the steak, then added it and the liquid to the remaining stew, topped it up with a ladle of stock and put it on to slow cook on medium for 4 hours.

I'm told the result was lovely, and CJBS enjoyed it enough to have it again on Friday night (when, with no appetite appearing, I had salad sandwiches as a way of getting vitamins and stuff into me) but I think he's already picked out and eaten all of the (not very much) beef in it.

Having it again tonight, which would be stew day 5 and beefy stew day 3, seems dull. I roused myself from my pit and got him some canned tuna on points and made him a pasta bake - it can sit in a cold oven and all I need to do is shove the heat on 45 minutes before he wants to eat it, allowing me to retire to bed before he comes home (he's old-fashioned enough to want his dinner on the table the moment he gets in and this is as close to that ludicrous Ozzie and Harriet-style idea as he's ever going to get).

Pasta bakes are easy. You cook off the pasta until it's al dente - ie, not quite cooked enough - then make a standard roux. Add 90% of the cheese ration for one person (almost 2oz) and a small tin of sweetcorn (on points, but actually bought last month for the store cupboard and not used, so not drawn from April's points) and bring up with milk. Then mix the pasta into the sauce and stir in the tuna.

Finally, take two slices of bread and the remaining cheese and blend to make breadcrumbs. Put the pasta mix into an oven dish, spread the breadcrumbs on top and bake in a slow oven for 45 minutes.

I think my appetite may be coming back - or at least my ability to taste - so I'd like something strong in flavour to tempt me to eat rather than just refuel. So I'm going to make curried rice again, using some dried mushrooms and peppers I've got in, plus some frozen peas (in a complete cheat). Plenty of stirring required, but my racking cough can only help stop it from sticking by invigorating my stirring.

I'll eat early, what with Doctor Who coming up tonight and Ashes to Ashes from last night still to watch. That's after I've cleaned the kitchen (if I can drag myself up to do it; no, that's not right... if I can make myself do it) where, transferring a can of Guinness from the counter to the fridge this afternoon, I managed to catch the can on a nail and spray its contents through the entire room, across the hall and into the utility room. And spilt Guinness sets, so I better do something.

On the plus side, the whole house currently smells of beer, which is exactly what I've always wanted out of life.

Chunky soup

2010-04-05T12:44:00.001+01:00

Today's soup is minestrone, or at least my version of it. Or at least I think it's soup.

I love my slow cooker (crockpot, I think they call it in the States) but I don't make as much use of it as I always think I'm going to. Perhaps because I work from home, I don't need to slow cook as much as I thought I would. Or perhaps peeling and chopping vegetables at 0730 doesn't appeal to me as much as I thought it would (and it didn't appeal to me at all).

But for this soup, I wanted to try it in the slow cooker, mainly in order to give me a Bank Holiday devoted entirely to the internet and the TV. So yesterday, whilst making bubble and squeak, I also baked half a dozen tomatoes. A quick blast in the blender, a glass of wine in the resulting mix and into the slow cooker. Two diced potatoes, some dried peppers, some "soup mix" (dried beans, lentils and barley) and a little bit of macaroni.

A little bit? I'll come to that. This morning, I switched the slow cooker on to medium and walked away. Slow or not, the cooking smells filled the house quickly, so it all seems to be going well. Then I glanced at the bag of pasta. Hmmm, a little bit of pasta? No, quite a lot, actually. Still, the soup looked fine and I'm mindful of the instructions to never remove the lid during cooking. But I never listen to instructions anyway. A brief stir revealed minestrone-flavoured pasta bake.

This wasn't thick soup, this was pasta and potatoes with a thin covering of tomato water. The pasta and potatoes had sucked all the moisture out of the sauce. This is easily solvable, I just added a couple of pints of stock - yes, pints - and gave it a good stir. Back on to medium until we eat it tonight. I'm assuming the macaroni - since each tube is now the size of a finger - can't soak any more water up, so all will now be fine.

So now I can get back to that whole internet-and-TV thing I've got going: more so, now that I've connected the internet to the new TV and can watch the BBC iPlayer or SeeSaw from the comfort of my own living room. I may never emerge from there again.

Parsnips, bacon, chips, peas and chow mein

2010-04-02T11:05:00.000+01:00

This soup lark is working really well, despite having the same meal for two days running each time. But a bit of cheat now kicks in.

Tonight I'm making a parsnip soup. Now, I loathe parsnips. They're horrible. So this is an excuse for me to have my monthly portion of chips, with mushy peas. Which CJBS thinks are horrible, so it's a fair exchange.

Since this soup isn't for a vegetarian and CJBS is due some of his meagre bacon ration, I'm going to do a bacon and parsnip soup. This just adds bacon at the frying stage of the roux, plus a carrot for the colour. A little bit of evap, on points, makes it into a cream of parsnip soup.

Tomorrow is a very special day: Doctor Who is back on and we promised to celebrate with our first Chinese takeaway this year. Britain's Chinese population have been here almost as long as our Asian population, but whilst the white British took to Indian food very quickly, they were slower to embrace Chinese (more precisely, Cantonese) cookery.

There is an exception to this: Merseyside. Here, Chinese food became a normal part of the diet early on, perhaps because the port of Liverpool, formerly being so huge, has long made the area very cosmopolitan (despite the poverty, of which there is a frighteningly large amount, Merseyside has very good 'race relations' - racism does exist, but not in the confrontational style seen in such dumps as Dagenham or Blackburn) and the people have historically been quick to adopt 'foreign' food.

The vast majority of the fish and chip shops on Merseyside are British Chinese owned and operated, a fact that surprises people from other areas (for some reason). Chinese food got in through the back door because of this: selling fish and chips, but also offering rice, then noodles, then stir fries... and soon Merseysiders were commonly buying fish and chips with chow mein and fried rice in the same way other Brits ask for fish and chips and a battered sausage.

From there, it's a short journey to Chinese sit-down restaurants without the fish and chips, of which Liverpool has a number worth visiting (and it always pleases me no end to see people making their way from Argos and Primark, laden with cheap shopping, stopping for a quick lunch of sweet and sour chicken and some prawn toast before getting a bus back to their terraced house).

All of this is a long way of saying that tomorrow's dinner is not anachronistic to World War II eating habits, at least locally. But normal service will be resumed on Sunday, where it's that old standby bubble and squeak, with a week of soups to start again on Monday. I'm thinking Minestrone, made in my slow cooker...

Souper star

2010-03-31T19:08:00.000+01:00

The soup month got off to a good start on Monday with a vegetable noodle soup that did for two days. My stock pot hadn't been started, but I had a way round it: the tinned asparagus I got came with plenty of asparagus-stocky liquid, so I made the roux from that. Some cabbage leaves, some leek, a handful of mushrooms and the asparagus, a simmer and then into the blender. Back into the pot with some vermicelli, boil and serve. It was lovely, too.

We had seconds last night before going out to the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall to watch Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball and Chris Barber playing scratch jazz sets whilst we drank red wine at £3.80 a glass.

For tonight, it's mushroom broth. I usually make cream of mushroom, so this is a departure. I'm also making it differently to the usual ways of these things, by frying off the onion and the mushrooms together to get the flavour out. I've got dried mushrooms that I've made a mushroom stock out of, and I'll build the roux from the mushroom-onion stuff with that stock. I've also bought a broth pack - a bag of oats, lentils and barley that the greengrocer does - to make it "hearty", as they say in the commercials.

Meanwhile, my satellite dish plan has ballooned a tad (in space terms, 93 million miles). I haven't watched any live television since Being Human went on hiatus. And that was the only programme I'd watched since Doctor Who finished on New Year's Day. Which suggests I only watch programmes with Russell Tovey in them, which is more true than is comfortable.

But Doctor Who and Ashes to Ashes are both back over Easter. And both are on BBC HD. My plan had been to get a standard box and attach it to my standard TV. With a bit of DIY, that's £90. And then I started following the "other people who bought X also bought Y" links. Now, this is why I don't watch QVC or Bid-Up TV. I'd see what other people were buying, throw rationing and financial caution to the wind and just get shopping. And I'm a Green socialist!!

But, if you buy the dish kit, there are special offers on the set-top boxes. And that makes HD boxes affordable. But that means a HDTV. And if you're going to spend on an HDTV, you might as well spend on a big, 42" one (size does matter. Yes, it does. Yes). And you'll need that stand they've got on offer. And some F-connectors (no, me neither, but it suggested a bag of ten would be useful).

For fun, I like to add stuff to my basket and walk away, because the capitalist scum might notice and feel the pain of a lost sale. What we need, at this point, is a futile gesture. Curses, then, to a certain large internet retailer who are on to me and have got round the problem by putting a large discount and a long interest-free offer above the "confirm order" button.

So now I'm getting my dream HDTV and satellite and don't have to pay for it... until next year, but that's, like, forever. But I'm still putting the dish up myself. Except that I'm paying the guy who put our wooden floors in to drill the holes in the wall. But otherwise I'm doing it myself. So all's well.

I'll put a red flag on the top of the set and sing The Internationale before I switch it on each day. So all will be well.

In the soup

2010-03-29T14:05:00.000+01:00

Back from Brussels and very well fed, it's time for month three of rationing. I've got a couple of conflicting goals that I need to make fit this month's project.

I need to save money. Christmas turned out to be virtually impossible to pay for - I've been running an overdraft since December - and bills continue to pile up. Being responsible people, we've made new wills after getting hitched last year, but they cost over £200. Also, rationing didn't save money. Quite the reverse - it appears to have cost a lot more, but that's likely due to a lack of planning capabilities. And I want a satellite dish in time for the forthcoming General Election (the existing digital aerial, designed for outdoor use, is propped up on a pile of books and a chair in the middle of the living room, so is slightly inconvenient; a dish will solve this issue) but it's going to cost £90 and require me to be all butch and climb a ladder and everything.
The lack of fat was easy for me to cope with last time, even if I did run out before the end of the month. It was harder of CJBS, nay, impossible, but I'm not going to let him have my fat ration so he'll have to live within his means. However, he's put his foot down: he wants cheese. 2oz a week, a portion that's almost impossible to cut, has been, he says, "killing me". So I'd like to find a period that will have more cheese and use those rations for this month. But it's impossible: the cheese ration fell in every year of the war and beyond, getting down to barely over an ounce by the 3rd year of peace. It was one of the last items off the ration, in Spring 1954 (meat was the last off, in May 1954; petrol was rationed, albeit generously, until 1957, whilst Ribena and orange juice could only be got by showing your Family Allowance/Child Benefit book at the chemist until about the same time).

My thought is that I'm going to give up my cheese ration to CJBS, giving him 4oz, a respectable 100-ish grams, a week. That should allow him to put the cheese to non-cookery uses, although I'm not sure exactly what he wants it for, to be honest. I don't think he knows, either.

But that will take cheese out of my arsenal of dishes to make on the ration. Add to that the saving of money I need to make and I'm in a real bind. It could be worse: if we went on to 1946/47 rations, we'd lose bread and potatoes to points; I'd be making gruel, or possibly ersatz gruel.

I spent the 4 hours of train trips yesterday thinking hard about this and have found what I think is a solution. It'll make the blog a very boring place for a month (sorry), but will achieve these odd aims. I'm going to spend a month making soups.

Yes, soups. I went out today, the last day on holiday, and bought about £10 of vegetables to last the week. I drew down my fat ration and spent points on evaporated milk and some pasta. I also got some lentils (for the protein - hat tip to Michelle). The £10 of vegetables got me a lot, thanks to my greengrocer's low prices, so I've some leeks, a cabbage, onions, tomatoes, a parsnip and potatoes. I'll start a new stock pot today, and choose the first soup from the available veg.

With plenty of bread still allowed, we won't go hungry. And we'll get the right nutrients. And the flavours should be pretty varied, even with each soup lasting two days. And there'll be less reheated cabbage (hat tip to Scott). Yet, somehow, I suspect "dull" is going to be the watchword for this month. I may have to fall off the ladder whilst putting up the Freesat dish just to provide some light relief.

Bread, cheese and whine

2010-03-22T15:38:00.000Z

As the rationing month comes to a close, so I slow to a stop with the blogging. Partially it's being busy, partially it's being fed up of rationing and partially it's because of Talk Talk.

Let's start with Talk Talk. On Friday, as we're eating dinner (fish and chip for CJBS, the last remaining vegeburgers from the ration for me), the doorbell rings. Hello, says the visitor. I'm from BT. We've just upgraded our exchange and I want to make sure that you're getting the benefit. Can you sign here to say I've been?

No, I can't, says I. You're not from BT at all, are you? You're a con artist. Go away, now, or I'll summon a policeman (I get frighteningly British when flustered).

Yeah, sure, he says, and saunters off to the next house along and rings their doorbell. So I call the police. The police are in the area, watching over the 15 year olds spewing, fighting and getting chlamydia in the town centre, it being a Friday. They come out immediately and stop him.

No guv', he says to them, I'm from Talk Talk. Look, here's my ID (which sprang from nowhere). I'm telling everyone I'm from Talk Talk. The police then call me back: he says you've made a false call. We've left him to get on with it.

Oh, for crying out loud, says I. Of course he's telling you the truth that he's from Talk Talk. It's just us he's lying to. Oh, says the controller, we'll move him on, shall we? Well, duh.

At that point, I spot that our useless communications "regulator", OfCom, have a big press release about how they've stamped out mis-selling like this. It's leading the BBC news. It's on their website. It's a big story. What's not on their website is anywhere to complain about mis-selling. I email them, pointing this out. They email back today: no, because we can't actually do anything about it (I paraphrase). First, you must read Talk Talk's full terms and conditions and its full licence. Then you must write to Talk Talk, giving the details they ask for in the licence in the correct order. Then, if they won't help, you can contact Talk Talk's in-house ombudsman. If she won't help, then you can contact OfGums. But they will only help if you've been caught by the mis-selling.

So the police and the regulator were both unwilling to do anything about the suave conman from Talk Talk at my door that night. This did not set my mood very high.

Additionally, the burgers set out to avenge themselves on me as well by making me very ill. I spent the night and much of Saturday calling god on the great white telephone. That night, from points, we had tinned soup and some bread, about all I could keep down. On the plus side, the rationing plus all the vomiting means I'm now down to a 32" waist (30" if I concentrate).

Sunday I felt brighter, but my body wasn't done yet: the kneeling in the bathroom didn't suit my arthritic hips (it's okay, it's "juvenile arthritis", and it'll be gone by the time I'm 15, I was told...) and I'm now on the second day of hobbling around with a walking stick and a pained countenance. Sunday dinner was therefore a simple one: baked potatoes with a tomato soup starter. Oh, but the tomato soup was good! The best I've done yet (it helped that I was starving by this point). The main good point was that I used so much garlic - oh, so very much - that it was actually garlic soup with tomato. And it was lovely, but you don't want me to breathe on you today, believe me.

So, what for tonight? Well, it's French Onion Soup. Some adaptations are required to get this within wartime restrictions, but it should still be good. The key to French Onion Soup is getting the onions to caramelize without burning them. Many recipes get round this by having you boil them, then add brown sugar. There's no need for this, especially if, like me, you've got used to the endless bloody stirring of rationed food. Keep them on a medium heat and keep them moving and they'll not burn.

Ideally, I'd put brandy and red wine in it, but I'm out of brandy. So I'm going to try adding some dark rum instead. Also ideally, I'd put a thick slice of bread on top, a huge heap of cheese and then grill the whole thing, soup and all, before serving (unideally, burning my fingers, usually). But I've no cheese.

However, what I do have is powdered cheese sauce. This was available in the 1940s and was, just like now, a poor, third-rate ersatz excuse for cheese sauce. But made thickly, with some extra mustard powder, then poured onto the bread and toasted and I'll have a passible imitation of what I'm seeking.

Just one more day to go with this rationing lark, then off to rainy Belgium to sit damply in various cafes for a few days. And, yes, we will be back on rations when we get back. Only this time, I must find a period of history with just a little bit more cheese available!

Subject is fatless. Repeat: fatless

2010-03-18T18:17:00.000Z

Ennui again. Or more a bankruptcy of ideas. Tuesday was salad, served with riveta. Wednesday was only last night but I'm groping for what it was. I wandered around Morrisons in a greater daze than usual. Ah yes! I made CJBS burgers from cheap mince and some onion pushed together and dry-fried. I had cheap vegeburgers. And I made a version of hash browns, that in the end were more rosti because they were baked. Fairly tasty, but all my fat was used up in the preparation.

Yes, I'm completely out of fat. For lunch, CJBS had bread soaked in the dripping from the burgers (he was thrilled but failed to notice that the amount of dripping left in the pan indicated that the burgers won't've been the healthiest thing in the world), and that's that for fat until the end of this month's go at the project, although I'll stare hard at my coupons just in case I've missed anything.

Fortunately, CJBS bought fish for him to have tonight. That doesn't need fat, but I had to turn to Madame La Patten for a recipe that didn't want some.

Fish roast was the answer. Take the pound of cod I've got, push tomato slices and bits of onion into it and bake it for 20 minutes. Then put more tomato slices and bit of onion on top and bake for ten minutes more, all in a medium hot oven. I'll serve it with mashed potato made with milk rather than butter.

For me, it's sandwiches. Basic salad ones, because I'm making them to take to Harrogate tomorrow at 5am (if I don't turn up at the office once a month, they'd have no evidence I was actually working for them; and I still haven't paid off Christmas, so my paycheck later this month will be useful lest I give up rationing and start busking). The bread is unbuttered, so it'll be a bit of a chew.

The solution is to do the following: buy the cheapest bottle of wine that the supermarket do (£2.99), pick the toenails out of it, and knock it back like medicine. With this plan, I'm sure to (a) not notice that the sandwiches are dry; (b) sleep well since I need to go to bed after The Archers; and (c) regret it horribly at 4am when the alarm goes off.

Pity me.

Happiness is... asparagus soup

2010-03-15T18:08:00.001Z

I'm making my leftovers go ever-so far at the moment. Friday's potato and tomato loaf was successfully combined with the champ-colcannon thing on Saturday to make a side dish. This was reheated on Sunday and served a main course to a naughty tin of Heinz tomato soup (on points).

Tonight it's being reheated again. It's getting a tad dry, so I'll serve it with a simple onion gravy. And since it's onion gravy, then it's sausages - two each - to go with it. That indicates a starter is called for, so I'm making a cream of asparagus soup. Only tinned asparagus is available at the moment, so I puréed the entire tin to start, adding some cabbage leaves: more reuse of leftover ingredients and also a good source of the fresh vitamins that the tinned asparagus will have lost.

I very finely chopped half an onion and fried it off, then built a roux with evaporated milk (points again). To that I added the asparagus gloop, then topped up with some stock from my pot and just under half a pint of milk.

Finally, with no brandy left, I put a shot of cheap rum into it, a dash of Maggi and two bay leaves, plus a handful of pearl barley and some rice for the bulk. Brought to the boil, it can then sit off the heat until I'm ready to bring it quickly back to heat and serve in a couple of hours when CJBS gets back from his much-postponed dog walk (which is happening at dog-feeding-time, leading to remarkable confusion from otherwise smart border collies).

In the meantime, I've been dealing with the usual domestic crises that seem to accumulate. I walked past the fridge - certainly a non-wartime luxury! - and heard a huge bang. No lights on the fridge. I moved quickly and decisively, which is a wrenching break with past precedent, and started to shift all the frozen food from the freezer part to the other freezer in the utility room, terrified of the waste of food. Frostbitten, I got most done, when I noticed that the other freezer was also lacking any lights. And the room lights weren't working. And the telephone was beeping in distress.

It was the downstairs master fuse that had blown. I reset it and the fridge and freezers sprang back into life.

I went back to my kitchen cleaning, emptying the sink of bleach water and giving it a quick buff. As I did, my feet got gradually wetter and the lino started to "bubble" from underneath. The sink water was exiting directly from the plughole into the cupboard underneath, where it was slowly dripping out onto the floor and below the cupboard under the lino. I pushed the pipes together - I don't know how they unjointed in the first place - then mopped up the water from the cupboard and the floor (I'll have to wait for the underlay to dry out before the lino is unbubbly).

I tipped the mopped up water into the sink, from where it immediately reappeared on the floor. The sink was leaking in two places. In fact, the sink, put in back in 2008, appears to have been held together by a cobweb and some sellotape. The slightest touch to one end of the frighteningly complicated pipework (two hot in, two cold in, two sink out, one dishwasher out that winds around the others to reach, eventually, the other side of the drain to where the dishwasher actually sits) will dislocate something at the other end, like trying to push down the lid of Tupperware.

At that point, I needed a Hamlet cigar. Or to seek the help of Ganesh in order to hold six pipes simultaneously. So I did the logical thing: I hit the pipes. And they snapped into place immediately.

No lottery win for me this week, then.

Comfort eating

2010-03-13T16:50:00.000Z

How to achieve comfort eating on rations? Well, I'm glad I asked that question. What's needed is hoarding of coupons, something I'm very good at. I've not drawn on the bacon or red meat rations at all this month and I've been very careful with the cheese and fat rations.

Yesterday's dinner therefore was lavish. I made the potato and tomato loaf I'd done previously, but for CJBS I diced some bacon into his. I also spent £1.19 on the world's smallest sirloin steak, which I rubbed with salt and paprika and left to stand for a couple of hours at room temperature (always do this: meat is muscle and cold muscle contracts and cooks badly. Let your meat warm naturally for a couple of hours and it'll be much more succulent) before frying off in a tiny bit of butter for 2 minutes a side.

For me, I had cheap supermarket own-brand vegeburgers. Dripping in fat, full of nastiness and even some egg (so far, I've got away with that without spending the weekend rueing it) but they were lovely lovely lovely. And £1.25, so just within rations for red meat.

Today, I'm wanting the same level of comfort food (in fact, I should've done last night's menu tonight, but I went with the flow) but this time with leftover tomato loaf and bacon. Perhaps feeling the luxury of last night's food, CJBS set me the task of making him something very bacony with lots of tomatoes for tonight.

So, here's the plan. I've made a simple risotto with a chopped-up slice of smoked bacon, some onion and, obviously, rice. I took the top off three tomatoes, removed the pulp and added that to the risotto. On a high heat, I kept it topped with stock until the rice was cooked. Now I'll spoon the mixture back into the tomatoes and bake for half an hour in a medium oven. Tick that box!

I've lots of my tomato loaf left, but very little of CJBS's. I've peeled and boiled potatoes and will mash them. Then I'll make a champ-colcannon-type-thing with onion and cabbage, but for CJBS I'll mash the remaining loaf into his, add some more tomato slices and the two slices of bacon. For me, I'll take the tiny bit of vegeloaf and do the same without the bacon and serve with onion gravy.

A big plate of this for me, a smaller plate from him but with the stuffed tomatoes on the side. I've got some nice crusty bread (as compared to the nasty crusty bread bought yesterday and found, sadly after taking a bite, to be moldy today) to toast to serve on the side.

Tomorrow morning, CJBS gets his ideal breakfast: grilled bacon and scrambled eggs (two, saved up!) and a grilled tomato with toast - he's had a long week on the rails. I just hope he's remembered that his personal fat ration isn't infinite and, if he hasn't remembered whilst devouring that tub of Benecol margarine, that he has a Plan B for the next 10 days that doesn't involve dry toast or taking some of my cooking fat.

'srooms

2010-03-11T18:49:00.000Z

A slightly odd meal today. I'd got a mixture of leftovers and shortages to make things challenging, so I had to think on my feet whilst shopping.

The other day I mentioned January's tomato shortage and the hell thereof. Well, the devil heard me: CJBS is craving cream of tomato soup, but the shelves were bare of tomatoes (there were bruised Israeli and Spanish tomatoes, but there's a war on, so they're out). There was also no evaporated milk, my favourite points spend. And his second crave, garlic pizza bread, failed epically due to there being no garlic and no pizza bread or dough.

Meanwhile, I had leftover mashed potato, having made about 3 pounds of the stuff yesterday. But we managed to eat about 2 and half pounds of mash, leaving not very much at all. So my thought of a doing something exciting with it faded away immediately.

But there was an upside. I'm such a fat miser, er, a miser when it comes to fat, I had stretched a week of butter to three weeks without even realising. So I've got lots and lots of butter suddenly (and my waste of dripping on failed Yorkshire pudding yesterday now feels better). Then I discovered a garlic bulb moldering in the back of the fridge: I don't usually go near the back of the fridge, preferring instead to just send the entire appliance to Porton Down every couple of years and asking them to help themselves to anything promising.

Excess butter and a stray garlic bulb plus some pitta bread equals homemade garlic bread. I melted a lot of butter in a pan, then added a lot of crushed garlic. Before the garlic browned, I took it off the heat and pressed each pitta into the fat. The result will be baked before I serve the meal: instant garlic bread.

Meanwhile, the soup plan was switched to mushroom soup. Now, mushrooms are an odd thing: you'd think them useful in rationing, given that they're savoury and bulking and easily fill in for meat. But Patten is silent on mushrooms. Did Britons of the 1940s not eat them? Or were they not farmed - did you have to gather them yourself and thus risk instant and painful death? Whatever, mushrooms are not something wartime recipes seem to consider.

Perhaps the mushroom soup is therefore an anachronism. But it's worthwhile. I've said this before: mushroom soup is lovely, but very very easily done wrong. To prevent that, it requires dried mushrooms (or mushroom ketchup) to get the flavour right. I made a stock from dried mushrooms, a pint boiling water and a teaspoon of cumin, left to stand for an hour. The soup is then an onion roux, made up with milk, vegetable stock and white wine - the latter a real treat in wartime - plus the mushroom stock.

So that leaves the mashed potato. I'm not prepared to waste cheese rations on it. I'm a cheese miser, too. But I did have cottage cheese and half an onion. Combine the lot with some butter and bake. That should be a useful "champ" type thing, but with cottage cheese. I'll see how that turns out.

Failing flat

2010-03-10T18:09:00.001Z

Yesterday was a salad day. CJBS had a single remaining tin of fish left from his points, so that seemed to make for a good excuse to fill up on raw vegetables. I had the leftover curried rice, which was excellent cold.

Today has been cold, with an uncomfortable wind blowing in from the Irish Sea, so something warming and filling seems to work. I'm making sausages and mash, with onion gravy and steamed broccoli.

I was going to make sausages in gravy in a big Yorkshire pudding. This was the plan, but as I've said before, I simply can't make Yorkshire puddings. They never, no matter what I do, rise. I've made the batter with real egg and dried egg and vegan dried egg. I've added bicarb and not added it. I've made the batter slowly by hand and quickly by handbeater. I've made it with extra liquid and less liquid. I've made it from scratch and out of a packet.

So here's the flat, burnt, unrisen waste of an ounce of fat. And, if you've got a tip for making Yorkshire pudding (US: "popovers", in a piece of information I've just discovered), please let me know! (Especially Tanya who never fails at puddings and also writes the hysterical Gypsy Creams blog).

Meanwhile I've peeled the potatoes, boiled them and will shortly run them through my ricer, so all is not lost!

Polypeptides

2010-03-08T18:50:00.000Z

Michelle's comment on yesterday's curry has got me worrying that I've made a bit of a mistake in my lack of planning for each rationed meal.

By the middle of the war, surveys by Mass Observation for the Ministry of Food showed that more housewives knew the pyramid of nutrition than knew who Lord Woolton was and that the majority planned their meals to include what was needed for a balanced diet.

I've not paid any attention to nutrition, working on the basis that it's hard to get it too wrong when you're cooking everything from scratch. But I suspect I'm almost starving us of protein. I looked it up and I'm not serving much protein at all.

Of course, this is a genuine wartime problem: when egg, cheese and red meat have declined to so little as to be almost unmeasurable, protein becomes hard to get. I've done little to boost the amount, perhaps because, as a vegetarian, I'm probably usually short of protein even outside of rations. But for CJBS, it might make a big difference. At the very least, this has highlighted a question that Chris Neill and I wondered about on his lovely Dirty Kitchen blog: what is it with mid-century recipes putting egg into or on stuff you don't expect to be enhanced by an egg? The answer, perhaps, is: where else are we to get the protein?

Wikipedia suggests that we need 2oz/56g a day of protein. From their list, we might be getting our share from bread. But I checked the bread: 4g a slice; we're not eating 14 slices a day. So, from tomorrow, I'm going to start making a point of adding protein.

Perhaps we'll get it from today's meal, but tempered by extreme fat intake: yes, we had fish and chips (well, I had chips and mushy peas) from a takeaway. Entirely possible in wartime but expensive and often in short supply. Still, once in 3 months is probably fitting with that. And I defy you to argue with me!

Ruby Murray

2010-03-07T20:26:00.001Z

I wrote about this in December and January, but it's still true: I'm a big fan of the British Empire.

Obviously, not the whole raping, pillaging, stealing of land, genocide and other bits they didn't used to teach in school. No, my love of Empire is simply that British culture is thousands of times better for our contact with other cultures and the vibrancy of our immigrant populations, the vast majority of which have been here for so many generations as to be far more British than I am (it's all cousins marrying cousins in the Valleys and my family is no exception; but we think we have Bermudan and Sinhalese in there; on my Dad's side, there's sketchy evidence that we're Russian-Jewish: a nice healthy mix leading to me).

So it's a purely selfish love of Empire, because it puts lovely food in my belly, especially in wartime when the standard Patten is for stodge with too much carrot. Tonight I made a classic Anglo-Indian curried rice that we both scoffed down far too quickly to really get the most from it.

Anglo-Indian food is nothing but a parody of the real street food of India, brought back by the sons of Raj in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 19th and 20th, when the British Indian population arrived, they brought more realistic versions, but these then changed out of recognition as white Brits rushed to eat at the tables of the new Brits.

Curried rice is firmly the earlier Anglo-Indian rather than the later Indo-European variety. It starts with a chopped onion fried off in a little fat. Then some chopped mushrooms go in. Then curry powder to make a sort-of roux. As a reminder, adding extra mild curry powder doesn't make the meal hotter; putting less hot curry powder in doesn't make it milder; similar, as you learned in basic quantum mechanics in primary school, to how an anti-up-quark is not the same as a down-quark.

A tablespoon of soured cream works well at this point. Then add your rice; 3oz/75g per person is always said, but add more than that. Stir it up and start spooning in stock. Add a couple of chopped tomatoes and some more stock. Some raisins or sultanas and more stock. Alternatively, you can just add all the dry ingredients, cover with stock and walk away. But I'm used to the endless stirring by now. Keep the heat high and add more stock if the rice sticks before it's done.

When the rice is sticky, it's read to serve. A further blob of soured cream is good on top. Naan or chapati on the side makes the meal. And it did. We go to bed happy, full and rotund. And the only rations used were the knob of fat and the points (not too onerous) for the rice.

Purple-sprouting pleasure

2010-03-06T15:21:00.002Z

A beautiful spring morning propelled me out of the house before noon for a stroll to the supermarket. And what I found there caused me to run back: broccoli! British broccoli for the first time this year!

I've missed broccoli. Not being able to buy imported stuff creates strange shortages - the worst was January's tomato drought - but broccoli and celery have been impossible to get domestically. And there it was: viciously overpriced broccoli, to be sure, but broccoli all the same. I abandoned half-formed plans for another salad and grabbed a carrot, a leek, an onion, a cabbage and some mushrooms.

At home I paused to open all the windows - again a first for this year - and then paused some more to wash the kitchen window, noticing that it hadn't been washed... well, CJBS bought the house in 1977, so, probably since 1977 (there's nowhere to stand to do it - a sheer drop to the basement means that the window is actually at second-floor level; I had to wash it with a mop, leaning over from the doorstep).

Then I started cooking. I chopped the onion in two, then divided one of the halves into four. I chopped up the mushrooms, leek and carrot. These then went into a medium high oven for an hour to roast to get a "deep" flavour.

The remaining onion I finely sliced, then fried off in a little fat. From that I made a roux from flour and paprika, with a shot of cheap brandy for some "bottom" (yes, I know "deep" and "bottom" are vague, but they're the best I can think of for describing what roast veg (depth) and brandy (bottom) give to soup). The brandy is almost done and won't be replaced - booze wasn't rationed but it was difficult to get, especially stuff not made at home (ie almost everything but beer).

I put the roast vegetables into the roux and made it up with stock from my stock pot to cover. Then I put in a diced potato, for the ever-needed wartime bulking of food, and brought it to a vigorous boil. Then I added the broccoli and a few cabbage leaves and have turned the heat right down. When to potato begins to soften, I'll turn the heat off entirely and let it cook in its own heat.

This is another puréed soup, I reckon, so the separate-broth-from-veg, purée-veg, recombine-the-two thing will be later: hence the usefulness of letting the soup cool. Bring back to the heat and serve with some National bread.

There should be enough for it to be my dinner tonight and a starter for two tomorrow: all from only one rationed item - the spoonful of fat at the start. It should also be nice and warming; useful, since British weather being British weather, the morning's spring has gone and has been replaced by steel-grey skies and a chill wind. Back to winter for a few days, then.

To counterpoint doing yet another soup, here's a picture of last night's sausage hot pot, which used slightly more fat but was still well within rations:

Triumph and disaster

2010-03-05T18:19:00.002Z

The Spam carbonara and the spinach and mushroom sauce respectively, that is. The carbonara was a simple roux made with some fat and a finely sliced whole small onion with plenty of flour added to make the sauce as thick as possible. Half a tin of Spam diced up and some chopped mushrooms, then a gentle heat whilst the pasta boiled.

The spinach and mushroom sauce was a simple roux made with some fat and a finely sliced whole onion and my 2oz of cheese for this week. Plenty of flour to make it thick, then the mushrooms and... the spinach. I should've known better. Fresh, raw spinach is excellent in everything. Lightly cooked fresh spinach is also good in many things. I didn't have either available. So I bought tinned.

My first experience of spinach was in the late 1970s. My dad had been in the States (or possibly Canada) with NATO and brought back booty. Mainly this was a big bag of potatoes: the British crop had failed (or been ploughed back into the land because the price wasn't high enough for the farmers) and a hundredweight sack in the hold of a Vulcan bomber came in useful. He also brought canned spinach. I can only have been about 4, but I vaguely remember the spinach being served, then taken away again by my mum, with a little polite retching. It was a long time before I had spinach again: possibly 15 years.

Thirty years later, lesson not learned. I stirred the tin of spinach into the sauce and ruined it. As CJBS gobbled his carbonara down without it apparently touching the sides of his throat, I picked at mine but each mouthful was like a spoonful of castor oil. So, for the first time in this project, I think, I've wasted food: it got thrown away. CJBS had seconds of his, whilst I filled up with garlic bread.

So tonight I'm treating myself. Sausage hot pot. I've fried off four faux sausages, a red onion and some mushrooms. I've roasted half a dozen tomatoes, then pureed them. I put the two together in a frying pan, and will now transfer the lot to an oven-proof dish. I'll layer sliced potato on top, then melt a spoonful of butter and brush the top with it. Finally, I'll cook in a medium oven for an hour and serve with some crusty brown bread on the side. There will, this time, be no waste.

By the way, for a funnier culinary disaster, read what happened to Michelle when the Rational Living household had lemon liver the other day. At least I got more than a mouthful of my disaster!

Ennui

2010-03-03T18:49:00.001Z

That's yer actual French, that is.

At almost exactly the same point as in January, the rations are starting to bite. It's not that I haven't had great food. Even the potatoes last night were almost enjoyable and varied (the tomato version was the best, surprisingly; the stuffing one failed epically; the cottage cheese proved my forgotten point that cottage cheese actually isn't very nice).

But I'd really like something artificial and nasty. Plenty of E numbers, probably a vivid hue, salt, salt and more salt. And fat: hidden in the recipe, declared on the packet and slathered on later by me. I knew this was coming when, last night, I glanced at the Rational Living blog and saw that Michelle had enough points to get lots of olive oil. Olive oil! Oh, what I could do with olive oil!

So tonight it's the closest I can get to such a meal whilst sticking to rations. I'm having hot dogs. They're Redwood vegan ones, no cholesterol (although my cholesterol levels are now right down anyway) and I'm having them in a brown crusty bread roll with lettuce and tomato and "made mustard" (from powder), so it's not exactly a complete betrayal of principles.

But CJBS is feeling the same thing. He set off to the wild reaches of Moreton with a "ditty bag" (no, me neither) full of spam sandwiches - requested, please note, Scott ;o) - but pointed out that tomorrow is his rest day, and, if he could request a cheat, he wanted a pasta dish with garlic bread. And this will actually work: I've got 2oz of cheese in, plus pasta I got on points in January and didn't use all of. There's half a tin of Spam in the fridge. So that's (almost) cheesy sauce for me and Spam carbonara for him tomorrow. With luck, I might even be able to get fresh spinach and spoil the dish entirely. And I'm ahead on butter; if I can get garlic, I can go a bit mad.

Well, more mad: I'm finding excuses to have garlic bread. What could be more mad than that?

Dem spuds, dem spuds, dem dry spuds

2010-03-02T17:44:00.001Z

Alone again tonight, but still two meals to prepare: one for me and one for CJBS to take to work.

Stung by Merseytart's shock at yesterday's spam sandwich meal for the former Golden Voice of Merseyrail, I've taken his packed lunch (his "scoff" as he insists on calling it as if he hadn't gone to a fee-paying school) upmarket. He's taking rivita, chopped onion, sliced tomato, hummus and cottage cheese with him. Less convenient for eating at his desk than sandwiches (there's no meal break on late shifts) but sufficiently middle class to please everyone except his drunken passengers.

For me, I really really enjoyed last night's snacky meal that has become CJBS's pack up today. But it's better to have something more filling after such a dinner, so it's baked potatoes for me. Two ounces of cheese doesn't make for much in a baked potato, so I'm experimenting with alternate, fat-free fillings.

Three potatoes, three fillings. First up, cottage cheese (which I always thought I hated but it turns out to be quite nice, despite looking like cheese someone else has chewed for you) with sliced onion and paprika. Normally I'd make this up the day before (to get the onion flavour through the dairy medium) but it didn't occur to me until about an hour ago.

Second, chopped tomatoes marinaded in balsamic vinegar; again, better done the day before.

Third, I've made up some Paxo sage and onion stuffing. It'll be a bit dry without any added fat (it'd be best with sausagemeat in it, but the whole vegetarianism thing has been preventing that since about 1989) but should be interesting.

In practice, I'd imagine I'll end up with a tasty presentation nightmare as I mix the various elements on the plate. A benefit of eating alone is that no-one needs to know just how awful-looking your food is that day, nor that you're breaking fundamental laws of nature by mixing cottage cheese and stuffing.

The potatoes are being prepared all wrong due to rationing and compressed time. Normally, I'd scrub each one, then rub them with olive oil before cooking them for about 4 hours in a slow oven. But there's no olive oil and I want to eat before midnight, so today they're just in a hot oven for a hour or so. With luck, they might burn slightly on the outside, simulating the crispy skin the olive oil gives you, but stay moist inside like in a slower oven. But in practice, I suspect I'm about to serve three dry potatoes with three dry fillings.

Snackarama

2010-03-01T17:58:00.001Z

Perhaps the biggest thing that has changed under rationing has been the elimination of snacking. If I get hungry, I might have a slice of dry bread, but otherwise I live entirely without snacks and feel virtuous about it.

I have always tried to not have snack foods in, on the basis that if you don't have crisps, chocolate and sweets in, you can't eat them. But they still manage to accrue. That tube of Pringles, that extra bag of Doritos, that "spare" packet of Redwood faux meat, lurking at the bag of a cupboard or fridge, waiting to catch me in a moment of weakness (ie a weekday; or at the weekend). I have no willpower at all, for anything. Ciggies, booze, junk food... once I'm on them, that's that.

But I'm simulating willpower very well with the rations. I've cut my booze consumption, even having a week with none (and not noticing it nor getting the DTs, so no fears of alcoholism here) and just haven't snacked at all. The ciggies haven't reduced, mind, but you can't have everything. Ahem.

So tonight's dinner, for which I'm alone (CJBS is back riding the rails - well, sitting in the booking office of our local station - on the late shift with spam sandwiches) is to be a form of snacking. I've got Ryvita, sliced tomatoes, lettuce, unrationed cottage cheese, hummus (a tad anachronistically) and cress. Yes, that's hardly snacking, I know. But it's like snacking in many ways, especially in the amount of salt I plan to add. And, like snacking, I'll be starving by midnight.

But it'll be worth it!

St David's Day

Image by CaterinaAnna | Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 2.0

As Dave pointed out in the comments yesterday, it's St David's Day today. Sadly, I've done nothing at all Welsh today: I couldn't get any daffodils in town, I don't like raw potato, I've had my complete fill of bloody leeks recently, and I don't have time to have four children from five different fathers in a remarkably short period. I'm also not in my twelfth year of unemployment. Nevertheless, at least I'm not English. Iechyd da everyone!

Colcannon soup redux

2010-02-28T17:44:00.000Z

Yesterday was a leftovers day: the last of the salad and the Belgian groensoep. The soup, in particular, was excellent, even if I do say so myself, and was a nice reminder of our second "home" in Flanders.

For tonight, I'm doing my colcannon soup again, as a single course meal as I think it will be very filling. And it makes use of leftover ingredients, so it's quite economical with the rations, even while I'm putting evaporated milk (got on points) into it.

The soup is made the usual way from an onion roux made with the evap. This is made up with stock from my stock pot, some oats and some pearl barley (for bulk). In goes 4 chopped raw potatoes, a third of a drumhead cabbage (leftover from the salad) and lots of spring greens^{[Warning: Wikipedia link containing badly-written drivel]} leftover from the previous soup. Cover with more stock and half a pint of milk, then bring to the boil, stirring continuously.

Just before it comes to the boil - and being made with milk it can do so suddenly - the heat goes off entirely and the soup will cook, covered, under its own heat for an hour or so. Drain the broth and reserve, then blend the lumps. Reunited the mush with the broth, being back to heat and serve with crusty brown bread.

In the meantime, I can put my feet up and get ready for tonight's ~~Russell Tovey droolfest~~ Being Human finale on BBC-3.

Asparagus and pee soup

2010-02-26T18:27:00.001Z

If only to make Michelle jealous (the Rational Living household have been reduced to liver - ugh!) tonight is a winter salad: lettuce, tomatoes, new potatoes, shredded cabbage, grated carrot, you know the stuff, with some fresh heavy bread.

I've been desperate for green veg, with nothing domestic in either the greengrocer or the dreaded Morrisons. I've got a solution, though I'm not too happy with it: tinned vegetables. Now these are already overcooked and pulpy before you even start, so aren't worth much. But some tinned asparagus and tinned celery (yes, who knew?) have been added to my attempt at Belgian Groensoep.

When we go to rural Flanders, this is a standard lunch menu item you can get in most cafes, even in railway stations. It's always fresh rather than tinned or rehydrated and I've become a big fan. But I've never had any luck finding out what's in it. Conversations with waiters always run like this:

What's the soup? It's our groensoep. What's in it? Green vegetables. Which ones? Err, green ones. Two bowls, please.

It's clearly a mix of vegetables, probably asparagus, possibly broccoli (not in my version shakes fist) and on that basis, I can make it with what's available. So this is spring greens, asparagus, leek, carrot, parsnip and onion, starting from a paprika roux base. It's a blended soup, and is currently cooking without heat ready to serve at 7pm.

As you may know, there are two facts about asparagus. It's all green; the white stuff is made by putting more soil on the spear each time it grows through, so it never makes any chlorophyl. The other fact is the pee smell. You may not know this one. Asparagus has a chemical in it that, when processed, makes your pee smell odd. But there's a Venn diagram at work here: 50% of the population don't process the chemical and thus don't get smelly pee; 50% of the population can't smell the chemical when it is processed. So you can be in any one of four states: producer/smeller; producer/non-smeller; non-producer/smeller; non-producer/non-smeller.

Now go away and find a method of discovering which one of the four you are. Report back when you're done.

Use yer loaf

2010-02-25T17:39:00.002Z

Still no green vegetables in the shops, but Marguerite Patten rushes to the rescue with an interesting-sounding cheese, tomato and potato loaf. Yes, there's cheese in there, but I've saved the ration and my (and CJBS's) 2oz each will go into this.

I've had the deep satisfaction of making the breadcrumbs for this (two slices into the food processor, ten seconds later: breadcrumbs. It never fails to brutally please) which are then toasted and put round a greased 2lb loaf tin.

I'm boiling some new potatoes and when they're done I'll let them cool and slice them up. I'm also making a cheese sauce at the same time. Next to slice some tomatoes.

Then it's layering: potatoes, tomatoes, cheese sauce. Potatoes, tomatoes, cheese sauce. And so on until the tin is full. Then 30 minutes in a medium oven. In theory, this should turn out onto a plate. In practice, it will be welded to the inside of the tin. Of course it will. These things always are. They only turn out neatly on to a plate on television, and that's because the food is plastic or otherwise faked (yes it is).

This is a meat-free, pasta-free lasagne in all but name. Have you ever cooked a lasagne and had it come out looking like the photo in a book or on a frozen food packet? Of course not. So I'm ready for this and will have Eduardo, our dishwasher, primed for his "Intensiv Care" setting (that missing "e" riles me) to scrape the remainder off.

You say tomato, I say potato

2010-02-24T17:33:00.000Z

The potato ring from last night was a surprising success. It wasn't the most exciting flavour ever, but it was savoury and filling, so I can't complain. The ring was actually two rings, the second being thrown forward to tonight's meal. I'll reheat it in the oven, covered with foil to stop it burning.

With it I'm serving the vegetable mince I invented previously. I've started by halving a dozen tomatoes, sticking some garlic into each one and putting them in a medium oven for an hour or so. This was so successful last time that I'm also doing this with the mushrooms and the carrot.

In a pan, I'll melt a small amount of my combined fat ration - well under an ounce, perhaps just half a teaspoon. I'll fry off some onions, then add the roast mushrooms. A little gravy powder to make a roux, then two thirds of the tomatoes. Add chopped potato and leave to slow cook covered. At the end, I'll add some gravy browning to give it the mince colouring.

With the remaining tomatoes, I'm making cream of tomato soup. I'll melt another tiny piece of fat and fry off some more onion, make a roux, add some stock, the usual. In with the tomatoes and the ubiquitous chopped potato. In with a small tin of evaporated milk (on points but worth it) and top with stock. Bring to the boil and leave to cook (off the heat if I've got time) until the potato is cooked. Strain the veg out and blend (or pass through a sieve). Reunite the soup and the pulp, bring back to the heat and serve.

Meanwhile, the stout from last night was very nice, although I could taste it all day whenever I burped, so I'm having another pint tonight. In further news, I had blood tests the other week for my high cholesterol (due to genetics, not due to a high fat diet). It's much reduced, thanks to six months of statins and the World War Two rationing of fat - the latter making my doctor cry with laughter at the very thought. So perhaps this is insanity, after all: even the medical establishment thinks I'm mad.

Ring a ring o' potatoes

2010-02-23T18:36:00.001Z

The leek and potato soup continues to provide, now into its third day. It was a chunky soup, but in a desperate search for variety I've now blended it to provide a new texture, if not a new flavour.

For a main course I'm doing a Marguerite Patten dish, prosaically called "potato ring". Her recipe takes three large potatoes, some flour, some seasoning and a little dripping, has you grate the potato, mix in the flour and seasoning, form into a ring and brush with the dripping. Then you bake it in a medium oven for 45 minutes.

As ever with La Patten's stuff, the recipe seems plainer than it needs to be. My version therefore adds a grated carrot and a grated onion into the mix. Because I'm using the grater attachment of the blender rather than doing it by hand, I don't need the flour to bind the ring: the potato is still wet and that does the job. Instead of the seasoning, I've gone with a dusting of the Hungarian paprika I got from Fortnum and Mason's a month ago and some salt. Other than that, it remains the same process: form into a ring, brush with melted marg (not dripping, ugh) and bake in a medium oven for 45 minutes. The result is basically a rosti, but in a ring.

Patten suggests steaming some fresh green vegetables to serve in the centre of the ring, and I really like that idea. But I can't get fresh green vegetables other than cabbage and leek, since I won't buy imported food. I've been craving broccoli (no, honestly) but it's Spanish only in Morrisons and the greengrocer. That forces me into using meat for the middle: sausage for me, but Spam for CJBS, which I'll fry. Onion gravy for both completes the meal.

In other news, whilst booze was not rationed, it was hard to get in 1945, so I'm playing along with that insane idea for some reason. Having had nothing this week so far, I'm allowing myself a pint of milk stout tonight. So, here's to alcohol: the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.

Deja vu all over again

2010-02-21T15:18:00.002Z

And so it begins, again. And, for a project that makes so much use of leftovers, appropriately it begins with leftovers.

One of the main things I learnt from last month is that these meals can be dull and repetitive, but if you always try to serve two courses with each meal, you make up for that. A good trick has been serving yesterday's main course as a starter today; and then doing the same the next day and so forth.

This being Day One, I'm not able to quite do that, but tonight's menu will allow it to happen from tomorrow. We ate out on Saturday, a lovely last cooked-by-someone-else meal in a restaurant in York, courtesy of my mum. But Friday's leftovers are still available for CJBS. Friday's dinner was "a bake", a non-specific title for a non-specific meal; it was also made from leftovers, in this case Thursday's baked potatoes.

I chopped up the remaining potatoes, an onion, 3 sausages and a good helping of mushrooms. I also had a can of celery hearts, which I drained and fried with a little butter. I put the chopped veg and sausages into a baking dish, poured the celery hearts over the top, then cooked the lot in a low oven for two hours.

For CJBS, the remains of his meat version of this will be his main course today (I ate all of my veggie sausage version). For my main course, and as a side dish for CJBS, I'm making something halfway between colcannon (mashed potatoes with cabbage) and champ (mashed potatoes with onion), or perhaps better to call it a combination of both (colchamp? Champcannon?). This must actually have a real name, as I can't be the first to have discovered the possibility of blending the two!

For the starter, it's cream of leek and potato soup, using new potatoes for a change. Since this starts with a roux that uses the same amount of fat if you're doing a single serving or doing a giant pot, I'm doing a giant pot; for tomorrow, this will be the main course with some bread or croutons, and a small salad (or leftover colcannon-champ thing, if any) to start. And so does it begin, again.

Don't snow on my parade

2010-02-15T16:24:00.002Z

The pasta bake I started prepping on Saturday and completed on Sunday was a great success, if I do say so myself. I'd said earlier in the experiment that I'd discovered that roasting tomatoes was A Good Thing and this serves to prove it.

The tomatoes, roasted without fat but with garlic and basil, gained a very deep flavour that helped when making the mush for the ragu.

The resulting bake is not suitable for when rationing starts again in 6 days, as can be guessed from the amount of cheese visible here (indeed, the way the cheese looks on these two photos is so nice, it's my sole excuse for including them).

But I learned a really vital lesson with the ragu attempt. By roasting the tomatoes, then adding them to dry-frying onions and mushrooms, then blitzing the result in the blender, I accidentally invented vegetarian mince!

Of course, vegetarian mince already exists, in the form of TVP, Quorn and a couple of other meat-like substitutes, some of which are almost very nice. This new mince, however, actually manages the texture of mince without the whole soya/tofu shebang, making the world a better place and reducing household emissions of methane.

The baked version I've done is still much more a bolognaise than actual mince, but when I do it again - and I will - some gravy powder will de-tomato it and some gravy browning will make it look and taste very mincy indeed. In theory, that adds at least two meals with no points or coupons for next month: the Scottish (but still nice enough) mince and tatties and, with a bit of firming up, meatballs! While I think on, I could even make beef sausages from it (roll the mince in breadcrumbs and grill). Or sloppy joes. Or rissoles!

As you can tell, I'm very excited about this idea. Just keep your fingers crossed that there will be no shortages of tomatoes or onions... Bugger. Just looked at a long-term weather forecast. Snow again around here next week. That's not good.

Pasta whilst baked

2010-02-13T20:09:00.000Z

With a week to go until rationing restarts, I'm doing some experimenting. Last month, I made an anachronistic pasta dish, making a wartime-standards dish out of something that wasn't eaten at the time - although there's no reason beyond British conservatism as to why not.

I'm trying it again, as a bake this time, based on what I've learned from a month on rations and from the last version. This time I'm actually being more authentic, as I used strained tomatoes last time but I've roasted whole tomatoes for this version. I made a tomato soup last month with roasted tomatoes and it really worked well, giving a "depth" to the flavour that tomatoes themselves sadly lack: too many restaurant meals have tomato sauces that taste of - and are - tinned tomatoes warmed up.

Actually, to digress, about 15 years ago I was staying in a hotel in Edinburgh whilst working on behalf of Lloyds Bank to close down and kill off their TSB subsidiaries. On the first night, exhausted by the world's most awful flight (I never flew again), my colleagues decided to eat in. There was a single vegetarian option, which turned out to be creamed mushrooms with mushroom risotto on a bed of fried mushrooms. My boss, the other vegetarian in the party, hated mushrooms and she instructed the kitchen to make something else (this was the reason she was the boss - they did, without question).

The chef said he'd make "penne arrabiata". What arrived was a bowl of spaghetti, still swimming in salt water, with a tin of chopped tomatoes on top. And a basil leaf (which turned out to be a mint leaf). Debs ate it, but refused to pay for it. And also got the wine we had comped as well (she really was a very good boss). It'd be very wrong of me to mention that this anonymous hotel was part of Best Western at this point, and worse still to recommend that people reading this don't ever, ever stay at a Best Western with their singularly unhelpful staff, bowls of rotting fruit in the rooms, damp towels with unfortunate brown stains and televisions with problems with horizontal hold, so I won't ask you to join my 15-year boycott of Best Western hotels and will leave you to decide for yourself whether you want to stay with the awful, awful Best Western chain or not in future.

Back on topic. The last pasta dish I made was simply not as filling as the wartime staples we'd been eating until then. So this one needs to be, ready for next week's hell-month. I took a dozen tomatoes, halved them and pushed garlic into the soft bits, then sprinkled finely chopped basil on top. A very slow oven, 3 hours.

Then I all-but dry fried a sliced onion. I used an almost unmeasurably small amount of butter to start it off - perhaps a quarter of a teaspoon. Unsurprisingly, the onion started to burn very quickly, so I added half a dozen mushrooms (quartered) and started on the unstoppable stirring. If nothing else, this project is giving me a right arm with muscles on it not seen since I was last enthusiastically over-using my right arm when I was 13.

When the mushrooms had softened, I sloshed in half a third-bottle of red wine (oh, the maths... that's half of 1/3 which is, er, one sixth of a real bottle, I believe) and let the alcohol burn off: if you're cooking with wine, don't slosh it in at any old point like in sitcoms; you want the wine in early to get the alcohol content burnt off while you're still cooking at a higher heat. Leave the alcohol still in the food and you're just asking your eaters to inhale fumes.

Then goes in the tomatoes, and more stirring to get them mashed up. Then it's a handful of oats; if I was making a pour-on sauce, the oats would've been before the wine, but I don't need to worry about fat globs in a bake. Finally, a sliced potato, some very very anachronistic black olives and some basil leaves. Bring back to the boil, cover and take off the heat to let everything cook in its own time. I also added a dash of Maggi, but a small amount of Bovril, a smaller amount of Marmite (or none, that's fine too) or even an intense bouillon cube will help at this point.

I'll run the cooked-but-cold mixture through the blender at the end, to make a ragu for my pasta bake. At this point, the rationing fails somewhat, as I'm going to top it with cheese (2oz per person per week does not make for cheese-topped anything from next week). Cook the pasta until it's al dente (literally "at the teeth" but more accurately "slightly underdone"); drain and mix with the blended roast tomato ragu. Put it in an oven-proof dish.

Now for the cheese sauce. White and cheese sauces are easy. There's a mythology that they're difficult because, in very complicated gourmet recipes, they're often sprung upon the unwary cook. Also, that awful Delia woman has published so many "here's a white sauce you can't get wrong" screeds that everyone now thinks white sauces are actually traps set before them. I was lucky: I had my mum to say: don't be scared of it. And she's right: don't be scared of it.

Start by melting some fat. You can't have too much, so don't worry. You will also rarely have too little, but that's not a problem either. It's easier with a lower heat, but with a higher heat it works too, you just need to be quicker with adding the ingredients. Add some chopped onion to the melted fat. It's not essential, but it really helps to know where you're up to. The onion should be allowed to go translucent but not burn (ie, if it starts to burn before it's translucent, turn the heat down).

Now sprinkle in some flour. It really doesn't matter what type. Cornflour thickens quickly, plain is more filling, self-raising may grow alarmingly. Oatmeal or even oats will work here, but slowly. Stir until all the fat is gone. Still some fat? Add more flour and stir. Still some fat? More flour again. Just keep going. You can't add too much (unless you drop an entire bag in, in which case, you're not ready for non-peel-back-and-stir cooking). Eventually, all the fat is gone and the onion is completely coated. Splash in some milk. Stir. The onion-flour combo will absorb it all. Splash some more in. Stir. It'll all go again. Keep at this until adding milk stops making more paste and starts making thick liquid. There's your roux.

For a white sauce or a soup base, you can now start adding your ingredients. For a cheese sauce, start stirring in grated or small cubes of cheese. Feel free to add more milk, water or stock if it starts to go back to being a dough. Remember, you're not scared of it. Eventually, you'll have either ingredients covered in paste or gluey cheese paste. Either way, add milk or stock until it's the ideal consistency. If it gets too liquid, let it cook uncovered for 10 minutes or so until it reduces.

For the meal I'm making, I'll get a thick sauce at the end to pour over the tomato and pasta from earlier ( I hope you were taking notes). Grated cheese on top (now; not when rationing begins, obviously) will provide a crust; and into a medium low oven until the sauce bubbles and the grated cheese browns.

Of course, I'm doing this all as prep for tomorrow. I'm alone tonight and was planning on having hot dogs or something similarly cheap n' easy tonight. But this post took two hours to write, in which time I accidentally drank 3 litres of cheap cider. So I might go to bed instead of having dinner.

Fat

2010-02-10T18:05:00.000Z

I finally had the much-craved pizza. With four cheeses. And olives. And jalapeño peppers. Oh, but it was nice.

But now it's back to versions of rationed foods before rationing kicks back in in a week and a half. So today it's fish (and faux fish for me) made using the recipe from last month - baked white fish in bacon breadcrumbs.

This recipe won't be possible under the 1945 rations: 8oz of bacon a week becomes 4oz, effectively 4 slices. These 4 slices will feel slightly wasted if two are used just as a breadcrumb flavouring. However, if I ate meat (or fish, for that matter) it'd make more sense: this recipe produces a huge helping, enough for two if you ratchet up the vegetable sides a bit.

This recipe does make very good use of the fat in it - a knob of marg and that in the bacon - by soaking it into the bread and then releasing it into the fish as it bakes. Rationed food often tries to make a lot from a little when it comes to fat. The majority of people in the Western world are either carefully watching their fat intake or should be. Manufacturers also watch fat carefully, trying to get as much in as possible into most foods, often in hidden (and dangerous) ways.

Rationing has had me look at fat from the opposite direction: instead of fearing it, counting its calories or failing to notice it, I have (and this metaphor doesn't work) embraced it. With a need for some fat, if only to start off most recipes, but almost none available, I use it carefully, wisely even, and get pleasure from using the least possible and reusing it whenever I can.

I'm now carefully watching my fat intake, but in order to eke it out or even increase it where possible. This is actually a luxury; but anyone wanting to lose weight should consider such a different view. It'd make a change from the sight of larger people filling a trolley to bursting with "diet" and "low fat" foods: if you buy and eat 5 "low fat" cup soups in one go, you don't lose weight - you still get a lot of fat and don't get filled up. So you snack, getting a still greater fat intake; and next week you buy even more "low fat" food and eat more of it... all without losing weight.

I suppose this is really an argument for cooking from fresh rather than buying ready meals. I know not everyone can cook; and not everyone has time to cook. But food isn't just a refueling exercise. Learn to cook just one meal well and you've learned to cook anything. 90% of cooking is confidence (and the other 10% is presentation).

If only we in Britain hadn't got rid of home economics lessons to save money. It has cost us so much more.

Everyone likes a sausage

2010-02-06T16:53:00.002Z

After the binge of fried stuff and fats last weekend, we settled down into ration-style food again quite quickly. I made a large cream of mushroom soup, padded out with potato, oats and pearl barley that lasted several days. It had Boursin soft cheese in it, so drifted from rationing slightly, but was back on track in the wholesomeness stakes.

A large winter salad over two nights followed, again drifting because of the large amount of cheese and the Hungarian paprika dressing I made (where has Hungarian paprika been all my life? Thank you, Dave, thank you thank you thank you!)

Tonight it's a sausage pie that would work well in wartime, although, with rationing off until later this month, I've made it more to modern standards. At heart, this pie is actually a sausage casserole, becoming pie only at the last minute.

In a moment of weakness, I bought pre-made pastry rather than making my own, and if I make this during rationing, I'll do the potato pastry I liked so much last month. I peeled, diced and brought to the boil two potatoes, then lined the pie dishes with pastry. When the water boiled, I took the potatoes off the heat and left them in the water to one side.

I finely chopped one onion and roughly chopped another, then melted some margarine in a frying pan. From this point on, I was actually making one vegetarian version and one meat version, but the process is the same and I'll not boast about my amazing skills at multitasking.

I started the finely chopped onion in the melted fat, then added the sausages. These I cooked slowly, on the smallest gas ring, so I didn't need to prick the skins. When the sausages were browned, I removed them with tongs and added gravy powder (which is basically cornflour and onion powder) to soak up the remaining fat, then made a roux with some pureed tomato. I topped this up with more tomato until I had a good liquid base.

If I was making a sausage casserole, this would be the point to combine the sausages, the rough onion, the diced potato and the tomato base and put the lot in the oven. But I wasn't. So instead I chopped each of the sausages into three.

By adding some instant gravy to the tomato base, I caused it to thicken. In wartime, I'd've used some cornflour in water made up in a cup and added that for the same effect. I drained the potatoes, then added them, the rough onion and the copped sausages to the tomato base, mixed well and put them into the pastry-lined pie dish. I then topped the pie off with puff pastry - a real indulgence in wartime - brushed the top with a little milk and then tried to find creative ways to make sure I had no wasted pastry off-cuts.

These can now sit until I'm ready to cook them - best in a slow to moderate oven for as long as possible. I'll serve with leftover new potatoes from the salad and, depending on how saucy the sauce is, perhaps some onion gravy.

Edit: and here it is cooked and partially eaten...

Oh, and another reason to go back on rations: it saves crushing disappointment. Earlier in the week, I bought some Morrison's cheese-topped garlic bread slices as a treat. If I'd still been on rations, I dare say the cheese would've been downright generous. But I wasn't, and it wasn't. For shame.

We're doing it again

2010-02-05T19:06:00.002Z

Okay, okay! Quiet down, you lot.

This experiment was a great success as far as I can tell. CJBS lost weight; I lost girth whilst staying almost the same weight (but why??). I used less than every ration and invented or adapted many new recipes. Altogether, it was a success by every measure.

And then I went back to the old ways. We'd both fantasized about chips (fries) and had them on Saturday. We'd both dreamed (literally) of nachos and had them on Monday. We'd both really wanted a full-blooded chilli and had one on Tuesday.

And I paid for it. The fat of the chips came out on my skin immediately, along with a teenager-style crop of zits. The nachos disagreed with me entirely. The chilli... well, just don't ask. A month of wholesome, home cooked, slow cooked, virtually fat-free food had suited my body in every way. The opposite certainly didn't.

CJBS felt the same. We felt far, far worse on the "normal" food than we did on the ration. So we're doing it again. And this time: it's personal.

I still need to poison myself a little bit more - I'm pizza deprived - but we're going to restart the experiment. On Sunday 21 February, rationing will kick in again for a month (first class Eurostar to Brussels in the last week of March will thus be allowed for). And to make things more, er, interesting, we're not doing the 1940 rations this time. Oh no. We're doing February 1945. This isn't the lowest things got - 1942 and 1946-7 were the low points - but it's serious.

We'll each have 8oz (200g) of sugar a week (half of 1940), But the standby of jam, and we had huge amounts on 1940 rations, is down to 4oz (100g) a week - the factories had been bombed out. Fat is 8oz in total - that's butter, marg and dripping, previously 8oz, 12oz and 3oz each. Cheese is 2oz (50g) which is effectively nothing. Bacon is 4oz - half of 1940's ration again. Tea is the same at 2oz a week, and we get just under an egg a week. Our points will be the same, since I did the 1940 points on the only source I had, which was May 1945. Gone is the sweets ration, combined into the points but effectively unavailable.

Red meat dropped from 1s 2d in 1940 to around 1d a week. Allowing for inflation, that takes us from £1.68 to about £1.20. CJBS suggests declaring himself a vegetarian in order to boost cheese and fat. I'm not sure and will need to think on. But whatever I decide, the plan is back on...

All good things...

2010-01-29T18:53:00.000Z

And so the experiment starts to draw to a close. Tonight's meal - leftover oatmeal sausages from yesterday, served as hot dogs - is the last proper cooking I'll do on the ration.

Tomorrow morning I'm off to that London, to see Enron and then have a meat-free meal (at a fish restaurant that does vegetarian options) with our friend peezedtee. We'll be back late on Sunday, and I've got toast (well, bagels, anachronistic as that may be) for our snack supper. Sunday breakfast will be mostly bread - the joy of Le Pain Quotidien on the Southbank - and I'll be full until late night.

I'll do a totting-up post on Sunday or early next week, but I can say already that I made it to the end of the month with spare points for butter, margarine, cheese, bacon, sweets and sugar. I've only used a third of my cooking fat. There's still a week's worth of tea left. Let me say that again: there's still a week's worth of tea left.

Weightwise, and this is probably due to my thyroid rather than the cooking, I've lost less than a pound. However, my 38" waist is a svelt 34" (32" if I concentrate).

I've learned some useful cooking tricks - I'll add oats and pearl barley to all soups and stews in future and probably keep up putting a potato into soups too - that are worth keeping up in general. I've also become a smarter shopper, and I hope to keep that up too.

Maths lesson (probably wrong)

2010-01-27T18:21:00.002Z

Tonight's a leftovers night: the very nice roast tomato soup and the indifferent Woolton pie (to which I will add gravy this time, my comments yesterday notwithstanding).

But for tomorrow, I'm experimenting. I've got some sausagemeat (not rationed) and some oatmeal (on points). I've also got some of those vegan hotdogs, so the following works both ways.

Sausagemeat, like sausages, was unrationed in the war but very hard to come by. When you did get it, it was bulked out with rusk and breadcrumbs. It was also fatty. Interestingly, this didn't change much after the war, with sausages over 50% bulk still selling well into the 1980s, when Brits finally started to become foodies.

This sausagemeat is much more meaty, as fits modern standards, but I'll soon see to that, because I'm going to make oatmeal sausages. Oh yes. These Ministry of Food inventions are both clever and disgusting-sounding. You fry off an onion in a knob of dripping, then stir in 4oz of oatmeal. Make up a porridge with water and cook for 15 minutes. Then add 2oz of sausagemeat (this also works for mince or chopped bacon) and allow to cool. Make the resulting gloop into sausage shapes, roll in breadcrumbs and fry if you've the fat or grill. Two ounces of sausagemeat becomes 7oz of sausages. I suspect the trick will be in the seasoning.

To serve with this, I'm going to make what Marguerite Patten calls "pigs in clover". Basically, you hollow out the centre of a potato, fill the space with sausagemeat and bake as you would with ordinary baked potatoes. No fat is used and, theoretically, no butter or cheese is required to lubricate the potatoes. This is then served on a bed of steamed cabbage - presumably the "clover". I like cabbage, but British cooking has long had a love affair with serving pork in, on or with cabbage for reasons I can't fathom. I dare say it'll be lovely; I can't see why the two don't mix. But why always together?

By the way, I can make a rare direct comparison in price for the oatmeal. In the 1940s, oatmeal was subject to a ceiling price set by the Ministry of Food and also a subsidy to keep it below that price courtesy of the Board of Trade (despite its name, a government department, now Lord ~~Voldemort's~~ Mandelson's Orwellian Department for Business, Innovation and Skills). The ceiling price was 3.5d a pound. That's about 1.5p a pound in the post-1971 decimalised money (12d [pennies] to the shilling, 20s [shillings] to the £, therefore 240d to the £), or 2.5 US cents.

I got a pound (well, 500g) for 53p (86c). That's 10 shillings and sixpence ha'p'n'y (10s 6.5d; I miss the pleasure that pre-decimal people had of reducing "half a penny's worth" to "hay-puff" - and that people younger than me don't understand the true insult in "you daft ha'porth!"). Parliament helpfully publishes the snappily named "Inflation: the value of the pound (research paper)" fairly irregularly. Here comes the science bit, and on that basis, prepare for it to be wrong.

We start with a "price index", which takes a pound in 1974 as being "100". The price index for 1940 was 20.2; the index for 2002 (the latest available) was 695.1

So, inflation 1940 to 2002 is 695.1 divided by 20.2; prices have risen by 34.5 times. Between 1940 and 2002, oatmeal went from £0.015 to £0.53; thats 35.3 times. Okay, if you're still with me, inflation since 1940 is 34.4; oatmeal in that time is up 35.3; so the price has risen in real terms by just 2.6% (that's 35.3 divided by 34.4, then minus 1, then times by 100). So despite the ceiling price and subsidy of 1940, oatmeal is barely more expensive now than then.

After doing that, I've sprained my brain. I'll have to have gin to cure it. I hope you're all happy now.

A Woolton pie for our times

2010-01-26T17:43:00.000Z

I didn't post yesterday because, no matter how much I would think myself a good writer, I can't stretch "I made bangers and mash" much beyond 5 words.

Today, however, there's more excitement to be had. I'm making a rich Woolton pie and a richer-still tomato soup.

The shortage of tomatoes earlier in the project made me start hoarding tomatoes, buying them whenever I could find them. The result, obviously, was 10 rapidly softening fruits not getting any fresher. A couple were seriously over-ripe, but there's a good way round that: roasting them.

As I've said before, most tomato soup recipes will have you skin and seed them, but the skins and seeds have no further use, so I'm roasting the entire thing. Slice them in half lengthways, sprinkle with sea salt, drop on each a couple of slices of garlic (or a shake of garlic powder) and put some finely chopped basil leaves on top of the entire lot. Cook in a very low oven for an hour. This intensifies the flavour of the tomatoes.

When they're done, I'll finely slice an onion and make up a stock-based roux (it's a broth rather than a cream of tomato soup). When that has become a soup, I'll put the roast tomatoes and a chopped carrot into the broth, boil, then let it cook off the heat covered. If you've got celery, add that. I don't have celery. I've not had celery for bloody weeks. What's the problem with celery shortages?

Anyway, back on topic. When the carrot is soft, drain the lumps from the broth and blend the former and add the resulting mulch back into the broth. Bring back to heat and serve.

Meanwhile, I'm making this rich Woolton pie, with help from my leftover mash from yesterday. I've taken a collection of winter root vegetables (beetroot, carrot, parsnip), a leek, a courgette (US: zucchini) and some mushrooms and cut them to equal sizes. Scrub, but don't peel. Chuck them in a heavy-bottomed pan and put them on a low heat on the stove. Stir a few times at first until they start giving up their liquid, then leave covered for 10 minutes. Take off the heat and leave covered until ready.

I've saved up my cheese ration and some milk and I'll make a cheese sauce (knob of fat, small chopped onion, flour and milk to a roux, crumble in the cheese, make up slowly with more milk and the liquid from the vegetables until you've got a cheese sauce, season as you see fit).

Put the vegetables into a pie dish. Cover with the cheese sauce and stir in. Cover with the mashed potato and place in a medium oven. If you've got cheese left over (I haven't), you can sprinkle that onto the mash; or you can put little pinches of butter on top (I've not got any of that, either). It's done when it's heated through - when the potato starts to get crisp on top.

A Woolton pie will be filling enough on its own; a soup starter certainly means leftovers that will reheat in a low oven tomorrow. The mushrooms give it a meaty flavour, but you can add gravy to make it more exciting if you like gravy-and-cheese in combination (CJBS yes, RJG no).

How shortages are made

2010-01-24T16:37:00.000Z

Michelle of Rational Living asked me about the shortages I mention frequently on this blog, so I thought I'd expand on my answer here.

First, some geography.

View Larger Map

This is the tip of the Wirral peninsular where I live - specifically West Kirby, the end of Merseyrail's Wirral line. I've asked Google to highlight the supermarkets nearby, to which it has added a couple of off licences (alcohol shops) for reasons I can't begin to fathom unless Google knows far too much about me. From this, you can see that Morrisons (formerly Safeway) have a monopoly on walking-distance supermarkets. For train-ride distance supermarkets, the Sommerfield (formerly Gateway) in Hoylake is actually an (in)convenience store rather than a supermarket per se, while the Sainsbury is half the size of the Morrisons. So I'd have to drive if I wanted a supermarket of any real size. If I drove, of course (I gave up driving for environmental reasons a year ago; I live opposite a station with a 15min service into England's 4th city and I work from home; what use would a car be?). But if I did have a car, I'd have to drive off the right of this map, all the way to Bidston (for a Tesco) or Upton (for a Sainsbury) to reach a large supermarket.

So, I think I've proved that Morrisons have a monopoly here. This monopoly they (take a deep breath, the UK's libel laws are harsh and fickle) might be alleged to be abusing. Some of the staff are breathtakingly unhelpful (some are wonderful, though, so go figure). They advertise themselves as being Britain's premiere supplier of cheap fresh food, then sell old mouldy crap for ridiculously high prices. This is partially true of all branches of Morrisons, but particularly true of this one.

Fortunately, the monopoly-of-crappiness that Morrisons have means that they haven't driven our independent shops out of business. We still have two butchers - one ordinary, one very upmarket - a fishmonger, a greengrocer and four pharmacies (one in Morrisons, and five if you include the Superdrug, but it doesn't dispense prescriptions; the people of West Kirby must be in a bad way).

The greengrocer is excellent - and cheaper than Morrisons - but doesn't have the muscle to hedge against supply problems. If the potatoes are frozen in the ground, Morrisons will, eventually, fly potatoes in from somewhere warmer (making it warmer still, ultimately). The greengrocer will go without potatoes. And so will I.

The posh butcher is much more expensive than Morrisons, but thousands of times better. Their meat is locally reared, locally cured and, for sausages, locally turned into sausages (in the back, where they've got a sausage-making machine, I'd assume). I don't eat meat, for moral reasons, but I believe you draw your own moral boundaries and don't impose them on others. CJBS does eat meat, the murderous swine, and I cook it for him. I'm very good at it, I'm told. Cooking with steak that has been hung for 28 days is a pleasure compared to cooking with the scrunched-up, bright red, nitrogen-bathed, shrink-wrapped, "processed in the UK" rubbish from the supermarkets. It just costs 5 times the price.

But using local stores requires planning. They open 9-to-5ish Monday to Saturday, with a half-day in the week; the greengrocer staff have usually packed everything away by 4:30, while the fishmonger has such strange opening hours you can't really predict when they'll open or close (at the first approximation, they're always closed). Morrisons is open from about 7am to about 9pm so is more convenient; they're also open on Sundays, unlike everything else.

So today, being a Sunday, it was Morrisons or nothing (perhaps Morrisons or better-planning-earlier-in-the-week would be more true). And at Morrisons, it was nothing. No carrots (they ran out on Friday, I think, but this could be weather related as the carrots they don't have are British), no non-air freight broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage (except red cabbage) or tomatoes. They did have some courgettes. Here they are, in case you wonder why I went without.

Environmental impact assessment

2010-01-23T18:53:00.000Z

Despite the (fully justified) nay-sayers, the ~~cabbage~~ colcannon soup was delicious and the Environment Agency didn't have to sue me for breaking emissions targets, even after two bowlfuls. That's useful, because I have another two bowls of it to have tonight.

What this soup didn't have was any suggestion of cabbage. I don't know whether I overwhelmed it with the potato - it seems unlikely - but it tasted of cream of some green vegetable rather than being specifically cabbagey (hey, no red underline! Cabbagey is a word!)

Tonight, therefore, is the same again; something that rationing forces upon you quite often. I dare say that the leftovers could be turned into something else, perhaps thickened into a sauce for cauliflower cheese or broccoli mornay (red underline: apparently not a word), but that would be asking a lot of Morrisons and their supply chain. Their cauliflower today was from Africa and their broccoli was from Spain, whilst Colin Lunt (fnar fnar) couldn't offer cauliflower at all and the broccoli was from Israel.

[By the way, I'm a very pro-EU Welsh lefty, not some Little Englander; I just normally watch my food miles anyway and during this project have specific rules about not eating stuff I couldn't get in 1940... in this case because Israel didn't exist and Spain, although neutral, was fascist and if I wasn't a wuss I'd've been in the International Brigades. I've even run away in faintly-absurd horror from condensed milk from Germany]

So, leftover colcannon soup it is, backed with some lettuce, tomato, onion and (yet more) cabbage in sandwiches. Tomorrow, CJBS isn't at work in the evening so for the first time in two weeks I get to actually cook for two (he's had 4 days off in that time, but I think I've fed him leftovers of my previous meals each time) and I've actually managed to get fish for him. Fish fingers, but fish all the same.

So tomorrow is fish fingers, both real and Redwood, a mound of mashed potato and some creamed leek. CJBS will also have baked beans, but cotton buds in vivid orange sauce are not how I'm spending my points.

Seeking inspiration

2010-01-22T19:00:00.000Z

The random shortages here combined today with a lack of inspiration. I went to the greengrocers to find empty shelves, so I bought whatever they had: two onions, some potatoes and a savoy cabbage.

Now, that would suggest bubble and squeak or colcannon. But neither excites me. Therefore it's time for an experiment: cream of cabbage soup.

I had a look around for recipes, but most wartime ones wanted such luxuries as celery and carrot. Online ones wanted cream and bacon. Mine needs to be a bit simpler, but I'll posh it up - this is not cream of cabbage soup, this is my colcannon soup. Oh yes!

I've started with an onion-based roux made with a little milk, then added two sliced potatoes and a chopped cabbage and made it up with stock. For extra bulk, always important, I've added some oats and some pearl barley. This came to the boil and then I've taken it off the heat and left it to cook on its own covered.

When it's done, I'll drain the broth off, blend the potato and cabbage, reunite them and bring back to heat. I have literally no idea how it will taste; nor do I know if I will have to sleep alone tonight.

You do win friends with salad

2010-01-21T18:09:00.000Z

I really enjoyed my empty calories in last night's hot dog meal (although vegan sausages are transfat and cholesterol free) and the amount of bread I used kept me full.

But then Rational Mama, last seen envying my salad a week ago, managed to squeeze a crispy, fresh and filling salad out of her US rations. My plans for tonight, half-formed, withered immediately. A salad? A salad!

Our random shortages - actually always a feature of the Morrisons monopoly here, just particularly noticeable when I'm under rations - intervened. With no non-rotten potatoes, no carrots, nothing to make anything of it, I've ended up with a cold collation of the past - lettuce, tomato and onion.

But I can get round this. Some limp raw cabbage leftovers dropped into freezing water to revive adds some bite, I've got some (egg-free) mayo and, despite a bizarre shortage of brown bread, two small baguettes. If I can make a spicy dressing, I'll have two footish-long salad subs.

If that doesn't fill me, nothing will. And only slightly anachronistic (baguettes, I believe without evidence, weren't a feature of most peoples' lives) so well within the bounds of the project.

Hot diggerty dog

2010-01-20T18:48:00.000Z

Tonight, I'm having something of an anachronism. After recent random (but oddly authentic) shortages, I've managed to get my hands on some vegan hot dogs.

Hot dogs - mechanically recovered various meats with bulking agents injected into a casing made of ick - were unknown in the UK in the 1940s. The British had sausages - unrationed but scarce - but these were completely different, especially towards the end of the war, when the meat content declined to almost nothing and sometimes actually nothing.

When US forces arrived in the UK after America joined the war following Pearl Harbor, we were very pleased to see them. And they were pleased to meet us, especially as we made them so very welcome. The GIs discovered that the British public valued them more than their own civilian population did, and we were so grateful to no longer be standing alone that we did what we could to make them happy. This included Rainbow Corner in London, a 24-hour canteen and recreation club open to all GIs, made by knocking together a Delmonico's and a Lyon's Corner House.

At Rainbow Corner, a GI could get local newspapers, listen to fashionable music, get help with letter writing (and reading, such were the times) from Fred Astaire's sister Adele and other US residents in London and even get US-style food. But the GIs had one complaint - the British couldn't do hot dogs (actually, we couldn't do decent coffee either, and tea was an acquired taste; but for our purposes here, we'll stick to the food).
This lack of a basic, ordinary food stuff pained the average GI who had come to a cold, threadbare and old-fashioned country, often on his first ever trip abroad.

Hot dogs would appear in the UK in the 1950s, after rationing was done, and become popular into the 1960s and beyond. As ever, the British would serve their hot dogs just slightly wrong, almost a parody of the American version. Now, we do a white bread roll with onions and mustard. Then, we would often use a crusty cob with salad and some chutney.

I'm not going quite that far; I'm having the sausage with onion and "made mustard" (powdered mustard made into English mustard by adding vinegar) and fried onion. But I'm having them in a sliced brown baguette, so I'm almost there.

By the way, a brief plug for Rational Mama's blog about living for a year on US rations (yes, they had them). Well worth a read.

Spud-u-might-like

2010-01-19T17:05:00.000Z

Tonight is part leftovers, part points and part unrationed. For the leftovers, CJBS is having his cat sick (mentioned yesterday) plus a small tin of baked beans and a baked potato. Meanwhile I'm having baked potato as a main course, with a cheese filling.

But how, I hear you cry. This is the fake cheese sauce I made recently as a Welsh rarebit, adapted: it uses very little cheese (although I have some blue cheese to give it a kick) as it's mostly a roux made with beer. To that I'm going to scrape out the insides of the baked potatoes, mix the pulp into the beer-cheese roux and put the whole lot back into the skins and bake again.

The result should be cheese-filled potatoes of the first rank. If not, I won't be able to rescue it with extra salt, that being this week's unexpected actual shortage of a non-rationed product. Could this be winter related? It certainly didn't go onto Wirral Metropolitan Borough Council's roads and pavements; but then they haven't collected our rubbish yet this year (loss-making) but have been round to get the recycling (profitable). But I digress.

And to digress further, my thumb is no longer bleeding. And whilst it looks disgusting and mutilated without the bandages, it does appear to be healing at a normal rate. In a day or two I'll start putting aloe on it to promote that a bit.

Thumbing my nose

2010-01-18T17:08:00.001Z

Tonight's meal is leftovers again for me: always dull to write about. So here's last night's meal described.

I had bubble and squeak (recipe earlier) and made what CJBS called "corned beef hash" for him. This wasn't what I would've called a hash, but he loved it as it replicated a school dinner of the 1960s for him. From that, I therefore understand that his school dinners looked like, and smelled of, cat sick. But there we go.

If you're insane enough to want cat sick for dinner, here's how it's done: boil and then mash or rice enough potato. Mince, blend or otherwise pulverise a tin of corned beef. Dice a carrot and boil it. Combine, sprinkle with a little grated cheese and bake for half an hour in a medium oven. Serve, then leave the room. As a starter, we had the last of the mushroom soup and the winter salad on the side.

In the meantime, two other culinary events have occurred. First, on opening the tin of corned beef (one of those wind-a-key-around jobs), the beef got stuck in the tin. I attempted to prize it out, and quickly and efficiently severed the tip of my thumb. This was painful, messy and is now disabling (you'd be amazed at the number of things having two opposable thumbs lets you do; and consequently the number of things that having just one on the "wrong" hand prevents you from doing).

In all the drama, I forgot to boil my stock pots. This evening, I went to boil them and lifted the lids first. Now, a useful thing when you're cooking is to trust your nose. Fundamentally, we're born able to tell when food is off. It's innate, a survival-of-the-fittest hereditary thing. Modern processed foods contain chemicals to inhibit mould and bacteria growth, but they also inhibit the smell of these things as the food goes off. Artificial flavourings also help mask the smell of bad food.

My stock pots contained nothing artificial. And they didn't smell "bad", just "wrong". There was the usual vegetable-soupy aroma to one and the slightly nastier meaty smell to the other. But underneath that was something else. Sweet? Sickly? A sugary note, of sorts. It was just something, not unpleasant, but... well, "wrong". That's all the clue I needed: both are now gone and I'll wash out the pans on the dishwasher's hottest, scrubbiest setting. And start again with new stock tomorrow.

Presenting salad and soup

2010-01-16T15:58:00.000Z

Tonight's dinner for me needs to extend into a starter and side for tomorrow's dinner. Fortunately, the shops were suddenly plentiful for unrationed goods, so I'm having a winter salad and mushroom soup. Tomorrow, I'll make bubble and squeak for me and corn beef hash for CJBS, with the soup as a starter and the salad remnants on the side.

In the 1940s, salad existed, although it was a pale shadow of what we would serve today. This wasn't because of rationing, but simply a lack of imagination . "Cold collation", as salad was known, was usually some lettuce, some tomato, some ham and some salad cream. As such, it wasn't much of a meal.

The Ministry of Food tried to put salad on a new footing, not altogether successfully, by suggesting more exciting meat-free collations; with vegetables unrationed and healthy, they hoped to get the housewife to save coupons and fuel by serving cold meals, but the British liked their meat and liked their food hot (now, of course, Britain is the most vegetarian country in Europe, a complete turnaround).

My salads are usually suitable as a main course in and of themselves, although rationing has reduced the fripperies I can add. Still, a winter salad as a large side dish to mushroom soup should be filling. I took the leaves of a hothouse lettuce and lined a bowl, then grated a dozen cabbage leaves into the middle. On top goes a grated carrot, half an onion finely sliced, two chopped tomatoes, a chopped apple and half an ounce of cheese crumbled over the top. I'm also going to add, as an afterthought, a cubed boiled potato to give the salad more bulk.

The key with a salad is presentation, so I hope I've made an attractive meal, if nothing else. By the way, to stop the apple going brown before you get to eat it, cover it in lemon juice. This stops the oxidation without changing the flavour much.

The mushroom soup is an easy one, but it has a major pitfall awaiting the first-time cook: mushroom soup often tastes of boiled milk with mushroom floating in it. The mushrooms can be reluctant to give up their flavour and need to be helped along. There are various ways of soaking, with vinegar in the water to prevent browning, to get them going, but I prefer a direct cheat: dried mushrooms. Drop these in a bowl, pour on half a pint of boiling water and leave as long as possible. The mushroom liquor is intense and can be chucked into the soup at any point.

The soup itself is a standard white soup: fry a small diced onion in a little fat until translucent, add flour until all the oil is taken up, then a quarter pint of milk to make the roux. Dilute that down with stock and you've got a white soup with no particular flavour.

Add the flavour by tossing in whatever you want to make a soup of; in this case, chopped breakfast mushrooms plus the liqour from the dried mushrooms (and the dried mushrooms themselves, what the hell). Bring close to the boil, then simmer gently with the lid on until the veg you're using is tender. Serve as it or blend to a puree, reheat and serve. I'll be cooking a chopped large potato in the soup and running the result through the blender: adding a potato to soup is a useful wartime standby as it adds bulk, something these recipes never stop demanding of the chef.

Why not try... a sandwich?

2010-01-14T18:52:00.000Z

Tonight's dinner is a second go at last night's tomato soup. It was very tasty and very filling, especially with bread; a second helping is worth having. Meanwhile CJBS has been sent off to work with more of the parsnip soup and a round of spam sandwiches.

Tomorrow I'm making my monthly trip to the office in Yorkshire. This presents a couple of problems, the biggest of which is that my (non-leather, I'm that much of a vegetarian) shoes life-expired two weeks ago. I've defaulted to my previous pair, which are scuffed but serviceable, however, they have suffered from 18 months of not being used and are like clogs. So my poor feet are in a ruinous state and I'll be using a mixture of insoles and Compeed plasters to stop the delicate mincing steps I take in them. I'll order new ones after pay day!

But that's not important right now. The biggest issues are that I get my 6am train via the Café Nerd coffee stand at Lime Street. A big latte and a sandwich or panini to "put me on" as they say in Liverpool, then sleep until Leeds. On arrival at work, we have our group meeting and discussion, then Helen and Sue lay on a slap-up spread for everyone, including one egg-intolerant vegetarian (me), one pescetarian and one coeliac. It's always lovely, but I'll make them miserable if I try to tell them what points I've got, how many I'm willing to spend and what values they need to put on them.

Since I haven't cheated on points or coupons once in 13 days, I'm not going to mark the fortnight anniversary by having cheese and crisps and chocolate and other such treats tomorrow. So I've just carefully made a small number of sandwiches to take with me. I had drawn on, but not used, my (not) bacon ration a week ago; with tomatoes in the shops and, miraculously, British lettuce suddenly appearing on sale again, the sandwiches could only be BLT (with a bit of cress for interest sake). I fried off 2oz of bacon without using any fat, then mixed together one part butter to two parts margarine to make the spread - I'm fearsomely attached to my butter ration, whilst the margarine ration is just as tight but inedible as spread. Split between four sandwiches, the result was a nice pack up to take with me... with one of the sandwiches now to go with my soup.

Everyone stops for soup

2010-01-13T18:32:00.001Z

Having filled up on baked potatoes last night - and stayed full - tonight I'm having another bulked-out wartime staple: soup. I made parsnip soup yesterday, but with bacon rinds, so I don't know how it tastes (I'll find out tonight when CJBS eats it at work).

With tomatoes now back in the shops after a week of shortages, I fancied tomato soup. Marguerite Patten gives the WVS's recipe, which contains bacon yet again; but as I almost always change her recipes, this one was freely adaptable to take that out.

I melted a large knob of butter in a pan, then added a finely sliced onion. When the onion was cooked, I used flour to make my roux, with a small tin of evaporated milk as the liquid. To this I added some of my vegetable stock from the on-going pot, then put in a diced carrot and a diced potato - the bulking agents that will turn a starter into a main course. Then I added more stock, and finally six tomatoes, halved.

Now, outside of wartime, I'd've scooped out the seeds and only cooked the flesh; and, if I could be bothered, deskinned the tomatoes as well. But the waste is terrible, since the skins and seeds really can't be used elsewhere and the WVS (now WRVS) recipe leaves them in. So there will likely be seeds still floating in the soup after I've run it through the blender. I'll cope, as will the tomato seeds.

Normally I'd bring the soup to the boil, then simmer. But the evap could easily "catch", so I'm back on the endless stirring until it gets close to boiling; then, as with the parsnip soup yesterday, I've taken it off the heat and left it covered for the potatoes and carrot to cook through in the hot liquid. This takes longer - literally "slow food" - but uses no gas, so it's worth the time taken. When the potato is done, I'll run the lot through the blender, return to the heat briefly and serve with croutons.

Meanwhile CJBS takes his parsnip soup to work, with some spam sandwiches to have on the side and some extra bread for toasting, whilst I think I've got the preposterous rubbish of "Survivors" to watch on the BBC iPlayer.

Pasta, potatoes, parsnips... and hay

2010-01-12T18:11:00.001Z

Yesterday's meal - an anachronistic pasta-in-sauce made to wartime standards - was lovely. But, despite eating my fill, I was hungry again after about an hour. I'm not used to this: the wartime bulking-out fills you and leaves you full.

So today I'm back on a wartime staple: baked potato with soured cream.

That'd be severely boring to blog about, but luckily I'm also making a soup for CJBS to have tomorrow (he's on late shifts for the next two weeks so he gets a packed lunch - sandwiches made from the leftover lamb today, with the bone going into the stock pot and thus meaning we had zero waste from the Sunday lunch).

The soup is a cream of parsnip. For the starting fat, I used two bacon rinds, chopped up. To this I added a finely-sliced small onion and let the two heat through. I added some flour to start the roux then used a quarter of a pint of milk (cream of, see?) to get the roux paste. Then I added two chopped parsnips and two chopped potatoes, all scrubbed but not peeled.

Then I added some of the meat stock to make the soup up to about three portions. I brought the whole lot to the boil, then, in a wartime measure of economy, took it off the gas and have left it covered; the parsnips and potato will cook in the liquid and cool enough to go into the blender (if I wasn't blending, I'd've grated the veg first and left the bacon rinds whole to fish out at the end).

I'll portion it off to go into the freezer - a non-wartime cheat - for CJBS to microwave at work for three evenings. The wartime equivalent of this was to warm a ceramic pot, fill it with soup, cover, then put it in a "hay box", a gas mask box full of hay. The soup would keep edibly, if not superbly, warm until he needed it. Of course, as a railwayman, CJBS would've been able to warm the soup on the coal fire in the waiting rooms (the railway in question was electrified in 1937, so there was never the option to heat it on the footplate, even if he had worked on the trains themselves).

Meanwhile, I'm off to have my baked potatoes and catch up with "Being Human" on the BBC iPlayer in peace.

Past pasta

2010-01-11T18:03:00.000Z

Tonight I'm trying something different. The heavy (if fat-light) meals of wartime are starting to daunt me after years of living on a much more Mediterranean diet, so I was pleased when CJBS suggested trying to adapt a standard Italian meal to rations.

Pasta (called macaroni or spaghetti rather than pasta) was not uncommon, at least in the cities, in the 1940s. It was rationed, but relatively generously, I suspect to restrict the use of eggs and the import of wheat. So I've got a bag of good pasta on points for use tonight; spirals rather than the plainer shapes of the time.

For the sauce, I was at last able to get tomatoes, but I'm using pre-strained ones (passata) anyway. I've started with a chopped onion added to a knob of melted marg and allowed to soften. Then I've added plenty of mushrooms and some powdered garlic - again available in the 1940s but rarely used by cautious Brits! - and left to cook slowly covered. That produces a nice mushroomy liquid, to which I'll add a splash of red wine, then thicken with some gravy powder. Then to add the strained tomatoes and leave to cook slowly, perhaps with a ladleful of stock.

While that's cooking, I'm going to see what version of garlic bread can be made with ordinary brown bread, little fat and some garlic powder. That'll be the hard part!

Sunday roast

2010-01-10T09:26:00.001Z

Fitting a standard Sunday lunch to rations seems a fun idea in the hour before I start actually doing it. It should also provide a method for reducing fat intake after I'm done with this project.

For instance, my roast potatoes have always used a lot of fat. I prepare them in the usual way (and if you don't do it this way, you should!) by parboiling them for 10 minutes, draining and then vigorously shaking the pan until they're all bashed up. This gives lots of corners to get crispy and ensures that the insides are fluffy: perfect. Then I slosh them with olive oil and drop knobs of butter on top of each one before baking.

I plan to adapt this by melting a little fat and a little more butter, then brushing the potatoes with the melted goo; less waste sloshing about the baking tray and less fat on the potatoes themselves.

Similarly, the roast salt marsh lamb would often be rubbed with butter or oil before cooking. Instead, I'm studding it with dried apricots (got with points) that I've soaked overnight in white wine. The apricotty wine will go through the flesh and keep it moist, saving the need for fat. The weather-related shortages this week have taken fresh herbs off the shelves, so I can't push spears of fresh rosemary into the lamb; instead I've put dried rosemary into the wine, so the apricots have taken on some of that flavour too.

The parsnips I'll roast without fat, using honey and balsamic vinegar instead. I bought extra parsnips to make parsnip soup tomorrow, although I personally loathe parsnips (CJBS loves them).

For dessert, I'm making rhubarb and apple crumble. I used honey in the fruit to avoid using sugar, giving me the sugar to use in the crumble part. The crumble itself uses less fat than pastry, and I can cheat a bit by mixing marg with butter but not compromising the flavour.

On not taking a day off

2010-01-09T09:01:00.000Z

I've discovered something pleasing. When I started this experiment, I mentioned the need to cook a Sunday lunch for our best friends Kate and Jon on one of the days covered by rationing. I concluded that I'd need a day off the ration to manage it.

But looking at my ration book, I can cover the meal with very little penalty. I've saved so much butter that I still have a week's worth left at the start of the second week. I've barely dented the margarine ration. The dripping ration is tiny, but using the extra butter and marg instead means I don't have to take a hit on that.

That means I don't have an issue with any leftovers: if I'm discounting the roast lamb, how do I use the uneaten meat in further recipes over the next week - something I'd do even when not rationing - without discounting them again? But I can cut the coupons without penalty and CJBS can dine off the lamb in the week.

All this means that tonight we're having the leftover vegetable curry again, but it was very tasty and we won't mind a second go immediately after the first.

Currying (dis)favour

2010-01-08T17:28:00.002Z

For the first time in the week I've been running this experiment I felt it today. The shortages, the two-hour cooking times with endless stirring, the damn potato with every bloody meal...

I'd already decided to do a classic British fruit curry tonight. For that, I wanted some spinach and some tomatoes. The shops could not provide - the spinach, wilted and old, was flown in from Portugal; the soft tomatoes were worse, with a choice of lorry from Spain or airfreight from Israel. This are not included in our ration, as they did not exist as an option in 1940. So no spinach and no tomato for my curry. (I'll use unrationed tomato juice, as I'm loathe to spend my points on tinned tomatoes).

But the shortages set my mind going. I want a pizza, my brain said. I want crisps. I want pasta in a thick tomato sauce with garlic bread and brushetta. I want to pierce some plastic film and shove something in the microwave or take something out of a box and throw it in the oven for 20 minutes. I want cheese and biscuits to finish, with butter and sliced tomatoes.

And that's after a week of pretty easy rations. I can only imagine what the people of 1945 felt, after 5 years of ever-diminishing supplies coupled to hard war work and fuel (therefore heat) shortages. No wonder that people trudged through life, as even after the war ended, the destruction of our economy became apparent and rations continued to contract; then came the winter of 1947, where even the sea froze.^{[Wikipedia] [Gallery] [Feature]}

With that thought, I'll now make our potato-and-carrot curry and feel cheered at my lot.

Camping it up

2010-01-07T21:12:00.000Z

When I blogged about the living hell that is tea rations (2oz per person per week is simply inhuman) my friend Dave (the world's best graphic designer, btw) mentioned that a wartime staple was the (unrationed) chicory essence liquid with the heroically non-21st Century name "Camp".

This stuff, now marketed as a cooking ingredient rather than a coffee substitute, is a Victorian relic, as suggested by the (now fortunately politically-corrected) label. It had brief spells of popularity in the first war, in the second and, during an artificial shortage created by the coffee companies, in the late 1970s.

In that time, the purpose of the tar-like liquid has changed, as has, I'd think, the ingredients. Certainly the preparation instructions have altered from the early requirement of adding a teaspoon to boiling water and chucking in cream and sugar.

Indeed, adding sugar is the last thing you'd do now, since the ingredients, in order of greatest first, are sugar, water, chicory (24%) and coffee (4%). So 70% of this is sugar and water, and 51% at least of that is sugar alone. No wonder the bottle now says that it's ideal for making milkshakes, baking cakes and flavouring cream. The current jar doesn't mention how to make a beverage out of it at all, other than to suggest adding an unspecified amount to warm milk.

I tried two teaspoons in boiling water with a standard amount of milk. This was undrinkable. So I tried two more and yet more milk. This produced something that looked a bit like coffee and tasted a bit like coffee... is as much as it also tasted a bit like toffee and a bit like caramel and a bit like cheap chocolate but not really like any of those things.

So it isn't going to replace my morning coffee and it isn't going to stand in for my rationed tea. But as a bedtime drink, it's no worse than Horlicks or Ovaltine and better, in some ways, than some of the modern powders and potions available for the purpose. So I'll finish the bottle; I just might not buy any more.

Fish dish

2010-01-07T20:20:00.000Z

CJBS bought a side of haddock. Since I needed the oven on to cook my pretend fish, baking the (real) fish was money-saving and eco-friendly. But the best way to bake?

Patten has various ways of baking "fresh salted cod", the preserved-in-salt, then-washed-in-bicarb version of fresh fish that appeared after we invaded Iceland and slaved their economy to ours (a plan we also had for the then-Irish Free State should the U-Boats drive us into starvation) . But fresh salted cod is quite different, and Patten is bulking it out to a degree not needed when we could buy such a large piece (admittedly at a terrifyingly high price - £2.77 for just under half a pound).

My choice was to make something of an occasion of it. I took two tomatoes and scooped out the pulp; I chopped the flesh and half an onion. I melted a knob of our fat ration (vegetable lard) and put two diced slices of smoked bacon in to cook. When this started to sizzle, I added the onion. When the onion was soft, I added the tomato chunks.

When everything was heated through, I put two slices worth of breadcrumbs into the mixture, soaking up the fat, then took it off the heat. I put the fish into a baking tray and spread the bacon-tomato-breadcrumb mixture over the top. I dotted half an ounce of butter over the top, then put it in a medium oven. Half an hour later, I served the now crusty, crisp-topped haddock with some mashed potato (made with both an ounce of butter and a quarter pint of milk because there was no gravy on offer) and some steamed broccoli.

Now I'll see if the resulting large meal was enough or whether CJBS wants the baked apple I've offered but not made yet.

Back to the future

2010-01-07T17:39:00.001Z

Tonight's meal is timeless: modern but classic, within rations but not rationed. It's a simple grilled (or baked, CJBS will decide) fish with mashed potatoes and steamed broccoli.

Fish was never rationed, but the supply was erratic due to U-Boat activity and disruption on the railways (fresh fish inland was unknown until the railways came in the 1830s and made the fast transfer of fish from coast to city possible, so fish and chips is a relatively modern British tradition). To simulate this, we banned fish from the supermarket and said that we could only buy it from the fishmonger. Our fishmonger has erratic opening hours, so the erratic supply is covered; indeed this is the first time that we've been able to get fish from him this year.

For me, I have some Redwood fishless fingers, which are almost exactly but not quite entirely unlike fish, so I'm covered in the vegetarianism bit.

For the first time, I'm not planning on a starter today. Instead I'm going to do the baked apple desert I mentioned yesterday. I've got mincemeat leftover from Christmas. Core out the apples and stuff the centre with the mincemeat. Wrap in foil and bake in a moderate oven for twenty minutes. Serve with custard or condensed milk, assuming you have the points for either.

Food flash

At the greengrocer's, CJBS was warned that potatoes are likely to be in short supply in the next few weeks due to supply problems from the poor weather (the potatoes are frozen into the ground). That'll make this experiment much more challenging... and also more authentic.

A rare bit

2010-01-06T19:17:00.000Z

Now for the main course: a faked rarebit. I've got 4oz of cheese in the fridge, of which I'm prepared up give up 2oz. Any rarebit is going to be a bit cheese-light and thus need to be lifted in some way. This is my attempt.

I started by taking some oats and toasting them in a low oven for an hour to bring out the flavour I'd much need. Then I melted a knob of butter in a heavy-bottomed pan and added the finely sliced (other) small onion and some garlic powder and let it sit on a gentle heat for a while. When the onion was translucent, I added the toasted oats to soak up the remaining fat. Then I added a helping of flour to start my roux.

This was a roux with a difference: instead of milk, I used beer. Specifically Riggwelter, one of the finest cooking-beers I've come across. If you're fool enough to try this recipe, you can substitute Guinness, but Riggwelter is ideal. I built up the roux as normal until I got the thick paste I needed, then grated in the 2oz of cheese and added 3tsp of wholegrain mustard. When this had settled, I added 1/2 gill (an eighth of a pint, 2.5 fluid oz or 70ml) of Household milk and a ladle of my stock and let it reduce until it was thick but not quite thick enough.

Taking the rarebit off the heat, I then boiled a peeled and diced potato; when done, I drained it off in a sieve then pushed it through the sieve and added the pulped potato to the rarebit. That thickened it and added the much-needed bulk for such a thin meal. It tastes good too!

Now to slice some bread and toast it and the rarebit under the grill, then put it in CJBS for a final verdict.

Cheating at carrot soup

2010-01-06T17:58:00.000Z

The carrot soup seems to have worked. With only two carrots, I had to cheat slightly, as I'll explain.

To make the soup, I took a good knob of butter and melted it in a heavy-bottomed pan. I finely chopped the two carrots and the small onion, and put them in with the butter. I left both to soften for ten minutes with a small amount of powdered ginger and garlic and some fresh nutmeg. Then I added a handful of oats to soak up any remaining fat and ladled in some stock from my stock pot and added a handful of rice. I left this to cook gently for twenty minutes and then I cheated.

I like chunky soups. I grew up with chunky soups. My leek and potato soup is nothing but chunks. These whizzed-up blended soups are for tins and cartons and restaurants that want their soup to look like they came out of tins and cartons. But two carrots don't make for a chunky soup. So I had to put it through the blender to make it go further.

Now, Wikipedia says that blenders were invented just after the first war. But they didn't become common, at least in the UK, until the 1950s or even the 1960s. What contemporary housewives did usually have, now completely gone, was a mechanical mincer. But a mincer wouldn't've made puréed soup. So I've cheated, using technology not generally available in 1940 to get round the shortages.

Back to the soup. Out of the blender and back into the pan, heating it gently covered, adjusting the seasoning according to taste. I've now taken it off the heat and will bring it back when CJBS gets home at 7:30pm. I'll serve it with more of those brown bread croutons as a starter before the faked rarebit.

Coping with shortages of... everything

2010-01-06T16:53:00.001Z

The bad weather continues. Although no new snow has fallen, the 3" from yesterday remains on pavements (compacted to ice) and on roads further inland. This has given me a lovely taste of World War II conditions: shortages.

I went out to get something - I wasn't sure what - for dinner. But most of the local shops are closed, and those that are open have bare shelves. I managed to get 2lb of potatoes in poor condition, two sad-looking carrots, two apples, 5 frost-burnt tomatoes, two tiny onions and a loaf of bread (thereby beating my Cheshire-based friend David who can't even get that). I had had ideas of doing a lavish soup followed by a small "cold collation" (as they used to call salad). This is clearly out of the question.

What to do with those ingredients and whatever rations I've already got in? I'm thinking that I can cobble together a carrot soup, eke out a rarebit and even make baked apple for afters. The rarebit will require quite some eking, with only 2oz of cheese available and only Household milk to make it. But, with some oats to thicken it (Marguerite Patten even suggests some mashed potato will make it go even further) and a slice of tomato on top, I think I'll've beaten both the weather and the panic buyers. I'll get back to you on whether it works.

Posh nosh

2010-01-05T18:17:00.000Z

With snow on the ground (a rarity on the coast) I'm pleased not to have to walk the half mile to Morrison's or Lunt's. I also want something warming for dinner. What to do with a couple of pounds of potatoes, two carrots, an onion, a cabbage, some mushrooms and four (vegan) sausages for me and a tin of corned beef for CJBS?

Potato and cabbage automatically sing bubble and squeak, but I've got little to serve it with. The carrots and the onion as well, however, suggest colcannon.

Colcannon is "peasant food", used by poor people to make a lot out of a little (and all the more delicious for that) but of late it has had a makeover, becoming posh nosh. From a simple mashed potato, onion and cabbage it now appears on BBC Food with lashings of double cream and melted butter, and elsewhere with bacon and yet more butter.

CJBS's bacon ration is something he prizes highly for a lazy breakfast. My own vegan bacon is unuseful for baking, being designed to be fried and put in a sandwich - which to me feels like a waste of both bacon and fat when I'm so short. Butter just can't be wasted on melting to make something taste a bit better. Double cream? Yeah, okay if you can get it, but my own rules forbid me from getting it to use in such a damp way. Don't they know there's a war on?

I brought the peeled and diced potatoes to the boil with the carrots. When the water boiled, I put the cabbage in. Meanwhile, I heated a knob (about a heaped teaspoon) of butter in a frying pan and fried off the onion and the mushrooms. When the potatoes were soft, I mashed the contents of the pan with a little milk, then added the onion and the mushrooms. With the frying pan still hot, I cooked off the vegan sausages, then diced the corned beef.

I divided the mash into two, mixing the vegan sausage into one and the diced beef into the other. Then I put both into a slow oven - it needs to cook very slowly as CJBS isn't home until 7:30pm. The heat isn't wasted as I'll make croutons for the leftover soup from yesterday (these are just cubes of brown bread baked slowly for 15 minutes) as the oven cools.

The result, in theory, should be crispy on top but fluffy in the middle. Onion gravy, an easy standby since I have leftover gravy from yesterday, will help lubricate it.

The leeky cauldron

2010-01-04T18:20:00.001Z

Day three and I've done my second vegetable shop, this time spending £2.56 on two days' worth. That got me two leeks, 8oz of local mushrooms, an onion, two carrots and three and a half pounds of potatoes.

In the two days so far of this experiment, I've learnt that a starter and a main course hide a multitude of shortages. So yesterday I served cheese soup and stew. Today, leek and potato soup (an idea put into my head by my friend Sandi) will be followed by toad in the hole.

My usual leek and potato soup (actually, like most of my best recipes, my mum's leek and potato soup) is a bit of a caloriefest, although still healthier than anything you'd get out of a tin and much tastier. This one I'm trying to make conform to World War II standards. Compare and contrast:

21st Century L&PS: roughly chop two or three leeks; peel and roughly chop two or three large potatoes. Make a roux (heat oil or butter in a pan, add flour and two crumbled stock cubes until all the oil is bound, add milk until there's a paste, add more milk until there's a thick liquid) in a large pan or stock pot and put the leek into it. Get it covered in the roux and keep adding milk. Keep stirring. When the milk covers the leeks, add the potatoes. Cover with water, stock or more milk, bring to the boil and reduce to a simmer. Cover and serve when the potatoes are done - say half to three-quarters of an hour.

WW2 L&PS: finely slice two leeks. Scrub and dice two potatoes. Put a knob (about a heaped teaspoon) of marg into a heavy-bottomed pan. Make up a pint of Household milk. Heat the marg and, when it begins to melt, tip in the leeks and start stirring. Eventually, you'll hear the leeks start to sizzle. Chuck in a handful of oats to soak up the remaining fat. Keep stirring. Add more oats if there's still any sign of liquid in the pan. Keep stirring. Add half of the pretend milk and stir well. Add a pint of stock from your stock pot and stir well. Add the rest of the "milk" and keep stirring. Add some salt and pepper (or mustard powder) and some "extract" (a teaspoon of Bovril or a good dash of Maggi). Keep stirring. Bring almost to the boil: this will happen quickly thanks to the Household milk and, again thanks to the Household milk, if you're not already stirring it will burn on the bottom. Put it on a lower heat and keep it simmering, staying attentive and - yes, you've guessed it - keep stirring. Cook uncovered to let it reduce, stirring all the more.

It's a wonder that 40s housewives arms didn't fall off! I'm a lazy cook, doing my prep in advance but also over dozens and dozens of bowls, containers, cups and tupperware as I start to run out of anything vaguely round. I enjoy getting the meal started, but then like to leave it to do its thing whilst I drink, smoke and look for naughty pictures on the kitchen computer. This is possibly the most demanding meal I've ever cooked and it's only the first course! I don't even know if it's going to be even slightly edible: and CJBS is awaiting my first wartime kitchen disaster (he's either got the perfect sympathetic look rehearsed or he's planning on doing a little dance; I can't tell).

Still, if I manage to ruin the soup, at least I can top that with the toad in the hole, which should combine my (inherited, there, I've said it, Mum) inability to make Yorkshire pudding batter rise with using powdered milk and egg.

I'll post more after the fire brigade has left.

Edit: The curse is broken! The Yorkshire pudding rose (not hugely, but nevertheless) and CJBS wolfed it down.

Let him stew

2010-01-03T11:40:00.001Z

A lot to do today - I need to tidy away Christmas, clean up, wash clothes and buy an electric blanket, new telephones and a bathroom scale... so that calls for a slow-cooked stew.

I bought £3 of veg yesterday (a bag almost too heavy to carry) and used about half of it to start my stock pot. The rest I've roughly chopped, covered in the new stock, added dried herbs, a bay leaf, mustard powder (CJBS can't have pepper so mustard stands in for it) and a good helping of pearl barley. Into the slow cooker on medium, and I'll come back to it at about 7pm to add oats to thicken it if it needs it and decide on either flour dumplings or mashed potato to bulk it out.

Now to get busy with the other stuff.

Edit: It didn't need thickening, the pearl barley did that job excellently and gave it much needed bulk - a bowl was enough for me when usually with stew I'd have more than one (CJBS had some of yesterday's cheese soup and finished with some mince pies and custard, seemingly aiming to blow through his points as soon as possible). I also managed to get all my shopping except for the telephones and, on topic, got as close as I could to half a pound of sausagemeat for CJBS, with 3 cumberland sausages. I've got a couple of tofu sausages, my powdered (not-)egg and an onion and I've saved up some fat through not using any at all in the stew. So I think we're having toad in the hole and mashed potatoes for tomorrow's dinner.

Stock answers

2010-01-02T18:30:00.001Z

I've done well today, having not snacked on anything and coped with shortages already (no tomatoes, no sausagemeat, no quality tinned fruit, no leeks) and I've sent CJBS off to work with a packed lunch of (unrationed) fishpaste sandwiches and (leftover) soup.

Now I need to think on about my dinner for tonight. I'm wanting soup and have plenty of vegetables to make a good one, plus some pearl barley and oats to make it filling and thick, respectively. But to create said soup, I first need a good stock.

I've got a lovely large stockpot, bought a couple of years ago, but I've only ever used it to make soup. So I'm starting my soup-making today by making a stock that I'll add to over the coming days and weeks. As long as it is brought to the (vigorous) boil once a day, it won't go off... and I'll try to avoid my grandma's world-famous attempt at stock, where she left the pot for over a week on a low heat. Once taken off the heat, it continued to bubble to itself, before making a grab for power in an audacious coup d'etat and rampaging across much of Europe and Hessle foreshore.

I've roughly chopped an onion, a carrot and a parsnip to get it going, then covered them in water with a pinch of salt and brought the whole lot to the boil. Now to leave them for an hour or so on a gentle heat, then swipe some of the liquid for the soup-to-be. Later in the week I'll probably start adding stuff like mushrooms (meaty flavour) and onion skins (for the colour) before dividing into one vegetarian stock and one meaty stock, for which I'll swipe CJBS's bacon rinds.

As for tonight's soup, I'm undecided between cream of parsnip, cheese or potato and cabbage soup. CJBS fancies the parsnip, I fancy using some of my cheese ration on something a bit creamier still. Splitting the difference would mean I end up making the potato and cabbage soup...

Edit: I ended up making cheese soup, adapting Marguerite Patten's recipe, but not enough (although the soup itself was very nice).

The Patten recipe takes a chopped onion, 1.5oz marg, and a pint of household (reconstituted) milk and brings them to the boil together. Then you make a paste with 2tbsp of flour and a little milk, and add this to the now-simmering soup. This thickens the soup; then you add a cup of grated cheese, let it melt, season and serve.

The flaw here is that the flour paste didn't soak up the globs of fat on the surface - why would it? - and thus what I served was slightly unappetising. The recipe would've made more sense by starting with a roux (fry the onion gently, then add flour until the oil is all bound up, then slowly add milk until the thickened soup appears). I doubted that a creamy soup not made with a roux would work; I was right, although the taste was fine, especially when I added two ladles of my new stock and increased the seasoning (code for salt) slightly.

And what do points make?

2010-01-02T10:16:00.001Z

So, we've begun! Tomorrow I'll buy some bathroom scales so CJBS and I can chart just how rationing reduces our overstuffed frames. Today, I'll be shopping for fruit and vegetables at our local greengrocer (Colin Lunt - not joking, and, yes, I intentionally spoonerise that name normally, but won't here else Blogspot will throw me off) and also get our fat ration.

Having looked everywhere, I failed dismally to find the value of "points" - the 16 free coupons a month everyone got that could be used (with money) to buy treats and store cupboard items. However, seeking to put off planning my menu for the week and enjoying three cups made from one teaspoon of loose tea, I picked up one of my favourite books: Peter Hennessy's masterful Never Again: Britain 1945-1951. And it fell open at page 49 - a table of points-values from May 1945. This wasn't quite the high point of values that we're using (January 1940), nor the lowest (early 1942 and late 1946, I believe) but it's all I've got.

So, these are our "points". We have 16 to last a month, and the quantity is a pound (450g) - although that's a maximum, not a minimum (so if 16pts gets a pound of something, we can use 8pts to get half a pound):

Meat products: 16
Tinned soup: 4
Tinned fish: 16
Tinned fruit: 4
Tinned vegetables: 4
Dried fruit: 16
Nuts: 12
Biscuits: 4
Cereal: 8
Oatmeal: 4
Dried peas and beans: 4
Rice, sago, tapioca and semolina: 2
Pasta: 4
Jelly, custard powder, blancmange, table cream: 8
Tinned peas and beans: 3
Tinned stewed steak: 20

Additionally, 2 points gets a pint of condensed milk, and 1 point gets a fluid ounce (30ml) of olive oil, salad oil or salad cream.

And, yes, the British had heard of pasta in 1940, although it was known as macaroni if it was shaped and spaghetti if it wasn't. They'd also heard of olive oil, but you usually bought it from Boot's or Timothy White's, not from the grocer (although this in itself has become a lazy journalist's shorthand, as you could buy it for cooking purposes from delis and specialist food shops).

So, with those values set, I can now try to plan the first week's food.

Generosity

2009-12-31T20:00:00.000Z

A week ago I said that the rations in our ration book looked generous. With the main rationing shop for the month due on the 2nd of January, they may well turn out to be.

But they also may well turn out to be completely inadequate. I bought the first rationed item yesterday: tea. We're almost out of tea bags (I'm letting supplies of rationed goods run out so we can't cheat next month) so it was an ideal time to get loose tea under rations.

The tea ration was 4oz (just over 100g) a month; the rationing of tea was not because of shortages but because of the shipping space in bringing it from Undivided India. Now, between us, that's 8oz for a month, which sounded a lot in my head. Metrication means you can't buy 8oz, but you can buy the nearest metric equivalent, 250g (8.8oz), so already I'm cheating the ration. But here's the rub: how on earth am I going to make 8oz of tea last a month? This is a tea household. After my morning coffee, uncommon in the UK in the 1940s but not unheard of, I drink tea. Four or 5 cups a day. CJBS drinks more, although he adds herbal stuff to that - other than peppermint, I don't touch such insipid concoctions.

If I remember loose tea correctly from the early 80s (when bags were still thought to be the sweepings of the tea factory floor), it went further than bags because you made it in a pot rather than in the mug. Certainly I've been wasteful of tea in the past - staying in hotels quite often, I can make a hotel teabag go for three cups at a push, whilst at home one bag == one cup. But the process of "refreshing" a pot of loose tea is a lost talent for me now.

But the tea I've bought, which must last a month, is in a teeny-tiny container. I'm looking forward to reducing the fat intake over January, and to reusing leftovers, and to making do with very little and eking out supplies. It'll be a challenge and it'll be fun and it'll be educative. But doing without tea? Well, that'll test the Dunkirk spirit and no mistake.

Christmas curry

2009-12-26T10:09:00.002Z

Christmas dinner leftovers gives me an excuse to make a traditional British curry. And, yes, you would've got one in the 1940s. In fact, you could get one in the 1840s, such is Britain's love affair with Indian-style food.

And Indian-style is accurate here: British curries are unknown in the Indian subcontinent; even our modern favourites were designed and made in Birmingham and Bradford and other cities, by British people whose connections with the subcontinent are now distant. Our vibrant British Asian population has been part of Britain for more than 200 years, with Queen Victoria settling down to a (pre-turkey) Christmas dinner of curried rabbit.

A classic mid-century British curry's ingredients list is more like that of a fruit cake than a savoury main meal, but its all the better for that. Heat some oil or butter in a heavy-bottomed pan and chuck in a diced large onion. When the onion starts to go translucent, chuck in some crushed garlic and start adding curry powder. A note about curry powder: adding extra mild curry powder won't make a curry hot; adding less hot curry powder won't make a curry mild; the temperature is set by the powder's temperature and adding more or less simply increases or reduces the intensity of the flavour, not the heat.

Keep adding curry powder and stirring until all of the oil is soaked into the powder and stuck to the onion, like making a roux. Then add a tin of tomatoes and stir well. Bring to the boil and then reduce to a simmer. This is your curry sauce. You can at this point stir in a glob or two of stuff to round the flavour out: HP or Daddies sauce, ketchup, worcester sauce, anything savoury that you've got in the cupboard will all help. Now for what you're currying: diced turkey for Boxing day, I suppose.

A large handful of raisins or sultana is essential; sliced apple is a good thing too. Left over roast potatoes can go in, plus other leftover veg - almost anything can be curried. Give it all a good stir, cover and leave on a low heat to bubble away to itself. The longer you leave it, the better it tastes, so if you're prepared to cook it for 5 hours, do so! If not, try to give it at least an hour. Stir occasionally to ensure it isn't catching on the bottom. Remove the lid if it's too watery for you to allow it to reduce.

The classic way to serve is by making a pile of cooked rice in the centre of the plate, then spreading the rice around to the edges with the back of a ladle; spoon the curry into the middle. The modern way of serving this would be to cover two thirds of the plate with curry and pile the rice into the remaining space. You can supply your own breads and pappadums.

Peace on Earth, 1939

2009-12-25T15:15:00.001Z

A 1939 MGM cartoon on the topical subject of peace.

Keeping Christmas merry

2009-12-25T14:12:00.000Z

With the rationing experiment fast approaching, I'm cooking the usual huge Christmas dinner you'd expect in the early 21st Century.

I'm interested to spot what I could and couldn't make of this meal during wartime. Starting at the top, the turkey is out, as is all poultry. Poultry wasn't rationed, but it became impossible to buy, and although the government encouraged people to keep hens, how many people could (a) find space and (b) wring the neck of a bird you've been caring for all year? Woman's Hour this morning had an all-too-brief clip of a 1940s "Murkey" recipe - mock Turkey made using mutton. I dread to think.

The bread sauce is out too. It's just too wasteful of the onion you put in the milk and then throw away; later in the war, milk would be rationed and a pint for a sauce is even more wasteful. Ironically, the cloves (nutmeg in this case, CJBS not liking cloves either) and the bay leaves would remain in plentiful supply, but of little utility with nothing for them to flavour.

The roast potatoes would still be plentiful, and Lord Woolton would like us to eat more. But there would be little fat to make that crispy, almost-burnt, outside. With no fat, you're getting baked potatoes rather than roast - still good, but not the same thing at all.

Stuffing, carrots, cabbage and broccoli are all fine, although the stuffing would be by hand from scratch rather than from Paxo. Carrots remained in good supply, but cabbage and broccoli are regional products and rely on the railways supplying a useful quantity, so sudden shortages are not unknown.

At the worst level, this Christmas dinner could have been stuffing made from stale bread and sage, carrots, baked potatoes and whatever meat or fish was to hand; if not available, then it would be Woolton Pie or some form of ersatz "savoury loaf" - filling, but uninspired by modern tastes.

At the best, then a small joint with plenty of vegetables would be on offer - this providing the fat to make the potatoes truly roast rather than baked. With few toys in the shops, perennial shortages of hard liquor and the beer watered down, virtually no fresh fruit in December, and supplies of foreign-grown nuts reduced drastically, Christmases 1940 through 1953 (rationing ran January 1940 to mid-1954) would've been very hard by modern standards.

Christmas Under Fire

2009-12-25T08:30:00.001Z

Listen to Britain

2009-12-24T13:00:00.002Z

Coughs and Sneezes

2009-12-23T12:00:00.001Z

Save Fuel

2009-12-22T11:00:00.002Z

Retro retro

2009-12-21T12:30:00.001Z

Keeping track of which rations we've used and which we have still got to go should be easy, what with computers and this blog and so forth. But there's an even easier way, and its usefully manual: I've made ration books.

The original ration books divided each period into weeks and each week into points. You could use your points before the week named on them, but not after. The genius of the points system was that the government could vary the "value" of points according to supplies, so one week 3 points was worth 3oz of ham, the next 3 points was worth 2oz. This way, there was no need to reissue ration books or insist on certain coupons not being used. It also allowed the supply ministries to reallocate coupons, so margarine coupons could be declared to be clothing coupons and butter coupons suddenly butter-and-margarine coupons.

The points system required a ready reckoner approach, with press advertisements telling the housewife how many points made five this week or month. Since the points-to-weight allowance is fixed for the duration of this experiment, I've not used points in our books. Instead, I've just listed the weight directly on the coupon, divided up into useful amounts. The exception is "points", which were points without a fixed item or weight against them and were used for luxuries and store items according to available surpluses, and red meat, which was rationed by price rather than weight.

So we're ready to go. At a glance, these books make the ration seem very generous and easy. Certainly they make it look easy, anyway. I'm expecting the "generous" bit to start looking "onerous" by about 10 January.

Dig for Victory

2009-12-21T10:00:00.002Z

A big ol' pan of fat

2009-12-20T11:00:00.001Z

The shortage of fat in World War II was often got around by the presence of a frankly disgusting pan of fat. The idea was to fry everything in a single pan, thus collecting the run-off fat each time. This fat was then kept, congealed, until it was needed next time.

The pan provided a useful source of dripping - bacon and other fat that you can dip toast or bread in as a tasty alternative to plain, tasteless margarine (there wasn't enough butter to waste on toast). And the fat keeps - regular boiling and congealing kills off most nasties, and anything that did turn could be scraped out, leaving the bulk of the fat available.

There's no other way of saying this: this practice is disgusting. It looks disgusting, it smells disgusting and it is, to 21st century minds, disgusting. And I'm starting my fat pan today, when CJBS has his bacon sandwiches for lunch. The pan will likely be vital toward the end of January, when fat will be hard to come by.

Edit: CJBS didn't want bacon cooked in a frying pan (only grilled), although he did offer his bacon rinds for further use (?) so I've made a start on a vegetarian fat pan instead, beginning with some baking marg and some vegebacon. This'll be very useful for me in late January...

A question of waste

2009-12-19T19:15:00.000Z

Earlier this week I reposted this Food Flash from the Ministry of Food. As usual with these pithy 20-second cinema shorts, it was informative without lecturing. And it occurs to me that we should be seeing similar stuff on TV and online now.

The modern recycling campaigns, aimed at young people, are all very well. But recycling is the final option, not the first one. When my mum cooks, she uses virtually everything for something (and online I've discovered that onion skins can be used for stock making; and even potato skins can be fried for crisps if you're desperate enough, although this idea came from someone writing about their experiences of Berlin in the winter of 1945 where things were indeed desperate; the same site appears to have a recipe that requires you to throw away the potato and keep only the skins, which makes me weep). I'm always much more slapdash. The top third of a leek is often mud-filled; it's so much easier to cut it off, throw it away and cook the tight white part alone. Onion skins are easiest to remove if you allow the top layer(s) of onion to be sacrificed with them. Virtually everything fresh has a part that could be used and I throw it away for convenience.

With luck, this experiment will purge me of such foolish notions. I'm supposed to be an environmentalist, yet with no garden and "no time" (made available), I happily throw away tremendous amounts of off-cuts.

Now, that's not as bad as throwing away edible food, or the slightly greater sin of throwing away food that has been over-bought and allowed to go off. But it's still waste and it's still foolish.

So even if this experiment doesn't work, or stops on January 31 with a trite post about how hard it was, what I really want is to walk away with a sense that every scrap has some value somewhere.

Counterfoil

2009-12-18T08:30:00.000Z

Powdered egg

2009-12-17T19:08:00.000Z

Powdered egg has long been thought World War II's "housewife's staple". So many recipes contain egg, but before the days of battery farming of hens (now itself fortunately dying away again), eggs weren't produced in the shelves-full quantities we now expect.

Add in the difficulties in transporting eggs from the country to the cities and eggs' short shelf life, and you've got a problem with getting protein to the people.

Powdered egg solved this. By drying out the egg contents, you could transport vast quantities without all the smashing, even up the supply along the "fair shares" principle of rationing and store it in tins almost indefinitely.

Needless to say, people hated it. It's really not the same thing at all: you can just about scramble it, and it'll do you an omelette, assuming you can add something else to unblandify it, but you can't have a fried egg butty with powdered egg. But for cooking with, in cakes and anything else needing binding, it was invaluable. When the new Labour government came in in 1945, they stopped production of the powdered egg and the import of the American cans, believing wrongly that shell eggs would soon return. The Conservatives got a Mrs Lovelock to form the Housewives' League to campaign for it to come back, and pretty soon had women all over the country voting to the right, rather than the centre-left they'd done since getting the vote, a situation that has only changed since 1997.

Just occasionally, I've found powdered egg on sale in the UK still, in small quantities from what used to be Supercook. But the local supermarkets don't see a market for it, as I've not found any for this experiment. Until today, when I went into the local healthfood store. I went there last about 5 years ago and it was all supplements and pulses. Now, I discover that they do a lot more vegan foodstuffs. Far too late for me, I've found online suppliers of everything. Except powdered egg-free egg. And now I've got some.

I've been egg intolerant for a couple of years, so the prospect of an omelette is pleasing me no end. Whether CJBS will be pleased at a month of powdered not-quite egg instead of real local free-range eggs... well, what he doesn't know won't harm him.

Potatoes

2009-12-17T08:30:00.000Z

Sweet Ration

2009-12-16T08:30:00.000Z

Waste not waist

2009-12-15T08:30:00.000Z

Finished the Woolton Pie

2009-12-15T00:55:00.000Z

...and it was excellent. Filling, tasty, and about 75p per helping per person. CJBS had seconds, enjoying the pie as much as my non-rationed version of old. I think it looked very appetising.

But then, very broadly, pie always does. But CJBS is the final arbiter and he shovelled it down.

Halfway through a Woolton Pie

2009-12-14T19:24:00.000Z

The potato pastry was excellent to work with. A great consistency, although not all that good at sticking together where there were gaps. Still, it's a hit with me and better than the pre-made stuff, so I'll do it again.

The boiled vegetable mass was drained and put into a pie dish, where it sat looking unappetising, as you'd expect.

The stock, now, I suppose, on its third use,was returned to the pan with some gravy powder (which is cornflour and onion powder) rather than the rolled oats that Patten recommends. Brought back to heat, it thickened and I mixed it into the veg mix.

Then I put the pastry over the dish, used the leftover bits to make a stereotypical leaf design, punched a hole in the top and brushed the result with a very small (1fl oz) amount of fresh milk.

And now into a moderate oven until CJBS gets back from work. I'll report back.

Starting a Woolton Pie

2009-12-14T18:42:00.001Z

As a fairly ordinary lazy person, I tend to buy ready-made pastry. There, I've said it and my Mum will now break down in tears. So making pastry is a fun new thing. Making potato pastry is even newer.

There are two types, one using mashed and then sieved cooked potatoes, but Patten warns subtly that this method uses less fat and has a bland flavour. The second version replaces 2oz of fat with grated raw potato, and is apparently much more robust in taste.

I took six ounces of self-raising flour and a pinch of salt, and rubbed in 3oz of cooking margarine - now somewhat forgotten but you'll remember it from your childhood childhood hood hood od od (no brand names, no pack drill). This took forever. Then I grated in 2oz of raw potato. This was then also rubbed in. With a little bit of water, a dough was made.

Then it was time for the pie filling. This was just £3 of seasonal vegetables - a small turnip, a small swede, two potatoes, a carrot, a leek and three very large mushrooms. Diced up, these were put in my stock pot, then I added the left over stock from Friday's meal, which was enriched by cooking (faux) bacon with the vegetables.

This has now boiled on the stove for 10 minutes, covered, and all the veg has softened. Next, the oven stage...

Eating well the Frederick Marquis way

2009-12-13T20:52:00.000Z

With time ticking on this experiment beginning (2 January), I'm going to have to tackle a proper Woolton Pie.

I already do a modern version that CJBS loves, but that version isn't as economical on rationed and short-supply items. My version uses no discrete fat but does use too much cheese and too much fat in the pastry.

For my usual version, I take seasonal root vegetables peeled and chopped and put them in a heavy-bottomed pan. Cook, covered, on a medium heat for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally so they don't stick to the bottom. This causes the vegetables to sweat. When the pan has liquid in the bottom, I add mushroom essence (bottled or from the liquid dried mushrooms have soaked in for a few hours), stir well again, and then add grated cheese - about two handfuls. Keep stirring until the cheese has melted around the vegetables and take off the heat.

Make (or buy, I'm not proud) shortcrust pastry, line a pie dish with it, then tip the vegetable mix in without the liquid. Cover with more pastry and bake in a moderate oven until the pastry browns. Serve with gravy. You can also top with mashed potato instead.

Now, Woolton Pie is designed to use almost no fat. The basics are the same, but without the cheese and without the shortcrust pastry. For the former, gravy browning takes the liquid and stiffens it. For the latter, it uses potato pastry, basically made from rubbing the potatoes with other ingredients forever, or a similar version that also uses grated carrot. Either way, the pastry doesn't keep. Make and use immediately, else it goes an unappealing grey, warns Marguerite Patten.

The result could be truly boring and even fat-free mash would be better, but I fancy the challenge of making something interesting out of it. So that's tomorrow evening's plan.

Add Water

2009-12-13T08:30:00.002Z

Spam spam spam spam spam spam corned beef spam

2009-12-12T11:11:00.001Z

One of the reasons CJBS is looking forward to our month on rations (and he now thinks that it should extend beyond if the following comes true and also if I introduce "points") is the prospect of getting the rare delights of stodgy comfort food from his school days. I'm familiar with this idea: my Dad, an essentially conservative man, had a very wide palate (he loved curry) thanks to my Mum and her superb cooking skills. But he continued to adore particularly the former British habit of serving something brown, something green and something off-white, smothered in something gravy- or sauce-like. If followed by a pudding that was 90% suet and covered in Birds custard, it would've been perfect.

CJBS loves the idea of school food, and the above describes it pretty well. Today I went out and bought some spam and some corned beef. He was delighted to see the tins in the cupboard. For him, cold spam with hot mashed potato and tomato ketchup would be perfection. If I could mash the corned beef into potatoes and serve with a limp gravy, well, he'd be in heaven.

This must be a thing of men of, er, a certain age. My late ex loved nothing more than mince and potatoes or a Vesta meal. My own creations were as nothing to what could come out of a 1950s-looking packet. For me, I drool over penne and tortellini, real South Asia curries and stuff with waterchestnuts and tofu bobbing about in them. Clearly British cuisine has moved on (and about time too) but a love of cheap food of the 50s clearly continues to dominate some people's palates.

I shall search for recipes that do a bit more with spam and a lot more with corned beef, if only to make either or both seem palatable now. But clearly I won't lose out if I just serve each out of the tin.

Points

Whilst I think on, I should clarify the mention of "points" above. Each ration book came with a page of non-specific coupons. These were called "points" and were designed to be effectively a second currency that the government could control. Every month, you accrued more available points. These could be "spent" (with the addition of actual money) on a range of goods, depending on what was in surplus and what was in short supply at the time. The government, via the Ministry of Food, set a points value on items that were in short supply but were not in themselves essential.

You could, if you so wished, use your points on basic rations, buying cheese or bacon "above the ration". But you could also use them on milk chocolate - a rarity that people really wanted - or on seasonal items like sprouts and mincemeat. Above all, they could be used on the items that came and went - often went for prolonged periods - like South African tinned peaches, a delicacy that still makes a 1940s or 1950s child drool. When in plentiful supply, tinned peaches could be bought for 3 or 4 points and the money the market asked (points goods were usually not price controlled). When they were in short supply, suddenly the points required would be 30 or 40, plus the steep price the market wanted. With 16 a month per person, the housewife - and it was a stupid man who tried to control these things, even whilst thinking nothing of controlling her money supply - could decide on that little treat this month and that store-cupboard item next.

Personally, as a lefty, I'd've preferred the government to have set price controls on these items and not bothered with points. But no housewife would've been without them in the 1940s.