Spotted Dick and other delicacies

I always make my own spotted dick!

 Someone asked "What is Spotted Dick?". If you've not eaten it, then you didn't go to a British school and you were not brought up by a British mum. Spotted Dick is a sweet suet sponge pudding with lots of dried fruit, including mixed peel. It's plain, but I add a sprinkling of powdered ginger. Suet is the dense hard fat found around the kidneys of an animal, it just needs grating and adding to self raising flour, sugar, milk and an egg to become suet pudding. You can buy a vegetarian variety, but I prefer the real stuff.

I didn't make this and mine has lots of dried fruit, consequently, it's very sweet and I add spice

 At school, the dinners are cheap and filling. Nothing chocolatey or expensive, but hearty and loved by children, especially if the pudding is covered in custard. I occasionally make puddings but know, I am not a growing child and really don't need that many calories, so it's something we only have once a week. I still go weak at the sight of a steaming pudding swimming to the point of drowning in custard. I hope that clears up the 'Spotted Dick' conundrum.

 The other delicacy just has to be homemade beef stew and dumplings. It makes a 400g/14oz pack of stewing beef make six portions of stew. I've portioned this for us to take to work and costs 40p a portion, we also take a 'cuppa soup' as a snack and a piece of fruit, so lunch is around 55p a day. It doesn't look like much but we're both 'cutting back' and it's plenty enough for us. It means we get around 60g of beef with our lunch, which is about the amount of meat a day, that Brits had during the rationing of WW2, which meant that people had the healthiest diet, that was rich in vegetables, low in fat with just the right amount of protein.