THE Prepping thread - a new beginning :)

Karmacat

Maryb, I'm ready to try again with fermented foods, could you please pm me the name of the place where you went on the course? Or the name of a starter culture seller you trust? Raring to go though I don't think I'm quite there yet on making my *own* culture.

[Deleted User]

Here's something to think on should we find ourselves in the suds over Brexit which is the most likely thing at the moment to cause us problems. I'm relatively older than many of you and can remember back to before we had the culinary world at our fingertips in every shop and before there were 'Food Fads' and Cuisine Nouvelle. I can remember seasonal eating and most of what we ate was UK grown too. Meals were simpler then and somewhat repetitive but we ate and weren't hungry'

The 'think on' thing is what was normal on a day to day basis for your meals when you were younger? We had porridge most days for breakfast in colder weather with golden syrup and it tended to be cornflakes with cold milk and sugar in the warmer months. Lunch was usually a sandwich with whatever was in the cupboard (this was pre-fridge) and that would have been a jar of paste, some oily drying out cheddar, jam, or in the late summer home grown cooked beetroot or outdoor ripened tomatoes. When things were very tight it would be sauce sandwiches, either tomato ketchup or brown sauce or brown sugar or condensed milk sandwiches, really anything to fill tums. In home grown fruit season there were always pears from the tree in the garden. Main meals were Stew and dumplings, smoked haddock on mashed potato with a poached egg, bacon and egg on toast, steak and kidney pudding and veg, Bacon, mashed potato and baked beans, sausage, mash and tinned peas and always some kind of roast on Sundays with cold meat, mash and veg made into bubble and squeak on Mondays. We always had a pudding on Sundays, rice pudding in the oven, fruit crumble with seasonal fruit or cremolia pudding which I loathed.

What would you be able to feed you and yours with on a restricted food availability food supply?

maryb

Karma have pm'd you

Karmacat

Thanks maryb, much appreciated.


MrsLW, not that much older than me We got a fridge when I was about 8 years old, and my mum shopped for the night's tea as she was coming home from work - no supermarkets, so no weekly shop. At the greengrocer, you queued up to be served, and he went and weighed out your pound of carrots or whatever it was.


As you say, repetitive food - when I was in my 20s and living down south, we were really surprised at the variety of food that ordinary shops had, even then. And by then there were supermarkets, of course. A dinner was tatties, usually boiled, one or two veg (peas, carrots, turnip, erm, broad beans maybe during the season) and some meat - a slice of corned beef, a chop (which I loathed), a fried egg if we were having chips. I was always hungry, my mum never served enough, I was told to fill up on bread and jam. My parents didn't ever grow any food themselves, just flowers, so nothing at all home grown. A "salad" once a week: 3 small lettuce leaves, 2 slices of cucumber, a tomato, and half a hard boiled egg, which left me hungrier still. Victoria sandwich cake afterward.



I'm sure that there'll be more variety than I grew up with, for the most part - there's a groundswell nowadays of grow your own, and Tom and Barbara Good-ing all over the place

[Deleted User]

I think family eating patterns were different back then, we sat at table for meals, there was no having a tray in front of the TV and we all ate at the same time, if someone was late back we all waited and ate later too. We also had home made cake in the tin all of the time but we had to ask permission to take some and were actively discouraged from snacking between meals or we 'wouldn't get the goodness from your supper' which is actually a point. I think the biggest difference between life in the 50s and life now is that peoples incomes were much less than we expect nowadays and mums usually stayed at home so all had to be purchased from one income earned by the father. We never had crisps except on those rare occasions when the parents went to the local pub for a shandy and we got an orange squash and a packet of crisps to have out in the car park, kids definitely NOT allowed into pubs in those days. Sweets were a once a week event with pocket money and food between meals if you got really hungry would be a slice of cake, perhaps a sausage roll or an apple and very little else on offer. A very different world?

carlislelass

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

I think family eating patterns were different back then, we sat at table for meals, there was no having a tray in front of the TV and we all ate at the same time, if someone was late back we all waited and ate later too. We also had home made cake in the tin all of the time but we had to ask permission to take some and were actively discouraged from snacking between meals or we 'wouldn't get the goodness from your supper' which is actually a point. I think the biggest difference between life in the 50s and life now is that peoples incomes were much less than we expect nowadays and mums usually stayed at home so all had to be purchased from one income earned by the father. We never had crisps except on those rare occasions when the parents went to the local pub for a shandy and we got an orange squash and a packet of crisps to have out in the car park, kids definitely NOT allowed into pubs in those days. Sweets were a once a week event with pocket money and food between meals if you got really hungry would be a slice of cake, perhaps a sausage roll or an apple and very little else on offer. A very different world?

You're certainly taking me back to my childhood

Cappella

MrsLW - I've been using all of my 1950s/1940s cookery books this year, and we have been more or less eating just the same way as I did as I did growing up. I don't think Brexit will cause us huge problems because our diet is geared to eating seasonal, British grown produce. At the moment we're harvesting (amongst other things) raspberries, strawberries, blackcurrants, new potatoes, salad greens, broad beans, artichokes, chard, New Zealand spinach and hispi cabbage. The herb beds are providing parsley, sage, rosemary, oregano, mint and fennel. We have harvested 80lbs of honey this week, and the Discworld ladies are producing between 10 and a dozen eggs a day. The older cookery books recipes are based on seasonal home grown produce, and using them ensures we waste as little allotment produce as possible, but I have to admit meals have become very similar to those I ate as a child.
Last week's menu. Sunday's meal served 6, all others served 2.
Sunday: roast chicken, sage and onion stuffing, new potatoes, cabbage, carrots and broad beans. Raspberry sorbet.
Monday: Cold chicken, Russian salad, potato salad, green salad.
Lad.
Tuesday: Curried chicken and rice salad, lettuce salad. Blackcurrant compote with Greek yogurt.
Wednesday: Sausages, new potatoes, (cook more than needed for this meal)broad beans. Strawberries with gourd and honey.
Thursday: Spanish omelette with the remains of salads made earlier in the week, lettuce salad. Cheese and oatcakes.
Friday: Fish pie with broad beans, carrots and peas. Strawberries and raspberries with a little honey nd top of the milk.
It looks a little dull, but the fresh ingredients are full of flavour.
Mum was a good cook, ahead of her time but she wouldn't have made the curried chicken salad, and we'd have had fried potatoes and fried eggs rather than a aspanish omelette but otherwise the ingredients would have the same as she would have used.

jk0

Your week's menu sounds yummy Cappella. Who needs imported food, eh?

villagelife

Cappella the menu sounds good. Eating seasonally does give variety throughout the year and definitely makes meal planning easier. The variety of salad leaves and type of lettuce have increased since I was a child.

Cappella

I don't think a seasonal diet has to be dull, though it can seem so We grow a wide variety of salad leaves Villagelife. But even in winter there are salads I make using grated root veg, hard cabbage and hardy salad greens that MrO grows in a cold greenhouse.
I still buy imported fruit, mainly bananas and citrus but try not to buy anything we can grow ourselves. I do use spices when I cook, but don't think they'll be affected by Brexit. They're part of our teaditkional cooking methods, gkinger, nutmeg, pepper and cloves have been used since Medieval times, and probably earlier? I just find it easier to cook this way. It saves me a huge amount of money, and I think we eat healthily most of the time.

Prepping news We are 8 miles away from the wild fires on Saddleworth moor but it reeks of smoke here and my daughter tells me it's a strong smell in Manchester City Centre. My son and his wife came last night to stay with us as the smoke is so thick in Stalybridge where they live and she has asthma and breathing issues. They just made a snap decision, grabbed their bug out bags and left, but houses are now being evacuated and it must be very hard for people who aren't prepared and are trying to quickly get things together.
I've let our bug out bags slide recently. Time to haul them out and check them I think!