Food, Food, Food

 

 

I've been thinking a lot about food recently, I seem to have food on the brain.  Thinking of ways to use up what we have, to make the most of every last little thing from the fridge and freezers and just generally planning and re-planning what we eat and when.

 

Well I've had an epiphany or rather WE have.

 

We are now eating mostly fresh foods, it's obvious from the shopping picture above and the fact that every time I go shopping my fridge fills up and nothing is added to the cupboards.  In fact nothing needs to be added to them as they do not seem to be going down at all.

 

 Last weeks shopping came to a total of £22.17 after discounts, now knocked off the £2 House Keeping Challenge figure (see stand alone page at the top).  This was all fresh foods apart from the bottled water and the treat of our favourite Garlic Breads on offer at 3 for the price of 2.  Now stashed safely in the freezer ready for garlic bread emergencies.

 

 

 

I have my larder cupboard packed to busting with packets of foods that it is going to take us an absolute age to get through, so after a brilliant idea from Lovely Hubby while we were selling at the car boot sale on Sunday morning .....

 

 

 

 

...... brought about because one of our really good sellers (they flew off the table) were Chocolate Muffins made with this mix, we had decided that there was no way we would be able to eat our way through this 12.5kg bag (bought in error I thought it was 2.5kg!!) so I made up a batch of 36 to sell on our table.  They were really popular, mostly with folks that had dashed out of the house without breakfast.  I sold 35 at 20p each making us a total of £7, yes I hear you saying "you made 36 where is the other one"..... yep you guessed ...LH had it with his coffee half way through the morning (I tried to charge him but he would have none of it :-)

 

His brilliant idea was to sort through the surplus to our requirement supplies and sell them off at the next car boot, using the money we make to supplement the £2 House Keeping Challenge money.

 

I must say I agree with him, it has been sitting heavy on my heart and mind that in this 'Year of Less' we have so much in the larder and cupboards.  Do we need it ....... I really think not.  We are tending to eat less and less, and to eat fresher, none processed foods, so it makes sense to jettison what we will not be eating and let someone else grab themselves a bargain.

 

Later today I am going to empty the shelves and put back only the things we really love and that will be eaten in the next two or three months and those things that go with the fresh foods that we buy on such a regular basis.  It makes sense to have a good larder of basics but not as much as we seem to have built up to recently.

 

 

 

For us fresh is the way forward and until I have my own crops growing away I will need to buy them and doing this will make us a little money to supplement the housekeeping money and keep this Challenge going a bit longer.

 

I feel quite excited about 'busting the stash' with such a good reason for doing it.

 

How much do you store in your cupboards at any one time?

 

Sue xx

Me and Green

 

Thank you for all those wonderful comments yesterday.  It seems there is a lot of 'Larder Love' out there!  There were a couple of enquiries about the shade of green, it doesn't have a name, a least not one that I know of.  It is 'My Green'.  (Here is a full view of the fireplace as it looks this morning.)

 

 

 

It all started with this jug, a really old jug made in England by a company called 'Lovatts', I found it at a car boot sale many, many years ago when I was married to my first husband, it has a chipped pouring lip and as such is no good to be used as a jug, but ideal for what I like to use jugs for - flowers.

 

The shade of green shouted at me from across the school yard where the car boot sale was being held and although we had virtually no money at the time I handed over a whole pound for this beauty without quibble or haggle.  It is a plain, bog standard straight sided jug but the colour made my heart sing.

 

It came with me when I made the sad decision to leave my husband, not much more did, I walked away with my son, my four cats and personal belonging, amongst these was my jug.  After a couple of years we were divorced and as he bought me out of the marital home I had money to put a deposit on my very own little terraced house.  When the kitchen was re-fitted I painted the walls 'my green', taking the jug to the DIY store for colour mixing.

 

Jump forward a couple of years and now with Lovely Hubby we went to look at our last farm ready for our change of lifestyle and guess what,  the front and back doors were painted in the exact shade of green, of course I fell in love (with the house, I was already in love with my man).

 

 

 

It's followed us everywhere and now when there is a choice to be made it's white (for walls, crockery, kitchen things etc) or green.  The 'money plant' in the picture a gift of my Mum is almost the exact shade of green, although the camera refuses to pick it up.

 

 

 

Most shelves we buy are painted in this colour.

 

 

Even this lovely antique set of shelves got the 'green treatment'

 

 

 

... and is now used for something much more useful.

 

 

 

Touches everywhere of my favourite colour.

 

Oh, and I wouldn't even have met Lovely Hubby if it wasn't for the colour green!!

 

We met online (as you do) and in his questionnaire he said he had blonde hair and green eyes, I thought what a lovely combination (I have brown hair, dyed blonde and green eyes) so I got in touch with him (lots of other things sounded brilliant too, I'm not completely mad!).  One of the first things that I noticed about him was that his eyes were actually blue (I don't like blue eyes on my men) but by that time luckily he was already growing on me :-)  So if he hadn't mistakenly got the colour of his eyes wrong I wouldn't have made that initial contact with him.

 

So green has followed me everywhere I go, if you want to get this shade of green for yourself I can only suggest that you find something this colour and get the paint mixed up, or if you're lucky it will be available ready mixed in the multitude of shades you can now buy at DIY shops.

 

Sue xx

 

Freezer Stocktake

I had just started to do the usual weekly menu plan on Monday, when I realised that rummaging about in the freezers to see what we had was making my poor little hands freezing cold AND more importantly letting all the nice cold air out of said freezers.  So I hatched a plan.

 

 

Or rather I made a plan!!

 

 

 

It was of course a lot rougher than this until I sat down at the computer yesterday and neatly typed it all out.  Now whenever I am making up my weekly menu or even thinking about what else we might want to eat I have it all there in black and white. 

 

Well green, black and white  ....but you know what I mean.

 

 



 

And of course a good side of this was that now all the freezers are nice and neat and everything is well organised, so when I do go in there for the food for each evening meal I should be able to find exactly what I want within seconds and then close the door again.

 

 

But, of course I must remember to cross things off my list as we use them or we will be very disappointed when I next make up a menu!

 

 



 

What shocked me the most was the sheer amount of food that we have in stock and it has made me resolve to eat our way through all this food before we do anymore shopping. 

 

It is a good job we have all this though as we have seriously gone into 'saving mode' now, and the plan this month is to pay off our credit cards.  We usually do this in full every month but last month our spend was pretty high due to unexpected bills and we only paid off half of one of them so the other half, added to some spending after we paid the bill means that this one is pretty high again and we are simply biting the bullet and paying off the lot, which will take away most of my housekeeping money.

 

You may ask why we have credit cards when we are living simply and frugally, well it's simple the cards we have M&S and T*sco give you points for every purchase in every shop, and when we buy petrol.   They reward you with vouchers every quarter that you can use for shopping or double up for treats, so we tend to put everything on the cards and pay them off each month so we have lots of voucher pounds at the end of each quarter.

 

Well for the next six weeks it's going to be cash all the way, as I want to watch every penny.  I have to sit down and work out how much cash I will actually have, but I know now there's not a lot!!

 

Still it will get me practising for next year and my £2 Challenge.

 

Sue xx

And now it really starts......

 

And now - TODAY - it really starts .... the truly frugal living. 

 

Once again my cupboards are full, not purposefully filled up, things have just crept up on me as usual.  Before I went away on holiday I placed an Approved Foods order with that weeks housekeeping money, they had tempted me with Ryvita of all things, but at 33p a pack who was I, nay how was I to say no!!  We both love them, all the different flavours, with butter with jam, with spread, with pate etc etc etc.  Of course I totally forgot I was still doing the Dukan diet and they are totally carbalicious!!  I will be able to re-introduce them soon though as long as I stick to my diet a little bit better and get to my target weight by the end of November.  It really won't matter if they are a little bit more out of date!!

 

 

 

 

The stash in this cupboard has gone down quite a bit and more room is now taken up with home produced stuff, pickles beetroot etc.

 

 

 

This cupboard is looking much clearer too now, you don't have to be ready to catch falling contents anymore as you open the door!

 

 

 

This cupboard has all the bottles of juice and olive oil bought when they were on offer, the juices make for a much cheaper drink for Lovely Hubby instead of the flavoured waters he used to drink.  The big mixes are all from Approved Foods and save us a fortune.

 

 

 

Although this one came as a bit of a shock. 

 

 When I spoke to LH while I was on holiday he said "what have you ordered from Approved Foods this time,the box weighs a ton" and I honestly couldn't think of anything that would be that heavy.  Then I came home and saw this, it is 12.5 kg of Chocolate Sponge Mix and not the 2.5 kg bag I thought it was!!  But at just £4.99 for the bag it was a real bargain.   LH will be enjoying chocolate sponge in many many guises for months to come, I may even have to help him a little bit, even though I'm not that keen on chocolate cake I can eat it with custard now and then.

 

 

This weekend I'm going through the household expenses with a fine toothcomb and whittling away at anything not totally necessary.  Our lovely little red Fiat 500 went back to the lease company yesterday, it was simply one car too many and now that we live so close to where LH works we have no need for this little fuel economiser.  So although we loved it we didn't need it anymore and with that gone we have almost £200 extra to add to our savings each month, it was sad to see it being driven away though.

 

Now it's time to get back to the arithmatic, I need to be so strict next month with the housekeeping that it is a good job we are so stocked up, we will be living off the stores for at least the next six weeks looking at my rough figures.  I guess it will be another How Low Can You Go type challenge.

 

Have a nice weekend everyone.

 

Sue xx

 



Behind Closed Doors

They say you never know what lurks behind closed doors.  Well behind these particular doors lurks a bit of a mish mash at the moment.

Last weekend I made a rather large batch of Tomato and Garlic Sauce, I had a HUGE catering size tin of tomatoes (thank you Approved Foods) and we needed some sauce to go with our meal so I decided to open it up and make a fresh batch as we were down to our last couple of homemade pasta sauces.

Of course once you make something that ends up doing two meals for the weekend and then gives you nine jars for future use, you have to be able to store them.  In this house I only have one double fronted wall cupboard for my food stores and that was pretty full to bursting, (regular readers will know that I like to be well stocked (**pulls happy, grinny face**) so where was I to put them?

Tucked in the back of my plate and dish cupboard was lots of jars of jam, these were also to be found in many other cupboards lurking behind pans and bottles of squash, so I decided to work towards getting myself organised. 

You know how it is when you move house, things get put in one place and that doesn't really work but you put up with it for a while, well this had been happening more and more, so I decided that by the end of Summer the kitchen will have all our things in their final resting place (it also gives Lovely Hubby a hope in hell of actually finding things too!!).

I bit the bullet and had a sorting session.

Now this tall cupboard will become my larder.

Jams and sugars are on the top shelf, I don't think I will need to be making any jam this year!!

Beneath them are the sauces and yes, you spotted them on the right, some more jams, these were another bargain from Approved Foods a while ago, Bonne Mamon Jam at less than £1 a jar and well in date, if I bought empty jars (which I don't) for making jams these cost  £1.99 each in our local supplies shop.   So I got yummy jam and jars for future use for well below the shop price on the jam.  Don't you just love Bonne Mamon jars with their chunky shape and cute checked lids.......or is it just me?

Next shelf down, my yogurt maker, jam pans and paraphernalia, pestle and mortar and my electric slicing machine.

Next shelf - a whole selection of recycled and some bought, reusable plastic containers for freezing things and my loaf tins, down a shelf to the empty jar department (starting to sound like the Grace Brothers elevator here), ready to take this years batch of tomatoey sauces. 

And finally on the very bottom, yet more jars (some in boxes), my skillet, a couple of tins and my pasta making machine and a few other bits and bobs.  In the basket (being used here to hold this door open) are the jars of spices waiting to go on my little painted shelf unit.....yes it's painted now, it had it's second coat yesterday and hopefully it will be on the wall tonight and then I can fill it up tomorrow.

So you never know what lurks behind closed doors, hopefully by the end of Summer ALL our food will be in here and the other cupboards will be used for the kitchen hardware and gadgets......well that's the plan.

How do you plan your stores?

Sue xx

Edited in to add - Can You Help?........ nip over HERE and see if you can?

Thank you.