The Results of a Day in the Kitchen

 

I spent most of Thursday on and off in the kitchen and then just an hour on Friday to cook and pot up the jam.  Time well spent if you look at the results.

I ended up with two and a half pounds of Compost Heap Jelly*.  There are no labels on the jars in this photo as they are still piping hot, but I will label them as soon as they are cold.

*If you want to see how to make this look at yesterday's post which includes a YouTube video from Pam the Jam. 

They are definitely going to be a sweet treat as it took a kilo of sugar for the liquid I had to make the jelly.  It's a good job I only have a thin covering on my toast.  😄

I had decided to turn the roll of puff pastry that I had instead of my fats and oils this on weeks rations into as many things as I could.  In the end I managed to get four meals from it.

Two quiche bases part cooked and now in the fridge ready to turn into quick lunches over the weekend, one breakfast jam turnover that I had yesterday, very sweet but also very delicious.  What a wartime treat that would have been.

And a Sausage Plait that I had for my tea when it was hot straight out of the oven.  Served with just some salad from the garden and a drizzle of mayo, it was tasty and very filling.

This is what it looked like inside it's pastry overcoat.

I thawed two Linda McCartney sausages out and made up a couple of tablespoons of dried stuffing mix, then stirred the two together before forming into this patty shape.  I was aiming to have something that looked like the old Linda McCartney Sausage Plaits that were sadly discontinued many years ago and that a lot of people miss.  Then I decided a little smear of the garlic Jam that I still have left over from last Christmas would be good on top.

 I cut slits either side of the patty and criss-crossed them over until everything was covered.  I brushed it with milk and cooked it for about 30 minutes alongside everything else to make full use of the oven space.  I pulled the quiche bases out first, then the turnover and finally the sausage plait.

Inside the turnover was just a big dollop of this months jam, not quite as big as it looks in this photo!!  

I'm think that I'm doing really well as I haven't touched the other half of my bi-monthly jam ration so it's all going to plan ... up to now, and of course I have my new jars of jam which will be available to me at any time as they have been made from scraps and my ration of sugar.  Either for me to eat or to give as gifts.

So I think that was a good day in the kitchen, three things made off this weeks menu and a bonus breakfast to replace my porridge yesterday.  And using this pastry made me realise that homemade shortcrust pastry is definitely better, which is a good thing because during the war years there was definitely no shop bought, ready rolled pastry available.  In future making my own will be so much cheaper, mere pennies instead of the current Aldi price for a roll which is £1.19, so much kinder to my budget.

Sue xx

Making Compost Heap Jelly ... and Using the Pastry

 

Yesterday I decided to use all the little bags of fruit scraps from the freezer, a punnet of raspberries that had been in the freezer for over two years, some dried up mandarin oranges that I had frozen and a few of the apples from our tree to make some Compost Heap Jelly.

My first stage was to get everything into a pan pour over a kettle full of recently boiled water so that it would be possible to cut everything up a bit, and then bring it to the boil.

I left it simmering away for about an hour with the lid on and then mashed it all up a bit with my masher.  After another 20 minutes of simmering I turned off the heat and left it to cool in the pan for an hour still with the lid on.  I wanted every bit of flavour and goodness out of all the mush.

Then after a mad look around the kitchen to find my straining bag, before remembering that my old one had broken and I had bought a new one and put it in a completely different place, I finally found it and got my fruity mush straining.

There was so much juice that i had to go old school and lift the straining bag higher over the jug.  Tying it with string to my kitchen cupboard.  I let it drip, drip, drip slowly at first and then I decided i didn't need crystal clear jelly I needed volume so I gave it a good squeeze.

I ended up with over 2 pints of lovely fruity juice.

And a little pile of mush that I put outside for the wasps for a while, before tipping it into the compost bin.

As well as this and as soon as I had a clear worktop I was making good use of my roll of puff pastry, that I took as part of this weeks rations.  Four meals worth of pastry products.

https://youtu.be/-jwQnlKSxQI?si=dYbieaSvYUxarB23

Today it's  time to boil up my juice with my sugar ration and make myself lots of lovely Compost Heap Jelly.  The beauty of jelly over jam is that the tasks can be split over two days.   Here's Pam who can describe how to do it all so much better than I can.

Sue xx

 

Lovely Pies, and the Easiest Recipe Ever

I took the drained vegetables from my stew made the other day and chopped them a bit finer.  

Then I made up some pastry with the last of last weeks fat ration ... there was a smidge over 2oz, so a bigger smidge over 4oz of flour and a pinch of salt ...  rolled it out and cut out six circles, three for the bottoms and three for the tops, left them all to rest in the fridge, the bottoms in the  greased tin to get the right shape and the tops on a plate wrapped in clingfilm.  

After a few minutes I filled the bottoms with the vegetable mixture and added the tops, brushing them all with milk and cooked them in a hot oven for 20 minutes.

One eaten straight from the oven with gently boiled cabbage and Bisto gravy and two left to cool and stashed in the fridge.

Delicious.

The easiest recipe ever:

Take leftovers

 Make pastry 

Put leftovers into pastry

Cook

Eat and enjoy.

Anything edible wrapped in pastry is elevated to whole other level in my humble opinion.

Sue xx

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