The Housewife's Tool Box: Thinking Ahead

Let's hear it for persistence... I nailed that vintage lunchbox menu today. (It's about time!) And just because I want to make sure these vintage menus are really and truly better for me, I'm going to compare the basic nutritional stats to one of my typical pre-mission lunches. I used to love having one of those table-ready cans of Campbell's Creamy Tomato Parmesan Bisque with probably two or three servings' worth of Rosemary and Olive Oil Triscuits and Trader Joe's Chunky Olive Hummus. Yummalicious! And yet:

Typical pre-mission lunch
Calories: 640
Fat: 36.5g
Sodium: 1,480mg *gasp*
Carbohydrates: 82g
Protein: 16g

Vintage lunch, adapted
Calories: 360
Fat: 23.5g
Sodium: 370mg
Carbohydrates: 27g
Protein: 17g

Yikes. My vintage lunch menu today was a no-holds-barred improvement on a typical pre-mission lunch. So far, these 1945 lunches - with a little tweaking - are undeniably a change for the better. Here's the adapted menu for tomorrow:

Organic Creamy Tomato Soup
Open-faced Cheese Sandwich with Mustard and Lettuce on Whole-grain Bread
Celery
Olives
Fresh Pear

All this fuss over lunches here at the Jitterbug household has made me think about just how important forethought was to the 1940s housewife. You might have the latest washing machine, a state-of-the-art vacuum, and an amazing storage closet, but you couldn't run an efficient home without the ability to think ahead. To anticipate the needs of tomorrow and the day after that. To plan, to remember, to always have a foot in the next meal while cleaning up after the last one. The kitchen - the basic, never-ending demands of the battle to put nutritious, affordable meals on the table three times a day --- the kitchen probably requires more forethought than any other facet of housekeeping. And when it came to rationing - a family couldn't have survived without the forethought an experienced mother and wife had ready to apply to the challenge.

My own vintage meals are several days in the making. Before doing my twice-weekly marketing, I sit down to plan my menus for the week ahead. Buying produce especially can be a trick. If I buy it too far in advance, it'll spoil before it hits the table. Produce that keeps or that needs time to ripen can be purchased a little farther in advance. How many eggs have I got on hand? How many days 'til my milk expires? Can I get a better deal on spices at the supermarket or at the natural foods store? All these questions must be weighed as I make my way through the store. I'll bet most successful housewives constantly carry about in their heads a running inventory of their pantry!

In the evenings, I must look ahead to the morning. Have I got enough space in the dishwasher for tomorrow's breakfast dishes? Is there anything which needs to be taken out of the freezer to thaw? Anything to soak overnight? My latest question: What can I prepare in advance for tomorrow's lunch? If a vintage dinner is in the works: Are there any dishes I can make up before I've finished cleaning up after lunch?

I don't think this kind of forethought has to come naturally... If it did, I'd be in serious trouble. It's a learned skill, I think. Something you just become better at with lots and lots of practice. I haven't picked it up completely myself. There are plenty of moments where I wish I'd thought of something hours ago - or days ago. But those kinds of moments come fewer and farther between these days. See? There is hope for all you last-minute types like me!

My Daily Constitutional

It's an unusually cool, breezy Saturday, and I'm sitting down with a cup of coffee before embarking on my housework today. Here's one sign of how much my habits around the house have changed since November: I bought a tall container of creamer maybe a year ago. You know, the dry, powdery type. Well, it made sense at the time. I couldn't see keeping these big cartons of milk about the house when the only thing I was using milk for was my coffee. On the few occasions I make coffee at home, I would sooner than not find it had already gone bad. Flash forward five months. I haven't touched that creamer in weeks, at least. It sits at the back of a cupboard waiting to be of service again, but I always have fresh milk in the house now. I need it for my breakfasts, I need it for my vintage dinner on the weekends... what a change!

I remembered to pull out the scale yesterday morning and did a rare weigh-in at home. So here's my official starting weight for this new mission: 194. I'm planning to weigh in once a week - on Friday mornings. I dutifully drank my glass of water yesterday morning and walked for 29 minutes during my lunch hour. This morning, another glass of water and I'm planning to walk at the park today for 30 minutes (+ 6 minutes to make up for my short walks on Thursday and Friday). I also cleaned about 2/3 of my kitchen last night, so I need to finish that this morning, go to the park for my workout, then head to the supermarket to do my weekly shopping. Here's the menu I'm planning for my 1945 dinner this weekend:

Stuffed Cabbage Leaves

Tomato Sauce

Buttered Peas

Carrot Sticks

Baked Caramel Custard

The Stuffed Cabbage Leaves recipe sounds very interesting and possibly delicious. We'll see! The whole menu feels very springlike - apropos for a supper on Easter Sunday. I'm even going to shell some fresh sugar peas for the hot vegetable dish...

One of the challenges for me when it comes to walking is definitely going to be timing. If I don't walk as soon as my lunch hour begins, I know that I won't have the willpower to get out there and do it halfway in. Been there, done that. Once I'm sitting comfortably at the table with my feet up in the next chair reading a magazine and eating my lunch --- there's no way I'll get up and go out there to walk! I know myself too well to take that chance, so out I go at 12:00 p.m. This is where those hearty vintage breakfasts are going to come in handiest. I need that long-term energy that's going to last me from 7:00 in the morning 'til I'm finished with that mid-day walk. A growling tummy doesn't make me any happier about postponing lunch for another half hour!

I'm trying to keep a brisk pace. I certainly ought to start stretching my calves beforehand, though, because my shins feel very tight during my workout and that could probably be alleviated with a little stretching. It's much too sunny to be outdoors at high noon without a hat or cap and/or some sunblock, so I need to give some thought to keeping some of these things in my office. I'm really trying to head off some of these minor discomforts that could otherwise end up as excuses for skipping a workout, do you know what I mean?

One of the biggest things I tend to do to sabotage an exercise plan is to start worrying about how I'm going to be able to walk outdoors once we're experiencing full-blown summer here in the desert. (These walks give me way too much time to think!) In about a month, temps will be at the 100-degree mark everyday and there's no relief even in the mornings and evenings. It's relentlessly sunny here, so there's not even the occasional cloudy day to enjoy outdoors. You're trapped inside 24/7 from about the end of May until the first of October. It's not even comfortable outside at midnight. I've been trying to come up with some exercise options for the summer - and I think I've come up with a few possible solutions - but the trick is not to let worrying about what's to come in a month keep me from exercising here and now. No matter what kind of challenges I'm facing come May, I've got to enjoy the privilege of being able to walk outdoors for as long as it lasts.

I'll talk to you later. My kitchen is calling...

Week Ten: The Mission

I was planning a quick trip to the grocery store after work yesterday - just a few things on my list. One of them was grapefruit for this morning's breakfast. Happily, it's grapefruit season here in the Southwest, and a coworker brought me in a bag of grapefruit from the tree in his yard! It's interesting how different these grapefruit look from the ones we buy in the store. They're kind of pear shaped, for one. You can see just by looking at 'em how they hang on the tree. The fruit is heavier at the non-stem end. They also have a much thicker pith. In fact, there was probably about 50% less fruit. Lots more juice, though.

Here's this morning's menu (and tomorrow's, as I have leftover biscuits):

Grapefruit

Baking Powder Biscuits

It was a tasty breakfast. Not as filling as a whole-grain cereal or eggs might have been. The Biscuits were super quick. A cup did the trick today, but I'll have to add a biscuit cutter to my growing list of needs for a vintage home.

Speaking of shopping, my mission for this coming week will be to do some "light" marketing on Wednesday evenings. Housewives in the '40s made multiple trips to multiple stores over the course of a week to buy groceries, toiletries, and household supplies. They might have been able to have groceries delivered in a pinch - and this was still the era of door-to-door salesmen - but they probably spent a fair amount of time walking or driving to the pharmacy, the bakery, the green goods grocer, the shoe repairman, etc. Today, our supermarkets and discount department stores are so massive that we can find most of what we need under two roofs.

I probably make three shopping trips per week (unless something special comes up). A trip to the supermarket, a trip to Trader Joe's, and a trip to Walgreen's. I buy my eggs and dairy and a few other odds and ends at Trader Joe's. There are some incredible prices on produce at another natural foods market, so I stop there sometimes. (They also have a good selection of flours - which has been such a help with these 1945 breakfast menus.) So my own habits in this respect fall quite easily into vintage marketing patterns.

The manual has one recommendation as to timing:

The bulk of marketing should be done on a day when local stores offer special prices. Often Friday and Saturday are bargain days.

I might be wrong, but I don't think any modern supermarkets have sale prices effective just one day per week. They seem to offer sale prices that change once a week, but are effective all week long. I'm going to set aside some time on Saturdays to do the "bulk" of my marketing (a trip to the supermarket) with Wednesday evenings dedicated to a shorter trip to either Trader Joe's or the natural foods store. Those two trips - at opposite ends of the week - should keep my pantry in good order. Wouldn't it be nice never to run short of things? Not to have to make any emergency stops here and there to pick up what I might have been stocked up on with better planning?

Week's End

It's been more than a week now since I started my last mission, but I'm getting ready to start the next, so thought it'd be a good time for a little wrap up. First, the eats. This is the first of the menus in the front of the cookbook:

Orange Juice
Hard-cooked Egg
Graham Muffins

Have you ever worked with graham flour before? It's kind of a happy medium between wheat bran and your generic sack of flour. One of the side effects of these vintage breakfast menus is that my pantry is becoming quite well stocked with different varieties of flour. Regular, wheat bran, buckwheat, graham flour... Thank goodness there's a grocery store here in town that keeps a great selection of Bob's Red Mill in stock! I wanted to make sure the Graham Muffins didn't turn out as dry as the Corn-meal Muffins a few weeks ago, so I added an extra tablespoon of vegetable oil to the recipe. And it helped. They were much softer than the Corn-meal Muffins. I had no idea what they'd taste like - visions of Golden Grahams were dancing through my head - but they just tasted kinda wheaty.

It was a good breakfast. And wonder of wonders, I had everything ready for the table at the same time! That's the kind of magic only experience can help a housewife work. I had to crow about it when I got to work today. But my co-workers didn't get why it was so exciting. I think most of the people I've told about what I'm doing - at least the breakfast part - don't really understand why. Why would I bother baking on a weekday morning? Why not just eat a protein bar or a bowl of cold cereal? It's not like I have kids to make breakfast for. Or a husband to impress. It's as if they think the skills I'm trying to cultivate are outdated and unnecessary. We've moved past needing a hot, yummy, nutritious breakfast or something.

Obviously, I don't think that's the case. But what's kind of nice is hearing that contrast. It makes me realize why I feel so good sitting down to a swell breakfast or crawling into a bed that's neat as a pin at the end of the day. I feel like I'm treating myself like a queen. Which I deserve! I haven't done that in a long time. And there's something about making my home a palace that makes me feel awfully good. So it's not just pride at work here. I would love to have found Mr. Right and to be making a home for my husband and children, but if that's not in the cards... I need to make a home for myself.

Making my bed every morning has quickly become one of my favorite chores. It's so much easier with the bed moved out from the wall in my bedroom. There's instant payoff when you step back and admire everything tucked in just so and the pillows plumped. I can't wait to be able to invest in some bed linens and blankets, maybe a fantastic vintage chenille bedspread, new pillows. Even if they mean it'll take a little bit longer to make my bed! Bedmaking is especially nice when I'm not completely in a rush and running out the door.

It's been interesting to learn a little something new about laundry. Though the process today is so different, the manual has made me appreciate how arduous Wash Day was circa 1945. It was hard on the muscles (so little of the work was actually automated), rough on the hands, and used a ton of water. I'll bet women consciously planned easier menus for Monday evenings just to give themselves a little less work after a long day over the wash tubs. And socializing on Monday nights. Forget about it! It wouldn't have been possible unless you had one of those new fully-automated postwar washing machines. Or a maid. And if you were able to afford hired help one day a week, it'd be Mondays.

Bran Bread Reflections

My 1945 breakfast menu for tomorrow includes Toasted Bran Bread, so I was poking around today looking for recipes - figuring it would be just a quick bread. Well, there is a recipe in my cookbook for Date Bran Bread, but it calls for the bread to be steamed for three hours! I have never steamed anything before, but I'm giving this a try. My largest pot isn't big enough for more than one of the small loaf pans, and I don't have any used coffee cans or other metal cans hanging about, so, after doing some research online, I bought one of those aluminum foil roasters, placed water in the bottom with some stones to raise the loaf pans above the water. Covered the filled loaf pans tightly with foil and slid the whole affair inside a 350-degree oven. I have no idea if this is going to work.

This is another of those instances where the author of the cookbook seems to take for granted that her readers have some basic skills most of us no longer learn from our mothers and grandmothers. Steaming bread. Making jam from dried fruit.

It will be six weeks tomorrow since I set forth on The Great Housekeeping Experiment. Six very interesting weeks. I realized the other day that I have a much healthier-looking, better stocked fridge than I've had in years. There are grapefruits and oranges inside, together with some dried apricots and prunes in sealed containers. A couple varieties of juice - and milk and eggs that are still fresh! (That used to be a rarity.) My cupboards are better stocked than they've been in a long time: Shredded Wheat, Malt-O-Meal, rolled oats, cornmeal, Wheatena, flour, wheat bran... These were the building blocks of a '40s wintertime breakfast. If a housewife kept these items on hand, she'd be able to put a variety of breakfasts on the table.

And speaking of breakfast - these vintage menus are just as carb-heavy as I anticipated, but it's easy to adapt them to be a little friendlier to the waistline. What I've been finding - much to my surprise - is that I've come to feel a real sense of pride in making a pot of non-gummy oatmeal, lump-free cornmeal mush, and farina with just the right amount of water. I've also been getting to know my stovetop better. Just where the heat needs to be set to get the water to boil quickly, how far to lower it to keep a good simmer going. It's funny to feel so accomplished when it comes to things most of my friends wouldn't get very excited about.

Good news! I just checked my oven and the batter I left inside those loaf pans actually appears to be turning into bread!!! I'd say they're just about done. Maybe five more minutes.

Something else I've learned in the last six weeks: when I pick up the things in my bedroom and living room everyday, the job is fairly easy each time. The same goes when it comes to the breakfast dishes. Tidy begets tidy, so when my bedroom is picked up, I don't want to set something down where it doesn't belong. It's kind of nice to keep these rooms picked up by putting things back where they belong in the first place. My living room also seems a whole lot more spacious, and, boy, is it nice to come home to a dark apartment and not have to worry about stumbling over something as I'm looking for the light switch.

I've also discovered that my sleeping habits stink. In the American Home article I mentioned several days ago, the author writes that she wakes every day at 6:30 - no matter what the day of the week. This has got to be a whole lot easier on the body than my own habit of burning the midnight oil and sleeping in as late as possible, getting up at a different time nearly every day. I've got a long road to go, so this will be something I'll try and fold into my routine over time.

As I finish writing this, I'm enjoying a slice of my own Bran Bread, fresh from the oven. I can't believe I pulled this off! It's nice and moist, too. I ended up baking it for about 1 1/2 hours at 350 degrees F. I'm definitely freezing one of these loaves so I don't have to go through this again for quite some time...

Week's End

Now here's a breakfast I've got some experience making! I did pick up some interesting trivia from my cookbook today. Scrambled Eggs were once known as Battered Eggs.

Grapefruit Juice
Scrambled Eggs
Toast
Coffee

I've definitely learned a little something during the second week of The Great Housekeeping Experiment. Looking ahead at some of the breakfast menus in my 1945 cookbook, I can see the same cereals used over and over again in different ways. I should note that the menus I've been using are all "winter" menus. There are alternatives suggested for warm weather, usually involving prepared cereals and fresh fruits. If a '40s housewife wanted to be well-equipped for breakfasts on winter mornings, her shopping would have been fairly simple. She'd keep a stock of cereals on hand (rolled oats, cornmeal, wheat, farina), a prepared cereal or two, dried fruits (apricots, prunes), milk, eggs, bread, canned/bottled juices (apple, grapefruit), and some fresh citrus fruit.

And this may sound strange, but I feel like I'm getting better acquainted with my stovetop. Better able to judge where I should set the burner, that getting the water to boil before adding the cereal is always best, that stewing fruits need lots of water. Each cereal has it's own protocol --- as I learned yesterday with Corn-meal Mush. Speaking of which, I may not have been able to find a recipe on my package of cornmeal, but here's a recipe from the Aunt Jemima website with a whole step I missed!

Corn Meal Mush

1 cup Quaker or Aunt Jemima Enriched White or Yellow Corn Meal
1 cup cold water
3 cups boiling water
1 teaspoon salt

In large saucepan, bring 3 cups water and salt to a boil. In small bowl, mix corn meal with cold water. Gradually stir corn meal mixture into salted boiling water. Cook 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Cover, and continue cooking on low heat 5 minutes for white corn meal or 10 minutes for yellow corn meal, stirring occasionally. Serve hot with milk and sugar. Yield: 6 servings