Groceries

I just wanted to share a few pictures of the groceries I picked up the other day.  Certainly, a housewife in the 1940s would not have picked up everything I did in one go.  Since I had very little in my cupboards after cleaning them out the other day, I had pretty much nothing left.  I went with 8 ounces of hamburger, 8 ounces of stew beef, 4 ounces of bacon, 1 tin of Spam and 1 pound dried red kidney beans for protein as well as my one egg and 2 ounces of cheese.  My fruits and veggies (which I did not photograph all of) included a ten pound bag of potatoes, two onions, two parsnips, one turnip, one bag of carrots, one small box of mushrooms, two heads of garlic, one bunch of spinach and one bunch of red leaf lettuce.  Other grocery items included Bisto granules, marmite, strawberry preserves, whole wheat flour, raisins, 2 ounces of butter, 4 ounces of margarine, and a small container of vegetable shortening.  Rations allowed for 12 ounces of sweets each month but I did not pick any up since I generally do not like sweets.

Random Bits

Who am I to undertake this project?  In all honesty, no one special.  This experiment is something anyone could do.  Though this is something that has been rolling around in my head for a very long time, I am not the first person to try cooking strictly according to war rations.  All you have to do is Google “ration diet” or “1940s diet” and you will find that there are people who have done something very similar to what I am doing.  Every single day, more people are realizing that there is a problem with the way we eat and the way we waste food.  My theory is that we can fix a lot of problems with the over-consumption, waste and quality of our food by looking to the past and ignoring today’s fads.

Since the clock is ticking down and I only have today and tomorrow until I go strictly on rations, I thought I would share a little random information about myself with anyone who is interested in following my journey.  I am just a regular person and I want that to be known in the beginning.

1. I am not a professional chef.
2. I am not a WWII aficionado.
3. I like to cook but I hate to do the dishes.
4. I am obsessed with British television and books.
5. My husband and I do not have cable or satellite television.  (We have rabbit ears on top of our television!)
6. I like to read – a lot.
7. I have over 80 books in my “to read” stack and countless more on my “to read” list.
8. I prefer to buy used books.
9. I am addicted to cookbooks and have way more than the average person.
10. My lineage is French, German, Irish and Welsh.
11. One of my favorite hobbies is knitting.
12. I also like to write – even if no one ever reads it.
13. I have no children of my own.
14. I have two adult stepdaughters, one of which thinks I am far more evil than any wicked stepmother in a Disney movie.
15. My dad died when I was 23.
16. I have not seen my mother in 4 years or any of my siblings in at least 5 years.
17. I hate shopping.
18. I have two dogs. Both of whom sleep in bed with my husband and I.
19. I regularly talk to my dogs and sing them songs.
20. I cannot carry a tune but it never stops me from singing loud and proud.
21. I try to force myself to be a day person but left to my own device, I always revert to a nocturnal schedule.
22. I like infomercials.
23. I have multiple tattoos and I am always ready to get another one.
24. I studied English Literature and Parks & Recreation in college.
25. I also hold a cosmetology license in the state of Washington.
26. I am very shy to begin with but once you get to know me, you cannot shut me up.
27. I have a very warped sense of humor.
28. I love movies and television from the 40s, 50s and 60s.
29. I have a permanent care of wanderlust.
30. I think I have the best husband in the world.

The Best Laid Plans

Don’t you just love it when you have everything planned out then something happens to throw a monkey wrench in the works?  I had originally planned to pick up my library books this evening, peruse the books tonight and make any additions to my shopping list for tomorrow morning.  As it turns out my husband has to work extra this weekend so we had to get our grocery shopping done tonight.  (Insert sad face here.)

My husband was able to stop by the library on the way home tonight and pick up my holds.  Even if I did not get a chance to peruse them, at least they are now in my possession.  Fortunately, I have done a lot of research on WWII recipes online and I was already prepared to get my shopping done.

As expected, there was a number of items on my list that were only available in larger quantities or that were significantly cheaper in larger quantities.  While WWII rationing would not have allowed an individual to purchase certain items in larger quantities, at least part of my reason for trying this experiment is to try to save money while cooking real food.  Therefore, I will be taking some time tomorrow to portion out my weekly rations in the specific amounts that I mentioned the other day. Anything extra will either be frozen or tucked away in a separate area of my cupboard.

I am so excited for the book that I ordered from Amazon to arrive.  It is a British book so since I will be following a British ration system, it may be a bit easier to prepare foods using those recipes than with American recipes from the same era.  Only time will tell.  The books that I checked out are both American wartime cookbooks and I can say that they really look like wonderful references!  I have not had a chance to read through them in detail but some of the recipes I saw while flipping through looked delicious.  I am definitely going to be copying down a lot of recipes!

The Big Decision

OK.  I’ve really thought about it and I have come to a decision.  Only committing to do one week strictly by 1940s rations is not going to prove anything to myself (or anyone else for that matter).   Therefore, I am going to commit right now to a full month on rations.  At that point, I will evaluate the situation and decide if I want to continue living on strict rations or if I just want to play loosey goosey and only focus on cooking WWII era and other vintage recipes.

I guess a small part of me knew I wanted to commit to more than a week of rationing in the beginning.  Hello?  I named my blog The Amazing Adventures of Ration Woman.  If I had only been interested in cooking vintage recipes, I would have named it something else, wouldn’t I?

Anyway…

I have my grocery list made up for our big shopping trip at the crack of dawn on Saturday morning.  I’m kind of a geek so I have actually made it out according to the layout of the store.  (Yes, I know that makes me a super geek.)  I hate shopping, though, and I find that having a list made out according to the store layout saves time and money.  In addition, it keeps my husband on his toes.  If I dawdle too much while shopping, he tends to get distracted and starts fiddling around with the internet on his phone – which I HATE!  Before I know it, I have continued on to the next aisle thinking he is still behind me, talking and getting very strange looks and he is still standing back in the previous row updating his Facebook page. When I go in with my list made up according to store layout, I tend to pick up only the items on my list and make my way through the enormous grocery store much, much faster.  If I am moving at a good clip, my husband does a much better job of keeping up and I look like much less of an idiot when I am talking with him and not thin air.  Anything to get it all over faster!

Good News: No Gnomes

Well, the good news is, there was no family of gnomes living in the back of my pantry cupboard.  The bad news is, I have to admit to finding quite a number of things that were expired – some of them as long ago as 2008 and even 2006!  (Seriously, who keeps things that expired that long ago??)  I hate, hate, hate that I wasted a whole bunch of stuff.  The organizing is done now, though, so there is no use crying over it.  I just have to move on.

Fortunately, I am not stuck with a lot of prepackaged foods.  Almost everything I have left happens to be grocery items that would have been available during the WWII era.  Rest assured that the few things that would not have been available in the 1940s will not go to waste.  My husband will be all too happy to eat them.

I have to admit that I really would like to try sticking with ration allotments for an extended period of time.  People were much more budget conscious during the war years.  Additionally, because diets focused more on locally grown fruits and vegetables (with nothing left to waste), people were healthier.  I could definitely do with a dose of that.

For anyone wondering, my decision to undertake this little experiment was not one I made on a whim.  While I have been thinking about rationing a lot lately, it is not the first time that I have taken the time to do research on the subject.  It is something that has been in the back of my mind for the past nine or ten years at least.  I think what spurred me to make the decision to try it now is another little project which I was putting off for years but just recently completed.

Several years ago, I was fortunate to be given the 1956 edition of the Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook that belonged to my mother in her younger days.  It was falling apart and stuffed with recipes she had clipped from magazines.  I finally got around to picking up a three ring binder, 100 top load page protectors and load of hole reinforcement stickers.  I went through the cookbook and pulled out all of the recipes my mother clipped from magazines and organized them into the binder.  After that, I started going through the cookbook and reinforcing the holes on the pages that were falling out. 

As I was going through my mother’s cookbook, looking at the recipes, it really made me think about how differently we cook today.  We have been taught to think about foods in terms of labels – low-fat, high-cholesterol, sugar-free, etc.  We are told that foods are so much more nutritious today than they were in the past.  If that is true, though, then why is there such an increase in obesity, cancer, autism and other illnesses?  Could it possibly be because we live in a time when we eat foods loaded with preservatives and chemicals?  I am not a scientist so I cannot say for sure but if I was a betting woman, I would put my money on that being the exact reason we have so many health issues today.

The more I thought about making use of vintage recipes, the more it made sense.  Unfortunately, I have a tendency to overindulge when it comes to good, home-cooked food.   That is where the idea to try eating a WWII ration diet came into play.  With a weekly ration on the line, I will have a set amount of basic foods to cook with and eat each week.

My plan is to start with rations on Monday.   I decided to start on Monday instead of Sunday because I had already promised my husband a big Super Bowl feast on Sunday.  Seeing as we live in Seahawk country and the Seahawks are in the Super Bowl this year, reneging on that promise might put my life in danger.  We had plans to go to the grocery store to stock up on Super Bowl feast food at the crack of dawn on Saturday so I will pick up my week one rations at that time.    

Preparation

I have been trying to do as much research as I can in a very short amount of time in preparation for my little experiment.  Since the library books I placed a hold on are not in yet, that means my research is focused 100% on the internet.  For the most part, it is not a bad thing.  There is a lot of information out there these days and, for someone who wants it, it is easy enough to find vintage recipes from the 1940s. 

The house where my husband and I currently reside has the world’s smallest kitchen.  No kidding.  I am sure that when the house was built, there was no such thing as many of the modern day kitchen appliances.  Even still, there is very little counter space.  The size of my kitchen is a good part of the reason we have taken up the habit of take-out and dining out so often.  Once I put a microwave, my husband’s coffee maker and a dish drying rack on my counter, I am literally left with less than one square foot of counter space to work on.  If we leave the toaster on the counter, I am left with no counter space at all.  There is very little I can do about it since there is no room to add counters or an island.  I just have to make do with what I have.

My kitchen also lacks cupboard space.  In fact, the entirety of my pantry is three and a half shelves, spread between two cupboards.  I have two shelves for dry, canned and prepackaged goods, a half shelf full of teas and drink mixes and one shelf for baking items such as sugar, flour and oils.  My plan tomorrow is to clean out those cupboards and take inventory of what I have to work with on my project.  Who knows what might be lurking in the back of one of those cupboards?  I will admit that I have not cleaned or organized my cupboards since moving to this house three years ago.  For all I know, a small family of gnomes may have moved into the back of one of them and is living quite comfortably back there at this very moment.

Wish me luck!

Learning From History

Do you ever wonder what it was like for our mothers and grandmothers to keep their families going?  This is something I have thought a lot about in recent years.  There is an incredible abundance now and our society seems to think little of being wasteful.  It makes me a bit sad to think what my grandmother or a younger (saner) version of my mother might have to say about it.

I was born at the end of 1974 into a large family in a small town in the middle of lower Michigan.  I was child number five in a family that would eventually expand to six.  Some of my earliest memories were of shuffling along behind my mother as she pushed a shopping cart containing my baby sister and groceries for our large family.  Though we were quite a brood, and surely, feeding a group such as ours would have been expensive at the best of times, I never wanted for anything.

My mother was born in 1937 so, though she was quite young during WWII, she did have some memories of the war.  It was only on rare occasions that she ever spoke about it aside from an occasional memory of the end of the war.  For the most part, all I know of her experiences during the war are contained in a single story.  She would have been eight years old on May 8, 1945 and her memory of the day was of sitting on the front porch, banging on a cooking pot with a wooden spoon and of her mother and grandmother crying because downtown, the people were throwing soap flakes from the upper windows into the streets in celebration.  Soap flakes had been a rationed item and were in short supply.  While happy to hear of the Nazi surrender, they were upset at the wastefulness of throwing out the soap flakes.

Growing up, I spent a lot of time with my paternal grandparents and never once did I hear them talk about the past.  It was right there in front of me, though, in the way they lived each day.  They were thrifty in their shopping – when available and well-priced, they bought extra and froze it for later, whatever wild berries were in season were picked in abundance and froze by the bucket, my grandfather and uncle fished on a regular basis then cleaned and froze more bluegill than most people see in a lifetime.  Nothing went to waste.  Nothing.

When I was very young, every meal was made from fresh ingredients and we always ate at the dining room table.  My father was an avid gardener and he had a large garden planted with a variety of vegetables.  We ate fresh all summer and my parents canned or froze the excess to see us through the winter. 

As I got a bit older, I remember my older brother and I begging our mother for what we thought of as the extravagance of a frozen Swanson’s TV Dinner.  On rare occasions, or begging worked.  We were not only allowed to eat the meal which was served in the foil tray, we were allowed to eat it on TV trays in front of the television.  We thought is was wonderful and special.

As I grew older still, more changes were on the horizon.   While we did not dine out on a regular basis, three or four times a year, we were treated to a meal at McDonald’s or Burger King.  There was also the occasional family trip to the local pizza parlor for a birthday or other celebration.  Dining out at any type of establishment was rare, though.

Around the time I reached junior high, dining out had become more commonplace.  Fast food meals were consumed at least once a month, if not more.  While my father still maintained his garden and we enjoyed many fresh vegetables, meals cooked at home regularly included pre-packaged and convenience foods.  We regularly at "leftovers".  On occasion, some of those leftovers hung around beyond the point they were fit for consumption and had to be thrown away.

By the time I was in high school and old enough to drive, my friends and I ate fast food whenever we wanted.  We thought nothing of nutrition and consumed candy, soda, and snacks whenever we felt like it.   When I dined with my family, portions were bigger and they contained more processed foods.  

When I made it to college, all bets were off.  I spent my college years either eating fast food, nutritionless snacks, and pre-packaged foods or dining on creamed corn and ramen noodles – depending on my budget at the time.  In times of abundance, I never worried about the times when my budget would be tight.  So too were my eating habits.

Fast forward to present day.  I’m 40 years old now and married and I live in the great state of Washington, in the suburbs of Seattle. More often than not, my husband and I eat take-out or dine in restaurants and it shows.  Even on the occasions that we dine at home, we have been lulled into the convenience of eating garbage that is full of preservatives in ridiculous portions.

So what is a person to do?  Do I try out a trendy fad diet or look to the past?  I have spent more money on fad diets than I care to admit to at this point so that just leaves looking to the past as an option.   

Each time I have to throw a piece of rotted fruit or vegetable in the garbage, I feel guilty.  I know that my parents and grandparents would have used it long before it got to that state.  In addition, I hate thinking about the fact that I have paid good money for that fruit or vegetable and then turned around and thrown it away.  After all, I would never throw money in the garbage and just throwing out food that I have allowed to rot is basically doing just that.

That brings us to now.  I have been thinking about how wasteful I have become while simultaneously destroying my health by consuming garbage.  I began wondering how to change all of that in one fell swoop.  Then an idea came to me:  Give up the modern conveniences of fast food and pre-packaged items and eat like they did during the 1940s – arguably one of the leanest times in recent history. 

The biggest problem with this scheme is, I no longer have my parents or grandparents to ask.  My grandparents are all dead, many of my aunts and uncles are dead, my father has been gone for 16 years, and my mother has dementia.  Now that I want to know about what it was like for my parents and grandparents during those lean years of WWII when nothing was wasted, there is no one to ask.  That means turning to books and the internet.  I can do that.  My only problem is, rationing in the US was not quite as cut and dried as it was in other countries.  People were issued stamps in different colors that corresponded to different types of foods.  They spent allotted amounts of them each week as items were available.  They were encouraged to make do with less.  I get the basic idea of it all but I find it a bit confusing to figure out the amount of different items One was allowed to purchase each week.

Confusing problem solved!  I stumbled on an article on Wikipedia about rationing in the UK during WWII.  Food sources in the UK were much more limited than those in the US during that time period and therefore, they had a much more regimented ration system.  They had set amounts of rations during and after the war.  In addition to the information I have pulled from the internet, I have ordered one used book from Amazon and requested several others from the library on cooking during WWII. 

For at least a week, I am going to try to eat only what one person would have been rationed in a week in 1945 in the UK.  (After that, I will decide if I should continue on weekly rations or take a softer approach and just focus on cooking daily meals according to wartime recipes.)  I will supplement it with whatever fresh fruits and vegetables would have been readily available to a person at the time.  This translates into the following amounts of food for one week:

Food	Amount
Bacon and/or Ham	4 oz
Sugar	8 oz
Loose Tea	2 oz
Meat	1 lb 3 oz
Cheese	2 oz
*Preserves	4 oz
Butter	2 oz
Margarine	4 oz
Lard	2 oz
*Sweets	3 oz
Eggs	1
*Milk	1 pt

*In 1945, preserves were allocated at a rate of 1 pound per month, sweets were allocated at 12 ounces per month and milk was allocated in the form of on tin of milk powder (equivalent to 8 pints) every 8 weeks.  There were also 24 “Points” allocated to each person every 4 weeks which they could use to purchase canned (tinned) or dried food (some months there were less).  I will do my best to find exactly what that translated into as far as those types of items go.

Obviously, I cannot go out and purchase just one egg, two ounces of this or 4 ounces of that.  Therefore, any extras will be either refrigerated, frozen or fed to my husband who will not be participating in this little project.  The only bread I will consume will be homemade according to an authentic wartime recipe and ingredients will be subtracted from weekly rations.  In fact, all recipes will be made according to authentic 1940s recipes and using only what I either already have on hand or what would have been rationed.  (Hey, I am not going to waste the food I already have in my cupboard.  My grandmother would have used every last bit of what was available and so will I.)

My goal in all of this is to reduce wasted groceries and to be as thrifty as possible.  If it works out well for one week, I may plan to expand it to a longer period of time or, permanent.  We shall see.  I will likely pick up the library books I requested and go grocery shopping on Friday night.  After that, I’m off and running! 

For more information on the British rationing amounts I decided to go with, please check out the Wikipedia page on the subject or simply turn to Google.  Information on WWII rationing in the United Kingdom is readily available online.