Ration Week part 2

This morning was a grueling one... okay, it wasn't, but I had porridge for breakfast (in this picture it looks suspiciously like fish paste!). I guess it's not really a pun since porridge and gruel aren't the same thing exactly, but anyway. The easiest thing to make and somehow I mucked it up--it was all rubbery and gross. I think some kind of sweetener might have helped, but I haven't anything appropriate (i.e. treacle, Golden Syrup) aside from sugar, but I'm hoping to use some of that for some other stuff (like parsley honey).

Before I move onto dinner, here's a picture of my staple rations this week (since this photo/blog idea came kind of late in the game, some of them have evidently been dipped into already). I have to confess that some of this isn't 100% accurate; the proportions of rations went up and down (mostly down, I expect) throughout and following the war, so I have a few different 'eras' of rationing to choose from. Here's what I've got:
Sugar: 8 oz
Tea: 2 oz
Butter/Margarine: 2 oz
Sausage/ham/bacon (uncooked): 4 oz
Eggs: 1
Cheese: 4 oz

(I have butter instead of margarine and sausage instead of bacon or ham)
Again, the numbers went up and down so this is sort of a general amalgam of possible amounts.

Lunch/dinner (either a very late lunch or an early dinner) was amazing. I found a recipe for 'Sausage en Surprise' from Bombers and Mash, which has quickly become one of my favourite books. Essentially it's mashed potato wrapped around sausage. I'm not sure what the surprise is supposed to be--that it's bloody amazing, perhaps. Here's what you do:

Grill and skin sausages. Let them cool. Mix an egg into some mashed potato. Wrap the mashed potato around the sausage. Let everything cool and set, then either throw it in a pan or brush it with egg and cover it with bread crumbs and stick it in the oven.

Like the other meals so far, I've adapted them slightly to what I've got--and of course, ww2 cooking was all about adapting, right? So. I'm only one person so the recipe has been reduced (though there were no specific proportions suggested in the first place), but anyway, I used one sausage instead of both of them. I only had one potato left; I considered bulking it up with some cabbage or carrot or something, but in the end it turned out there was more than enough potato (I'd added milk to it since the milk is about to turn) to cover the cut-up sausage, so I covered the rest of yesterday's sardine fish paste, which I was really dubious about.

(By the way, I realized I'd left out an ingredient in the fish paste--I put in the vinegar it called for but forgot to add margarine (though my ration is butter, not margarine). I wonder if that would have made a difference? It sounds worse to me, but whatever.)

Instead of bread crumbs I crumbled up some stale crackers after first brushing them with some of the remaining egg (actually, there's still some egg left over so I can use that for breakfast! I'm impressed by how far one single egg can go). Even after they were set they were a little damp and runny, so instead of skillet-ing the mess it all went into the oven for about 20 minutes. Here's the result:


The picture is a little dark, but you get the idea. I'm pretty sure they don't look right but-- crumbs!--were they ever good. Even the sardines were outstanding. I have two left over (one fish and one sausage), which will hopefully keep for tomorrow.

There is a similar recipe specifically for fish, by the way, which involves tinned tomatoes (I haven't any tinned tomatoes, however), so I guess this is a mixture of both recipes. It's similar as well to Pigs in a Blanket, though I think that's bacon in pastry, but it's the same idea, particularly since a lot of pastries used potatoes as substitutes for various other ingredients.

All I can say is that I'm super excited to finish these tomorrow, and even after this experiment concludes I can imagine eating this again very happily.

And, in case you're wondering, yes I have been scraping the fat off of everything to reuse it for cooking lard later on. I realize this is totally gross, but it's also totally useful. The only thing is that it's annoying to get all the bits out and also I don't know how long I can keep it without getting, I don't know, lard poisoning or something. I'm not actually that neurotic, don't worry (In case you didn't know, if you click on the pictures you can see larger versions. Click on this with the warning that it looks like some kind of alien residue from The X-Files).


The thing I am really happy about is that I've gained some sort of confidence when it comes to cooking. In the first post I mentioned Woolton Pie, which is a big deal to make, at least to me, but I'm still hoping I can manage it, even if it has to be done after this week.

Here is a brilliant video: Tea Making Tips

Another video, Kay Kyer's band featuring "Gorgeous" Georgia Carroll and some other folks. Awesome. I wish we still lived in days when cigarette companies could sponsor bands.