Royal cooking

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.

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.

Failing flat

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!

Triumph and disaster

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!

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.

Don't snow on my parade

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.

Everyone likes a sausage

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.

All good things...

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)

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.

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.

Hot diggerty dog

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.

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.

Let him stew

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.

And the final product

I've finished the savoury meat roll experiment. Only the result has been sausage and potato patties. I'm not unhappy with this.

The texture from not steaming but baking instead was firmer and just looked "right", compared to the soggy faux-meat version I made for myself. Out of the oven, I rolled the result into balls, flattened them, dipped them in a little beaten egg then shallow fried them.

When they were golden, I took them out and drained them on kitchen roll. I'd imagine that, during the 1940s, people would've left this sort of thing on racks and collected the run-off fat, perhaps even keeping them in a low oven for half an hour to extract as much as was going to fall out. Gravy hides a multitude of such non-sins.

 

And now the results go into the fridge, for me to reheat tomorrow for CJBS to pass a verdict. I think they'll be fine. Meanwhile, I'll keep the browned breadcrumb remains and the fat from shallow frying (it was the fat I cooked the sausages in earlier, so it was already flavoursome, as these things go) for use tomorrow and look for a recipe that will use both.

And the rationing experiment doesn't even begin until 2 Janaury!

Savoury meat roll

As previously mentioned I'm trying a variation of the savoury meat roll recommended by La Patten, re-reusing the bubble and squeak. And it's looking good.

I'm using faux sausages, which I tried - and failed - to pass through the potato ricer. So I mashed them with a fork. I used sage rather than thyme, on the basis that I like sage, and that I didn't have any thyme. I also made up my own mustard using mustard powder.

Since this is just for me, and despite my blood pressure, I added the outrageous amounts of salt and pepper Patten requires. The result, formed into a loaf, covered with foil, is now in the oven gently steaming itself.

The breadcrumbs - also homemade - bit follows in about half an hour. In the meantime, CJBS has had his bubble and squeak (his first go), his cottage pie (his third go) and two cumberland sausages bought today from the local butcher.

Please excuse his trousers. If the savoury faux-meat roll works, I'll cook CJBS an actual meat version, using the internals of the remaining sausages tonight.

Edit: Whilst it doesn't look all that appetising, here's the savoury faux-meat roll straight out of the oven but before it gets the breadcrumbs:

Leftover leftovers

Having previously written about making bubble and squeak, I then went and made some bubble and squeak. Actually, I made lots of bubble and squeak.

So now I have leftover leftovers. This is a good thing, because, if nothing else, it forces a bit of creativity from me.

I've also got some Redwood vegan sausages in. So the bubble, plus the sausages, must equal something tasty - if only just serving the sausages with the bubble and covering it in gravy. 

Marguerite Patten suggests a savoury meat roll. This is made with sausage meat (which appears to have been unrationed but almost impossible to get hold of and, by the end of the war, was only about 2% meat when you could get it), soaked stale bread and pinto beans. This sounds foul, on two counts: wet bread makes me retch, for reasons I've never worked out, and pinto beans are pinto beans. 

Adapting the recipe tonight to swap the bread and the beans for the bubble would seem the thing to do. I'll have to improvise, but I'd suggest mashing the faux sausages, mix them into the bubble with some mustard and some thyme and finally add gravy browning for colour and for the binding properties of the cornflour. The original, because of the bread I'd assume, wanted steaming for two hours. That would prevent it drying out, but cooking it covered in the oven might also work. The end result is then sliced, rolled into breadcrumbs and served hot with gravy. 

I'll have fun trying this, then inflict a meat version on CJBS if it works.