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.