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| Zuppa |
Very grateful for the cooler temps of late. Mostly because it means it's soups and stews weather. lol This is a chicken and rice soup I made this past week, all made from pantry ingredients, of course. We had the leftovers for Saturday night supper last night, with peanut butter sandwiches, and there's still enough left for at least one of his lunches this coming week. It was quite tasty. In the 25 days since I started this Pantry Challenge, I have spent about 15 dollars at the grocery store, for mostly produce and a couple of loaves of bread. But this week I'm going to start making bread again, and I'll probably still have to buy a little produce and fruit. But that's okay. I'm sticking to it, even though the local grocers keep trying to entice me with their ground beef and steak sales. lol
Today is Sunday and I'm trying to figure out what to make for our supper tonight. We usually clear out whatever leftovers there are on Friday and Saturday, but not this week. There is still some air fried chicken in the fridge. And soup. But I made breakfast for supper Friday night and finished up the mashed potatoes by making potato pancakes, the white gravy by using a leftover biscuit each for B&G, the piece of leftover smoked sausage for , well, meat. lol Added 2 over easy eggs and it was a great supper. And cleaned some stuff out of the fridge. Win/win !! I just had a thought about a one pot Corned Beef and Cabbage dish for supper tonight. Make it with home canned corned beef, baby carrots and red potatoes and fresh onions and cabbage. I could bake a small loaf of Irish Soda Bread to make it special,. Mmmm... that sounds pretty darn good. Himself does love that Irish Soda Bread. (Me too). lol
Hope everyone is surviving the inflationary prices of everything. The cost of gas is going back up again (that didn't last long). Makes me worried that I cannot afford to refill my propane tank. The last time it was filled it was 700 dollars. And that's when fuel prices were not nearly this high. SMH... interesting watching Victoria (the Masterpiece Theater series) last night about the Irish Potato Famine and the attitudes of the wealthy (English) landowners and their behaviors. Quite disgusting, really...millions of people dying of starvation and they're throwing them off the land and houses and proclaiming that they "brought this upon themselves". Then himself proceeded to tell me about the British evicting all these people living in the slums because they were sick and tearing down all the housing, leaving them with nowhere to go. This was (I think) late 1800's.
Slum clearances: evicting the lowly
Between 1878 and 1899, slum clearance schemes in central London led to 45,334 men, women and children being evicted. Those, at least, are the official figures; the real numbers may be much higher, because it was in the slum landlord’s interest to evict as many people as he could before the official valuation of his property – empty rooms having greater letting potential than houses filled to the rafters. There is no figure for those thus ‘winkled out’, but even the official number is huge – equivalent to the population of Rotherham in the 1890s.
Who were these people? The short answer is: we don’t know. The voice of the evicted slum-dweller is, for all practical purposes, silent. Some among them would have been intelligent and articulate, literate and skilled. Most, though, were the nameless poor, who lived large parts of their lives in hunger, cold and semi-nakedness. Perhaps word of mouth told them to stay put for the few shillings of compensation that came their way, but that is all they got. At the end, as the social reformer the Earl of Shaftesbury described in the House of Lords in 1875, when the bailiffs arrived “perplexity and dismay are everywhere; the district has all the air of a town taken by assault”. The slums were not cleared to benefit people like these. They were cleared to get rid of them.
