Celery, salad and soup

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.

Souper star

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

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.

Happiness is... asparagus soup

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

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.

Purple-sprouting pleasure

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:

Colcannon soup redux

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

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.

Ring a ring o' potatoes

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

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.

Maths lesson (probably wrong)

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.

How shortages are made

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

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

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

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.

Presenting salad and soup

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.

Posh nosh

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.

Stock answers

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.

Keeping Christmas merry

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.

Bubble and Squeak

As a dish made of leftovers, this is best if the cabbage was cooked a day or so before. It also doesn't harm if the mashed potato is from the day before or even if it is scraped from the top of a cottage pie or somewhere else. I'd imagine you could mash pre-cooked chips or croquettes or the like, but haven't tried it.

If you don't have leftover potato, peel and cut into roughly equal portions some potatoes: the better the potatoes, the better the mash, so something named rather than "baking potatoes" or "white potatoes" will work best. Put into a pan of lightly salted water and boil until you can pass a knife through one without pushing. Drain the water off.

Mash (or better still rice) the potatoes with some butter or olive oil.

If you don't have leftover cabbage, roughly chop your cabbage. If you have a stove-top steamer, steam for a minimum amount of time. If not, boil a pan of water and drop the cabbage in. It really doesn't take long either way. Minutes. The less the better.

Chop an onion. Put a bit of butter in a pan, melt it and add the onion. Wait for the onion to go translucent (see-through). Medium heat is best (too hot it'll caramelise, too cold it'll just sit there). When the onion is done, chuck in the cabbage and stir up. Now chuck in the potato mash. Add some pepper (and salt if your blood pressure is normal) and mix up.

The mixture can now be set aside until you're ready to use the oven for something else. When you are, place the mixture in a shallow baking pan and smooth over, or divide into balls, or put into Yorkshire Pudding trays, or whatever suits you best. Oven cook for as long as possible, until you see signs of browning on the top.

Note that it doesn't matter if any part goes cold during the making of this, so it's perfectly possible to do all of this using just one pan, a colander and a baking tray.