"you do not support the root, but the root supports you."

Yesterday I set about making a birthday card for Grandma's birthday. With Sense and Sensibility playing in the background, and this beautiful belt gifted to me from my sister as my inspiration, I started painting.

Eva has a huge box of old letters in her room that she's sorting through right now. It really made me glad for my own letter-writing, but I wonder if I shouldn't be a little more decisive in it - that is, that I could ask more meaningful questions and because of that, cherish the answers even more. Surely that is a precious thing about letter-writing? That one can express more through writing than can be expressed in spoken word. Part of me wants to splurge on a box to hold them all, but instead I went on a little wander round the charity shops first and stumbled across these two dresses.

I'll finish with one of my favourite quotes from the film Bright Star:

"A poem needs understanding through the senses. The poing of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it's to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out... it is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery."

The Girl in Green

As anybody who has seen my bedroom knows, I have a bit of a thing about the colour green. This also extends to my wardrobe. Today I decided to go for my green 2-piece knitted set, which I haven't worn together for a long time. I decided to go with my red Torpatoffeln clogs (please note: open-toe clogs and freezing temperatures do not a comfortable experience make).

On my way back home, I had a little look in my local vintage/retro shop, where I found a lovely little jumper in exactly the same shade of green as my outfit!

Jumper: Vintage from Really Me 

Trousers: Charity Shop

(The Book is Känner du Pippi Långstrump?

Rations

Hullo! It has been a rather relaxing week - despite the revision and the essay deadlines - and I decided to give rationing a go. I spent a lot of time going hungry, which was not as bad as I thought it would be, and thoroughly enjoyed cooking for the week. This is the weekly ration for one adult per week.

Bacon & Ham: 4 oz
Meat: to the value of 1s6d (generally about 8-10oz, but as war went on the actual amount fluctuated)
Butter: 2 oz
Cheese: 2 oz
Margarine: 4 oz
Lard: 4 oz
Milk: 2-3 pints
Sugar: 8 oz
Preserves: 1 lb every 2 months
Tea: 2 oz
Eggs: 1 fresh egg per week (usually...)
Sweets: 12 oz every 4 weeks (if you were lucky)

These rations were subject to much change as the war went on. Offal - things such as kidney and liver - were not generally part of the meat ration and was often sold quite cheaply. Preserves could be bought, or exchanged for an extra sugar ration to make your own. The egg ration could be exchanged for chicken feed if you kept your own chickens. A child's ration was generally half of an adults, but there was extra provision in certain areas (e.g. milk)
On top of these rations there was a complicated points system, limiting a great number of things (tins of baked beans, for example), and food prices were under inflation of up to 25%.

Monday's dinner was... (drum roll, please) roast squirrel! Yes, you read correctly, I cooked a squirrel - two, in fact - and then ate it. It tastes surprisingly nice, quite a lot like chicken. I served it with the stuffing I wrote about in the last blog post, purple sprouting and beetroot leaves, and potato cakes.

Preparing the squirrel!

On Tuesday, I cooked a dinner for my grandparents, who came round to dinner with us. With the help of my trusty cookbooks in supplying a potato shortcrust pastry recipe (with some rosemary mixed in), I cooked up a liver and bacon pie, served with some cabbage. The cake wasn't a wartime creation, but rather a  gluten-free treat for my coeliac sister (and not made by me - my food is not particularly beautiful).

And to finish off this week's post, here are two photos of what I have been wearing -pretty much the same outfit every day, and a couple of bad-quality snaps of my now clean bedroom!

Jess xx

My first ever roast chicken, and... a chamber pot?!

Today I cooked my first ever roast chicken! I decided to use wartime recipes to go with it, including a rather delicious parsley and celery stuffing. I also used some beetroot leaves from the allotment, which we had with some purple sprouting, and some potato/carrot/swede mash. For pudding we had freshly picked and cooked rhubarb and.. (drum roll, please) rabbit blancmange!

I had a nose around the charity shops today and my heart nearly stopped when I saw the object of my desire for the past few years - a chamber pot! As I want to re-make a late '30s-'40s house, I've been on the lookout for all sorts of odd pieces that I could use, and a chamber pot would've been pretty important!

Relaxed for a little while in our allotment.

In case you can't quite read the miniscule writing, here is the recipe. It is from a Ministry of Food pamphlet:

4 oz chopped celery

2 large onions finely chopped

4 level tablespoons parsley

4 oz stale breadcrumbs

Salt and pepper

2 level teaspoons mixed herbs

1 oz melted dripping

Hot water to mix

Mix all ingredients together adding sufficient hot water to give a soft consistency. Use for stuffing meat and poultry.

fresh herbs!

It's best to use stale bread for this recipe. You can blend it into breadcrumbs, or use your fingers. I did mine with my mincer, which worked pretty well.

Not the most prettiest of things, but it tasted delicious!

Blancmange is one of my favourite puddings to make, and I was given a beautiful rabbit blancmange mould for my birthday this year, so it was time to try it out. This is the recipe I use:

2 cups milk

1/3-1/2 cup cornflour

1/3 cup sugar

1-2 drops pink food colouring (optional)

a few drops of almond or vanilla essence to flavour

First, mix a little of the milk with the sugar and cornflour, and put aside once it is a smooth paste. Next, put the rest of the milk into a saucepan and bring to the boil, stirring with a whisk. Add the cornflour mixture, food colouring, and flavouring, and keep whisking until it forms a gloopy substance (don't know how else to describe this!). Keep on the heat for 8-10 minutes and then pour into a damp mould. Leave in the fridge or somewhere cool for a minimum of 1 hour until the mixture is set. 

My beautiful blancmange mould!

The blancmange mixture before going in the fridge to cool.

We usually have our blancmange with tinned peaches, but as we had some rhubarb in the allotment we cooked this with a little sugar and a splash of water and had it instead.

The cooked rhubarb

The finished blancmange!

Jess xx

Bookish Inspiration

Last week I decided to use my copy of 'Paradise Lost' as a colour palette inspiration for my outfit. This is what happened:

Jumper: charity shop

Dress: charity shop

Jess xx

A Night at the Theatre

As I have very little in the way of a life, you may be surprised to hear that I went out this evening; and as I decided to write a blog post about it this evening, indeed an hour after getting home, you can see I haven't deviated far from my usual level of sophistication.
Tonight I went to see the London Swing Orchestra with my friend Alex - who was impeccably dressed as always - at the Theatre Royal in Windsor. The theatre itself is very beautiful and deceptively small, and the building itself, along with the history of theatre in Windsor and Eton, which you can read about here. The building that you can see below (unfortunately not my photograph) was completed in 1910 and was opened that December. It (only just) survived talkies coming into fashion and a variety of things, but is still here and more popular than ever.

The London Swing Orchestra (formerly Graham Dalby and the Grahamophones) were absolutely brilliant, and the worst bit of the night was not being able to get up and dance, which was lamentable indeed! They played us through a whistle-stop tour of the history of swing from the turn of the 20th century from Benny Goodman to Nat King Cole, Irving Berlin, Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra.

I went for a... sort of forties-fifties look, although I don't really know what it resembles... As always my bedroom is in a sorry state. It'll be cleaned up nicely soon - once I've written all of my letters and sorted through the mountains of records - so you'll have to excuse its rather dishevelled appearance.

Blouse/top: Topshop hand-me-down

Jumper: charity shop (originally Edinburgh Woolen Mill)

Skirt: charity shop (part of a set I bought last week that I'm not sure if I love or hate)

(And if you're feeling particularly intimate - and if not, shield your eyes! - my lingerie is all from WhatKatieDid)

And last but not least, I'm sure you're dying to hear what the LSO sounded like, so here are a couple of pieces, the Tiger Rag, and 'Jeeves and Wooster' from their CD:

Hope you all had a fantastic weekend celebrating the Welsh rugby win and St. Patrick's Day, and aren't dreading the return of the Monday morning too much.

Jess xx