'srooms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Failing flat

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!

The leeky cauldron

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.