Saturday 31 January 2015

January reading

Like everyone I have a stack of library books to keep me happy indoors during the cold weather. I have "gobbled up" my Lee Child's Jack Reacher book and moved on to Mike Carter "One man and his Bike". A journey round the coast of UK exploring and observing modern life.  So far I am inspired to visit the coastal area of Essex!
I quite like these kinds of books and have read several over the years, I can't remember all their details but some of the ones I most liked were:

  • a journey across middle England on a milk float  (Three Men in a Float)
  • Harry Enfield's father's cycle ride across France - 
  • Journeys by canals - Narrow Dog To Carcassonne and Narrow dog to Indian River (we met the author and his wife at a folk/canal festival some years ago and they were lovely. The dog stayed home because it was raining and he did not like to get wet)
  • Nicolas Crane did a great book when he walked down the longitude line of 2 degrees west down the UK
  • Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round the Shipping Forecast areas
  • a journey down the River Trent by boat - Tom Fort - which has been made into a BBC4 programme (still on iplayer)
  • THE ICKNIELD WAY:a hike across southern England following one of the old track ways and ending in east anglia. Robert Macfarlane
Do any of you bloggers have any recommendations?


Friday 30 January 2015

January budget

Updated our accounts software today and total spending on groceries (includes household goods like cleaning stuff) was £222.38.  Which is £7 per day for 2 of us as an average.

This was 2 deliveries from Sainsbury's, so no cost involved in going anywhere and £7 at the local shops which I cycle to.

I was then in the kitchen preparing the pie and did a mental add up of all the things I had brought in advance of real "need" and will last well into February - there was at least £35.00 of unopened goods around most of which would not get started till the middle of the month.  So really the actual cost is nearer £6 per day (for 2 of us having 3 meals a day and keeping the house clean etc).

Not too bad???  I will be glad when my veg garden is up and running because £40 of that was fresh fruit and veg!

Have not watched the new BBC programme about cutting food costs - I will be watching on Sunday for tips!  I will have to be nice to the husband as he has to put up with the Allotment challenge on Friday and Sewing Bee next week!!! My favourite programmes will confined indoors in the snow!

Thursday 29 January 2015

Braising Steak

I cooked £3.85 worth of braising steak with some root vegetables in a (Bisto) gravy yesterday in the slow cooker in the morning. When it was cool I divided it into two.   One serving with dumplings (with a touch of sage added) yesterday and today I will add 4 oz of mushrooms and a pie crust. Both meals with fresh veg - probably no more than £5 spent on both meals.  £2.50 per meal for both of us.
Both meals were filling and warm - just what was needed on this rather windy and cold spell.


Wednesday 28 January 2015

Bargain buy at Garden Centre

Being new to the area we are exploring the local garden centres, its early in the season yet for the main plants and seeds, but we snapped up a pile of spring bulbs at quarter of the original prices. All these for £4. Some were already sprouting in the packets! On a good day this weekend we popped them in sheltered beds - even if half flower this year it will add to our stock in the garden.

Sunday 25 January 2015

Planting a hedge

A beautiful day in north Norfolk today, sunny and fairly warm. So we decided to take the 25 bare root stock natural British hedge plants down to the far end of the field to make a hedge.  Our long thin plot ends in a dyke/ditch just before which is wide hump. This is the remain of a 1700s historic Sea Dyke. Yes, the sea used to come up to here - the 5 or 6 miles between us and the sea is reclaimed land. This farm land is supposed to be the most productive in the UK.  Which bodes well for the 25 "sticks" we just planted beside it.

After that hard work we came back down to the other end and cleared up some of out "work area" to plant an area of more garden trees and shrubs. This will form a shelter belt for the polytunnel. We planted two hollies and a flowering cherry tree today.

Exhausted we wandered back in for a cup of tea!

Did the RSPB bird count - hedge sparrows, blackbirds, green finch, collared dove in the garden. A few passing seagulls and a large flock of migrating geese!

Weather forecast is for very cold and snow.  Brr...

Wednesday 21 January 2015

Keeping home made bread fresh

I was a bit disappointed in my bread drying out dispute being in my ceramic bread bin.  I remembered having a conversation with an Artisan baker at a street market in Chepstow some time ago who recommended keeping the bread in its paper bag in the bread bin.  I tried this last week using a bag saved from the treats purchased at the deli at Xmas and it worked!  The bread kept much better.

Only problem now is finding paper bags!

I do remember my mother and Aunts in the 1950's and 1960's all hording paper bags when they shopped and reusing them. Wise women.

Tuesday 20 January 2015

Tomatoes for this season

Here are our choices for the coming season.
The Moneymaker's are left overs and at the end of the sell by date so I will do those today.

There were 21 seeds so if only a few come up they will be useful early plants.  The Alisa Craig will be our main crop with the Roma.  I am looking forward to them as they promise to be good for cooking.  I saw a lovely recipe of toms like these poached in their own juices and creme fraiche on toast as an alternative to baked beans on toast!

Monday 19 January 2015

Frugal budget for 2015

Have you seen the blog  Frualdom's 2015 challenge to live on £4000 for the year?


I am trying to keep a lid on spending but I am not sure I can live up to this! £5 per person per week for food - but I know they grow and forage a lot.

Toad in the hole for tea tonight to stretch 6 small sausages a bit further.

Buiding a scarecrow

My husband suggested we could do with scarecrows to frighten off the local Pheasants from our vegetable garden.  I used bubble wrap left over from our house move last summer, stuffed in a bin bag to make the body and legs and into carrier bags for the arms. The trousers did not fit so I added a pad of more bubble wrap to make a over sized rear!  He's a recycled man.

He will have to be well taped and staked down as we have winds straight off The Wash!

He's so sweet I have left him at the table to keep us company until it gets warmer outside!


Saturday 17 January 2015

Garden Tool Bag

I often look at SewMamaSew blog for ideas and they often have free patterns and lots of ideas.

14 Projects to get yourself organised is about storage items.


I like this idea for a garden tool bag (there is a good pdf tutorial) - I think I have some odd materials for the pockets and lining, and I think I may have some canvas material.  Time to search the material box!

Friday 16 January 2015

Garden bird count

We responded to one of those charity adverts on the TV yesterday. We thought we would sign up for the RSPB garden bird count next week and texted for the "free pack". That was a mistake I should have just gone on the web site. I got a call back and gave details for the pack, which may not even arrive in time, and had to have the charity direct debit sell.  Firmly said no, as it was difficult enough to afford bird food each month without an extra expense!  You can report on line and dont really need the pack apparently.

Looking forward to recording our flock of house sparrows. They may be declining elsewhere but there is a flock of 30 plus in our hedge!

Spring is coming! Snow drops appearing and daffodils showing too.

Wednesday 14 January 2015

Budget setting for 2015

A couple of years ago my husband brought a Home Accounts software package from Amazon for £5 and set about rationalizing our accounts and keeping a close eye on everything. I ran a report today on Groceries, Eating out, gifts. All came to £3500. Last year was a bit of a strain with a funeral, two births, my retirement early from work and moving house which added to our expenses and strained our income.  Nevertheless I set some budgets for 2015 and hope to operate well within them as we will both be home full time and growing a lot of our own food.

  • Groceries £2800 (£54.00 per week for two of us having 3 small meals a day and occasional visitors)
  • Dining out £200 (it will have to be treats only and our picnic stove will have to come out and be in the car ready all summer.  Or our guests will have to treat us in exchange for free B&B!)
  • Gifts £300 (more homemade things planned but we have a growing brood of grand kids)

We are going to have to check our buying  of bird food - our flock of house sparrows, numerous blackbirds and finches are costing us a fortune.
I will continue to explore the budget options of this software but I can recommend doing this as it makes us very conscious of our bottom line and we thoroughly check all debits on our accounts each week.

Frugal with heating 2

On the 3 Dec I wrote about our heating strategy of living with an average temperature of 18 C in the house. Then our boiler malfunctioned and it only works manually. But we have soldiered on with no heating overnight once the wood fire has gone out and have got used to 16 C most mornings before I switch it on for an hour or two. Today I was listening to an interview on the radio about the so-called Ice Diet and one of the things said made me really happy! Apparently obesity is linked to people having their houses too well heated and if you reduce the temperature you burn up "brown fat",  loose weight and are more healthy.
I am waiting eagerly for the weight loss to start!  This is our fire just after installation - we have decorated now.

Tuesday 13 January 2015

Renovated sewing corner

Its taken a week but the second bedroom walls are finally painted in Natural Calico, which is nice and bright compared to the previous mushroom and brown!  My sewing corner is back together and ready for my next project.
I have scoured the house for all the nice baskets and boxes and got rid of the cardboard boxes from when we moved in. The round tins in the red dots and pretty flower paper are my grand-daughters SMA tins - very handy for storage with snap on lids.

Rainbow!

As a squall cleared away this afternoon a beautiful rainbow appeared - with its foot at the bottom of our garden. Perhaps I may find gold one day.

Monday 12 January 2015

Getting ready for spring

Spent the morning getting ready for spring today. My husband built a potting table from scrap wood and bits of pallets which I painted with fence paint.

We cleared out the conservatory and mended an old picnic bench to put along side the new one. And then we found all our old seed trays which had not yet been unpacked from our move last summer and set them out.

Will have to wash them and go shopping for compost and seeds. Yippee - spring is coming!

DIY tip

Having painted myself into a corner and balancing between a chair and a desk I was in urgent need of a damp cloth to wipe up some emulsion on my desk. Desperate I looked round and found a packet on the windowsill (left there from a clear out of the en suite prior to Xmas guests arriving), Not only did it mop the current spot, it took off the day's before spatter and the day before that! Crikey, when I climbed down I went round the wood floor and revitalized the wood and got rid of all the splatters and spray I had been ignoring (thinking the new carpet would cover it up).  If they are that good at melting emulsion paint - what do they do to your skin??

Friday 9 January 2015

Beautiful day for gardening

Between bouts of decorating I nipped outside to enjoy the 12C sunny morning with a nice wind. I took the cultivator with me and ran it down the surface of the two fruit beds. These are not wide but are 30 ft long. The field was previously used to graze horses and last summer it was very compacted and hard.  I am trying to work up a nice tilth on the top soil, when it rains it tends to "pancake" plus it is so mild weeds had started to appear!

By 2 o'clock it was grey and a cold wind was getting stronger - back indoors to paint another wall and move some shelves in my sewing corner ready to paint.  I felt very smug when Radio 2's Terry Walton came on live in a rain soaked and hurricane winds in the Rhonda Valley where he was slurping around in liquid mud!


Thursday 8 January 2015

Stretching the food

Like everyone else I am stretching out the food in the house. Our meals this week have included:

  • Home made pizza - using up 4 cheeses 
  • Home made minestrone in the slow cooker (10 litre)  - using up veg
  • Home made lamb meatballs - 3oz lamb mince plus Bulgar wheat from the store cupboard to make it go round
  • Home made salmon  fishcakes - left over fillet of salmon and some boiled potatoes with plenty of coriander, dusted in some breadcrumb mix from the back of the cupboard.
  • Pasta and broccoli  using some left over soft cheese to make the " sauce"

And to my husband's delight a big bowl of homemade trifle for puds - Xmas sponge fingers and blancmange packet only needed another jelly and a pint of full cream milk.  It tastes better than semi skimmed we usually have.

I tried a mix of Greek Yogurt and Parmesan cheese on chicken breast baked (to use up the Yogurt from Xmas) but I was not impressed. I will check the receipt on the web site and try again before I recommend that!

Currently planning a fruit cake for my husbands birthday next week (just got to check I have everything I need in the cupboard - it will not have any brandy in it).

As he is suffering from a bad back and in a lot of pain he needs a treat!

Wednesday 7 January 2015

New Year - back to reality

Time to return to our decorating - I wrote in December that we had put out  £100 for paint.This has gone up to £125 as we needed 2 more tins while they were on offer. and this must go as far as possible.  Lounge was given fresh emulsion on the walls  prior to Xmas and over the last 2 days I have done the bathroom.  Well 50% of it is fully tiled so it was not too big a job. I tried not to rub too hard on the paintwork because I scraped one bit and revealed that at one stage the door had been deep red, and that had been put over tangerine!  The 1960's had a lot to answer for!
Powering on, I started to prepare the spare bed room too. Took off the mid wall frieze and when I had a bit of pale emulsion to use up I whacked it across the brown emulsion on the lower half of the walls. the 1980's ideas of interior decoration was not a lot better than the 1960's was it?

Everything had to stop this afternoon as the hares had come in from the fields behind us and had been nipping off our hazel and blackberry plants where we are trying to establish a wood and orchard area. We trooped down the garden to reinforce tree guards etc.

Relaxing listening to a concert this evening from Portofino on the Italian coast by Andrea Bocelli - now that looks like a nice place!

Reading gems

One of the joys of retiring is that I love reading and I can make great use of the library services. Detective stories are one of my favourite genres. I love a sense of place or characters that I can relate to.  I like UK based stories or somewhere interesting geographically.  
Two books I currently have read are:
James Sallis Salt River. The style is very poetic with intense descriptions, and a film noir set of scenes and story lines. The main character Turner, is very like a James Lee Burke character - very anti-heroic. Rural southern US well observed.
Ross McDonald The Drowning Pool. Is very like a classic Raymond Chandler. Nicely paced and well observed early 20th Century California.  The story evolves with each conversation between the detective and the suspects. They are pithy with undertones you have to spot; but not as striped out conversations you get with a Robert B Parker novel where you get lost and lose track of the crime!

I'd love to hear of others recommendations.



Tuesday 6 January 2015

Completed first sewing project of 2015

I have finished my blouse - it was completely free!
Pattern from a magazine give away (altered slightly), fabric from my daughter in law at Xmas, free thread and button from some odds and ends given to me.  It will be just right for casual wear this summer. I will do an audit of summer clothes and see what else I need to sew! But I am sticking to my strategy of only having what I need - I don't want too much or we will need to buy more cupboards!


Monday 5 January 2015

New gardening programmes

Welcome back to the Allotment programme on BBC2 - took all of the last series to get my head round the format but I quite enjoyed it.  This year's is a bit less confusing as the plots are tended by one person instead of the confusing pairs!  I was horrified by the rats in one persons plot, with no explanation why or how to get rid of them. If it has four feet and a tail I would be terrified.

The other programme on Sky "Show Your Garden" is apparently based on the format of Come Dine with me, but I have never seen that so it was lost to me.  Each week 3 gardens are shown and voted on by the other couples. It was quite interesting to see round ordinary gardens. We do enjoy seeing gardens in the Yellow Book in the summer too!

Wont be long till Gardeners World is back, I like Beechgrove too even if it is based in the far and frozen north.


Getting annoyed with packaging - getting the last drop.

I don't buy many  lotions so I value what I do have a lot and I get really annoyed when I can't get the last drops out! I take scissors or craft knife to the packaging often to get 2 or 3 more days portions out.  Why can't packaging design be more efficient?


Does anyone have any tricks for getting the best out of tubes?

Sunday 4 January 2015

Thrifty thinking reaches the Saturday Telegraph!

As a treat this week we brought a Saturday newspaper to do the crossword in front of the fire over the weekend and to have something to light the bonfire not having had any papers for a couple of months!

In the Telegraph magazine there was an article by Rose Prince that starts - "Everyone is talking about little and often - short shopping trips to buy what food is needed rather than car-bootfuls that are not." And she gives some store cupboard recipes - yet again other peoples store cupboards seem to full of posh stuff we never consider! There were two recipes I liked; I was about to do my signature dish of Cumberland sausage casserole and one of hers fitted the bill for some plain sausages tucked away from Xmas and some tinned beans I had picked up on Saturday. Put the cumberlands back for another day!
White beans, pork sausages(or sausage meat) and crispy breadcrumbs
Garlic, carrot, onion, celery base saute lightly;
 add dried rosemary and thyme before adding stock and a tin of chopped toms.
 De-skin pork sausages and fry crumbling the meat. Pour off any fat and add to the sauce.
 Stir in a can of haricot beans. Simmer.
 I added a bit of tomato puree to increase the colouring and popped mine in the oven for 20 mins as I was preparing veg.
The topping was  bread crumbs browned in olive oil and garlic with fresh parsley but as my last garlic clove needs to last all week I just did the bread crumbs in oil and added some chili flakes. I put on top of casserole and left in oven for  a few minutes.
It was very filling and half was enough for our evening meal with a baked potatoes and veg - rest will be for tomorrow.
The other recipe I liked was pea soup with bacon, mint and paprika - I will pop in my scrap book for another time.

I shall need some pound stretching this month as we did the accounts today and after the car tax is paid I only have £130 for groceries maximum this month. Store cupboard meals in will be!!

Saturday 3 January 2015

Household things made of wood

When Retireewannabe\ ( (http://frugalinessex.blogspot.co.uk/) wrote on the 31 Dec about her wooden ironing board repairs I was reminded about my father's handy-work back in the late 1950's and early 1960s.  He was a Barry Bucknell fan (the very first TV DIY man) and our house not only had a wooden ironing board, but a wooden clothes horse, handmade kitchen, cupboards built into alcoves, a rocking duck (yes, duck, not horse - must find that photo!), and a stool with built in potty for my little brother.  At one stage he was much beloved infants school caretaker whose skills in building stuff was welcomed.

My husband is much the same - building furniture, sheds and flower planters. They never met but I am sure they would have been great pals.

I never forgave my father for sending me on a BUS across town to collect a 6 ft by 4 ft panel of hardboard when I was about 12. My husband made out first born a trailer for his first tricycle - we used to send the 3 year old down the 150 ft garden to get the fire wood and haul it home!!  Don't think we have been forgiven yet either!!




Friday 2 January 2015

First sewing project of 2015

I was given some lengths of cloth for Christmas one of which was just right for a blouse pattern I have been saving.  This was a free pattern on a magazine from an "Indie" (independent) designer ie not one of the main sewing pattern suppliers. I am adapting it a bit, shortening the sleeves and losing the bow tie!  The sewing method was new to me - so I am experimenting! In this method you overlock or zigzag the edges before sewing the seams which are 1cm wide.  In my old fashioned methods I would have used french seams. Will be interesting to see how this works out.

Thursday 1 January 2015

A lovely first day of 2015

I had a super first day of 2105 sewing, baking and trying out new recipes.
Here is the baking - bread (half brown and half white flour used), Victoria sponge and a mincemeat plate pie. I am not keen on the mincemeat so I put in a diced apple and made the pastry a bit thick - it will be lovely with custard.



My new recipe include a carrot and lemon soup from my Kenwood food mixer book.
1 leek sliced, 12 oz carrots shredded and a crushed garlic saute 5-10 mins  in 2 tbsp veg oil;  add grated rind of a lemon and 1 1/4 pints of veg stock and simmer for 10 mins. Remove from heat and stir in juice of lemon and some fresh parsley. I blended mine a bit as I prefer smooth soup. It was very tasty as the lemon brings out a spicy tang - my husband even said "delicious".

My other experiment was for left over turkey. Finely dice 2 onions, and grate 1 eating apple to saute in 2 tbsp of oil, add 1 tsp of sage and 2 tbsp of plain flour; add 300 ml of stock with 2 tbsp of mustard and 2 tbsp of honey.  Put in 350g of turkey and leftover roast veg and simmer for 15 mins. I did not have any veg so I sliced in some mushrooms. This too was tasty and cheered up the leftover turkey a lot.  I found this on BBCGoodFood site)

Neither of these needed anything difficult - just larder stuff.  Various thrifty advice books and sites have all recommended having a good larder stock. It is something I am working on - but I need more effective cupboard storage. Kitchen is awaiting a make-over which I am planning in a vintage style!