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  It really won't matter if they are a little bit more out of date!!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

 



Thank You Mum

 

 

My day started with an email from my Mum, with a recipe.

Mum's Lettuce and Courgette Soup

Two Servings

Ingredients
1oz butter, plus a small amount of olive oil
8 fresh large outside dark lettuce leaves roughly chopped
1 medium onion, cut into small chunks
1 medium Courgette sliced or chopped
1 chicken or veggie stockpot or cube diluted with 1/2 a pint of water
1 level tsp Turmeric
1 clove of garlic crushed or finely chopped
salt and pepper
2 large spoonful of plain yogurt to stir in at the end

Method
Soften the onion, courgette and lettuce in the butter and oil for 5 minutes, do not let them brown.
Then stir in the rest of the ingredients and simmer for 20 minutes.
Blitz with your blender.
Serve with a swirl of yogurt and a crusty bread roll if you're very hungry.

 

I used a pint of water with the stock and it still made a wonderfully rich soup, so a very thrifty recipe, as this way it would stretch to feeding 3 or 4 people with a bread roll.

*** *** ***

Thank you Mum, guess what I'm having for lunch. .

So I already have my three things to say thank you for today - the day itself, my Mum and my brilliant warming inspirational lunch.

What three things can you say thank you for right now?

Sue xx



Keeping the home fires burning........

Keeping the homes fires burning and the house nice and cosy is a priority at this time of year.  Although this year with this unseasonally warm weather we are only have 3 or 4 fires a week at the moment.

We have central heating but we keep the thermostat down at around 15-16 degrees, if it gets cold in the house it will fire up and bring the house back to this temperature, but it is so much cheaper to chop all the free wood we have all around the farm and use that to warm the house in the colder evenings than to turn the thermostat up and have the radiators glowing hot.  Even the radiators have their own thermostats so we have them set to have more heat in our bedroom and the living room, all the other rooms have them set low just to take the chill off the air and keep the room at a neutral temperature. 

Lovely Hubby went out with his chainsaw last week, and with our landlords permission, cut up some trees that had been felled earlier this year (they were diseased we found out, at first I was horrified to see the tree massacre going on).

We now have stacks and stacks of wood in the barn, drying nicely.

Some already chopped smaller to dry out quickly ....

.... and some still in big chunky logs that we thought might be easier to move with if we can find somewhere to rent soon.

We have a big builders bag full of ready cut kindling, that kept LH busy for hours chopping patiently away at pallet wood.  The bag at the back is full of logs from last year which have dried out wonderfully, I get a few out each day and have finally mastered the art of splitting them.  It's good exercise as I have to retrieve lots of logs that shoot off in all directions.  The old saying is definitely true that wood warms you three times, the gathering, the chopping and the burning.  Although the dogs think it's very unfair that Mum comes back from doggy walks with lots of sticks that she just won't throw!!

We have been very lucky recently, all through last year when we had pig feed deliveries we were usually the last farm on the drop off list as we live in the middle of nowhere, so by the time the drivers got to us they usually had our ton of feed on a pallet plus a few extra pallets that the previous customers didn't want.  Of course I always made them a lovely cup of tea and then asked very politely if I could help lighten their homeward load by having the pallets.....I was never refused.   So we have quite a stack of good pallets drying out ready to chop up for firewood or be put to lots of other money saving uses.

Although it makes the living room look slightly cluttered with our baskets of wood and piles of newspaper (also free - courtesy of Mum and Dad) I can turn a blind eye, knowing that come evening with the sidelights on and a roaring fire the room will just look cosy.

A good excuse to keep the home fires burning.

Sue xx

Thrifty Thursday

For the next few weeks I'm joining in with Angelas'  Thrifty Thursday gang, visit Angela HERE to get a full list of links to all the lovely folk offering up their brilliant tips for saving money,  time, and the environment.....how can you not go !!

Seeds ........ more and more of us are growing our own food now, whether it be on the kitchen window sill, window boxes, in pots and tubs in the back yard, gardens or allotments, or in my case on a small farm.  Some of us are lucky enough to have a greenhouse or in my case a polytunnel, but the one thing we ALL need is seeds.

And NOW is the time to buy them for next year. Most garden centres are selling off their seeds cheap, very cheap. I got all these seeds from Wyevale Garden Centre in Bicester (they have branches all over the country),  they have an offer on at the moment and ALL their seeds are 50p a packet!!

Now when seeds can cost up to £4 a packet for some of the more exotic plants this is a fantastic saving. In the first picture are 16 packets of seeds, they cost me £8, they would have cost me £36.12.  

When I got home after my shopping expedition and told Lovely Hubby and he said you should get some more. The next day in the post I got £5 of vouchers to spend at Wyevale and a voucher for a Buy One Get One Free Lunch, (I'm a member of their Gardening Club, you get points for every purchase and then vouchers about four times a year, it's always worth joining these things) and with Jason's imminent arrival I decided we would have a return visit.

So on Monday we went back, I managed to get a further 14 packs of veggies that I needed for £7, and worked out they should have cost me £27.66.  I used my £5 off voucher so that brought the cost down to £2.  While we were there we had a leisurely lunch with the meal voucher and a brilliant chat catching up on news.  So a good and thrifty day out.

So on Monday evening I gathered together all my seeds, the ones from my box in the polytunnel and all my new ones, laid them all out on the kitchen table (evicted a few spiders and earwigs) and then checked that I have everything ready for the next growing season.    Then I neatly and carefully filed them all in alphabetical order (it won't last but it helps for a while!!) in my little seed box (picked up for 10p at a car boot sale).

So I now have new seeds to the value of £63.78 that actually cost me just £10.  Which means I have the capability of feeding us and the chickens all next year (and beyond)  with fresh vegetables.  And looking at the amount of seeds in some packets I have just worked out that I could potentially grow 4,480 lettuces!!  So that could be my cash crop for next year.  Each year I sell at least one crop at Car Boot Sales that covers the cost of ALL my seed purchases, so in effect we eat free from the Kitchen Garden.

Now if that's not Thrifty I don't know what is!!

One final little Thrifty Tip for this week - pizzas.  Most of us love them, they are easy to make from scratch, but sometimes you just want something easy and quick, but that still has that lovely homemade tatse and quality.  Something I have done for years is to buy the BIG value pizzas from the supermarkets (they all seem to do them, usually for around a pound or get them for 20p like I do at the end of the day).  I cut them in half and wrap them well and pop them in the freezer. 

Whenever we are in a rush for a meal and fancy a pizza, I take a half out of the freezer and while it is thawing slightly I grab whatever leftovers we have in the fridge, on the one above I had a green pepper, a red chilli pepper and some sliced onion, I sprinkled a handful of cheddar cheese on top and 15 minutes later we had a lovely slice of piizza each to follow our bowl of homemade vegetable soup. 

 The beauty of doing it this way is that the pizzas already have a basic tomato sauce base and a sprinkle of cheese, what you are doing is adding the more deluxe ingredients that taste fresh and vibrant after cooking, so instead of just a plain base (which cost more than these basic pizzas in some cases when you buy them ready made) you have this already flavoured base.  Of course you could be even more thrifty and on a quiet day prepare lots of your own bases in the same way and pop them in the freezer ready for future use.

As my son would say (a few years ago) easy peasy lemon squeezy!!


( and.....YES.......you've guessed it......I hurt my back reaching over the kitchen table to pick up a packet of seeds!!  I work all week on the farm lifting and shifting up to 20kg bags of chicken food and pushing wheelbarrows full of muck .....and lifting a packet of seeds finishes me off!! )

Sue xx