There’s no doubt about it - Aldi has a difference ambience to your typical Waitrose or Tesco. Visiting our local one this week, there was no soft lighting and no Sinatra playing. Even the trolleys weren’t free – you had to insert a £1, which puzzled one old lady on the forecourt. A sign in the window deterred charities from collecting funds outside the store because it might cause 'congestion'.

But as your blog comments this week have revealed, it wasn't just pensioners shopping there, but reasonably affluent-looking people of different age groups. As I browsed the pasta, two women crowed about the cheap prices, and how delicious the pasta sauces were. I noted though that while pesto was cheap at 59p it was 9p dearer than in our farm shop where you get two for £1.

Stumbling across cut-price toiletries, I was like a kid in a sweet shop, bagging an anti-wrinkle cream (one of my female friends has got me into this nonsense) for £1.89! Bargain!

I’d half expected to dislike the fruit and veg, but I was pleasantly surprised. Much of it was locally produced, from Kent and Essex and good quality (although I did pick up some Peruvian asparagus for just £1.39). And it all looked much more palatable than the stuff served up in our local Somerfield. I didn’t buy any, but bread was 89p while 4 pints of milk was £1.40 - 4p cheaper than our Asda. Even the meat looked appetising, so I picked up some sausages for £1.39 and salami for £1.29 (DJ loves it but will he eat it?). It’ll be interesting to see if the bangers are tastier than the £1 ones I recently bought from the farm shop which tasted like the ones you get in tins of baked beans...eek...

By the time I got to the checkout I’d forgotten I was in a discount store, until I realised I’d forgotten carrier bags and had to buy some for 9p each, which was annoying. The cashier was the most miserable one I’ve ever met and the quickest – if he doesn’t get RSI I’m a monkey’s uncle – so I had no time to pack anyway. I noticed other shoppers put the items unpacked back into the trolley and then stood at the exit packing them, after paying, into their own bags. Was this was to save money on Aldi bags or so their neighbours wouldn’t know they’d been shopping there? How ridiculous, I thought.

But when I arrived home a funny feeling hit me. As I unloaded the car of the bags which screamed ALDI, I found myself hoping my neighbours were out. My heart sank when John the Poacher pulled up in his van to get some eggs. My gut reaction was to run into the house to hide the bags. How ridiculously childish! He probably shops there anyway!

Here is my Aldi food shopping list by the way - tell me if you think you can beat it.

(£)

4 pints milk 1.40

1kg plain flour 0.43

ginger nut biscuits 0.39

1kg Penne pasta 1.09

1kg spaghetti pasta 0.85

1kg onions 0.69

1kg onions 0.69

410g red kidney beans 0.17

425g premium baked beans 0.22

425g premium baked beans 0.22

326g sweet corn 0.39

326g sweet corn 0.39

290g mild cheddar 1.30

6 butchers choice sausages (400g) 1.39

6 vine tomatoes 1.09

3 mixed peppers  1.29

250g asparagus 1.39

bag celery 0.65

350 closed cap mushrooms 0.79

200g spinach 0.79

125g mozzarella 0.49

100g salami 1.29

Total: £17.40

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Phew! My worries last week on the Woolton pie front were thankfully unwarranted, despite tales that the vegetarian pie, named after the famous Minister for Food, was a standing joke during World War Two because it was considered so unappetising. Even DJ, who initially pulled a face on Friday night when he got home and found out what I was cooking, said he enjoyed it. Maybe it was because I did, admittedly, doctor it a tiny bit by adding a few dried herbs to make it a bit more palatable. Or perhaps the taste of the gravy covered it up! But surprise, surprise, DJ actually said he would eat it again, which was a big thumbs up for the recipe and, frankly, my cooking in general.

Now, happily, I am leaving the frightening days – and food (apologies, but I won’t miss some of these bland, tasteless recipes, I must say)– of World War Two behind and throwing in my lot with the discount supermarkets.

Cut-price stores, like Lidl and Aldi, have sprung up all over the UK in recent years. And while some British consumers might not like to admit to shopping there, as the credit crunch bites Aldi has reported a 25 per cent increase in sales as price conscious shoppers desert Tesco and Asda to hunt for bargains there. (Check out this interesting article on supermarket snobbery on MSN)

Aldi has even started a website campaign – www.saveamillionwithaldi.co.uk - to encourage more people to shop at its stores by showing them how much they could save over a lifetime. The supermarket reckons one mum of a family with three children, based in Lincoln, who recently ditched conventional stores to shop at Aldi could save more than £44,000 over her lifetime (based on her previous shopping bill of £90 a week). It claims she saves at least £20 a week on her bill now.

So, I thought I’d see for myself whether, snobbery aside, there is any significant difference in price and product quality between Aldi and conventional supermarkets, by doing all of my food shopping this week in our nearest store.

I’m not entirely a stranger to Aldi. I have been in our local one before, although I’ve yet to try out the food. About a year ago I bought some tomatoes and mozzarella from there but sadly ended up throwing them away as a sniffy DJ refused point blank to eat them.

One issue, though, is that our nearest one is almost six miles away and we need to see if the savings we make are worth the extra petrol spend to get there.

Would you shop at a discounted supermarket like Lidl or Aldi? If you shop there already, does it help you save on your grocery bill?

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I’m making Woolton pie tonight, named after the famous wartime Food Minister - admittedly not a popular dish - and am wondering if DJ will make it home for dinner at all. I fear he is tiring already of eating World War Two style food and tempted to get something on the black market...Oh dear!

Woolton pie comprises of cauliflower, carrots and swede, and I had to buy some of the veg in especially. So it struck me that if our vegetable patch was in full flow and we’d stored veg from last year we wouldn’t need to buy it. Unfortunately, all that’s ready to eat right now are some early Anya potatoes, albeit delicious. We had problems with some seeds not germinating, so the crop isn’t quite ready yet. But the courgette plant is flowering and peas are on the go.

Allotments, of course, were vital during the war in producing food to feed the nation, and I wanted to find out more. Luckily the Churchill Museum in London is running a fascinating exhibition called Dig for Victory: War on Waste and has reconstructed two allotments in St James’s Park.

Melody Allen, exhibitions assistant there, says the project was inspired by growing interest in sustainability. “The allotment started up last year,” she says. “It was very successful and we encouraged many school children to grow their own vegetables. So this year we thought we’d continue it. We’ve got two allotments side by side, one cultivated as a modern day one and the other as a World War Two allotment. The wartime one is growing potatoes, carrots and onions, while the other has other vegetables more popular now.”

The Museum is gardening organically, but this wasn’t always the case during the wartime Dig for Victory campaign, which encouraged people to dig up their gardens to grow food. “Back then priorities were very different because they were growing food for the nation,” Melody explains. “For example, nicotine fumes were used in the green house [to kill pests]. But we can learn from their recycling methods. Burying an old mattress under broad beans helped retain moisture, while old window frames were used to make cold frames.”

Allotments sprung up in the unlikeliest of places. “Kensington Gardens, most of London’s Royal Parks and even the Tower of London’s moat were dug up and used to cultivate veg,” she tells me. “People dug up their backyards and some even grew vegetables on top of Anderson Shelters. There were 1.4m allotments and over half the UK’s families were growing their own to supplement their rations. They produced over a million tonnes of veg each year.”

The Ministry of Food supported gardeners by distributing 10m instructional leaflets and organising food into different food groups - not unlike the modern Five a Day campaign. “Amateur gardeners were keen to grow fruits and salad vegetables. But the government encouraged them to grow sustainable crops like potatoes, carrots and cabbages [which could be stored easily],” Melody points out.

She believes that as a throw-away-nation, we have a lot to learn from wartime recycling techniques. “People were very resourceful then,” says Melody. “But now the UK produces 434m tonnes of rubbish each year and if we continue to by 2010 our landfill sites will be full. So we’re particularly looking at sustainability this year. We’ve got lots of ice cream tubs planted up and are trying to encourage people to save yoghurt pots and newspapers to make plant pots.”

And just as the allotment was vital during the war, Melody claims growing your own could help us save on our food bills. “I think growing your own on an allotment is an affordable way of producing food. It’s possible to produce £300 of veg a year plus you get exercise from it and it builds a sense of community. If you don’t have space you can grow courgettes or salad leaves in pots.”

Meanwhile, the Churchill Museum’s allotment is thriving. “The veg is doing particularly well this year,” she tells me. “The only problem has been black fly and as we’re gardening organically we can only spray soapy water on them. We’ve also used World War Two techniques such as companion planting - planting flowers to attract the insects away from the veg.”

Do you grow your own? Does it help you save on your shopping bill, or do you think it's just another fad that will disappear eventually? What are your recycling tips? Leave a message and let me know. Have a great weekend, xxx Piper

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Living on wartime rations isn’t easy – I’ve already poisoned myself with one simple recipe! So in an effort to learn more, I caught up with Terry Charman, senior historian at the Imperial War Museum, this week and picked his extensive brains about diet and food in wartime Britain.

He was amused by my experiment. “It’s interesting that when recession looms people look back to the war period,” he told me. “What we can learn from wartime Britain is not to waste food. Back then everything was turned into something else. People used up food scraps and even made imitation food – such as mock goose – to capitalise on what was available. It was a very different world and people living now would find it difficult to go back.”

We often consider World War Two as a time of privation, but the Ministry of Food went to great lengths to ensure everyone ate healthily. “The wartime diet was extremely healthy because you didn’t have the fatty foods and there was the Dig for Victory campaign, which encouraged people to grow their own vegetables,” Terry explains. “You wanted a fighting fit nation. Bacon, ham, meat, sugar and butter were all rationed and things like potatoes were seen as big fillers.”

But the food was boring. “You could live quite well on the wartime ration, but you would find it monotonous and the lack of oranges and bananas difficult,” he says. “At the museum we have photos from a fair during the war where they auctioned off a banana for £5. That’s the length people went to [for fresh fruit]! What is so difficult to convey is the enormous choice we have now, but then they had to put up with what was at the butchers or bakers. Nobody went hungry but people couldn’t have what they wanted.”

Leftover meat would be recycled. “Meat was rationed at 6p, which would buy an individual two lamb chops,” Terry explains. “But the housewife would buy the family meat ration in one go – a leg of pork or a shoulder of lamb – serve it for Sunday dinner, and then it would continue to put in an appearance until the Tuesday as rissoles, cottage pie etc. Only meat was rationed in monetary terms, everything else was rationed in weight.”

But not everything was rationed. “Chicken, turkey and game weren’t rationed, and neither were fruit and vegetables, although bananas, oranges and lemons almost disappeared as shipping space was needed for munitions,” he says. “Restaurants were ordered to serve meals costing no more than five shillings, although luxury ones got away with charging for extras, such as the band. People were encouraged to keep rabbits and pigs in a pig club. Offal wasn’t rationed, but a lot of people turned their noses up at it. People didn’t drink much coffee then either. Nobody even thought of rationing coffee.”

I admitted I found some wartime recipes uninspiring. “People’s tastes were blander then,” Terry points out. “They hadn’t done the foreign travel we have. If they had a takeaway it would be fish and chips.”

Ironically, Terry says money wasn’t an issue then. “What could you spend the money on? Consumer goods had more or less gone and food prices were controlled. Entertainment was the main thing. Books flourished in the long hours of the blackout and people went to the cinema.”

Difficult for consumers to bear was the continuation of rationing nine years after the war ended. “Rationing went on until 1954,” Terry points out. “Meat was the last thing that went off ration. People couldn’t understand. We’d won the war and defeated countries were no longer on rationing. But rationing actually increased after the war, with bread going on ration for three years. There is a mindset that people would accept this in wartime, but during more intangible things, like economic downturns, it is much more difficult to rally the troops.”

Could you stand to live on World War Two food? What do you think could we learn from the wartime Britain’s diet and approach to food? Leave a comment and let me know.

As I write this blog entry, I am wondering if I need a bucket handy. I’m not feeling too good, and it’s all due to my new food challenge this week. My wild food week is now over – it was a lot of fun and I especially enjoyed meeting Kris Miners – (I’ll let you know at the end of the month whether it helped me save cash) and now I am travelling back in time to World War Two and rationing. As food prices spiral, some people have suggested that revisiting WW2 recipes and our waste not, want not attitude to food then, might help shoppers save and maybe even fight obesity.

Well, my first attempt at cooking a WW2 recipe has certainly helped me lose my appetite! I’d been leafing through my Eating for Victory book, a collection of WW2 cooking instruction leaflets from the Ministry of Food, to try to find a quick lunch recipe, and I came across one called Cheese Savoury. It sounded harmless enough – just mix a beaten egg (or reconstituted egg) with half a pint of milk, seasoning, 4 oz grated cheese, 4 oz breadcrumbs and some mustard, and bake in a greased oven dish for 20 minutes. Compared to some of the offal recipes, I felt I was breaking myself in gently.

DJ had the day off yesterday and we were lunching together. I served up the cheese savoury, which strongly resembled a pile of cat sick, onto a plate with a little side salad al fresco as the weather was nice. He sat down uncertainly and gazed at the plate in disbelief. “I’m sorry, but I can’t eat this,” he said, looking green. In my enthusiasm I’d forgotten he has a strong aversion to soggy bread. “Don’t worry, I’ll make something else,” DJ said, while I gamely tucked in. Surely it couldn’t be that bad? But soon I began to feel queasy. The taste of mustard was very strong and I wondered if I hadn’t cooked it for long enough, as perhaps the breadcrumbs should be hard and not soggy. I couldn't work out whether I was still hungry or going to be ill. I thought I was tired of eating dandelions, but come back weeds, all is forgiven!

I just hope the other wartime recipes are more appetising. How on earth did people stand eating this stuff during the war, or have we just become big food softies? I don’t know. At least tonight’s meal should be tastier. John the Poacher has done us proud this week with two wood pigeons. He also brought us a rabbit but unfortunately some of the shot had entered the stomach cavity, which can contaminate the meat so we weren’t able to use it. But game and rabbits weren’t rationed during the war so we can eat our fill.

The kitchen was a sight as we set about trying to deal with the fare. The patio is still covered in pigeon feathers, but hopefully my neighbour will assume it is the cat’s doing. Funnily enough, Dougal the cat felt the need to join in with his own contribution to the wartime larder.

After observing DJ dealing with the pigeons, he ran into the house clutching a mouse in his mouth, (fortunately still intact) and as I tried to rescue it, it disappeared. Where had it gone? I puzzled for about five seconds before realising the creature had done precisely what any stereotypical mouse would do – it ran up the leg of my jeans! I shrieked a little – more out of surprise than fear – and shook the bellbottom of my jeans and out it came!

Do you have any memories of World War Two food or rationing? Did your parents or grandparents tell you what they used to eat? Let me know by leaving a comment.

I’ve included a rundown here of 15 wild plants Kris Miners identified for me on our forage around Hanningfield and how you can use them. But do bear in mind that you must ask permission from the landowner if you wish to dig up the roots of plants or you can be prosecuted under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.  It’s important to respect our few precious woodland areas in the UK, especially nature reserves, and not go about stripping the land of its assets. If you do pick wild plants then you must always leave some of the plant behind. OK, lecture over! Onto the plants...

Woundwort – A member of the mint family with a pungent smell. Don’t worry - it doesn’t taste as strongly as it smells! The leaves can be used in salads or as a filling in sandwiches. As the name suggests, can also be used to treat cuts and staunch bleeding.

Hawthorn – There are two types - common hawthorn (shown) and Midland hawthorn. Midland has more than one seed in its berries, common hawthorn only has one. The young leaves have a nutty, bitter flavour – you can eat these in salads. “You can also eat the berry but not the seeds as they contain cyanide,” says Kris Miners. “Crush the berries, dry them in the sun and use them to make fruit leathers. Our ancestors would also have made fishing hooks from the thorns. It’s also good burning wood as it gives off a lot of heat.”

Blackthorn - Don’t confuse hawthorn with blackthorn, which has oval leaves. Hawthorn has divided leaves and blackthorn flowers before its leaves appear, and vice versa with hawthorn. You can eat blackthorn flowers but not the leaves. But you can eat blackthorn sloes (the blue berries) straight from the bush and use them to make sloe gin.

Dog rose – Dog rose petals are often used to decorate cakes but Kris says his granddad used to cut, peel and eat the stem, a bit like asparagus, although he can find no record of anyone else doing so. We tried it and it tasted good! Don’t necessarily try this with your roses at home though as the stem may be too hard.

Giant reed mace – Often mistakenly called a bulrush after it featured in a famous painting of Moses in the Bulrushes, but it isn’t one. “This plant is one of the most useful in bush craft,” enthuses Kris. “You can eat the tops like a corn on the cob when they’re green, and collect the pollen and use it as flour. It’s also highly flammable and has been used in making fireworks. You can use the fibres from the top when it’s dried out as tinder for making fires or padding for clothes or pillows. Plus the grubs in the stem can be useful bait for fishing. And you can use the stem as a hand drill for making fires, although you have to do it carefully as it can be brittle.” He also tells me that the root can be dug up and cooked on the fire, plus the base of the stem can be used like asparagus, the sap can treat toothache and the stem used in basketry. The uses are endless! The only problem is that it likes sprouting up in polluted water, which isn’t ideal for the forager, and it can be confused with iris or yellow flag.

Ash - The ash tree might not look appetising but it has provided food in times of famine. It develops keys, a bit like a sycamore tree, which can be eaten raw or pickled and used as a caper substitute.

Vetchlin - A yellow flowering plant which admittedly isn't seen very often. It is a type of wild pea and you can eat the seedpods. Be careful, though, as it is similar to bird’s foot trefoil which isn’t edible.

Nettle – The young leaves can be used like spinach or in herb teas. The stalk can also be made into string or rope. Eating too much nettle which is past its best (after it has flowered) can be bad for the kidneys though.

Horsetail or mares tail – Not edible, but used by Kris as a handy bushcraft scouring pad!

Sedge – The stem is diamond-shaped. People say a sedge has an edge, which is a useful rhyme to help you remember how to identify it. The seeds are like millet seeds and can be ground up and put in water to make biscuits.

Plaintain – The scourge of my front lawn! The seeds of the reed-like stem can be ground up to make biscuits and you can eat the leaves too.

Grand fir – Native Americans ate the bark. If you pop the blisters in the bark you can use the sap to heal cuts. It’s also used in an antiseptic eyewash and as a chewing gum.

Wood sorrel – Don’t eat this if you’re pregnant or arthritic. But the leaves can be to make a sauce which is especially good with fish.

Ground ivy – Also known as alehoof because it was used in the past to make beer when hops ran out. Can be used as a herb or to make herbal teas.

Elder –There’s a lot of superstition associated with the elder tree – it was thought to be unlucky if you sat under it and Judas is supposed to have hung himself on one. The leaves are also poisonous. But they can be rubbed on the skin to deter mosquitoes. The flowers, which are edible, have a strong aroma. You can make a tea by pouring hot water on them. Don’t wash them or you’ll lose the flavour. You also can coat them in batter and fry them. The berries are edible but can be a bit sickly – you need to add other berries to them if you want to use them in a crumble etc., says Kris. They are also used in wine making.

NEVER eat wild plants or fungi unless you are 100 per cent sure of what you are eating.

Have you tried any of these wild plants? Got any good recipes?  Leave a comment and let me know.

Have a great weekend! Piper xxx

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I went on a three hour foraging foray this week at Hanningfield Reservoir, a beautiful nature reserve in Essex, in the company of bushcraft expert and conservationist Kris Miners, who runs Green Man Bushcraft Ltd, and I’m feeling pretty shattered. It must be all that fresh air. I used to joke when I worked in London that it was only the pollutants keeping me awake, but it must have been true!

I explained to Kris that I’d been having difficulties identifying some plants and was afraid of poisoning myself, so I wanted a crash course on easy ones to identify. In fact, I got so much information from him that it’s impossible to distil everything here, so part two will follow tomorrow with a guide to 15 wild edible plants and how to identify them.

According to Kris, I’m not alone. “Unless you’re doing it all the time it’s difficult,” he explains. “I’ve heard so many stories from people who’ve been on my courses. One guy told me that he’d eat any mushroom that was white. He was very lucky he didn’t get ill. Another asked me to identify a root he’d eaten once and found bitter. It’s surprising how many people eat things [without identifying them]. We do point out on our courses which plants are poisonous, as well as the edible ones. The umbelleferae family of plants, which includes cow parsley, Alexanders and hemlock, for example are difficult to distinguish.”

And grasses are another problematic species. “In basic wild food courses I leave out the grasses too,” he tells me. “You can get a fungus growing on them and there are some bad stories about people making bread flour from infected grasses – a woman lost her leg after doing so. If people forget to check grasses for the fungus then it’s easy to come a cropper. Stick with what you know.”

However, Kris also claims that after years of identifying plants you can taste when something is amiss. “I also believe we’ve all got something built-in to us to tell us if something is poisonous [once you’ve been identifying plants for a while],” he says. “I can taste that something’s not right. It’s that extra sense you’ve got.”

I told him I’d eaten nettles which were a bit past their best and he warned me they weren’t as safe as I’d thought. “Old nettles can irritate your kidneys,” he warns. “But it’s a useful plant. You can also use the stalks to make string and rope. There’s a theory that nettle rope was used to move the stones into place at Stonehenge.”

Kris emphasises the importance of touching, smelling and tasting a plant to identify it. “Books get you looking at what the plant looks like all the time, but it’s about more than that,” he says.

However, as a conservationist he is concerned that the growing interest in wild food thanks to programmes on TV may prove detrimental to the environment. “It’s really nice that people are getting back to nature, but they can do harm,” he points out. “People strip bark from birch trees and don’t know what they’re doing so they harm the trees. The TV channels don’t always show you what to do properly. I’m trying to educate people. You have to be careful [harvesting wild food] because we don’t have much woodland. It can do a lot of harm to the environment. We haven’t got a lot of greenery to support it. People have almost made certain plants extinct by taking them.”

But, if carried out responsibly, will foraging help you save on your shopping bill? “It depends how much time you’ve got and if you’re willing to hunt,” says Kris. “You can easily get your salad for free. But many people are used to what things taste like in the supermarket. However, if you’ve got a year to build up to it and preserve things by making jellies, jams and soups and a good location, then it’s possible to save money by eating wild food.”

Tomorrow – fifteen wild plants and their uses, courtesy of Kris Miners

Do you think eating wild food would help you save on your grocery bill? Or is it too difficult and time consuming? Leave a comment and let me know.

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Despite all the great advice from Fergus Drennan and countless books at my disposal courtesy of DJ’s obsession with Ray Mears and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, I have to admit I’ve found the great foraging adventure a little daunting so far!

First of all, it was pouring with rain yesterday and I didn’t really want to have to venture out of the house at all, but I had to if I wanted to find lunch! What’s more, besides actually locating the food sources and working out what to do with them, it’s difficult to plan my meals because I don’t quite know what I’m going to find out in the wild or how much of it. But the biggest obstacle of all is plant identification.

Now, I’ve been on three wild food courses over the past year – ok, one wasn’t very good and another was just for a couple of hours wandering around a wood. But I like to think I’ve at least picked up a little information from them that the population at large might not be aware of. However, putting it into practice is a different story. While I’ve heard a lot about the plants you can eat, like fat hen, Alexanders and pig nuts, and I’ve been shown them by the course teachers or seen pictures of them in books, I still don’t have a clue about finding them myself and properly identifying them. And I really don’t want to take the risk of poisoning myself or giving myself a tummy upset.

The problem is that there are lots of wild foods that can be easily muddled with poisonous ones. Just leaf through wild food writer Johnny Jumbalaya’s cookbooks (alias Marcus Harrison who runs courses at the Wild Food School in Cornwall) and loads of the ingredients are asterisked with warnings about what they can be mistaken with or that too much of it can make you need the loo all the time (dandelion!) or cause kidney damage if eaten to excess (sorrel). It’s enough to send you running to the safety of the local chip shop! So I am playing it safe by sticking with the plants that I know well and can easily identify, such as dandelion, nettle, plaintain and herb bennet etc.

But so far I’ve had some great meals. Luckily, just in time John the Poacher dropped a rabbit round at the weekend, in exchange for some eggs, which made a delicious stew. All the more tasty as we didn’t pay for the meat! And I’ve also been experimenting with Marcus Harrison's multiple inventive recipes for nettles, dandelions etc.

His nettle and potato curry recipe (I actually made this with some sweet potato my neighbour gave me for free as she was going on holiday) wasn’t bad, although I think the nettles were a bit past their best and stringy, despite me only taking the very top young leaves.

And my nasturtium leaf and sweetcorn fritters (my own adaptation of a conventional recipe) with dandelion, daisy and nasturtium salad were seriously good! I’m also going to experiment with making some dandelion coffee.

But I’m hoping that Kris Miners who is taking me out foraging this week will help me widen my repertoire and find me some more adventurous and exciting things to eat!

Had any adventures with wild food? Leave a message and tell me all about it!

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