Bread Pudding -v- Bread & Butter Pudding

 There seems to be some confusion over what is meant by Bread Pudding/Bread and Butter Pudding, not only among my readers, it seems to be a pretty widespread thing.  They are actually two distinct and different things.  My Mum made both of these regularly when we kids lived at home, as did her mother before her.....probably because they were pretty cheap, easy and quick to make.

This is Bread Pudding, which I made yesterday morning, obviously minus the bit we've eaten:-

It's made by tearing bread up into pieces, putting it in a large bowl with dried fruit, sugar and mixed spice, pouring a mixture of milk, eggs and melted butter over and leaving it to soak for a couple of hours, then squidging it up with your (clean, obviously!) hands and putting in a lined tin and baking.  It sets firm and is eaten sliced in squares, usually cold although can be warm with custard, it's just like a fruit cake, albeit quite a different texture, being somewhat stodgy, certainly very filling.

Bread and Butter Pudding, on the other hand, is a dessert not a cake:-

(image taken off the internet)

This is made by buttering slices of bread (Mum often used to spread the buttered bread with marmalade) and layering them in a dish with dried fruit and sugar.  A jugful of milk with beaten eggs is poured over, some more sugar (Mum used demerara) sprinkled over the top and then baked.  It's served warm usually with pouring cream.  At home Mum used evaporated milk in place of cream.  The top is crunchy and golden, the underneath soft and luscious, it's delicious.  The egg custard is often flavoured with vanilla extract, Mum never bothered with that.  She did sometimes use some cream in the custard instead of all milk, if she had any.

I've only ever made it once - husband had never eaten B&B Pudding, it wasn't something his mother ever made.....he tried it and didn't like it at all, so I've never made it since.  It would be easy to make a smaller quantity, just one or two portions though, but I'm not really a pudding eater, I just have a piece of fruit after dinner if I want something sweet.

I do make Bread Pudding (the cake) reasonably often, it's one of husband's favourite cakes.

Nice new neighbour, bread pudding and please make the weather garden friendly!

 We met the new neighbour yesterday, she came over to thank us for the Welcome card I put through her door.  She's around mid-70s, very sprightly, seems really nice, I think we'll get on fine.  She's moving in on Saturday, coming over every day this week to bring a few things in her car.  Yes she's got a little car - but says she wants to give up driving!  Where she currently lives (in a property also owned by our landlords), she said it's quite rural with no public transport or amenities - sounds just like our old house.  Hence why she wanted to move here, closer to amenities and with support as she's getting older.

We nipped to the supermarket yesterday evening, I needed a couple of things I'd forgotten to put on my last shopping list, to go towards meals this week.  They'd reduced a lot of their bread, I got 3 of my favourite Jasons's sourdough loaves reduced to 1/3 of their original price, they'll be useful to keep in the freezer for days when I don't feel inclined or have the time to make my own bread.  I also picked up one of their instore bakery small brown sourdough loaves, reduced to 50p.  It was already going a bit stale but I immediately thought it'd be brilliant for making a bread pudding.  So that's what I've done this morning, the bread is all torn up in a bowl soaking with dried fruit, mixed spice, some orange zest, a bit of brown sugar, milk, melted butter and eggs, the kitchen smells like Christmas.  I don't follow a recipe for the bread pudding, my Mum used to make it often and I just more or less copy what she did, throwing in unmeasured amounts of this and that until it looks the right consistency and quantity.  Actually, I think bread pudding is one of those things that is very forgiving and is pretty much impossible to get wrong.

Well, the forecast for all day sunshine didn't materialise yesterday, we had an hour or 2 of reasonable sunshine early morning, then back to brief glimpses of sun through the clouds, bitterly cold with spots of rain...yet again.  My washing didn't get dry on the line, had to put it on the airer in the hall and in the airing cupboard.  So irritating.  Dull, rainy and cold today, but hopefully some sunshine tomorrow.  We really want to get on with the garden, even husband is currently quite enthusiastic so I really want to harness that before it wears off!!  (Which it will).

Thanks for all your comments on the possible wartime ration experiment, especially Chinadogs, very interesting.  I'll give it some more thought and google a bit more, I'll definitely post about it if I do decide to do it.

Wartime rationing

 When we were kids at home, mum and dad didn't have a lot of money.  Mum didn't go out to work, she was a housewife with us 4 children to look after.  Dad was in the RAF initially, not as glamorous as it sounds, he worked in catering - I think possibly in the officers mess.  He liked to make out he had a responsible high-up job, he even showed us his medals - they meant nothing to us kids, but he liked to show them off to us.  He left us to go and live with another woman, leaving Mum alone with 4 young kids, I was the eldest at 13 (he buggered off 6 days after my birthday, and on my brother's birthday), my youngest sibling was just 18 months old.  Some years later, I asked Mum what he got the medals for - he'd taken them with him when he left.  She gave an ironic laugh and said he hadn't earned them, they weren't even his - he'd bought them off a market stall!

Anyway, Mum did find life hard after he left, she/we survived on Social Security.  The house was quite often cold - no central heating, just a coal fire in the lounge and paraffin heaters in the bedrooms, but we all had hot water bottles for our beds and lots of blankets and wore jumpers, gloves and hats knitted by our Nanna.  We never went hungry - Mum cooked from scratch - well, ready meals and processed stuff wasn't really a thing back then.  She wasn't an adventurous cook, I don't think she even really liked cooking, but we had good, filling meals and if we were still hungry, there was always bread and homemade jam to fill up on.  I think Mum made similar meals to what her mum had made - mum was a child during WW2 so obviously her mother cooked meals according to what was available on rations.

I recently joined a FB group dedicated to living on WW2 rations, just because it interests me.  It's been said that people during the war were actually very healthy (and not fat!), the rations were carefully worked out by the Ministry of Food scientists to give people just what they needed in terms of nutrition to stay healthy.  The woman who runs the FB group (she's called Carolyn Hyland) also has a website called the 1940s Experiment, she tries to live on wartime rations to both lose weight and save money.  She's quite an authority on wartime rations and is currently writing a book, which will be published next month.  

I'm thinking about giving a wartime diet a try, for a couple of weeks initially.  There's not much meat in it, which suits me just fine actually, although husband won't be quite so keen.  There's plenty of vegetables, fruit is a bit limited as so much of it comes from abroad and it won't be our soft fruit season for a few months yet, and of course apples and pears not till the end of summer.  The only thing that concerns me though is that the rationed diet did contain quite a lot of carbs, and I don't do well eating too many carbs.  But I expect I could get round that, with a bit of thought, eating wholewheat carbs would be better for me and I've read that cooking, freezing and then reheating carby foods makes them less likely to cause glucose spikes.

Have any of you tried a wartime diet, or actually lived through rations (I know rationing of some things continued for a few years after the war)?  I'd be interested to read your experiences.

Garden supplies ordered, new neighbour, baking

 We went to our little local garden centre this morning, so I could order the compost we need and have a look at their bags of gravel and mini slate, I chose gravel in the end and also ordered a bag of grit to mix with the soil for the new rockery we'll be constructing soon.  The garden centre deliver to us, the next day usually, and whilst their goods are a little more expensive than some places, it's worth it to me in terms of saving time getting everything in the one place.  Plus I like to support small local businesses.  Husband though kept wittering on all the time about how we could get things cheaper in some of the other big stores on the trading estate.  I expect we could, but we're only talking a couple of pounds, it would mean going into several different stores, and they're all big national firms, not little local ones that need the money and support more than the big firms do.  He wouldn't let up until I asked him to stop.  The thing is.....it's my money, I'm paying for all this myself so it's up to me what and how much I spend.  It's coming out of my legacy money, when I first received it I gave husband a share and told him he was free to spend it on whatever he wished, as was I.  I reminded him of that, so he shut up.  Everything I've spent or bought out of that legacy has been a carefully considered purchase, I haven't (nor would I) frittered any of it away on frivolous things.

The further down the line husband gets with his steadily declining cognitive stuff, the more petty and money-grabbing he becomes.  He's always been a bit of a miser and always goes for the cheapest of anything - cheap is the first, well the only thing he considers.  And we all know that cheap is not necessarily the best value....as evidenced by most of the very cheap tools he's bought in the past that break on the 2nd or 3rd use.  😒  It seems that some of husband's worst, shall we say, traits are becoming exaggerated as his cognitive decline goes on.

Our new neighbour is moving in within the next couple of weeks, it's a single lady, I've only seen her from a distance.  Our Housing Officer told us her name (she apparently knows her from also being the H/O at the estate where she currently lives) and said she's very nice indeed.  Now that I know her name I'll put a Welcome card through her door.  We got a warm welcome from 2 or 3 of our neighbours when we moved in, so I'd like to do the same for her.

Mixture of sunshine and showers today, with a strong bitterly cold wind so no garden work today.  It's meant to be bright sunshine (and no rain!) Tuesday and Thursday this week, so hopefully we'll be able to get on with more garden stuff then.

I've made another double quantity of oil pastry this morning, half has gone in the freezer.  I've used the first half to make a butternut squash, leek, cheese and sage flan, half of which we'll have for dinner tonight with beans and homemade coleslaw, the remaining half to have cold for lunch with salad tomorrow.  I'm now about to mix up another half white/half wholemeal seeded loaf dough, it'll have an overnight prove and I'll bake it tomorrow.

A good film

 Both of us have aching muscles and back twinges after yesterday's garden efforts, so it's a day of rest for us today....besides, it's raining again.😒  Looks like Tuesday will be the next dry-ish day, so more gardening work then.  I'm so pleased we're able to start working in the garden now, it's been such a long - and very rainy - winter.  If the rain eases up this afternoon, which it should do, albeit briefly, we'll pop to the garden centre and order the bags of compost and slate or gravel for delivery.

Oh, and I forgot to say.....the service provider thing has been settled to our satisfaction and we've been given a refund, so all's well that ends well.

We watched a very heartwarming film last night, called The Great Escaper.  A true story about an ex-serviceman who wanted to attend the 70th anniversary D-Day remembrance service in France, but he'd missed the deadline for the organised trip.  So, instead of giving up and watching it on the TV, he decided, at the age of 90 and living in a care home with his poorly wife, to make the trip to France by himself, with his wife's blessing.  Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson were the old couple, they played the parts really well.  The media got hold of the story and he was welcomed back as a hero by loads of press, much to his surprise (pretty unwelcome surprise at that).  The reason he'd wanted to go was so he could visit the grave of his best friend who had died in the D-Day landings, he was blown up on the beach.....he'd always felt terribly guilty because his friend had died and he'd survived, plus he'd told his friend that it would be ok, adding to his guilt.  He stood in the middle of the Commonwealth cemetery in Bayeux, Normandy, looking out over the sea of around 5,000 graves and cried in despair over the complete waste of young lives, very moving.  Upon his return to England and the care home, his wife told him that he'd had nothing to feel guilty about, his friend getting killed and him surviving was basically a case of bad and good luck, and she'd always been grateful that he'd survived and they'd had a wonderfully happy life together.  I shed a few tears, there were some very poignant moments in it, and it showed the utter futility of war and the massive amount of people killed for no good reason.  He never spoke about his experiences during the war, and nor did my Granddad, who was in the army during WWII, he wouldn't be drawn to talk about any of his war time.  Those men (women too of course, but mostly men on the frontlines) who survived those terrible experiences must have been haunted by those memories to the end of their days, it's a wonder they didn't all go mad.  And still wars go on.

A good and productive morning

 We've had a really productive 4 or 5 hours in the garden today.  Washing hung out, tree planted, husband fixed a fence post that had broken.  I did lots of weeding and pruned 3 large rose bushes.  I dug up 2 clumps of succulent type plants that had appeared in one of the raised beds out of nowhere and put them in pots - free plants for what will be our new rockery.  Picked up loads of dead leaves and twigs blown around the garden and swept the paths.  Pulled up around a dozen or more leeks that hadn't grown properly or were split or had gone to seed.....dug up 4 or 5 useable ones - we needed that raised bed clear for new veg seed sowings from next month.  Two of the raised beds have been topped up with fresh compost, levelled out and then covered over to warm the soil up ready for seed sowing.  We've half filled a dumpy bag with all the prunings, weeds, leaves and twigs.  Bit more to do when the weather is next dry enough, then the bag will be loaded in the car and taken to the tip.  We calculated how many more bags of compost we'll need - probably 6 or 8 - plus a couple of bags of small slate or pebbles, we'll have all that delivered by the local garden centre.  We also need to get a couple of planks or sleepers for husband to renew the edging on one or two sides of the gravel beds.

I'm hoping - well, planning - for all of the garden works to be completed this year, so it's just a question of maintenance after that.  My little legacy is helping to buy all that we need, that windfall has covered lots of small jobs and some small and larger purchases.   

We've stopped for the day now, both of us have aching backs and sore muscles.  We should both sleep well tonight.  Betty was out in the garden with us all morning, she didn't do anything much except follow us around and sniff everything but it's worn her out too.

I see there's nothing much we want to watch on TV tonight, not all of us are sports fans!  I expect we'll look for a film to watch.

If he wants a fight, he'll get it

 Husband's just left to go to the gym (his self-imposed payment suspension starts from 1 March), so I've got an hour to myself and the sun is shining - so it's a good start to the day.  I'm going to pop outside after I've posted this, to have a look round the garden with my notebook, to make notes of what needs doing tomorrow.  Forecast to be sunny all day tomorrow, albeit cold, so I want to take advantage of the sunshine and get the garden ready for planting, the tree we bought last month to provide more privacy between us and the overbearing neighbour needs planting too.  

On the subject of the neighbour, husband had a chat with him yesterday, it seems that building work (he's having his dilapidated old single-storey barn converted to a 2-storey holiday home) will start at the end of next month.  The neighbour then said to husband that he thinks the best thing to do is for him (neighbour) to remove all of our fence and replace it with his own fence, which he says will be 5ft high.  Only it won't be 5ft high, as the ground is lower on his side of the fence, so it will actually only be around 4ft high on our side.  This shows the neighbour's arrogance - 'the best thing' is what HE wants, with no regard whatsoever to what WE want.  Husband, I'm pleased to say, stood his ground and told the neighbour firmly that no, our fence is staying, it's not to be removed.  Husband also pointed out that the existing 3ft high fence doesn't belong to the neighbour, it belongs to us - well, our landlords actually - so neighbour cannot remove it without permission.  Which he's not getting.  We know he wants to put his new fence where our existing fence is, giving him an extra few inches space on his side - land grab in other words.  I've already emailed our landlords to tell them of the neighbour's plans and reiterate that we do not want our fence removed - I have plants growing up it, for a start.  On Monday when our housing officer comes, I'll get her to take photos of our existing fence which she can pass on, with our wishes for the fence to stay, to the appropriate department.  Meanwhile, I shall keep a close eye on what the neighbour is doing and if he shows any signs of starting to remove our fence, we'll be straight out there demanding he stops.  He's a bully and, like all bullies, backs down when confronted, we've already found this out on previous encounters with him.

It's a pity, we really don't want to fall out with neighbours, we just want quiet peaceful enjoyment of our home and garden, particularly as it's our forever home.  But I'm not having him ride roughshod over us, so if he really wants a fight, he'll get one!

Right, off outside whilst the sun is still shining - more showers forecast later.