Monthly Archives: November 2010

No such thing as the wrong weather!

money saving
-5C outside (23F) and 15C (59F) inside! 18C (64.5F) in my heated lounge

There’s no such thing as the wrong weather, just the wrong clothes. Before anyone mentions it; I haven’t put on five kilos, just five jumpers. Tonight, I am wearing. Leggings, trousers over the top, long back covering vest, long sleeved tee-shirt, roll neck jumper, jumper, cardigan, wooly light weight scarf and cotton scarf over the top. I was watching the news when Dearly Beloved snapped me with the dogs. They love a blanket snuggle too. I have lots of Whitney blankets, all of which were £1 each, either from the local car boot sale or Salvation Army shop. I have one round me now as I type in my office and one drapes over the office chair to keep my back warm.

Don’t worry about me! I’m as warm as toast!

Keeping warm on a limited budget

Saving money

We are much warmer than the rest of the UK. Down south in Cornwall, we rarely get it this cold and we’ve been -2 at the warmest today!!! It is a challenge to stay warm in this weather. A lot of people like me will be doing what they can to keep warm. We were advised by the central heating engineer, to have the boiler set on the lowest setting and the radiators set of the highest setting. Boiler is on 1 and the rads are on 9 and the house is 18 degrees. What warmth we have needs to stay in. If you have spare blankets, shut the curtains and then hang a blanket over the curtain rail to form another thickness to your curtain. Hang a blanket or another curtains over the doors. We’ve lightly nailed curtains to our glass internal doors. I’ll worry about the holes and fill them with wood filler in the spring. For now, the need is warmth and not looks.

I’m upstairs working in my office and to stop the warmth being wasted, I bring a flask with me and then I don’t have to keep opening the door. I also only boil the kettle once. I don’t have lovely homemade blankets, but I do buy whitney blankets in the charity shop. I have one over the back of my office chair and one across my lap. I’m certainly not cold.

I’ve stopped up all the draughts with draught excluders. I don’t have any thing as posh at the one below, I use folded old curtains or folded old towels. They stop the air flow just the same.

One thing we can afford plenty of, is homemade soup. Tonight we had the remainder of the gammon with some chips and beans, but we always have soup to defrost.

Tonight, our heating will be on for three hours and we need to make sure we keep the house warm all night. Even double glazing is not that brilliant as insulation, so you need to do a lot to stop the warmth escaping. If you don’t have spare curtains, then use old cardboard to form another barrier inside. If you have a spare duvet, put that under your bottom sheets to insulate underneath your body as well as one of top.

The gas bills will go up in the new year, whilst we are paying for this quarter, so be aware of the 7% increase, which will have 20% VAT on it too, so our bills will increase by one quarter. Hence if your bill is usually £100 a quarter, it will now be £125 a quarter!!!

I’m not suggesting that anyone allows themselves to be chilly for the sake of saving money, but if you have heated your home, do what ever you can to keep it warm and yourselves warm. Finally, one room living is the answer, if like us, you’re just a couple without children. We’ve warmed (taken the edge off!) all of the house, but we heat the one room we are in. We use our oil filled radiator, it cost us about £25 (Argos) and it really warms a room to the point of being cosy. It is very cheap to run. You can wheel it from room to room. Ours is in our living room, where we eat, read, knit and ‘hunker down’ in this cold weather. What is everyone else doing to keep warm without breaking the bank?

Making everything go a long way.

frugal food

Sometimes, electric gadgets just sit in our cupboards and take up room. I have never regretted buying my Kenwood slicer. When I make homemade bread, I slice it all and pop it into old shop bought bread bags and take a slice out, just when I need it. We do the same with home cooked gammon. I’m busy earning some extra money by marking, so Dearly Beloved is in charge of the kitchen today.

It’s not his natural habitat, but he actually does a really good job. He’s just as frugal as me, in fact, he’s a natural scrimper. He boiled the bacon joint today and then added the veggies and potatoes to the steamer, forty minutes into the cooking time. Everything was cooked on one gas ring and turned out just fine. The only hiccup was the cheese sauce, which I cooked in a plastic jug in the microwave and I managed to make it lumpy. It tasted fine. We now have three more meals from our gammon joint as it was so carefully carved. I’m quite looking forward to gammon, egg and chips!

Halving my energy bills.

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I’ve had really complimentary remarks on my blog recently and I’m glad to set a frugal example of my pound stretching lifestyle. There are really easy things that everyone can do to save half their gas bill and half their electricity bill. Firstly, if you have a thermostat, let that decide when to turn your heating on and off. Set it to the temperature that you would need outside to not wear a jumper. You would still need to be reasonably clothed, but you do not need any more than light clothes. 18 degrees is the temperature of a summer’s morning, before the 22 degrees of the mid day sun, (those of you in sunnier climes, it never gets really cold or really hot here; you’ll either be sympathetic or jealous at this point). When it reaches 22 degrees in the summer, I can quite easily wear nothing more than a swim suit and lay out in the sun. So, you don’t need a house where you can wear a swimsuit, just where you don’t need to wear more than one layer. For me, 18 degrees is warm enough to wear one layer of clothing. If I’m sat still, then I might need a cardigan or jumper but nothing more. Also, if you reduce your heating thermostat by one degree every other day, you will reduce the temperature of your house and not really notice the difference.

The next thing to think about with heating, is how long you leave it on for. Our house is south facing, the windows are full height and we have thermal heating all day. Our lounge and dining room at this very moment are hot. We don’t open the windows to let that heat out but leave the doors open to move the heat through the house. We then trap that heat as the sun starts to set at 4 pm and close the curtains and the doors to keep the house warm. We also don’t have our heating on timer any more. We hold off until we can’t bear it and then turn it on. It’s usually on from six pm to 9.30 pm. We reduced our gas bill from £900 a year to £400 a year even though the gas prices have almost doubled in 18 months; we still managed to reduce it.

The obvious thing to do, if you need to live on a tight budget is get rid of your tumble drier. You will use it, if it is there. Today is really cold 0 degrees outside, and hanging the washing out made my hands ache. I had no choice as I have no drier. Bright and breezy winter days are perfect for drying washing. I save it all until a dry day and I check the weather forecast to make sure I use any window of opportunity I can. Not having a drier does mean I have to be organised but I can’t afford to be any other way. If you have children then you are going to need to be even more organised.

I also make sure that I don’t wash anything until I really have to. Wear old clothes when you are cooking so you don’t make your good clothes smell of what you’ve eaten. Hang clothes up straight away after taking them off. Wipe marks off trousers and winter skirts with a damp but clean cloth. Hang some lavender in your wardrobe to keep it smelling fresh.

One thing I had to stop doing when I got rid of my drier, was that I couldn’t wash clothes at will. I had to plan it. I had to make sure I had a full load, could dry it that day and didn’t waste water, energy or time. I’ve washed winter skirts and woolies today as I know they can dry. I’ve stripped the bed and hot washed the towels and bedding as I know I can get them blown through today. My electricity bill used to be £900 a year and I’ve halved that too. We have, of course, done everything else possible to reduce our bills and only have lights on in the room we are in, we leave nothing on standby, we put plastic bottles of water to freeze in our freezer (the thermal mass keeps the freezer cold) and use a mini oven instead of a full sized one.

By the way, this is not Dearly Beloved and I, the picture is merely a metaphor. Gas will increase in price by 7% on average in the New Year as other providers follow the piss poor example of Scottish Gas and British Gas. The only way any of us can keep our own pounds in our pockets and not theirs is to keep a very close eye on what we spend.
Love Froogs x.

They leave their mark!

cornwall

I grew up in Fowey. I am a Fowey girl! Sometimes I feel as if I’m a race apart. The Fowey so many of you know is not the Fowey I grew up in. Every one, to coin a Cornish phrase lived on their ‘beam ends’. A ‘beamer, is a Cornish beam trawler, not specific to Cornwall, but to fishing community, a beamer is a dangerous beast. They drop nets from either side, like two arms and trawl back. There’s little or no fishing from Fowey that I know of, but in my childhood, plenty of people made their living from the sea. Everyone’s dads ‘work a’ trawler’. ‘down the docks’ or ‘way at sea’. No one had any money and fish was something you ate day in day out because it was cheaper than meat. Pollock was the length of the kitchen table, still steamed when gutted and filled the freezer. Fowey may be ‘Michelin’ starred and five starred now, but I loved the salty rough as guts Fowey I grew up in. If you lived on your ‘beam ends’ you were barely getting by.

I’m feeling really sad for bits of Fowey today as two Fowey boys, who left their mark died yesterday. Both on the same day. Both from terminal illness. Both before their time, but after a full life. Here’s how they left their mark.

It was the late 1980s, I had left a terrible marriage and was renting a tiny house in Fowey; on my own with my pre-school son. I lived on single parent benefit and we barely got by. The beam trawler men were the gentlemen of the sea compared to the scallopers, who dragged chains (I know, get off my back, it’s environmentally disastrous, but they were less enlightened times and poor people had kids to feed) and dredged up the scallops. They lived in mud and would come ashore, looking like swamp monsters. After a three day trip away; Fowey fishermen would drink the Lugger dry and Fowey pubs were beer swilling, smoke filled and uncouth…………and I’m being complimentary here. One such scalloper, who I knew as a school friend, felt sorry for me and my boy. If he dredged up sea coal, I would find boxes of it on my door step. If he had flat fish, usually Turbot, I would find a bag of them on my door step. Sometimes, I would have a net of scallops. There is something particularly moving about a benefactor, who gives without expecting anything in return, because they know someone is skint and having a hard time. He left this world yesterday.

Another part of my life, which happened some five years before that, also in Fowey. Teenagers have always been trouble and Fowey teenagers in the early 1980s were no exception. Summers seemed longer then. We drank more. We were reckless.

The river Fowey has fierce currents and is no place for drunk, reckless teenagers to be in, in the dark, after midnight, when no one was around. We’d got the passenger ferry over to Polruan, been to the sailing club disco, were all worse for wear and had missed the last ferry home. Stranded, we (almost eight of us, boys and girls, all of 17 and 18 years old) had ‘borrowed’ a couple of rowing boats, which we piled in and started to row back to Fowey. If we were sensible, we would have behaved ourselves. We were not. The dingy I was in capsized in the middle of the river and we were adrift, in a running tide, in the dark, with no one around.

The water was freezing and we soon lost sight of each other. Screaming must have been heard from the harbour side as the maroons flew into the sky. Within minutes, the Fowey lifeboat was looking for us. We were hauled on board by some very angry lifeboat men, none of whom wanted disturbing from a ‘lock in’ by stupid pissed up teenagers! I don’t know who was the most furious; the crew or my dad. The man who pulled me out of that water that night, died yesterday. Two people who touched my life, one to bring me food and warmth when I had nothing and one who saved me from almost drowning, died on the same day, in the same Cornish town that shaped the person I am today. They leave their mark.

Indian Takeaway!

frugal food

Many, many years ago, I lived in Bath. On Broad Street where I ran a pub called “The Saracen’s Head”. It was on the same street as Crudginton’s and Rossiters and the most wonderful Indian Restaurant. The gun smiths would drink in the pub, the shop girls from Rossiters would come in after work and the staff of the Indian restaurnant used to ply my ‘fruit machines’ with hundreds of pounds and drink me out of fruit juice.

My eldest was just a tiny lad then and we would sometimes eat with him in the Indian Restaurant and I loved King prawn dhansak and naan bread. We would sometimes wait in the kitchen, for a takeaway, with the staff who frequented our pub and have a cup of tea. The tandoor oven would glow and they would have wetted oven gloves, almost to their arm pits to get the skewered meats in and out and the bread itself was slapped on the side of the oven and then peeled off a few minutes later. It was a magical place. It was the first place I experienced Eid. The restaurant staff who would work all day with nothing to eat or drink during Ramadam and as part of their three day celebration at the end, gave free food for all the neighbours (Us!!!!) at Eid at the end of it! I was in my early twenties, a young mum in a strange town and I will never forget the incredible hospitality of my neighbours who invited every person who lived on that street to come and eat with them.

I haven’t been to an Indian restaurant since I left Bath; it wouldn’t be the same. Eid would have been celebrated this year on the 16th November……….if they are still there in their restaurant in Bath; their supper on the three days after that would have much posher than mine. Nonetheless, we had a fab supper tonight.

Quorn is a favourite here and is on offer in Pesky Tesky at a £1 a bag for 6 fillets. I cooked them all in a tin of Tesco value curry sauce 9p. We had tesco value rice with veg.28p - we had some mixed frozen veg (7p)cooked with the rice. We ate this with a peeled and cored cucumber and a finely sliced onion with some homemade salad dressing. Sorry about the lack of photos, but we greedily ate the lot!

The curry sauce is extremely mild, more of a lightly spiced gravy! But my simple supper with leftovers for lunch tomorrow cost 65p per portion, so a very cheap Indian Takeaway.

When it goes wrong, make it into something else!

frugal food
34p - you can’t make your own for that price

My spinach and ricotta cannelloni recipe went wrong, as when I defrosted the spinach, I discovered it was in leaves and I couldn’t even cram it down the cannelloni…………..over to plan B! Mix the defrosted spinach with the ricotta, add some chopped parsley and a liberal sprinkling of nutmeg.

A large bag of spinach was just over £1 and it lasts for several meal in many guises.

Pour the tomato sauce into the bottom of a dish, layer with spinach and ricotta and lasagne sheets, top with tomato sauce and sprinkle with some cheese.

You could make a cheese sauce for the topping, but as it has cheese in it, I thought that would be too rich.

We ate this with some salad and homemade dressing. Not bad for a mistake and as my first meal in 48 hours! It was really needed. The lasagne will serve four hungry people or six normal appetites! I was so hungry that I ate a quarter of it!

Cluster Bomb migraines

health

Every heard of those? I don’t get migraines for years on end then I get a whole series of them. Today, after being ill for over 24 hours, I feel as if I have woken from a coma. I still can’t stand up for very long and I still can’t keep anything down. I’ve taken as much medication as I’m allowed and I’m still not able to open the curtains and let any light in! The worst part is, I can feel another one coming and not even out of the last one yet!

I sometimes wonder what my animals do when they are home without me all day. I’ve managed to photograph the evidence. It’s a good job they do sleep. If they wake up and start barking, it makes me sit up suddenly, stagger around and have to go to the loo to vomit. I’m now exhausted from writing this and I’m going back to bed. Maybe another 24 hours asleep might cure this one!

Menu Planning and budgetting.

frugal food, Saving money

I shopped late last night. I’m really starting to notice the almost weekly increases but yesterday I topped up my store cupboard and was shocked by some prices. Here’s the week’s menu.

Today - Fish pie and salad, taken out of the freezer and reheated in the mini oven, eaten with the much reduced price salad from Pesky Tesky.

Here are the rest of the meals.

Salmon Fish cakes and salad with croutons.

One tin of salmon, mixed with mashed potatoes, finely chopped parsley and one egg. Fry gently on both sides until golden brown. The cost of a tin of salmon surprised me, it’s now £1.50 a tin, however, that’s enough to make eight fish cakes, four for supper and four to freeze for another day. After you have lifted the salmon cakes out of the frying pan, drop in the small cubes of old bread - fry and serve with the salad.

Spinach and Ricotta Cannelloni

You will need a quarter of a pack of frozen spinach, allow to defrost. One tub of Ricotta cheese - now £1 a tub! When did that go up?? 100g of Parmesan and one egg. Cannelloni is also expensive and was £2.50 for a large box in the supermarket! It will last but that’s a lot to lay out! The sauce to cook it in is: one tin/box of passata, one finely chopped onion, two finely chopped cloves of garlic. Saute the onion and garlic in some oil, add some black pepper and passata (I just use a cheap tin of tomatoes and mush them myself) Cook through until sauce like, usually about 20 minutes.

Drain the spinach in a fine plastic sieve, squash all the water out with the back of a spoon, stir together with small pot of Ricotta, Parmesan and one egg. To get it into the cannelloni - push the cannelloni tub into the mixture and then towards the side of the mixing bowl, keep gathering it up and pushing it to the side until it fills the tube.

Place some of the cooked tomatoe sauce in the bottom of a dish and lay the canelloni on top, then cover with tomatoe sauce, if you have some grated cheese then put that on top - I don’t, I don’t usually make my tomato sauce as Tesco value pasta sauce is 34p, which is the same price as a tin of tomatoes, so it’s cheaper to buy the sauce. We have two tubes each and I will make enough for two days, we just eat the same the next day, reheated with some salad.

Veggie Chilli with baked potato

You will need half a bag of quorn mince, an onion, tin of sliced mushrooms, one pepper, tin of kidney beans, some chilli powder and another jar of Tesco value pasta sauce. One large baked potato each.

Drain the mushrooms, finely chop one onion and one pepper, fry in as little oil as possible. When cooked, add the quorn mince and the chilli power. I usually use the Tesco chilli mix, they sell three sauce sachets for £1 and I usually have a stock in the cupboard. It thickens as well as flavouring. I then add the pasta sauce and keep adding water until I get the consistency I want. Quorn soaks up water and can be dry without enough sauce. When almost cooked, add the tinned kidney beans and allow to cook through. Serve with a baked potato

Bacon and Pea Risotto

You will need: one pack of Tesco Value ‘cooking bacon’ - it’s the offcuts from the rashers and a variety of shapes. 300g of Arborio rice (that’s still cheap!), one litre of veg stock, one onion and 100g of frozen peas. Chop and fry the onion, along with the finely chopped bacon, cook through - I add the rice and stock all in one go and keep stirring. We eat this with any cooked veg, usually cooked ‘squeaky’ beans.

Friday night Special - egg, chips and beans!

Homemade chips, an egg each and a tin of beans between us. We always ‘pad’ out our budget with something really cheap in the week.

I’m sure everyone on a budget is noticing the rise in prices. I can only imagine that we shall eat meat as a treat and stick to veggie meals most of the time, supplemented by fish (tinned!) and seasonal.

Saturday night takeaway.

frugal food

In the past, Friday night was always a take away night. (Many years in the past I hasten to add!) We would get a pizza, fish and chips or a ‘chinese’. Even Fish and Chips for two is £10 and that now has become a very rare treat. We eat seasonal food as it’s usually cheaper, so we don’t usually eat salad at this time of year. We decided to shop late today, to see if we could pick up any bargains. I did and, just for Pixie, most of the recipes will be veggie this week. As you can see from the pictures, we bought some cheap salad tonight!

I never buy shop made dressings any more and usually use Jamie Oliver’s 3-2-1 recipe of three tablespoons of olive oil, one tablespoon of wine vinegar and one teaspoon of mustard and one sprinkle of salt. Pop into an old jam jar, do up the lid and give it a good shake.

You can see how I portion out the quiche, and freeze it so it’s ready for DB just to take to work. We had a slice between us with our supper tonight. A real Saturday night take away; just the type of treat we need today to get some fresh veggies and vitamins inside us. The best part is that there is plenty for tomorrow night.