Day One

I’m normally an “eat and run” person on weekday mornings, as I have to get to the train station for my daily commute. I usually grab a cereal bar and a coffee. Today I took a couple of weetabix and some milk with me to work, which I ate at my desk before starting.

Speaking of coffee…. Coffee wasn’t really rationed during WW2, but that’s probably because it wasn’t as popular as now. Most folk were tea drinkers. We aren’t really tea drinkers, so to be fair, I decided to limit the amount of coffee we had. The tea ration was about 15 teabags per person for a week, so I decided we could have 2 cups of coffee a day at home. At work we can have a cuppa, because it isn’t coming out of our ration… it’s only the same as getting one at a tea shop or a canteen.

Lunch (in the spirit of not wasting…) was a sandwich containing leftover sage and onion stuffing from weekend.

All the guidelines from WW2 suggest you should have one raw vegetable a day, so I will tackle this by making lots of salads. Today’s salad is lettuce, white cabbage, beetroot tops, a little onion, a bit of cucumber.

I have just been flicking through “We’ll Eat Again”, and I have found the following: It’s a good idea to cook potatoes in their jackets. The skin stops the precious Vitamin C from escaping and getting lost in the cooking water. Steaming potatoes is best of all. I always cook potatoes in their skins, and I prefer to steam them too. It’s good to know I was already cooking them in the most nutritious way.

With our Trenchmeat Pudding I served mashed potatoes and gravy made from homemade veg stock & Bisto.

The pudding was much tastier than I expected, although if I did it again I think I would probably add more spices. Just a personal preference there.