Thank you for your kind words and support on my latest short video. For those that don’t use the community tab on YouTube (where I post short, written updates) I thought it would be good just to let anyone who is kind enough to pop on and watch my videos why it will be another 2 weeks before I post another video.
My next weigh-in at the doctor’s surgery is June 9th which is weigh-in day at home too so that seems a good time to try and spend time editing a longer video and uploading it.
I hope you are having a wonderful Coronation Day and enjoying some feasting! I had two large scones for my lunch which I made from a WW2 recipe and the rations I had and thoroughly enjoyed these. They were delicious!
Coronation Day Fruit Scones
16 oz of self-raising flour (or plain flour and 2 heaped teaspoons of baking powder)
2-4 oz butter or margarine (I used 3 oz of vegan butter)
2 oz sugar
1/4 pint of milk (I used oat milk)
2-3 oz of sultanas or dried mixed fruit
pinch of salt
Method
Sieve the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar (or add the sugar after sieving)
Add small lumps of the butter/margarine and rub in with fingers until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs
Add the milk and mix until a stiff dough is achieved
Roll out to 1 inch thick and use cutters (I used 3.5 inch cutters which made 8 scones)
I’m living on a WW2 diet for a full year to lose weight (hopefully 100 lbs) and become healthier as well as fulfil my obsession with WW2 rationing and recipes. BUT there is another great reason to do this as well and that is it will save me over £3400! Watch my video to see how that breaks down and what I was spending and eating before.
Of course, in the months leading up to starting my year on WW2 rations (9th January, 2023) my eating had got out of control. Not only huge quantities of my main three (healthy) meals a day but the takeaways and junk food and constant need to snack in between was costing me around £85 per week which is just crazy! Literally feeding my addiction…
While saving £3,400 a year seems impossible for most, for me it will be a reality based on the last few months of 2022. I don’t smoke, I only drink on special occasions, I have no addictive vices except for food. But surely food itself can’t be blamed or can it?
My next blog post and video (coming soon) will be about ultra-processed foods in our modern diets and how the typical diet today compares with a wartime diet of yesteryear.
I’m going to be getting back to creating new recipe posts and WW2 rationing content very soon but first I thought it would be good to share what changes have happened regarding my health in the first 3 full months of living on a wartime diet.
Click above to watch my video on YouTube which explains everything and logs all the data for anyone who is interested, I’ve also taken a few screenshots and dropped them into the post below.
For anyone interested in who I do my blood testing with for Cholesterol, Vit D, Liver, Thyroid, Kidney, Diabetes, Protein, Iron, B12 and CRP etc. I’ve been doing an annual test with Thriva for several years now, full details are on the video but I have a link here which will tell you more. http://www.thriva.co/i/CEWPGS
It’s lovely to be pain free in my back now when walking and to generally feel happier and healthier just 3 months into my year long journey.
I haven’t ached so much in months! Another busy weekend coming up as we try and clear more space and move more stuff into the house from the storage unit! Last weekend I got my daughter moved into my home office (which is a tiny box room) and I moved my computer and desk into my bedroom. It’s a really tight squeeze but trying to make it work!
Oh did I mention that my eldest daughter Jess has come back to live with me? We got a permitted occupier permit (we rent our home) and Jess is settling in Swindon and will be with us until she is ready to move to her own place. Rent here is just so expensive, I really don’t know how people on minimum wage get by. There are many HMO’s here as renting out a room in a house is the only affordable option for many single people on a lower income.
Anyway, our house is now bursting even more with boxes and no place to store things so I’m committed to a tip run at least once a month to get rid of anything we don’t need anymore (if we can’t donate or recycle). It means being brutal and letting go but it has to be done!
My eating remains surprisingly stable. My daily 1940’s menu is often this…
Breakfast: Porridge with milled flax seed with a handful of berries thrown in OR a couple of slices of toast with Marmite OR a cooked breakfast on toast one day a week.
Lunch: Leftovers from dinner the day before OR a large salad and a sandwich
Dinner: A stew rich with beans and pulses or soy mince OR a pie with pastry OR vegetables and mashed potato with vegan sausages OR bubble and squeak
Snack in bed: A piece of fruit OR some bread and butter pudding OR a slice of bread a jam
My average grocery spend per week is around £15 but I tend to spend a bit extra here and there when I run out of condiments or when I fancy some extra veg!
Hi all, I made a video regarding my weight-loss during the past month living 100% on a WW2 English ration book diet.
This month I’ve had my first modern day real-life challenges which I feel I managed to navigate successfully. I was invited out to meal with my work team to welcome a new member aboard. I don’t spend much time away from the house due to the fact that my youngest has some severe anxiety issues and panic disorder BUT I can’t put all my life on hold so we work things out by short periods away from the house. The restaurant was just two streets away so I went.
Living on a WW2 diet I’m committed to eating food stuffs that were available during the 1940s during the times of rationing. The restaurant we attended served curries so I went for a vegan plain vegetable curry (tomato based) with plain white rice, no naan, no poppadoms and I drank an ale. Curry was served in Britain as early as 1733 and there were curry houses in several cities during WW2 but it wasn’t until post-war Britain when Bangladeshi seamen began to buy bombed out chippies and cafes and started selling curry and rice alongside fish, pies, and chips, that curry worked it’s way firmly into British culture.
I digress….
Apart from the excitement of enjoying a curry, most of my diet has been very similar but I am thoroughly enjoying it. In addition to porridge, sandwiches, salads, stews, pies and lots of vegetables and potatoes, I’ve also baked biscuits, bread pudding and fruit cake. With hindsight, baking a cake wasn’t a good idea as my inability to resist high fat/high sugar combinations, led me to eat the whole cake within 30 minutes. This was a lesson learned to only cook small portions of treats. However, this wasn’t a complete disaster as I ensured I carried on eating plenty of main meals with lots of vegetables and potatoes and this ensured I didn’t have any cravings for the sweet stuff!
Despite this, I’m pleased to say that I lost 11 lbs this month and in two months I have lost 24 lbs (1 st 10 lbs).
This morning made my heart sing! Without going into too much detail, this morning was such an amazing feeling visiting the park with my youngest Em. This is the first time in many years that we’ve been able to do this as they have been struggling. Thought I’d share some of the photos Em took.
There are times we struggle with life. Despite those dark days there will always be a day here and there where the sun reaches through the woodland boughs to illuminate a clearer path offering momentary respite and a glimpse of future hope.
Finding myself down to my last two vegan sausages and even out of potatoes, I looked to an original recipe pamphlet from 1941 for something I could make fairly quickly, that could fill my tummy and give me energy.
Wartime Recipes by Ambrose Heath came up with the simplest recipe I could imagine that had just two ingredients, flour and suet! It was called “Devonshire Suet Pudding”.
Devonshire Suet Pudding
2 cups of wholemeal flour (any flour will do)
1 cup of shredded suet
Pinch of salt
Water
Method
Add enough water to mix (not sloppy or not stiff)
Grease a milk pudding dish or ramekins
Place the mixture in the dish and bake at 180-200C for 1 hr (about 25 minutes if split up into ramekins)
It should be golden-brown and rise a little when cooking
Serve with meat and gravy, serves 6
TIP: add extra salt, pepper, herbs and fried chop onion for extra taste
Right now, nearly every day I will eat potatoes. But how authentic was eating spuds 5 times a week during WW2 for the average urban working class household?
I’m happy to announce that potatoes were the foundation of the working class diet, not only providing up to 45% of the recommended daily intake of vitamin C to each person who ate them (and most people ate around 4.5 lbs of spuds per week) BUT were delicious, affordable and were able to provide that vitamin C all year around due to their great storage capabilities. Farmers could store potatoes in large “clamps” which essentially were long mounds of potatoes covered in straw and then earth was piled on the top to form a frost free storage and households could store their potatoes, throughout the winter in hessian sacks in an outhouse.
Because I’m a WW2 food nerd, I’ve enjoyed spending Valentine’s Day evening CONSUMING DATA from “The Urban Working-Class Household Diet 1940-1949”. I’m particularly interested how people maintained good health during WW2 on a limited diet and happily for me, this book tells me what food sources supplied people with essential vitamins, iron and protein as well as providing enough calories to sustain an active life.
I thought you might be interested in some snippets below about potatoes!
C xxx
In addition to data about potatoes I found this quite interesting. Vegetable protein was Great Britain’s main source of protein throughout WW2 which is not surprising seeing how meat was rationed. Before the war people were eating around roughly 2.5 lbs of meat and fish per week, during the war it was about 1.5 lbs per person, per week (according to the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations Britons currently consume almost 3.5 lbs per week).
At 8:00pm last night I just fancied some pastry. This first month on WW2 rations I’ve fancied pastry quite a few times but what with one thing and another (usually lack of time) I’ve just not go around to it!
At 8:03pm I found a recipe for “Marmite Biscuits” in Margaret Y. Brady’s “Health for All – Wartime Recipes”, a wonderful little 1940’s recipe book which focuses on maximizing good health on wartime rations. I already love this book so much!
For anyone who saw my last video HERE you will also know that I talked about the use of NUTTER in one of her recipes in the book. The recipe called for 1/2 a lb of nutter and to roll the nutter in the flour. If you are British then you’ll know that the word nutter was once a commonly used term in our general vocabulary for instance “that bloke is a right nutter” (that man is crazy, odd, eccentric!).
Quote: “Nutter” itself, first recorded from the 1950s, has always meant either a deranged person or an engaging eccentric. Such words can be used cruelly, but their plenitude also suggests some kind of delight (albeit satirical) in the varieties of human oddness.
Further examination of her recipe book revealed that NUTTER was in fact a vegetarian cooking fat, sold by Health Food Stores but for several hours before finding this term in the glossary there was much discussion and indeed mirth on what Nutter could actually be. Most common thoughts were a book typo (should have been butter), nut butter, peanut butter and peanut butter biscuits. Google wasn’t helpful to me at all, and clicking on the Urban Dictionary’s description of “nut butter” in the search engines returned results, wasn’t something I really wanted to be enlightened on!
I digress…
Marmite Biscuits
1/2 lb wholewheat flour
4 oz cooking fat (I used a hard margarine)
1 dessertspoon of Marmite
Little cold water
Method
Put the flour into a cold basin
Rub in the cooking fat until it looks like fine breadcrumbs
Add water a little at a time to the dry ingredients to make a firm dough
When well mixed turn onto a floured board
Roll out thin
Now spread over thinly with Marmite
Fold over and roll out again
Spread more Marmite fold and roll out again, repeat
Cut into rounds or fingers and bake in a moderate over until crisp and brown
This will make around 40 small, thin biscuits
Cost: Ingredients will cost about £1
I thought these tasted delicious, I’m a huge Marmite fan and that mixed with what essentially is a short pastry, made me think these deserved at least an 8.5 out of 10!
The 1940's Experiment 