Bread, Vegetables, Porridge and Woolton Pie

 

My only shopping this week has been a brown unsliced loaf and a bottle of washing up liquid.  

Bread was never rationed during the war years and the brown National Loaf was the only sort available to buy in the shops as it was seen as too wasteful to mill white flour.  I will try to stick to this sort of bread as I think it is reasonably authentic ... even if lovely and soft, something the National Loaf really wasn't. 

 Household cleaners and soaps etc were on a points system of their own, but I think I'll get my head around that in a couple of weeks, but these were the only things that I needed for now.

I do all my washing of pots by hand in the sink, I have never had a dishwasher and indeed there wouldn't be room for one in my small home even if I did want one, so I am already quite authentic in the kitchen for pot washing.  Using just two bowls of soapy water and a drizzle of rinsing water each day means that I use much less water than a machine would as I am just mostly washing pots for one person.

Yesterday while my porridge cooked I chopped the vegetables to use for my lunch of stew, a couple of bowls of soup, a pasty filling ... and a Woolton Pie.

I made good use of that little pot of Flora that I had found in the fridge and spread it lavishly on the crust end of the loaf to have with my lunchtime vegetable stew.

I added some frozen peas to the pan and left it all on the hob to cool down slowly while I ate my lunch.

Then once I had finished my lunch I divided the pan contents into a large portion for a pasty, a smaller pie dish full for the Woolton Pie and whizzed the rest up into enough soup for two large bowls.  The one in the photo was going into the fridge and the other was already in the freezer.

And here you can see what I had decided to do with the ready rolled pastry from the fridge.  I had enough to make three lids for my little enamel dishes ... a perfect size for a Woolton Pie for one person ... and the rest I rolled out to make a pasty for my tea.

I had my pasty with some Bisto gravy and then put one lid and the enamel dish into the fridge for one Woolton Pie, and after wrapping them well I put the other two pastry lids into the freezer.  They should thaw out in the time it takes me to cook vegetables for future pies, a nice time saving little trick ... not one a wartime housewife would have been able to do with no freezer.

Sue xx