When we were quarantined in China (during H1N1) the Chinese government provided the food. Three meals a day, all Chinese and quite delicious. Every meal included ingredients I recognized as considered particular healthful and strengthening based on Chinese medicine. I appreciated the effort although I’m fairly certain most of the rest of the people in quarantine did not and would have killed for a burger and fries. I can’t say I’m making much in the way of medicinal food during this quarantine. Our focus is more on comfort food like rice, stir fry, tofu, asian noodles, mac and cheese, pasta with meat sauce.
Finding things missing on the grocery store shelves has led me to do some reading up on life and cooking in England during World War Two and rationing. Its actually pretty interesting. I even found a website where someone had followed the rules on rationing and found they lost weight and felt great. I suspect they were following rationing rules for the beginning of the way, not the end, but it was still interesting.
Its particularly interesting because some food items are actually hard to find like flour, yeast, sometimes milk and eggs. Many a joke has been made over who are all these people baking all of the sudden and what the hell are they doing with all the yeast? But the other day, there was actually flour at the store and Francis said he would bring some home. He presented me 2 quarter pound plastic containers of whole wheat flour because all the food from the bulk section is now prepackaged and you are limited to buying 2 of the thing.
What does one do with such a small amount of flour? Make a depression-era cake of course. I tweaked the original recipe by reducing the flour from 1 1/2 cups to 1 cup and the sugar from 1 cup to 3/4s of a cup. I also added the cinnamon and the 1/2 cup of almond flour. Of course, that means my version can only be made by those with a well stocked pantry. While the original was a bit dry around the edges, the crumbs applied to plain vanilla ice cream, resulted in a damn fine cookies and cream ice cream where the cookies tasted exactly like the chocolate part of an oreo cookie.
Pandemic Chocolate Cake for a Well-Stocked Pantry
Pre-heat oven to 350F
Dry Ingredients
1 cup flour
1/2 cup almond or some other nut flour
3/4 cup sugar
3 Tablespoons cocoa powder
3/4-1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 – 1/2 teaspoon salt
Combine all dry ingredients in an 8 inch square cake pan. Make sure there aren’t any lumps and that the cocoa and cinnamon are well mixed.
Wet Ingredients
5Tablespoons vegetable oil (I’ve been using virgin olive oil)
1 Tablespoon vinegar
1 1/2 – 2 teaspoons vanilla
1 cup water
Working quickly, draw 3 parallel trenches across the dry ingredients. Pour the oil in the top trench, the vinegar in the middle and the vanilla in the bottom. Pour the cup of water over the whole thing. Using a fork or whisk to combine the ingredients to a smooth batter without lumps.
Stuff in the oven and bake for 30 minutes but checking the center for doneness after 25 minutes.