Self-Sufficient in Suburbia - June 2011

This is the next edition of Self-Sufficient in Suburbia covering June. We are building a poly tunnel, digging a pond, handling bees, cooking in the kitchen and helping Dad with his allotment.

Hazel nuts in abundance

The growing season is earlier in London and the South East than it is in the North East. As I walk around the local woods next to our village of Sunniside in Gateshead checking out the wild food supplies, I have noticed that hazel is in great abundance. My guess is that it will be a bumper crop. I came down to London a few days ago and have found lots and lots of hazel nuts ready for picking. Indeed, we did pick some and have spent the morning cracking them open and eating them. It's a few weeks yet before hazel nuts will be ready for picking back home but start looking around your local hedgerows, parks and woodlands for them. They are high in protein and oils and are an important part of the self-sufficient diet.

Wartime cooking - marrow stuffed with spam

This was the last of our meals on our 2 week wartime diet. A wartime experience cannot be complete without spam. This recipe - marrow stuffed with spam - also highlights the importance of allotments in feeding the nation during the Second World War. It also helps to highlight how allotments can play a role in feeding Britain in the 21st century, were we to stop them being used for house building or illegitimate car repair businesses.

The soft flesh was scooped out of the marrow after I sliced them down the middle. The stuffing was made from chopped spam (a quarter of a tin), a chopped onion, a bit of corned beef that we hadn't used up and, of course, the great wartime ingredient, breadcrumbs. I added a little bit of lard. Normally not somethig I use, it was the main cooking oil of the Second World War in Britain. As a special treat, we used an ounce of cheese, grated over the top. Given that a person's ration of cheese was 2oz a week, this amounted to an incredibly luxurious meal.

Put in the over at 180C.

We've stuffed marrows before though this is the first time we've used spam as the protein. We rather like stuffed marrows and with the crop we have growing on the allotment, we'll be having more of them over the coming weeks.


Marrow before cooking


Marrow after baking

Leftovers soup

One of the great lessons from the wartime diet that is useful for those of us setting out to be self-sufficient is waste - or rather lack of it. Nothing is wasted. Food leftovers are not destined for the bin or the compost heap. They are the ingredients for another meal. In this video I put together a load of leftovers and make leftovers soup. Rather tasty as well.

Rabbit burgers

We had some rabbit meat left over from our wartime cooking so we decided to use it to make rabbit burgers. This had the attraction of letting us use up some sausage meat leftover from some other wartime cooking (the potato piglets).

The rabbit was chopped and mixed with the sausage meat, some bread crumbs and some soya flour. There was already some herbs in the sausage meat but I added a chopped onion as well (we picked the main onion crop yesterday).

The burgers were grilled rather than fried. And we had them in a couple of toasted buns. Alas, the buns came from a shop. I haven't had time recently to make bread so I am surviving on the muck that is sold in shops. A few lettuce leaves and a potato salad (we have started harvesting the potatoes) and a splash of homemade hawberry ketchup and the meal was complete.


The first potatoes harvested from the allotment.

Wartime curried rabbit

As part of our wartime diet experience we launched a counterattack on the army of rabbits that takes such a toll on my brassicas. I found a recipe in a 1940 cookbook for curried rabbit. The quantity of curry powder used was tiny (half a teaspoon) for the whole rabbit so this was more a hint of curry than something we, in the early 21st century, would regard as an actual curry. I also suspect that modern food is so packed full of added flavourings and enhancers that our taste buds are shot to bits. I could barely taste the curry in the rabbit. Nevertheless, it was fun to try.

Rabbit was not part of the meat ration so if you got one, it was in addition to your basic meat allowance. Having spoken to many people who lived through the period, though the price of rabbit was controlled by the government, in rural areas in particular, rabbit was often traded for other foods. Across Britain, many people kept rabbits in hutches in their back gardens. They often joined together to form rabbit clubs to share experience, information, feed and time to produce rabbits for the pot.

Wartime potato crisps

These are nothing like the crisps that are consumed nowadays. Instead, this is another wartime recipe that used up a kitchen waste - potato peelings - that would otherwise be thrown out. Potato skins are the most nutritious part of this vegetable so it is useful to find ways of using peelings regardless of whether we are at war or not.

To make wartime potato crisps, dry off the peelings (make sure the potatoes are scrubbed before peeling them). Put a bit of oil onto a baking tray and put it in an oven at 200C. To make this more realistic of the time, we used lard but a small amount is all that is needed - enough to give a thin layer over the bottom of the tray.

When the oil or lard is hot, scatter the peelings over the tray and then sprinkle some herbs or curry powder over them. Return the tray to the oven and roast for up to 15 minutes. They should come out crisp and tasty. We are definitely making these again.