Soup again today. Roasted butternut squash, leeks, garlic, water, vegetable stock cube. It doesn’t have many ingredients and it’s a simple recipe – roast veg, boil it up, blend. Done. You are forgiven if you are wondering why I used leeks as they don’t seem like natural partners. Regular readers have probably already guessed – after some bad shopping decisions and a holiday I had run out of onions. That was why Friday’s tea was cauliflower cheese with roasted calabrese. We nearly had roasted leeks but I needed them for the soup and the Sweet Potato & Chickpea Curry. I really need to put more thought into my menu planning.

The weather has taken a turn for the worse and the evenings are feeling a bit nippy now. It will soon be time to unpack the jumpers and start doing other wintry things. We are hoping, as usual, to last September out without using the heating. This is even more important this year., with the cost of gas.

Earlier this evening I was browsing the internet and found an interesting article on farming in WW2. It includes a Ministry of Agriculture leaflet, as displayed below. As you may note, the rat has a Hitler moustache and fringe drawn on it – propaganda was simpler in those days. If I were a rat I’d be very upset about this. As you may recall, I am no lover of rats, after years spent working farms, but even I think they are getting a bad deal here.

Actually, I’ve just been thinking – when you look at the Putin/Poo Tin pictures that were done at the start of the war in Ukraine propaganda hasn’t moved on much.

However, there is a serious point behind the rat message – a rat can eat 15-20g of grain a day. In 14 months four members of the Women’s Land Army in Wales killed 7,600 rats. That number of rats could have been eating a ton of grain a week, which would produce about 1,700 loaves of bread.  That would mean those rats could have eaten the equivalent of around half a million loaves of bread over the course of the war. And that is just in one part of Wales.