Getting ready for the new year of growing

I went into town yesterday to post off OH's Ebay parcel, he wasn't selling, he had bought a not quite working tablet and wanted to return it.
Easy ,since I have no paid work now, I can always get down to the post office.

Anyway, on the way there, I thought I would pop in to the pound shop and see what seeds they had.
I already have 10 new packets but no Brussels or leeks, so I checked the shelves.
They had leeks in a combination pack but no Brussels.
After posting off the parcel (over £5 without extra insurance!!), I went to the 99p shop and they had different packs of seeds.
I bought 1 pack with Leeks included amongst others and 1 pack with 3 types of Beans.
As I was passing the pound stretcher store I thought I would just pop in and check on their seeds.
They didn't have much of interest but then I saw the fruit trees.
These are about 4 ft tall and they had apple,pear,cherry and plum so I selected a cherry and a plum and parted with the money.
I got a few interested glances as I walked back through town with a tree in each hand.

We have 4 fruit trees already, 1 pear and 3 apples.
2 of the apple trees were from woolworths
The other 2 trees were from wilkos and were about 18" high when we bought them,they had a good crop last year.

The new cherry tree is a Morello cherry, they are quite bitter but you can cook them and they make excellent jam and pies.
The plum will replace the one we cut down about 8 years ago . That was a heavy cropper but was over 25 years old and got very heavily damaged in a storm.

Superscrimpers

This is a program on Channel 4.
It is supposed to outline different ways of saving money or at least, not spending unnecessarily.
The family featured , spent £200 a WEEK! on food for a family of 5(one child,the youngest  looked about 9).
They were challenged to spend only £50 for a week and they went off to Tesco and spent almost all of it.
Their bill showed they had made a saving of about £1.80 so they probably did spend all of it but incorporated a multi buy of some sort which brought it down.
Their dinners were planned out on paper and seemed to be chosen absolutely randomly based on how nice it sounded.
Their Sunday Dinner (they called it lunch) was beef and all the trimmings.
OH and I watched it with disbelief.
According to the presenter, they had 'managed' to produce dinner on Sunday for £16 !
What a Laugh!

Apparently the £50 was to cover only dinners or so I have heard.
That probably means school dinners and maybe breakfast club  for 3 kids and the adults both eat bought food for work.

Our Sunday Dinner this week was Chicken,potatoes,greens and carrots with gravy.
Mondays Dinner was 1/2 a bag of cod pieces from the fish and chip shop (50pence) made into a pie with a cheesy breadcrumb topping, rice and vegetables.
Tuesdays was Chicken stew with Barley
Todays will be Chicken bolognaise and tomorrows will be chicken and ham and pineapple pizza.
Fridays will be left over bolognaise for 1 person and curried left over chicken stew for the others.
There is left over cooked rice or cous cous for the curry eaters.
Saturday will be home made fish and chips using the other half of the bag of fish and chip fish bits(50p) and home made chips with whats left of a bag of mixed vegetables and baked beans.
Bread for lunches is home made at 30 pence a loaf and fillings are typically sardines,baked beans,spreads
we drink tea mainly with milk

Chicken was £5
Greens around 80p
Carrots around 78p
Barley (half pack)40p
Pasta 25p
Cous cous 1/3rd pack around 30p
rice 1/2 pack 20p
Small amount of frozen veg 30p
baked beans 60p
Sardines 50p
Cheese £2.50/ half kilo
puree 25p
tin of tomatoes 38p
Reduced ham 80p
Marg about 1/3rd tub 33p
tea 90p a packet (lasts about 2 weeks)
Milk carton of uht is about 50p so around £1
Oats for breakfast about 80p
Raisins for breakfast 25p at the moment
Bananas around 1.20
Fish bits from fish and chip shop(easily enough for 8 portions but we made it into 6)£1

£18.09......our whole weeks food comes to only a little bit more than their one sunday meal
But be fair OSD
....I will divide it by person
we are only 3 at the moment as DD is away at Uni so it comes to £6.03 per person
They have 5 people so 6.03 multiplied by 5 is £30.15
They should be eating like kings on £50 a week for only dinners but they weren't given a lot of guidance about actually cooking from scratch or choosing less expensive brands.

Rip off UK again 

There was also an article about extended warranty on electrical goods.
The presenter stood under a market awning with a collection of goods ,the price and the extended warranty price,alongside each other.
She pointed out that there are insurance companies that will cover your pricey electrics for less than these , however, she didn't once mention inbuilt obsolescence which the electrical industry is guilty of in this country.

The dirty truth is that in the rip off UK ,your washing machine is built to last 5 years and no more.
Once the parts are unavailable,you are screwed because how will it be mended?
Extended warranties are offered for .......oh yeah 5 years but the price tallies quite closely with the cost of a new machine .
It is like paying for a lottery.
Your machine goes wrong within the time and they will mend it or replace it, mending it isn't going to give you  a new machine, it is the same machine with one less 5 year life-span part. If it doesn't go wrong within the 5 years, you get nothing at all even though you have paid enough for a new machine.
If they replace it ,you won the lottery and we know how likely that is.

We stopped buying these warranties when our last washing machine but 2, died exactly at the 5 year and 3 days mark.
The warranty was useless and we had to scrap the machine because you could no longer get parts.

Our last bought one , died as expected and we replaced it with a free-cycled machine for free,the person who gave us the machine was getting a new one as the part for her one was going to cost almost a new machine, funnily enough, our machine was the same make but a lesser spec so we could remove the part needed to mend hers,scrap the rest and have a higher spec working machine .

I thought I would sign up to the super scrimpers challenge.

So far it is only day two.
Yesterdays challenge was ..have a no spend day.
I didn't,I had 5 no spend days last week.
Todays was...find somewhere where you can get your hair cut as a model, free or cheap.
Hmm, I cut my own, I use mirrors and scissors and for the last year I have been using a Robocut but I can do it without too. I haven't had my hair cut outside our home for about 3 years and then it was a free cut using a voucher from a newspaper.
Previously to that it was around 12 years ago and my kids said it looked just the same as when I did it myself.

OH is the same. I bought him a phillips self cut type hair clipper about 3 years ago and he cuts his hair about every 6 weeks.

A rare trip to London

We hopped on the Motorbike today and zoomed to London.
Then parked up and changed from our leathers into jeans and jumped on a bus to Charing Cross.
We were up there to see the Da Vinci Milan Exhibition.
It was well worth it.
There were sketches on the most fragile looking pieces of paper some belong to the Queen and are on loan.
I love Leonardo's style of drawing because he shades with fine cross hatching and some of his light and shadow drawings are beautiful.
Of course there were paintings too including the 'new' discovery which is a painting of Jesus holding a glass globe.
For me the best exhibit is the copy of the Last supper which was hanging in the upstairs Gallery.
There was a huge life size print of the original painting which of course cant be transported because it is painted on a plaster wall. This is fading and flaking and sadly the worse for wear but hurray for the artist,he had a copy which he made on canvas and that was there in beautiful clear colours and completely intact.

There were also his preparatory sketches of various aspects of the painting.
I expect he did a lot more but the ones we saw were maybe all that survived.

I love art and especially Da vinci who's drawings were particularly realistic in an age where many painters will still making quite crude artwork.
There were not many mechanical drawings sadly but I suppose these were not particular to Milan.

Afterwards, we went to Pizza hut (another very rare treat) and had what was reportedly a Hawaiian(for me) and a farmhouse(OH) deep pan pizza of regular size.
Mine had absolutely no pineapple and the OH ended up with a chicken supreme.
We were hungry so we ate them anyway.
I think the waitress was Scandinavian and maybe misunderstood us, either that or we got someone else's order.
The base which was meant to be deep pan, seemed very light and bicarbonate of soda tasting.
Dear me, for nearly £9 each, we wont be hurrying back.

I can make a far more substantial pizza at home,twice the size  with a real bread base for around £1.

Blood from a stone

Last mights meals was one of those miraculous, nothing in the fridge jobs.
I took the chicken carcass from the previous weekend, and a frozen wing of turkey and bunged them in the slow cooker in the morning.
They bubbled away in water all day.
Then at tea time, I stuck 1 and a half cups of rice in a bowl,covered it with stock from the slow cooker and put the bowl in a knotted carrier bag, then zapped it on full in the microwave for 15 minutes.
The meat bits that came off the bones (a good 2 cups full) were added to 2 cups full of mixed frozen veg and heated through thoroughly with a stock cube added.
The cooked rice and meat and veg were then combined in the pan that the meat and veg were heated in .
It made a big bowl of chicken and turkey risotto.

Not wasting Bread.

We tend to cook a loaf in the bread maker then cut off an end. The end is put aside and we cut enough for lunch time sandwiches.
If it is just DS and me, we can make a loaf last 3 days.
IF OH gets there, he can polish it off in one day.
The end bits and end holey bits get left,so I collect them and put them in a bag in the freezer.
When certain people are on the hunt for toasting bread, they are much less fussy about end bits and holes and so the bits get eaten after all.

The thick end bits are nice for eating with stew or soup.



Thickening soups ,sauces and stews .

A grinder is a handy Gadget.
I use mine to grind lentils into powder.
This powder is excellent for fast thickening.
You can add it to most savoury things where you might thicken them with cornflour or even gravy powder. It has nothing added to it as gravy powder does and isn't as finnicky as cornflour or flour, you just sprinkle it on and stir it in when the food is hot.
A couple of minutes and it is done.

Our grinder also makes rice flour from rice which is handy for shortbread.
It grinds down porridge oats to give a more instant 'ready brek' effect when you add hot milk or water.
You can grind sugar to caster or icing sugar fineness.
You can of course grind coffee beans.
If you dehydrate veg or fruit,you can make powders from them too.

Good grief a week has whizzed by!

I have been avidly survey filling in and working hard to keep the spending down.
So far the tally is 66.58 over the 3 weekends of this year.

Yesterday, we drove to Asda and I bought 10 packets of raisins.
They were 24 pence each. Since last Septemberish, raisins have been beyond our spending limit and we have bought mixed fruit instead at 64 pence.
I don't care why they have reduced the raisins, I only know that as long as they are 24 pence, we will be buying a fair few when we go there.

Yesterdays raisin bounty saved me £4.10 because we would buy them anyway and that would have been the difference in price of buying 10 mixed fruit packs.
If I had stuck to raisins (hehe) they would have been around 86 pence and so the saving would have been £6.20.

Baked beans are now 30 pence a tin minimum in Asda and Tinned Tomatoes are 38 pence.
Not so long ago I could buy 5 tins of tomatoes for £1 and 4 tins of Baked beans for £1.
No wonder people are struggling.

Today I have a chicken carcass in the slow cooker along with a meaty Turkey wing.
They will make risotto with a big bowl of rice, an onion and some mixed vegetables.

Bookish Monday

I have just finished reading
The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsay.
It is rather like a modern Version of the Richest Man in Babylon.
Dave advises getting rid of your credit cards.
(We never had any).

Saving 1000 as an emergency fund by selling stuff or doing something extra to earn it...

(I did this about 12 years ago in secret).

Paying your debts as fast as you can manage it..

Luckily we just about got ours under control about 6 years ago when the car was paid off.

Saving 6 months living expenses.

We managed this last winter.

Paying off your mortgage as hard as you can..

Here we were very lucky because OH inherited enough to do that.

Investing any savings you can make above the 6 month expense fund

(This is the one I am going to work on this year although investing may just have to be banking it what with the economy absolutely frying the interest rate for savers)

OH pays into a pension pot at work so part of that is already done anyway.

His main mantra seems to be

'Live like no other so that you can live like no other'.

In other words,

Live as frugally as you can and the good times will come. 

A quiet weekend.

Our DD is gone back to university.
We are 3 again .
It means less having the dishwasher on, less cooking, less breadmaking.
I shall miss her chats though .

I am still reading my wheel of time ebook, only half way through, they are very long but worth the time .

Today I put the pull up bar back on DD's door frame and managed to do 4 each time I tried a pull up.
It will take time to build back up again.
I did a bit of indoor skipping too.

I am averaging 135 points a day on swag bucks which is nice as it is about £5 a week in Amazon UK vouchers.

I bit the bullet yesterday and ordered my vegetable seeds from the Us Amazon store where I accrue a few vouchers. They should be here by the end of the month.

Bookish Monday

This last week I have been reading
The Towers of Midnight
This is a book from the Wheel of Time series that was devised by the late Robert Jordan.
The latest book is part written by his chosen successor Brandon Sanderson and follows the Adventures of the boys from the Two Rivers, who are now men , and their endeavors to defeat the dark one and stop him  from either wiping out or enslaving the world.
I love these books, they have witches and wizards by other titles.
There is intrigue and religious dogma, war and love and all manner of conflict.
The books still hold the humour of the original Author with ironic twists thrown in every now and then.

Tis the first day of the new year!

Happy new year to anyone who reads this.

At the moment I am watching swagbucks TV and writing this at the same time.
I have Opera as my web browser and when there are 2 tabs open, I click Tile and can have the pages side by side.
So the SBTV can play in one window and I can go to the next video as each one reaches the progress bar point , and still do something else at the same time.

My resolution this year is to get back to frugal earning and veg growing.
I shall also continue with my fitness through exercising and running.

This Christmas my weight has not risen much despite the lack of running.
We were much more sensible about what we ate.
I bought 1 tin of chocolates before Christmas and we received another as a present.
Last year we had 2 tins,received another and also had chocolate oranges.

Today we will have a turkey dinner rather like our Christmas Day meal, with a home made Christmas pud  to follow.

Lunch time was home made bread,crackers, cheese and pate.
Coffee to follow.
The coffee was a free gift from Taylors or Harrowgate.
It is Christmas Blend and is actually very mild which I prefer.

My ebook reader has been busy this week.
So far it has only needed to be recharged once despite daily use for over a week.
I charged it on boxing day and it isnt even 1/4 used yet.


The men have gone for a driving lesson .