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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.

Sunday roast

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

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.

Positively green

The two previous posts here have, accidentally, emphasised the negative aspects to the rationing plan - how it doesn't actually replicate 1940 reality and how I'm effectively skipping three days of the month for my own convenience.

So I should be positive: today, I wished I was already doing the plan, because I've got some great leftovers.

To people born in the 1950s and 1960s, leftovers rarely sound positive. I was born in the 1970s, and my school friends talked disparagingly about leftovers (usually to be had of a Monday night). But I don't have this experience: my mum was (and still is) a chef of the first order and has catered to parties of 1000 and of 2. She knows exactly how much to cook and her leftovers, if she chooses to have any, are re-presented later as brand-new meals that nobody would know were recycled. (This is now in fashion, with at least one serious and one post-modern-lets-take-the-piss-of-a-subject-we-actually-want-to-make-money-from book on the market). Thanks to my mum's very patient teaching and lack of a gag reflex - I'm not a natural in the kitchen in the way she is - I can also spin leftovers into other meals.

On Monday, I made two cottage pie meals; one with real mince, one with faux veggie mince. Both with the same riced potato topping (via Kate and Jon's part-wedding present of a potato ricer, be still my beating heart: Best. Present. Ever). There's no way of making that meal for one sitting, especially in two mutually-exclusive varieties. The leftover pie is then re-served the next day, but is less alluring a second time, so needs something new adding.

This time it was steamed cabbage. Yes, you remember it from childhood and cringe. I don't. My memories of it from childhood is it being cooked barely and briefly until it was bright green, crunchy and tasty but not bitter. I told you my mum was good. A perfect supplement to cottage pie. But a whole cabbage leads to more cabbage than two people can eat.

No matter. The leftover cabbage will be tomorrow's bubble and squeak. But that's not my point here. My point is that I was left with the water the cabbage steamed in: salty water that was bright green. And some gravy that I made from granules that I didn't finish. These will go down the sink.

Except they shouldn't. I paid good money for that gravy. And the cabbage water contains much of the nutrients and almost all of the vitamins of the cabbage itself. I'm not doing it now - and I'm feeling guilty because of it - but when the rationing plan kicks in, leftover steaming water plus leftover gravy plus a few root vegetables... doesn't that just scream "the perfect soup"?

Terms of reference

Having established why we're doing this, we need to work out how this will work.

Obviously, some parts of the World War 2 "experience" are not going to be easy (or desirable) to repeat. Working out the dividing line without bankrupting the experiment is difficult.

First things first, however.

Rations

Wikipedia provides a useful ready-reckoner of rations at their highest and their lowest. Since we're starting in January, we might as well start with the January 1940 rations - tight, but positively generous by later standards.

That gives us bacon and ham at 8oz/230g a week. Sugar is 16oz/455g. Tea is 4oz/115g. Cheese is 8oz/230g a week. Jam is 1lb/450g a month, with marmalade at 2lb/900g a month. Butter is 8oz/230g a week and margarine 12oz/340g. Lard - ugh - is 3oz/85g a week. Sweets are 16oz/455g a month. Meat other than pig meat is slightly more left to the market economy to regulate, at a shilling and tuppence a week.

That meat ration provides the first hurdle: 1/2d is slightly over 5p now. The meat that buys in 2010 can barely be measured. So we need to allow for inflation. Here an invention not thought of in 1940 (except perhaps by Alan Turing) comes in handy. The internet says that, allowing for inflation, 1/2d is just £1.68. That's £6.72 a month, or enough, from our excellent but premium local butcher for about half a pound of lamb or a pound of some appalling cut of beef. And that's in a month. Hmmm.

As a vegetarian, which I am but CJBS is not, all I can find online is that I get "more" cheese to make up for the reduction in pig, "meat" and lard. This is unhelpfully vague (I'd be grateful to anyone with actual figures who got in contact) and, of course, doesn't take into account the modern ways of using Quorn and the even better Redwood vegan meat replacements.

Still, those figures are a good way of proceeding.

Off the ration

Now, how to deal with things that weren't rationed but were still difficult to get? For instance, fish was never rationed but it was very difficult to get hold of. My solution is to allow CJBS as much fish as he would want... but not from the supermarket. If he wants fish, he must go to the fishmongers, where their half-days and strange closing times make getting it difficult. Similarly with vegetables: you can have as much as you like, provide they're British. If they're Commonwealth... well, it's not a drain on Sterling but it does endanger our sailors. Vegetables from Europe are out, even thought the Nazis haven't yet (if 2010=1940) broken out into the west. Our local greengrocer has lots of local veg, amongst the non-local stuff and the air-freight stuff that makes me wince in 2010, let alone in 1940. Anything British from there is therefore fine.

Unrationable

With a faintly green side to this plan, what can we do about the other stuff that we now call "recycling" and "carbon footprint" but in 1940 called "waste not want not"? The 1890s house we live in has had all the fireplaces bricked up, mostly in a refurbishment in 1937 (the one that survived I had bricked up in a refurbishment in 2007). We have central heating - North Sea gas - rather than coal: something on both levels never thought of in 1940. The best I can offer is to be "careful" with it in 2010. We will turn off radiators we're not using and turn down the radiators we are. We'll also wrap up warmer. To a degree we already do this, of course, and fuel and power rationing didn't really kick in until much later in the war... but that's all really excuses.

I have a deep freeze and a fridge - something my Dad's mother never had, even into the 1990s. Both fridge and freezer were effectively unknown in the UK in 1940. I also have clingfilm - a development from the post-war oil boom. To do this properly, I'd need to give both up and live with food that goes off much more quickly. This is an anathema to me - wasting food just bothers me terribly - so I'll continue to treat the fridge like my grandma's pantry. But ideally I'll avoid the deep freeze for voracity.

Exceptions

CJBS points out that exceptions will need to be made three times in January. At the beginning, our best friends Jon and Kate will be visiting for Sunday lunch. Even if I take their rations into account, the roast lamb I promised a few months ago will be the entire meat ration for the month immediately. And Jon doesn't even eat meat! Shortly after, we're promised our friend Tony almost exactly the same meal - but long enough after that he'd notice that the meat had been reheated. Finally, right at the end of January, CJBS and me are in London for a play. This involves a restaurant meal; whilst these were not initially rationed, when it did happen they were limited to 5s (25p) a sitting. That's £7.18 allowing for inflation. £14.36 between the two of us? Well, not including wine and coffee (both were excluded and charged at a premium by restaurants to subsidise the main meal) that's something we could just about do. But the two guest meals will need thinking on about.