Day Twenty One - Old Jam, Fadge ... and This Week's Giveaway

 

A simple and very early breakfast, hence the low lighting in the kitchen.  

Isn't it staying dark longer in the mornings now, something I quite like just as I like the dark evenings.  Something I'm not so keen on though are the high winds and heavy rain that we've been having over the last few days.  Alan's Fig tree went from leaves and fruits to just a few unripe fruits clinging grimly to the branches in the space of two nights.  Oh well we are halfway through Autumn now, so it is all to be expected.

I noticed that the jam that I am currently using is one of my much earlier batch of Compost Heap Jellies made way back in 2016.  There have been many others since then, so I wonder why this one is still around.  It's still very tasty that's for sure.  I need to get my new, much smaller batch done today.

Later I set to making some mashed potatoes.  

I drained the potatoes and kept the cooking water.  While it was still hot, I dissolved two teaspoons of stock powder into it as I thought it would be a good base for a flavoured rice on another day.

Once they had steamed dry a bit while I was making the stock, the potatoes were mashed and divided into two.

The 8oz of potato was mixed and kneaded into 4oz flour.

Then patted out into a round that would fit into my frying pan and cut into four.

I sprinkled some grated cheese on one of the farls as they were cooking and then topped it with one of the others once it was on my plate.  To be honest I could barely taste it, so although it perhaps made it slightly healthier it was a bit of a waste of cheese for flavour.

It was quite tasty, but also very stodgy.  I should maybe have remembered from the Potato Floddies recipe that I followed HERE, that potato and flour do not sit that lightly with me.  Anyway, it was a filling lunch and feeling so podged meant I did not have any inclination whatsoever to snack during the afternoon.

My tea was a simple Bangers, Mash and Gravy using the last of this morning's batch of mashed potatoes.

 Oh, I do love mashed potatoes ... especially when they are not mixed with flour.  😄

And now, time for this week's giveaway.  All you have to do is leave a comment below saying you would like to be entered and your name will go into the draw tomorrow to win this little collection of replica wartime ephemera.

Good Luck. 😀

Sue xx

 

Day Nineteen - Pigs in Clover, Wartime Recipe

 

Time to start using up those four sausages I thought to myself as soon as I got out of bed this morning.  I wanted to try a recipe that I had read about in my Victory Cookbook and in the Food Facts book.  It's called by various names, usually either Pigs in Clover or Potato Piglets.  Whatever you call it it's very simple and as you can see from the ingredients above it requires just one sausage and one potato per person that you are serving. 

And a cup of coffee always goes down well when you are planning your menu. 

Oh, and while my sausage thawed out, I remembered to photograph my porridge breakfast this time. 😀

For my lunch I warmed up the other portion of yesterdays lentil soup and had it with the last of the croutons.

The recipe for Pigs in Clover is so simple it's barely a recipe at all.

Simply take one baking potato and one sausage for each person and using an apple corer ... or a potato peeler in my case, as I haven't got an apple corer anymore ... make a hole right through the centre of the potato and push the sausage through.  Wrap the stuffed potato in foil and bake in a moderate oven for around an hour, or until your potato is soft to the touch.  Serve on a bed of lightly steamed and buttered cabbage.

Now I adapted this a little bit to suit modern times, I thawed out the Linda McCartney frozen sausage and to save on power, something that would have been approved on during the war, I used Alan's microwave to zap the potato for five minutes to speed up the cooking time.

This was absolutely delicious as it was, but after eating it and planning to make it again I was thinking of all the other ways to serve a Pig in Clover.   With gravy for a start, and perhaps with a portion of sage and onion stuffing for a small Sunday lunch type meal, or perhaps on a hot day with a side of coleslaw and a sliced tomato.  All variations that would fit in with wartime rationing or with modern eating habits.

A very tasty wartime recipe and one that I will definitely be keeping in my repertoire.

Someone else who made this recipe and blogged about it.

Sue xx

Week Three - Day Fifteen - The Oslo Meal

 

The day started well with a large bowl of porridge and a cup of coffee.  I've found that my usual 50g of porridge oats is just under 2oz, never have I been converting as much as I have just recently.  It makes for a filling breakfast, so much so that it was nearly two o'clock before I even started thinking about lunch.

I wasn't really in the mood for cooking when my tummy started to rumble, so I thought what better time to try out The Oslo Meal.

The Oslo meal, or breakfast or dinner ... it had many names ... was originally a diet developed in 1920's for Norwegian school children in Oslo, then adopted by many in the UK in the 1930's as a health rather than weight loss diet.  It was picked up by the Ministry of Food during WWII as an ideal and healthy lunch for both children or adults and it was eaten regularly by many people.

The main component parts are brown bread, butter or spread, milk, cheese and some raw and mostly green vegetables, along with a glass of milk.  And after eating this for my late lunch I can testify wholeheartedly that it is very satisfying and very filling.  I ate some of it as it was and then made myself a huge sandwich with everything that was left on my plate.

Still comfortably full at teatime I decided to thaw out one of my little dishes of stewed apple and blackberries and the little bag of saved crumble mix and just have that for some supper with a cup of coffee mid evening.

So, it was a good day, with meals eaten at all the wrong times if you are being pedantic, but a very tasty and interesting day too.

Sue 

Day Six - Jam, Parsley and WWII Vegetable Curry

 

Day six was a good day food wise.

 I started the day feeling not all that hungry, so a slice of my brick of a loaf toasted, with one half buttered and one half jammed was enough, along with a lovely cup of coffee.

Oh, and I'm really enjoying using my cups and saucers.  

The cups are designed just right if you know what I mean.  Your fingers fit through the handle perfectly, there is a little rest built into the handle, so the cup doesn't slip down if you are concentrating ... and to be honest I'm rarely concentrating on my drink when I'm drinking it, there's always something else on the go to distract me.

Lunch was equally as simple.  

As I have a good amount of cheese left, I decided on a very cheesy baked potato and at last I remembered a sprinkle of my Parsley.  

Eating parsley, which grows well in this country for a long season and dries for Winter use, was highly recommended during the war years for its high vitamin C, A and iron content, and my poor plant has been sat waving at me for days. 🌿

I set to and made my evening meal nice and early so that the flavours could develop as it cooled. I chose the Mixed Vegetable Curry from page 39 of my Food Facts for the Kitchen Front book.

It made a nice sort of spicy curry, nothing like modern flavours, but in a way all the nicer for that.  With plain boiled rice it made a pleasant change from all the potatoes and bread that I've been eating up to now.  And there are leftovers of both for tomorrow, so I have adapted my menu for the final day of this week.

https://youtu.be/rLBRK5Tf1I4

I'm currently watching this via YouTube.  Although the quality of the old television series isn't to our current HD standards you soon forget that and sink into the lovely gentle atmosphere of Harry Dodson and Ruth Mott teaching us in their unique way.  Enjoy. 

Sue xx

Day Two - Missing Bowls of Porridge, Homegrown Salad and Spinach Au Gratin

 

Now this is getting silly ... after taking this photo and drinking this coffee I DEFINITELY took a photo of my bowl of porridge and its accompanying apple, but it has vanished!!

You will have to imagine a green Beryl ware bowl filled right to the brim with porridge... yes, I made my usual portion forgeting that the bowl was smaller ...  and sitting just behind it was a red apple.

There that was breakfast, doesn't it look lovely.  😁

Thankfully my camera did not delete the photos of my lunch.

I took my inspiration from this recipe and started with a grated carrot, then I went off on a tangent and replaced cabbage with leaves and cucumber from the Victory Garden, a single spring onion finely sliced and the merest hint of a bit of spread to stick everything to the bread.

Oh, it was tasty, very fall-y apart-y but tasty.

While I was out in the garden gathering in lunch, I picked all the remaining usable tomatoes and brought them in.  Some might ripen a bit more with the help of the few red ones I already had, but the majority will be turned into some Green Tomato Chutney to help fill my store-cupboard for winter.

I decided the next job was to process all the scrumped apples.

It didn't take long.  All the cores and peels were put into a bag and popped into the freezer, when I have more time I will make a batch of Compost Jelly, a nice mild fruity jelly/jam that's made from all the odds and ends of fruit and peelings strained so that none of the pips or bits get through.  

More food for the winter stores.

Once stewed into a glorious mushy, lumpy mess I filled one large and two small enamel pie dishes and then decided to put in some of the blackberries from the freezer into the hot apples.

For my evening meal I had chosen another recipe from the Food Facts book, this time a healthy sounding Spinach au Gratin, I decided to accompany it with a simple baked potato.

... the last line over the page reads: 'moderate oven for about 20 minutes to crisp the top and blend the flavours well'.

They were all cooked at once in the oven to save on wartime/modern fuel costs, although I did zap the potato briefly in the microwave so that I didn't need to have the oven on for too long.

My tea was tasty and very filling, but somehow didn't quite sit right, I don't know how to improve on it really, perhaps some other vegetables mixed in with the spinach.  I will have another go at it with some tweaks though, as I could almost feel the mass of greens doing me good.

Oh, the large crumble turned out lovely, unfortunately I was too full to eat it, even later for supper.

So I ended the day as I had begun it with a nice cup of coffee.

Sue x

Day One - Vegetables, Lord Woolton Pie, Crumble Prep and Trimmed Spring Onions

 

Day one of my modern wartime rationing started with a bowl of weetabix, well the equivalent sort from Aldi but I always call them weetabix ... with a little 'w'.  Somehow, I haven't got the photo, I could have sworn I took it but no, it's not on my camera or phone.  Oh well, I'm sure you can picture two little weetabix with a good splash of milk in a little green Beryl Wood's Ware bowl.

Soon after breakfast I started making my lunch and evening meal, as it was to be a bowl of vegetable soup and a Lord Woolton Pie the base was exactly the same ... vegetables.

Before long everything was in the pan and simmering gently in a couple of pints of stock.

Time to get out the unsliced loaf that I bought the other day.  

I purposefully bought it a little bit early as the good old National Loaf was always sold one day after it was made, so that it would be easy to slice with little wastage, and unlike modern bread it turned into a solid brick within twenty-four hours.  

Oh, how lucky we are.  My more modern wholemeal loaf was still wonderfully soft and easy to slice.

On the menu for lunch was Vegetable Soup and bread, but the vegetables looked so good that I decided to simply have them as they were.  It was delicious.

I put 12oz of the vegetable mix from the pan into my enamel dish and left it to cool ready to be topped later, then I whizzed up the rest with my stick blender to make a pan of soup for later in the week.  That's a few lunches sorted out then.  I think I have it twice more on this week's menu so some will be frozen for future use.

After lunch, I was either brave or mad ... I'll tell you which later in the week!!

I used half of my week's fat ration to make up some pastry and crumble mix.  I just did the usual half fat to flour ratio.

Then I split the rubbed-in mixture in half.  

To one half I added some salt and water and made pastry, which went to rest in the fridge for a couple of hours.  The other half had an ounce of my sugar ration added to it and a spoonful or two of oats, this will be my crumble mix for on top of some of the apples and maybe a blackberry or two from the freezer.

Once cooled the vegetables were topped with the rested rolled-out pastry, which I photographed just in case it all went horribly wrong in the oven!!

Lord Woolton Pie

 But I needn't have worried it came out looking very presentable and it was delicious.  I should perhaps have had some gravy and cabbage with it as was my original plan, but I just fancied trying the pastry exactly as it was, and I wasn't really that hungry.  

It was delicious.

Taken from this book, but this recipe is also to be found in lots of other books, especially those written my Margeurite Patten.

So that was day one over, and I found it pretty satisfying to be honest.  I had to fight the urge to snack a few times, but a cup of coffee in my little Jasmine cup and saucer or a nice glass of cold water straight from the fridge and I was fine.

Oh, and now that the spring onions have had a good trim they fit on the shelf in the fridge. 😃

Sue xx

Wartime Recipe - Potato Floddies

 

I think it's about time I started sharing some recipes and some more photos of the food that I've been eating.  Life has been a bit hectic these last couple of weeks and I really don't feel I'm doing this Challenge the justice it deserves.  So the first recipe I'm sharing with you was on the menu on Tuesday of this week and was  Potato Floddies.

How brilliant I thought to make something that sounds filling and vaguely nourishing out of such limited ingredients, so I thought I'd give it a go.

I used the two small potatoes you can see in the bowl in the first photo and I added a pinch of garlic granules for a bit more flavour.  I have read that garlic was occasionally available during the war years,  although I guess this would have been seen as quite an exotic ingredient back then and it was usually considered more as a medicinal item than a foodstuff.  So with this in mind I will just be using up the dried powder, granules and frozen cloves that I had already in my store cupboard at the start of the Challenge and then just not buy anymore as though my 'rations' had dried up.

One example of my research into garlic in the UK during the 1940's is HERE.  And indeed I must have a copy of the leaflet mentioned somewhere in my replica leaflet stash.

I think I added a touch too much flour, in total I added three desert spoonfuls ... two would have been sufficient and although they smelt garlicky as they cooked I could barely taste it.

So what's my opinion of Potato Floddies?

Very filling, quite tasty ... especially when very hot ... but very stodgy.  Perhaps though that was due to me adding a bit too much flour, so if you have a go be a bit lighter with the flour to potato ratio.  What would make them so much better would be the addition of some grated real garlic cloves or perhaps a quarter of a grated or finely sliced onion.  They just needed something else added for more flavour, but I guess these days we are just used to our foods being a lot more flavourful and my taste-buds need to adapt a little bit more.

I would give them a 5/10.

The recipe pictured above came from this book.  

I have put links to Amazon on my sidebar for the books and DVDs that I have been watching, just so you can go and have a look and get other peoples opinions of them and not just go off mine or maybe get yourself a copy.   Some of my books are only available in the Used off Amazon, but then that's to be expected as that's where I got mine from 😀

Sue xx