I'm glad I took the time to check all 11 pages of this thread first. I was going to post this because it looks really good. Leave out the tomato sauce. I'm going to try it. Pasta with Peas (plus potatoes and onions) If I don't like it, I'll just add a little Miracle Whip and make macaroni/potato salad. .
I love Miracle Whip. The name says it all, yet it says nothing. Regarding the dish: I like peas with pasta (in its myriad variants), yet rarely think to make it.
"According to Kraft archivist Becky Haglund Tousey, Kraft developed the product in house, using a patented "emulsifying machine", invented by Charles Chapman, to create a product that blended mayonnaise and less expensive salad dressing, sometimes called "boiled dressing"[4] and "salad dressing spread". The machine, dubbed "Miracle Whip" by Chapman, ensured that the ingredients, including more than 20 spices, were thoroughly blended". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Whip
When my cousins and I spent the night at my grandmother's house, we would always have fresh grapefruit for breakfast, cut in half with sugar sprinkled on top. I thought this was very odd. We never had grapefruit at home. It seemed too fancy. Hard to eat, sour, juice squirting all over. We would get the giggles over this and make a mess. A lot was wasted. The point of this silly story is... I always assumed my grandmother was trying to impress us because she had visitors. Likely not so. Grapefruit was cheap and a common food during the depression. I didn't know that. "The Federal Surplus Relief Corporation was a New Deal program which aimed to divert surplus commodities such as apples, beans, canned beef, (grapefruit) ... to local relief organizations to different parts of the country where they weren't naturally grown. In September, 1934, the FSRC shipped 692,228,274 pounds of foodstuffs to the unemployed in 30 US states." April 8, 1935. Food inspector examining grapefruit being received at a Surplus Commodity Distribution Center for distribution to the unemployed.
When I was growing up in northern Idaho, I used to find the large “sponge mushrooms” when i was out horseback riding, and would gather the fresh ones and bring them home to cook and eat. They came out all over the day after a rain, and you had to pick them when they were fresh. There were zillions of these mushrooms, so in a time of food shortage, they would be able to be a main component of someone’s depression meal, and could be harvested most of the year. and this is only one kind of edible mushroom, there are a lot more. We picked some tiny ones that grew in kind of a circle/ring, and also the morels when we found those. So many of the wild plants are edible, like clover and violets and dandelions, that we usually never even consider having as part of a meal, but are abundant almost everywhere if we needed to eat them. Even kudzu is edible, but way too tough unless you get the tiny leaves. I tried it.
We, too, would pick those mushrooms when I was a kid in Indiana. Regarding edible plants: I took a botany class as an adult, and we visited a botanical garden. The guide picked the flowers off of plants and passed them around for us to munch on. I've known folks to put dandelions in salads. Of course, you gotta know what you're doing (I don't.) The margin for error is pretty small for some of this stuff.
One of my favorite speakers is Sergei Boutenko, and he has a lot of videos about raw foods for health, green smoothies, and also forging for food. He is an entertaining speaker, and even though this is a long film, it goes along fast because Sergei keeps your interest. He has a whole YouTube channel, with lots of other films, some about different wild foods for foraging, from a health standpoint.
I'm still hung up on macaroni. They used to make macaroni pudding. Same recipe as rice pudding, except use macaroni. Not so sure about this one. .. Anyone try it? ..Some raisins might help.
"The Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana) was not originally native to the West Coast of the United States. It was intentionally introduced into the West during the Great Depression, probably as a source of food, and now occupies much of the Pacific coast." Pictures of a baked whole possum did not leave enough to the imagination, so this boneless recipe is included instead, in the interest of science.
When I am in a bad mood I always eat any kind of desert with some nice fresh mint tea. Can be a cake, ice-cream or chocolate. Always helps!
I make these all the time. Johnny loves them though he calls them 'hoke cakes' and I call them 'hot water cakes'. I use self rising cornmeal, egg, diced onions, and hot water. Once my sister's friend said they taste just like hush puppies with onions. He liked the addition of the onions.