My Wartime Rationing Evening Meals

 

My wartime rationing evening meals have not all been strictly 'wartime'.  While I am trying to eat my way through things that I already have in there's been a lot of  'in the spirit of' going on.

Sometimes I'm pretty close and the 'bangers and mash with gravy' fits that bill in my opinion, although some steamed cabbage on the side would have made it perfect.

The bread crumbed plaice and mash not quite right, and of course there were no veggies.  I just wasn't hungry enough and with me if I'm not that hungry it's always the vegetables that get left off.

I really need to do something about that!!

The Garlic Kyiv definitely not 1940s fare, but the rice and peas would have been.

Beans on toast one night when I wasn't hungry ... there's a real theme developing here isn't there!

My favourite has to be the nights when I have pasty or a pie with gravy.  That way I can incorporate the vegetables into it's pastry wrapping and I don't feel as guilty that they're not on my plate.

My favourite meal up to now and one that I think will be on the menu at least a couple of nights every month is the Woolton Pie.  Tasty, well balanced and so easy to make.

Sue xx

My Weekly Rations - Week Three

 

Week three of my ration challenge already, and actually I'm a day late with everything.  The last Bank Holiday of the year ... before the Christmas ones ... has thrown everything into disarray and just as I thought I knew what day it was it's suddenly not that day at all.  😄

To head the post a black and white photo of my weekly rations this week ... I love black and white photos ... but don't worry the colour version is at the bottom.

I didn't need any milk this week as I have around half of last weeks left.  That will do for me I don't use milk in many things.  If by any chance I suddenly start drinking lots of the stuff there's always the spare Monthly Rations carton still in the cupboard.  

I put my coffee jar on the scales and zeroed them so that I could just add this weeks two ounces to the jar.

I didn't enjoy that cream cheese last week, and as it's a very ultra processed food I won't be buying that one again.  I will however still be using the Violife cheese that I enjoy.  The grated bit is leftover Cheddarton and the block is a new pack of Extra Mature that I opened to make it up to my four ounces.

The extra mature actually has the least ingredients, so I will have to think long and hard about if I want to carry on eating the Cheddarton version ... it is delicious though and the nearest dairy-free cheese to actual creamy cheddar.

The spread that I use as my butter and margarine allowance actually weighed exactly 6oz in it's tub, so I just left it there ... and I've given the butter dish the week off. 

I topped the sugar cannister up with this week's 8oz.

I'm thinking that I now have enough to be able to make my Green Tomato Chutney and maybe a few jars of Compost Heap Jelly too.  🍅

This weeks oil ration in place of lard.  

I will carry on doing this until all my stock is used up ... that may take a few years at just 2oz a week!!

This week's very random sweet ration. 😃

My sweetie stash is building up.  I still have one pack of the little chocolate covered mini rice cakes from week one and one of the little bars of chocolate from week two.

Here is everything all together in glorious colour, including my weekly egg and two veggie sausages.

I ate last weeks egg over the weekend it made for a lovely breakfast, I just fried it with the only little cherry tomato that was ready for picking and had it on a thick slice of toast.  I am finding that having such simple meals, with simple and few ingredients, means that every mouthful is savoured and really enjoyed.  

Sue xx

A Pound of Spuds

One pound of potatoes.

The Ministry of Food advice recommended that everyone ate 1lb of potatoes a day, or 1/2lb of potatoes and 4oz cabbage.  If people did this it had been worked out by the experts that they would have the adult daily requirement of vitamin C, meaning that the lack of citrus fruits would not cause too much of a problem.

Your cabbage could also be eaten with 1/2lb of carrots to provide enough vitamin A.  Four ounces of the National loaf along with 4oz of oats would give you your daily requirement of vitamin B.  So with all this in mind I am starting to see why at the end of the war years the people of Britain were by and large the healthiest they had ever been.

With the manual work so many of them did in factories, on the land and the housewives at home doing all the chores with less mechanical aids than we have these days, everyone would have been fitter, and yes no doubt pushed to the extremes of their endurance at times, but overall fitter and healthier.  That is if the person providing the food was a good manager, and there were lots of cases where the homemaker wasn't at first.

The Ministry of Food issued a lot of leaflets, booklets, information films that you could watch at the cinema, radio broadcasts with tips and advice, and even physical lessons in village halls and church halls given by people such as Marguerite Patten, who was the absolute queen of the war years if you ask me, to try and ensure that everyone could learn all the new tips and recipes.

What a whopper!!

More than a day's recommended portion in one potato.

And remember potatoes, carrots and cabbage were never rationed.  As long as you had the money and your greengrocer had his supplies, you could buy as much as your family needed.

Sue xx

My Wartime Rationing Breakfasts and Lunches

 

I've not really been writing that much about my day to day meals, to be honest they are not really that interesting, although they are tasty in their own way and most definintely filling.

The go to breakfast for the first week and then a couple of days of the second week was porridge.

On the first day that I made porridge for breakfast I put my normal scoopful of oats into the pan on the scales to see what measurement I was used to.  It seemed a fair amount so I decided that I would continue to use this much.

Now with oats being on the Points System at 2 per pound, and me only getting 1lb of oats this month I know they are not going to last me all month.  I should get approximately 10 or 11 breakfasts of porridge this month.  I will perhaps buy 2lb of oats next month.

So to make the oats last longer, and of course to stop any monotony, I have been interspersing them on a couple of days with toast.  Sometimes with spread and sometimes with jam and sometimes with jam and spread ... but never with both on one slice of toast at the same time.  

Which is absolutely fine with me as that is the way I have always had my toast since being an adult. 😀

On the days that I have toast for breakfast I usually make my lunch potato based, in this case a baked potato ... or Jacket Potato as they were called in the UK during the war years ... with half of one of my tins of beans also bought with points.

On the porridge days I try and make my lunch bread based, on this day I used up my two veggie sausages with a part-baked roll I had in the freezer ... and very nice it was too.

Bread was never rationed during the war years, but everyone was asked to make good use of the homegrown potatoes whenever they could as they were in much greater supply.  Our wheat had to be supplemented with large amounts brought to the UK on ships by the Merchant Navy as we could not grow enough to feed our population.

Potato Pete was introduced as a friendly way to make people and children want to eat more potatoes.  He had a recipe book full of tips and ideas and appeared in many advertisements.

As the recommended amount of potatoes to eat in a day is 1lb I am going to weigh out what a pound looks like ... it sounds an awful lot.  I work much better with visuals, as you might be able to tell by all the photos that I share.  😁

Sue xx

A Step Back in Time

I was sat on the benches outside the pub for a rest while Alan ran some errands the other day and decided to photograph our lovely old cobbles.

This is the look towards the benches and the pub with the Market Cross in the foreground.

And this is a look down the High Street of our town from there.

A modern bustling little town with parking down one side ... except on market day and bollards dotted the full length on both sides so that cars don't go onto the pavements.

I'm not sure what year this is, but it's the same view in a time of much less traffic.

And this is how it looked in the 1940s looking up towards the pub and the market cross.

A step back in time.

Sue xx

Wartime Chocolate Spread

 

I just had to do it after watching Utility Jude's YouTube video, see the last post if you're wondering what I'm going on about.  😀

I made it to her exact proportions:

2 tbsp. Mashed Potato

1tbsp. Sugar

1 tbsp. Cocoa Powder

a dash of Vanilla Essence - or extract in my case as that's what I had.

Simply mix all the ingredients really well together.

Making sure that you get rid of any lumps of mash or coco powder ... the cocoa powder highlights all the little lumps of mashed potato that you might not have realised were still there!

You get this amount from the mix.

Which is enough to cover two slices of a large loaf of bread.  

I wouldn't cut your bread too thick or this will be a very stodgy snack.  Of course I knew what it was as I pondered over the taste for a while, so then I decided in the interests of a fair test I would give a piece to Alan to get his un-informed opinion.  A proper blind taste test.

He said it tasted like Nutella with not enough nuts, he said it was very chocolatey, and very edible ... he DID NOT guess that it was made with mashed potatoes and was very intrigued when he found out.

We both thought that if you had no chocolate in the house and were craving a chocolatey fix, this really would hit the spot.  After Alan's comments I think I will try it with almond extract next time in place of the vanilla and see if it gets even closer in flavour to Nutella.

It is a very filling snack for sure.

Sue xx

Pie, Mash and Chocolate Spread

 

It was Pie and Mash for tea last night, with the now obligatory Bisto gravy.

I didn't really think the gravy would go that well with the pie, as it was a Saag Aloo pie from the freezer that I wanted to use up, but it really did.  It made me think that I will try to make a curried vegetable pie for myself, after all curry powder was available during the war years and I have a whole drawer of spices to use up.  I only had a little bit of mash as I wasn't that hungry, but I still made enough to have some left overs.

During the war years mashed potato was used in a lot of ration recipes as you were advised to eat around 1lb of potatoes a day per person.  I may not be quite managing that at the moment but I am trying to make sure I have some available.

And there's a very specific recipe I wanted to try, so I separated out two tablespoons of the potatoes before I added any salt or butter.

https://youtu.be/iOK6zYFDloU?si=-AcrtkZiZFaJlamI

  

I'll let you know how it tastes.  😀

Sue xx

The Victory Garden ... and at last a Homegrown Large RED Tomato

My little garden with it's two wooden raised beds and the few pots and planting boxes that I have,  has now been officially renamed - The Victory Garden.

And as if to celebrate the renaming, my monthly subscription of Kitchen Garden arrived with it's usual three packets of free seeds for me to plant this month.

Cabbages, Parsley and Lettuce seeds will be going in the beds in a couple of weeks.  And I decided to take them up on the cover offer of 'Free Autumn Planting Onions Sets', I also ordered some garlic to put in at the same time.  So that will be all the beds filled again by the end of September.

The Victory Garden is not having the Winter off this year!!

And just in time for breakfast this morning my first large red tomato turned red.  Seen here with it's cousin who's plants have already given us a few red cherry tomatoes.

And of course we've already been eating the yellow ones, just a few up to now but they are very tasty.  I've had my eyes on that beautiful big tomato for days now, watching it change from green to pale tinged red to full blown red this morning.

And my gosh was it delicious.

I sliced and cooked it gently with some garlic powder and the green tops of a spring onion, also from the garden and ate it on a piece of buttered toast.  The simplest and most delicious meal I've eaten for ages.

I'll be watching all the other tomatoes very closely now. 

Sue xx

 

This Week's Non-Ration Shopping ... and Scrumping

 

The fridge was looking pretty bare so I decided it was time to go to the supermarket and pick up my non-rationed foods.  There's also an invader in amongst all the almost authentic WWII goodies.

A banana!!  🍌

Alan wanted one, and it seemed a bit much to make the cashier do a single banana as a separate transaction so it's on my receipt and therefore in my photo.

The single potato as well as the bag of potatoes is there because I could get 60 extra Nectar points by buying loose potatoes ... so one was enough to qualify me for that.

I weighed all the potatoes together before putting them away and I have just under 7lbs of spuds.  Enough for me to be able to have the recommended 1lb a day.  It's a good job I like potatoes!!

And on the subject of potatoes, I have really been fancying some crisps this past week, so I thought what are the oldest crisps around, I'll buy those.     In the UK seemingly it was Smith's crisps, and by 1934 they were selling 200 million packets of crisps in Britain each year.

Smiths Potato Crisps, now owned by Walkers and called Salt & Shake.  

I remember getting these as a child and loving the little twist of salt in the blue paper.  Now it's a sealed packet of salt but back then it was just twisted closed.  The thrill of getting two, and the disappointment of not getting one at all, is still in my memory.

Here's my receipt ... and the apples that I scrumped from the park while I was walking the dogs on the way to the supermarket.   There were some lovely looking larger ones higher up the tree but even shaking the branches a bit couldn't dislodge them yet.  I'll have to go back with Alan and see if they're ready to fall off in a couple of days.

 Free food ... yes please.  😄

I know I went over my aimed for £10 per week spend this week, but as I was so far under it last week I thought I would let myself off with the overspend.  What took me over was buying the packet of fish portions.  

Fish was never on ration as it was regularly unavailable or only in the shops in small quantities.  So if you were near the front of one of the long snaking queues you might have been lucky.  I'll allow myself some sort of fish two or three times a month ... if I get in the queue in time.  😉

Sue xx

The Ever So Famous Woolton Pie

 

I realised the other day that I hadn't show you my little individual Woolton Pie in all it's gravy covered glory.  

I showed you it the other day, naked in it's little enamelled dish, but not with it's pastry lid and ready for eating.

I rolled the lid out a little bit thinner to accommodate the piled up vegetables and once trimmed used those trimmings to make the letters for the top.

I've always found the best recipe for it is in this book, which is actually an amalgamation of three of Marguerite Pattern's wartime books - We'll Eat Again, The Victory Cookbook and Post-War Kitchen.  I'm guessing the Woolton Pie recipe will be in at least two of the three individual books.

It would be a HUGE pie if you used one pound each of your chosen vegetables so I always just use leftover vegetables when I making another dish.  It's a very basic and forgiving recipe, you just cook your vegetables and then assemble them in some sort of gravy or sauce under a pastry or mashed potato lid.  If you are a meat eater you could also add some leftover, chopped up cooked meat to the dish before covering it with pastry.

Simple and very tasty, and possibly one of the most famous of all wartime recipes.

Sue xx