HISTORY: Preserved

Day 9 of the wartime cooking class focused on the wartime lunch box. This is one of my favorite food topics, so not only were we trying out a mini version of a war worker's lunch box, I was gearing the kids up for the final, ultimate challenge which you'll find out about next week!

So, we discussed how important nutrition was for keeping war workers healthy, happy, alert, and full of energy. I gave them some examples of sandwich fillings to mixed reactions and we dove straight in to making our own wartime lunch - Mock Chicken Salad Sandwiches with Corn Meal Cookies, and Orangeade to drink.

The Mock Chicken Salad is absolutely delicious! I've made it in the past, so I knew the recipe was a keeper. It uses cooked pork ground up with carrots and celery with mayo and Chow Chow (a sweet, tangy, mustard relish). A lot of the kids really liked it (I think a couple weren't fond of it), but some even asked for seconds!

The Orangeade was something I tried out with my family in …

For our eighth class of History in the Kitchen - WWII, we learned about the emphasis during the war on canning all the produce from your garden and how canned foods were rationed and more expensive due to the high demand for tin.

I wanted to focus on a fruit recipe this time, so we tried this recipe for Peach Griddle Cakes along with experimenting with two Mapleine Pancake Syrups and one Molasses Spread. The Peach Griddle Cakes were easy and straight-forward. I used canned peaches, which worked very well.

I  made two different Mapleine syrups - one using sugar and the other using corn syrup. The one using sugar was okay, but as soon as we tried the one using corn syrup, we were amazed. It tasted exactly like store bought pancake syrup! Surprisingly with just corn syrup, water, a bit of salt, and Mapleine, the syrup produced even had a bit of a nutty flavor. It was really good and used the most.

A few brave souls tried the Molasses Spread which is more of a watery syrup, but it wasn…