The Betty B All-Purpose Super Cleaning Spray

If you go into a store and look at the aisle with cleaning products, you'll end up dizzy from all the different kinds for different purposes in garish colours and adorned with warning labels. Just imagine the endless amounts of chemicals we pour down our drains every day just from cleaning and then take a moment to look up what they do to our water supplies. And yet, for all those extensive lists of ingredients, many of them works surprisingly poorly.

I have been making my own cleaning products to and fro for years, and after much trial-and-erroring here's what I have decided is the absolute best for almost all home cleaning purposes (except, as always, very delicate stuff like your great-great-great grandmother's Georgian chairs and such, and, obviously, untreated wood of all kinds as it will dry it out).

The basic idea is this: you need something that works well on grease, that can be used on surfaces intended for food, and that works on limescale (essential for all areas where water is used like kitchen and bathroom). If possible, it would also be nice if it worked like a mild disinfectant, wouldn't it?

As a basic ingredient, some sort of soap-like substance is good for, you know, its cleaning qualities (I've figured out that soap cleans; isn't it great? My mother must be so proud). I use eco-friendly washing-up liquid, something that shouldn't be very hard to come by in any part of the world. Since you don't use very much, a bottle will last you a long time so even if your local store doesn't carry any good alternatives, buying online won't be too much of a hassle. And the good thing about washing-up liquid is that it will be tested and approved to use on dishes meant to eat from, right? So that's a nice guarantee for you that you can use it around the kitchen.

The next thing you want is something acidic. This is great for grease, and since limescale is basically calcium carbonate, it will react with acids (remember how acids and alkalines react to each other from chemistry class?) and become carbon dioxide (which is a major ingredient in the air we breathe) and water. Also, acids have certain disinfectant qualities as most bacteria don't like too acidic an environment (something your stomach knows and makes use of on a daily basis).

The acid in DIY recipes for cleaning products found online is often given as vinegar (or the much more concentrated ättika here in Sweden), but it isn't the only option. Vinegar smells like, you know, vinegar, and not everyone likes that, so instead, you can use citric acid, which is an industrially produced substance that is naturally found in citrus fruits among other things. Citrate, the conjugate base of citric acid is one of a series of compounds involved in the physiological oxidation of acetate from fats, proteins, and carbohydrates, and forms a vital part of cellular metabolism, and citric acid is used in the food industry as an emulsifying agent to keep fats from separating, to caramel to prevent sucrose crystallization and in all sorts of sour and/or fizzy things. In short, it's not some weird poisonous chemical – although as all acids, it can be dangerous in high concentrations. You can usually find citric acid in the food department of your grocery store.

Then, in order to get the right concentration and not just super acidic washing-up liquid, you need water. This can hopefully be found in your kitchen in generous amounts.

This was what I started out using, but I have added another, super-ingredient – alcohol. And because I'm lazy and want to be sure it's OK to ingest, I use some from my drink cabinet. That's right; I clean with cocktail ingredients, that's how badass I am. So why do I do that? Well, first, as everyone who did not grow up under a rock in the woods know, alcohol is a great disinfectant. It also helps dissolve the washing-up liquid into the water and obviously works as a preservative (hint: tap water isn't sterile), plus I find it helps with grease and leaves glass absolutely spotless. So, yeah, alcohol.

Now you can basically clean anything already, but it'd be nice if your cleaner also smelled nice, wouldn't it? That's why I add some essential oils as well. Which you pick is up to you, but I like a green, fresh feel to mine so I use tea tree oil (again, something with disinfectant qualities), rosemary and lemon. I also use gin as my alcohol of choice, because I like the added scent of the juniper. The choice, however, is entirely up to you.

The exact ration I use are:

2 tsp washing-up liquid
1 tsp citric acid powder
2 tbsp gin (or vodka)
2 cups of water
10-15 drops of tea tree oil/10-15 drops rosemary essential oil/10-15 drops lemon essential oil
or, 20 drops of any essential oil you fancy

Pour everything into a spray bottle, shake and clean away. I always keep this on hand in the kitchen since it's great to wipe down surfaces with, but I also use it for the bathroom (but sometimes I go for more perfume-y smells there, like lavender or geranium rather than tea tree and rosemary). It's excellent for washing windows and all sorts of glass surfaces (it's great for cleaning your spectacles) and works wonders on limescale. Just spray and wipe.

Mushroom & cabbage stew

One problem with wartime food is that it's usually not very pleasing to the eye. It makes for rather bad food blogging, because clearly, who gets inspired by brown stew and potatoes? Not the most aesthetic food, obviously, but there you are. Better brown stew with Churchill today than humble pie with You-know-who tomorrow!

This was a stew made with things I already had at home and it's really more winter food than summer-y, but since I made it on a glum and rainy day, I didn't mind.

Serves 4

• 2 small or one large onion
• A hefty piece of cabbage
• Plenty of dried mushrooms
• Meat or vegetable stock
• 1 tsp cooking fat (I used olive oil)
• 1 tsp butter
• 1 + 1 tbsp flour
• salt, pepper, hot water

Start by heating water and pouring it over the mushrooms, taking care to let them stand and swell for about an hour. Drain the mushrooms, but save the water – it'll make a lovely base for your stew.

Chop the onions and the cabbage. Heat the fat (but not the butter) and let the onions soften and get a little golden. Add the cabbage and let it simmer until the cabbage is starting to soften and look a little golden too.

Mix the butter and the flour, and add it to the pan. Sprinkle the second tbsp of flour over the vegetables and stir. Add the water from the mushrooms and as much stock as you need to get a nice stew-like look to it. Finally, add the mushrooms.

Stir and let it simmer until the cabbage is soft and the stew has thickened a little. Taste with salt and pepper and serve with potatoes and some fresh vegetables (if you have them).

This recipe uses very little rationed ingredients – only the fats, actually, but it's really tasty and plenty filling!

Elisabeth's Grandmother's Dessert Pie

Fellow Dieter and Swede Elisabeth shared a Swedish wartime recipe for pie. She says about the recipe:

"It is passed on from my grandmother to my mother to me. Notice it has little sugar, but very much flour - they were farmers and had good access to flour, but not to the rationed sugar."

Here it is:

• 100 g sugar (a little more than 1 dl, 1dl sugar = 0,85 hg) 
• 200 g butter 
• 300 g flour (6 dl of flour - be sure to sweep of the excess, "strukna mått") 
• Fruit or berries

Mix it all into a paste (or dough) and use about a third to make a bottom crust. Bake in 150 °C until it has a nice golden coulor.

Fill crust with apples (or berrys, for example a mix of raspberry and blueberry), use remaining dough to make a top-crust. Bake in oven until smells tempting and the cover has a nice colour.

Elisabeth says she always adds sugar over the berries or apples, and then enjoys it with lots of custard-sauce. Well, I don't know about "lots of custard sauce" but custard powder wasn't rationed in Britain so if you could get it... I'll leave you to sort that out with your conscience!

Great grandmother Anna's Wartime Apple Cake

The recipe is a bit odd, because the actual cake contains neither butter nor eggs and only very little fat poured over it. The story behind it is that my great grandmother, who was a cook, supposedly made this up during the war. My mother used to make this all the time when I grew up, always taking care to feed me some stories about wartime rationing with it.

I call it “apple cake” rather than “apple pie” because the result is very much like a very moist, heavy sort of sponge cake. It doesn’t need custard or ice cream or cream and it tastes even better cold and doesn't get dry - it's still fine after a few days in the fridge. It yields a lot too, so it'd be very good for some sort of festive occasion, either with tea or coffee, or as a simple and rustic dessert.

2,5 dl sugar (1 cup)
6 dl flour (2.5 cups)
3 dl milk (1.3 cups)
5 teaspoons baking powder
5-8 apples (depending on size)
sugar, cinnamon
butter or margarine according to taste (I’d say about 100 g but the more the tastier - but obviously, you could get away with much less)

1. Peel and slice apples very thinly (remove the seeds and such first of course).
2. Mix sugar, flour and baking powder. Pour the milk a little at the time while stirring. Stir until smooth. It’s going to be not quite like dough, but a lot stickier than when you make ordinary sponge cake or muffins.
3. Prepare an oven-pan (a large one, I used one that was about 35×30 cm – about 11×14 inches) with butter and breadcrumbs. Pour the mixture into the dish.
4. Cover it with layer of apple slices.
5. Pour some sugar and cinnamon on them.
6. Put on another layer of apples. Add more sugar and cinnamon.
7. Finish by pouring the melted butter evenly over the cake.
8. Bake in 225 °C (450 °F) for app 20 min

*Sorry for the poor picture quality; it's an old photo