On Food

[neadods]

Long story short, one of the ways in which I'm trying to simplify my life this year is to pass on the stress of trying to come up with a meal plan every week and instead perfect a standard plan: for example, Tuesday lunch is a meat sandwich, seasonal fruit, and yogurt; Tuesday's dinner is a rice or pasta dish. It doesn't matter *what* meat or what dish - it could be mac & cheese or spinach & catfish noodles or fried rice or spaghetti (if I ever eat it again) or I could run by Siri's for pad thai. Enough variety to keep from being boring; enough structure not to go "oh hell, what am I going to do tonight?"

Well... that's the way it'll work when the plan is finished. Still working on that part.

Then there's the question of cutting down on fats, red meat, and sugar while still getting proper nutrition, preferably while doing most of my own cooking. (I don't have major food allergies, but the only way to really know how much salt, corn syrup, etc. you're eating is to make stuff yourself.) As I've said before, experts did the heavy lifting on that one two generations ago; I'm not going to reinvent the wheel now. Outside of the reference books shawan_7's going to loan me, I've now got:

Grandma's Wartime Kitchen
Grandma's Wartime Baking Book
We'll Eat Again
Josephine Gibson's Wartime Canning and Cooking Book ("How to eat well though rationed")
and the 1943 Good Housekeeping Cook Book with the Wartime Supplement.

That one is illustrated and it's surprising how food photography has changed over the years. What was once an enticing pot of baked beans is seriously gross now. (It's like Jr. year abroad in England; all the fruit in billboards that America shows as shiny, England showed as moist to the point of water beading off it. I was surprised how much that turned me off although there's nothing objectively wrong with it.)

Other resources, on or offline, would be welcomed. I'm sure the war and WENN buffs have more.

I could also use some advice from bookphiles and librarians about rebinding. The Good Housekeeping has ripped entirely off one hinge; the staples securing the Gibson booklet have ripped free of the cover. Neither is objectively valuable enough to be worth archival treatment, but I don't want to just slap on duct tape either.

Comments

[shawan-7.livejournal.com]

We'll Eat Again was one I was going to lend you.

I'll put Post-War Kitchen and From Hardtack to Home Fries to one side for you.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

Hardtack to Home Fries sounds particularly interesting - cooking through American history, I assume?

[honorh.livejournal.com]

What I do, especially in the winter, is to make up a big pot of soup, stew or pasta at the beginning of the week and use it as either lunches or dinners for the rest of the week. Actually, this week, I'll be making two pots--one for lunches, one for dinners. I'm at my cold junior high this week, which means I want hot lunches instead of bento boxes. It's cheaper and easier than making dinner each night, and I know exactly what goes into it.

Must look up wheat roll recipes before tomorrow, though. Wheat rolls for beef barley soup.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

I used to do that, but by meal three, I was ready to sell my soul to eat something different. I'm trying to shake up the same concept by making a vat of things and freezing it in individual portions, so that I then have my choice of last week's chicken casserole or this week's pot roast or the soup from last month. ("Something from the freezer" is Monday's dinner.)

This was also balanced in tandem with the ration plan & the food pyramid, so that if I do it right, I don't have to worry about dairy/protein/grain allotments per day. (I'm letting myself free-feed on fruit & veggies.)

[dune-drd.livejournal.com]

The funny thing is that the Wartime Kitchen Books are having a huge comeback over here as well, but not for healthy food but for the cheap prices ^^.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

That too -- with the exception of the Good Housekeeping one (which admits in its preface that it was written before the war), all the stuff in the cookbooks is dirt cheap and half of it you can grow yourself.

But they're still... stuck in that time's mindframe, for lack of a better way of phrasing it. Liver is more expensive than goat, but people have always eaten liver so the wartime books have liver recipes. Goat didn't really show up in the markets here until about 5 years ago, on the wave of I'm-not-sure-which ethnic group.

(It's dirt cheap, though, and I'm culturally more inclined to eat musculature than internal organs. I have *got* to figure out what to do with cube o' goat.)