Never Eat Yellow Snow

                                                          Yellow rice is Ok tho' :o)

 

 

For perfect yellow rice, measure out a cup of basmati rice - this serves two for piggy Friday night portions (equals 100g of rice per person), or three for a more sensible weekday meal.  Add half a teaspoonful of turmeric.  Add water - twice the volume of your rice (so that'd be two cups in this case).

 

Put in a pot that has a tight lid and bring to the boil.  As soon as it boils, turn the heat off, make sure the lid is tightly on, and get on with preparing the rest of your meal.  Assuming this takes you about 15-20 minutes, your rice will be ready to serve at the same time as whatever you are pouring over it (for us  the "whatever" part of meal consisted of beef mince, aduki beans, onions, green peppers and gravy. Yum !)

 

Earlier in the day, though, we went spending.  We're a third of the way through STOP-tober now, did you realise ?  Anyway, today we spent £1.50 on essential school supplies (one of DD's lever arch files broke and needed replacing), £1.91 on over-the-counter medication, and £39.85 on groceries.  Luckily, all of the above happened to be on the same bill, giving us the required £40 spend to get our first Christmas Bonus coupon.

 

Nanny Ogg

From Nanny Ogg's Cookbook, by Terry Pratchett, Stephen Brigs, Tina Hannan and Paul Kidby


"Somehow the idea crept in that housework was not real. Well, I remember my mam's kitchen, all full of things bubbling

 

 

 

                                                                           rising,

                                                                          pickling,

                                                                              soaking,

 

 

                                                                               salting

                                                                       and dripping.

That smelled real, all right. As she said, any fool could earn sixpence a week working for Mr Poorchick, but it took real effort to make that stretch over nine children. "


Elaine has been saying for a while now that I seem to be turning into Nanny Ogg :D 

Turns out, it's worse than that - I have become Nanny Ogg's mam..... 

Couscous Fritters

Inspired by this recipe.  As usual though, I tend to read recipes as more of a....suggestion.  So, tonight I started with couscous that was already flavoured (mushroom), which negated the need for stock; and keeping it simple, the only other thing I added was a handful of dried onions, because I want them used up sooner rather than later.

An egg went in, and feta, and - instead of yogurt, of which I had none - a splash of kefir went in. 

 

Served with carrots, baked beans, and a spoonful of runner bean and courgette chutney.

 

An NSD today - and about time for a proper, across-the-board NSD, in this supposedly no-spend month. Plus a £10 Amazon voucher got sent by one of my survey sites :)  I am ever so tired though - the weekend can not come quickly enough.

 

As for my Morrisons dilemma - huge thanks to everyone who contributed;  and yes, as I would not be exceeding my usual budget - and only exceeding the reduced October budget by a very small amount - I should really go for it.  Hex has hit the nail on the head though - I am not at all sure if I want to be tied into 9 weeks of shopping at Morrisons.  We prefer shopping around, depending on where the best offers are at the time (or who sent the best vouchers), and rarely shop in the same place two weeks in a row.

 

Having talked it over, though, here is what we decided to do - we'll go shopping in Morrisons this week, and we'll allow £40 for the shopping.  If that £40 gets spent on the stuff we either need this week, or find better value than any other place we can get it, then we might come again next week and do the same.  We will take it one week at time.... And if it turns out after 4 or 5 weeks that we've met the criteria for the offer thus far, then we'll see it through.  If at any time a rival store offers us a better deal for that week though, we'll go for that instead and forget about this offer.  Sorted :)

Topping Up

No question this week, I'm afraid - the grocery shopping was not going to see us through the whole week without topping up.  We've eaten all the fruit, you see.... And for that, I had to hit the shops on my way back from work today.

 

Luckily, Waitrose very kindly sent us a coupon for a £1 off fruit - any fruit; and I haven't had the October magazine yet, either.  Pink Lady - DD's favourite, and rather pricey, apples, were reduced already; and I got another penny off for using mywaitrose card; then it was to Asda for cheaper grapes.  Total spent £2.74.

 

 

 

But despite this being a spend day - albeit an LSD (hner hner) - that is, a low spend day - it was rather a good day in financial terms.  The Amazon seller money went into the account - £22.31.  Then another £25 slid in - a survey site cash-in from back in August.  Both got moved over to the emergency fund account,  so there is £55.29 sitting in there now :)   And then a couple more things got sold on Amazon, so there's £19.33 sitting there now, waiting to join its mates over at the Emergency Fund, where all the action is at.

 

Other than that, I am knackered.  We've eaten - macaroni cheese for dinner - the laundry has been done, and we have a film to watch tonight. So all's well with the world.

 

Except.....

 

I have just received an email telling me that if I spend £40+ a week on groceries at Morrison's over the next 9 weeks, I'd get £40 off my Christmas shop.  Shopping at Morrison's I can do.  Spending £40 a week I can do, easy.  Except that spending £40 per week would take us (slightly) over our allotted budget for STOP-tober, and that's not taking into account any top-ups. 

 

But £40 worth of free food ?  Can you imagine how far that would go towards restocking the storecupboard ?  It would be silly not to.

 

On the other hand, this is why I am doing an attempt at a no-spend month, because, well, it's just to easy for that cash to evaporate. 

 

But £40 worth of free food !!!!  At Christmas !!!!

 

Oh dear.

 

HELP.  If you were me.... What would you do ?

Spending Diary

Part of the reason I am doing the STOP-tober challenge is the fact that, if I am not mindful about our spending, it can all too easily descend into a situation where you end up feeling you are haemorrhaging money, and have nothing to show for it.  Oh, I don't do hairdressers or beauticians; I do not shop for clothes; we do not shop recreationally and we do not fritter our hard-earned down the pub.

So, where does the sodding coin go ?

I mean, I cook from scratch; I am mindful about using the oven; I storecupboard and forage and grow my own.  I have a teeny-tiny wardrobe

 I got rid of the electric kettle and replaced it with the stovetop version (believe it or not, that reduced our energy costs by a quarter, a couple of years back !);

 I read free books on Kindle and take advantage of the book exchange at my workplace.  In fact, I borrow books from my workplace for free - one of our few perks - I happen to work in an academic library, you see.  I don't buy lattes, or magazines (I read blogs instead), or DVDs (but we do have a subscription to LoveFilm).  I brew our own booze, mend clothes - I do not have the skills (yet) to make them - I make bread, and chutney, and pickles, and jam, and stock, and cheese, and on and on and on.

I walk to work and back, and OH's commute is of sufficiently short duration not to necessitate huge petrol bills;  in fact, I walk pretty much everywhere.  DD is studying from home, and while that necessitates some money spent on textbooks and similar, it's but a fraction of what going to school used to cost (from the school bus to uniforms to school trips and on and on and on).  We use energy saving lightbulbs, our house is well insulated, we DIY to the best of our ability and rarely call tradesmen in -  in fact, I consider us, as a family of three that contains a teenager with additional needs, extremely thrifty and frugal.

So, where does the sodding coin go ?

Well, it is pretty ruddy expensive to live nowadays.  Mortgage, council tax, water, gas and electric;  TV licence, broadband, line rental;  car insurance, tax, RAC membership, MOT and servicing - even before you think of any issues or repairs;  house insurance, child maintenance (give but do not receive), food and petrol.... And of course, the small matter of my bright idea of moving a thousand miles away from my parents who are not getting any younger, and the necessity of seeing them at least once a year, which costs.

Still, all that can, and does, get budgeted for, and we are extremely fortunate to be earning sufficient income not just to cover all of the above, but also to be overpaying the mortgage on a regular basis.  The rest of it, though ?  On paper, there should be a tidy little sum sliding into the savings accounts every month..... Yet though something always goes into savings, it never seems to be what I expected.

Once again, I ask - where does it all go ?

Well, there's only one way to find out.

No, not a fight.  This is not Harry Hill's TV Burp.   I mean a spending diary.

The concept - as all the best concepts are - is simplicity itself.  Simple, incidentally, does not mean easy; it just means "not at all complicated".  It can still be hard as hell.  Anyway, all you need to do is write down everything you spend.  Every.Single.Thing. From those tickets to the holiday of a lifetime you've been saving up for a decade for to that chocolate bar at the train station;  and the chocolate bars are a lot more important to note down than the plane tickets - after all, the latter will hardly drop off your radar - the former have a nasty habit of doing just that.  And they add up - they all add up.

The spending diary has been my close and personal friend for the last five years or so - every single little coin spent is noted down, and then all the expenditure is added up weekly and then monthly by category.  Once the year is out, the final tally (by category) is divided by 12 to make me able to tell you exactly how much, on average, we spend on food, or petrol, or clothes, or books, or entertainment.....  And should any belt tightening be needed, it makes it pretty simple to see where the cuts can be made.

No one should be without one, no matter how much money you have to spend.  Without writing it all down, it might be pretty hard to make an informed decision as to how to get the best bang for your buck. 

Thanks to my spending diary, I can tell you that my first week of STOP-tober ended up being pretty ouch.  OH's day out with his son plus needing to fill up with petrol made for a very spendy day yesterday..... But hey, I did not spend a penny.  Nor did I spend any today, despite going shopping with DD.  I made bread

 I went to work, I accompanied DD to town where she spent her grandparent-donated funds on a new winter coat, a new handbag, a pair of slippers, a fountain pen and some socks;  and she still had a few quid in her purse at the end of it.  It's really rather nice sometimes, having a teenage daughter ;)

And for dinner we had a pea risotto - one of the superfrugal staple meal I grew up on, made ever so posh by a scrag end of chorizo, ditto of  Red Leicester cheese, and some torn basil leaves.

 Silly money may have been spent last week, which will no doubt make some people feel that my STOP-tober challenge is a bit of a mockery..... But if it wasn't for STOP-tober, I assure you that even more would have been spent, and well, my aim isn't not to part with a penny (though it would be nice to live the kind of lifestyle where that is possible, all this spending can be rather wearing), but to refill my "baby emergency fund" so it's there to draw on in emergencies.

 

 

 

 

Sunny Sunday

Wonderful, wonderful weather this weekend - this Indian summer just keeps on going.   As a consequence, most of today was spent sitting either in the conservatory with both doors open, or pottering round the back garden - sometimes with laundry (wonderful drying weather), sometimes with sneaky chicken for next door's cat (and I wonder why I can't get rid of him), sometimes with a book.  I've finished the Wartime Housewife book now, and moved on to Dodger. 

In the meantime, though, there were a few things that needed to be done indoors, too.  Pasta for OH's lunches for the week, for instance.  We ran out of tuna, and in the spirit of Stoptober, I did not replace it, but looked around for a substitute - and a packet of minced beef seemed just the thing.  I made a kind of tomato-free ragu - onions, garlic, the last sad wrinkly stick of celery from the salad draw, a  carrot and the handful of runner beans that hadn't made it to the freezer yet. 

 

 

I also made mayo:

 

 

 

And then I boiled up a pot of pasta and threw it all together.  OH's lunches done and dusted. 

 

Another thing we ran out of is breakfast cereal.  This is not something we tend to depend on - far more likely to go for eggs, sourdough bread, fruit, kefir, or all of the above - but it's a nice-to-have, and something that OH is likely to reach for at the weekend when I am having a lie-in and no inclination to be preparing anything more elaborate.  I know, I know - most normal people tend to go for rushed cereal in the mornings and then have lazy protracted breakfasts at the weekends.... But we are not normal people ;)

 

Anyway, the way it went was - no cereal, but plenty of oats, and as the WTH book had a recipe for granola, granola it was.  I mixed up a batch, stuck it in the oven, and with the sunshine streaming into the kitchen through rather filmy windows (they're on my list, OK ?), I noticed that the cutlery draw really needed a clean.

 

 

 

I pulled everything out, gave the draw itself a good scrub, then looked through everything that was in there and identified an item that was best stored elsewhere (the honey dipper - it went into the cupboard next to the honey pot, because storing it at the back of the draw meant it was never used) and four items that were to be disposed of - a fork that was an ancient remnant of some defunct cutlery set and thus surplus to requirements;  two potato peelers that do not peel and are therefore never used; and an apple corer that was very useful until the amount of apples I had to core ended up pretty much snapping it in half.  I was sure I had disposed of it at the time - clearly, I was wrong !

 

I washed and dried all the cutlery, sharpened my knives, and back it all went. 

 

 

The gadgets that remained are all used regularly - a zester, a peeler that actually works;  a cherry pitter (or olive stoner, as you prefer - it will get rid of stones in all small fruits, from Mirabelle plums to damsons); garlic crusher, a Homer Simpson bottle opener (essential), a corkscrew, tin opener, and a couple of bottle stoppers - for keeping the homebrew fresh once the cork is out.

 

 

And back in it all went.

                                                      Meanwhile, the granola was ready:

 

 

And there were still sweetpeas to be picked in the garden.

 

October ?  Are you quite sure ?

 

And I have not spent a penny.  OH, though, had a day with his son, and some spending was done on that front, but that fortnightly expenditure is counted as part of his essentials. 

 

And another week starts tomorrow.... And here's hoping that the no-spend run happily continues :)

The Storecupboard

The big secret to eating frugally - and to not spending, especially now, in Stoptober - is keeping a good storecupboard.  The storecupboard means that you buy non-perishables (and freezable perishables, as the freezer is, in our house, considered an essential part of the storecupboard) when they are cheap, and only when they are cheap.  It does not matter if you haven't got much money to go out and buy a month's, a season's, or a year's worth of staples - a single pound kept back from your regular weekly shop could buy you, say, six packs of supermarket value noodles (15p); the next week's pound will buy you three cartons of "SmartPrice" passata, the following week it could be 2kg of value rice.... And pound by pound, your storecupboard grows.

 

Okay, you might say, but how does that save you money ?  In fact, isn't it really rather a nuisance - all this stockpiled food needs storing, so why not let the supermarket take care of the storage issues, and just buy things as you need ? 

 

Sure, you can do that.  But how many times have you been to the supermarket over the last year or so, only to find your usual buys costing more than they did last week ?  Even if you buy them just at the ordinary price, buying up a small stock of staples will save you money against these price rises; and once you have built up a small stock of basic foodstuffs, you should be able to have a week or two off from "normal shopping" and buy just, say, a few pints of milk and some fresh fruit and veg - the rest of your grocery budget can be saved against such a time when a favourite item is on an unmissable sale.  Half price beans, or meat, or whatever can be stored or frozen - and instead of buying just one or two, you can buy a year's supply; meaning that, over the course of the year, that portion of your meal will have cost you half of what it would have been otherwise.

 

So, that's where the big savings come in.  Five  years ago, my shopping went like this - once a week, usually on a Saturday, a big shop costing about £80.  Come Friday, there'd often not be enough in the house to even make a meal, so that would mean popping into Asda  and spending another £10 on that night's meal.  Monthly grocery spend - £390 on average, plus at least one meal out every week, usually Saturday lunchtime (to recover from our mammoth, list-less  shopping trip), and in addition to that, there were probably at least two dinners out, or takeaways, every month. 

 

Now, this was not a problem for us - we could afford it, we had no debt other than the mortgage, and the idea of living below our means had not crossed our minds at that stage - so if someone suggested I started "storecupboarding" in order to save money, I'd have probably just smiled and told them thanks, but I don't need those savings.

 

The reason I started making sure I had more in than was necessary for our immediate needs had nothing to do with saving money, in fact - but everything to do with rabbits and  water pipes.

 

See, it would appear that a rabbit somehow got into a mains water pipe in our area, drowned and started decomposing, thus polluting our water supply.  The water coming out of our taps - this essential of modern living that most of us living in the developed West take for granted - became undrinkable. 

 

I was at work when I heard the news, and on leaving my half-day shift, I did the same as most other people and made a beeline for the supermarket in order to buy some bottled water. Only, by the time I got there, the shelves were bare.  Same with the other supermarket next to it; and the newsagents down the road.  A call to the other half, working in a different part of town, eventually resulted in some bottles of fizzy flavoured water.  Which was fine overnight, and by the next day the supermarkets would have restocked on water, or the water problem have been resolved.

 

Except that neither of those happened.  We made do with boiled and purified tap water as best as we could, but those supermarket shelves remained bare.  We drank ghastly aspartame-flavoured fizzy water and fruit juice.... And got an unexpected and really rather scary insight into supermarket supply chain.

 

At this stage, my "what if" writer's brain kicked in, and I started asking myself what would happen if, at that exact moment, there was a problem in, say, petrol supply, making it impossible for the lorries to bring new deliveries to local stores.  Or if the weather got really bad.  How long could we last without the ability to pop into the shops and restock ?  The answer was, about three meals. 

 

The shock was. well, pretty darn tremendous.  I remember that, as soon as the realisation hit, I hot-footed it to Asda and bought, for some bizarre reason, a big bag of yellow split peas.  It made me feel better, as it meant a few more meals between us and starvation - and that Saturday's food shop was little short of ma-ga-hoosive - because I had to, no matter what the cost, put the makings of a few more meals between our family and the unforeseen.

 

The money-saving aspect of this did not take long to make itself apparent.  In order to maximise our food security, I - working on a sort of auto-pilot - went back to the skills I picked up when I was 14 and the war in my country started and suddenly getting enough to eat became a challenge - so instead of baking a loaf of bread once in a blue moon, I stocked up on flour and yeast and got to baking all our bread.  Passata was cheaper than Dolmio sauce, so I could buy more and feel more secure - and of course, that saved us masses of money.

 

The upshot of that rabbit in the pipe is that today,  good five years later, and with most of the staples now costing a great deal more than they did back then, our grocery budget is £250 a month.  About £150 of this I'd say goes on what we actually eat in any given month, and the rest on maintaining the storecupboard, toiletries, household supplies, homebrew stuff (mostly sugar), and garden supplies (counted as grocery as most of what we grow in the garden gets eaten).  We give food away, we support the food banks, we eat better than ever.....

 

....and the best bit is, that if the push came to shove, we'd be okay for a good six months. 

 

And this, boys and girls, is why you should keep a good storecupboard.

 

So, where do we store all this stuff, bearing in mind that we have no larder, no massive converted garage or cellars, and live in a teeny-tiny bungalow ?

 

 

We store it in lidded plastic crates under the bed:

 

 

(That's our homebrew supplies above - wine kits bought at quarter price and masses of sugar bought at the best price we could find at the time)

 

 

A huge sack of chappati flour kept safe from bugs in a fermentation barrel (normally the lid is tightly on)

 

                                                         In a bookcase in the kitchen:

 

In two rows !

 

We keep our most-used spices on the kitchen counter (the light makes them deteriorate, so the little used spices, as well as the rest of the big bags that I buy them in, are kept in dark cupboards)

 

 

In kitchen cupboards (duh):

 

 

And the shed is home to the wine rack:

 

 

The overflow of tins and pickles:

 

                                                And the booze still at fermentation stage:

 

At the moment, our booze supplies consist of 8 litres of beer, 5 bottles of elderberry wine, 4 bottles of Merlot, 18 bottles of Chardonnay, 6 bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon, 1 litre of elderflower champagne, a gallon of Elderflower Rose, and half a barrel of elderflower white.

 

And then, of course, the grandmother of them all, the chest freezer :

 

More on how to make the best of the freezer  another time.  In the meantime, if you haven't already got a storecupboard, put aside a pound, or a couple of euros, or dollars.... And buy a few tins to start your own storecupboard.  If you store and use it wisely, I promise you'll never regret it.