Monthly Archives: February 2011

Another 50 pence supper.

frugal food
Slice the back bacon and mushrooms and fry until cooked, add two tablespoons of flour and 12g of grated low fat cheddar.

I love a challenge! Things are financially tight and I have to focus on saving every penny to pay for the house and car insurance; the only movable budget I have is my food allowance so I’m cutting that back. Tonight I made my own version of carbonara. I used 120g of low fat cheddar (half price in Lidl) 33p, one pack of back bacon 69p, four mushrooms 20p, 2/3 of a litre of skimmed milk (I always buy UHT - it’s half the price), two tablespoons of wheat free flour (the sauce never sticks with that) and a third of a bag of Tesco Value Penne. A total of £1.63 and I made five portions, three of which are in freezer tubs and of course, in the freezer. We ate ours with two sliced tomatoes each.

Add the milk and mix together, heat through, stirring all the time until a smooth sauce.

add the cooked penne - I get the pan of boiling water on and it takes as long to cook the penne as the carbonara sauce.

Serve with seasoned sliced tomatoes (family pack from Lidl) and pop the rest in the freezer for days when I don’t feel like cooking 47p a portion
Tesco’s own ready meal is £3!!!! I’ve never bought it, but mine just might be tastier and at 33p a portion a tenth of the price.

Spotted Dick and other delicacies

frugal food
I always make my own spotted dick!

Someone asked “What is Spotted Dick?”. If you’ve not eaten it, then you didn’t go to a British school and you were not brought up by a British mum. Spotted Dick is a sweet suet sponge pudding with lots of dried fruit, including mixed peel. It’s plain, but I add a sprinkling of powdered ginger. Suet is the dense hard fat found around the kidneys of an animal, it just needs grating and adding to self raising flour, sugar, milk and an egg to become suet pudding. You can buy a vegetarian variety, but I prefer the real stuff.

I didn’t make this and mine has lots of dried fruit, consequently, it’s very sweet and I add spice

At school, the dinners are cheap and filling. Nothing chocolatey or expensive, but hearty and loved by children, especially if the pudding is covered in custard. I occasionally make puddings but know, I am not a growing child and really don’t need that many calories, so it’s something we only have once a week. I still go weak at the sight of a steaming pudding swimming to the point of drowning in custard. I hope that clears up the ‘Spotted Dick’ conundrum.

The other delicacy just has to be homemade beef stew and dumplings. It makes a 400g/14oz pack of stewing beef make six portions of stew. I’ve portioned this for us to take to work and costs 40p a portion, we also take a ‘cuppa soup’ as a snack and a piece of fruit, so lunch is around 55p a day. It doesn’t look like much but we’re both ‘cutting back’ and it’s plenty enough for us. It means we get around 60g of beef with our lunch, which is about the amount of meat a day, that Brits had during the rationing of WW2, which meant that people had the healthiest diet, that was rich in vegetables, low in fat with just the right amount of protein.

75p Sunday Lunch

frugal food

Today, we ate the last of the Quorn Casserole I made a couple of weeks ago. I bought Quorn chunks on offer for £1 a bag and made 6 portions out of that. To make Quorn casserole, I use a chopped onion, half a head of celery, 6 carrots, a green pepper and made a casserole. I used veggie gravy mix to thicken and cooked it in the oven. We ate it with rice. So far so good and very healthy. That’s where our good intentions ended.

Frugal advice, cook in the microwave, steaming uses too much gas.

The suet pudding mix that I bought will make pastry, dumplings, jam roly poly, spotted dick, and also, as I made today, Treacle Pudding - it’s actually made with golden syrup, I buy half a litre from Tesco for 89p.

Bought from Approved foods for £1.50 and should last us for months and has many uses.
To make Treacle Pudding, mix 250g of dumpling mix with 145 ml of milk, one egg and three tablespoons of sugar. Pour plenty of golden syrup into the bottom of a pudding basin, pour pudding mix over the top and place in the steamer. It will need an hour to steam. I gave up after 30 minutes and was concerned about the cost of the gas, so I microwaved the pudding for 5 minutes. Insert a clean skewer into the pudding at a angle, if it comes out clean, then the pudding is cooked. It’s the same way to test sponge cake.
All hail the golden pudding

The finished results are a thing of beauty. I’m sure suet puddings are unique to Britain and places where Brits settled. Don’t even start me on the calories, it has beef suet in it!!!

We had ours with cream, as Morrisons had loads going at 25p, so I picked some up last night. I don’t recommend this to anyone with a weak heart, or high cholesterol or if you don’t own elasticated trousers. However, puddings of any sort, make Dearly Beloved go weak at the knees and as he’s forgoing meat in the name of frugality, then at least I can do is make the poor bloke a sticky pudding xxx

Beany Burgers for 15 pence each.

frugal food

I have set myself a £100 challenge to feed us and the pets for a month. Whilst I’m in the ‘zone’, I’m stocking my freezer. Here’s how I make my 15p beany burgers.

I rehydrate a cup of soya mince, with a pack of Tesco Value stuffing - I use a chicken stock cube in water. I then add, one tin of sweetcorn, and mix well. Don’t over season as the stuffing mix is full of garlic, onions and spice.

I then wizz a two tins of beans in the processor - take your pick, any beans will do.

I then grate four carrots and add everything together. I then use a burger ring to shape them, onto greased paper and cook them in a hot oven for half an hour. If you store them, just reheat in the mini-oven or fry in shallow oil.

We had some for lunch with a green salad.

I make them huge as we’re big eaters.

The others have been wrapped in foil and frozen along with the veggie chilli. We do love the ‘Dragonfly’ beany burgers when we’re feeling ‘flush’ but they have now reached £2.11 for two in our local healthfood shop and mine are only 15p each.

Spring in my step with money in my pocket

money saving

Hello Readers, you all deserve much better than the misery I’ve been writing about recently. The smile on my face is because I’ve got most of the money back by making my ‘ex’ pay. He was fuming that I had bought a shower even though I explained that the flat had been without hot water since Jo and Rik moved in there last November. He didn’t feel that was his problem. Some people are arseholes! Love them anyway.

I’m back on track today. After washing everyone else’s washing all week, I got round to doing ours and it’s blowing on the line after doing the washing hokey cokey all morning (hang it out, bring it in, hang it out again - showery weather). I also got round to filling up the bread bin. I’ll keep baking bread all day for the freezer and it’s going to be a day of stove side pottering.

I’ve started my batch cooking today with a huge pot of veggie chilli. The dried soya mince costs £1.60 and I can make ten portions from it. It’s much cheaper than Quorn, which I only buy when on offer. We still eat meat but only around 4oz at a time. Soya Mince has no taste and needs lots of ‘spicing up’. I use chicken stock cubes (10p for 8 in Tesco) but I also use veggie cubes if I’m feeding veggies.

It swells up and has a lovely texture and we really like it. I would obviously prefer to use beef mince, but it’s way too expensive at the moment and I am going to have to be very careful with money over the next few weeks as I save up for car and home insurance.

I added one fifth of a pack of soya mince, 2 chicken stock cubes to 2 large mugs of boiling water, let the mince rehydrate and added that to some fried onion and garlic, a tin of sweetcorn, a tin of tomatoes, a tin of kidney beans and a chilli sauce packet mix. (I always buy sauce mixes when they are on offer - usually 3 for £1 and then stock pile them.)

I then let it simmer gently for forty minutes and decanted it into four seperate freezer containers to eat over the next few weeks. I’ll probably blog more over the day as I fill up the freezer.

I thought I’d let you into my bathroom. Our biggest expense is water, we have to ration it. Dearly beloved has 3 minute showers, but as I don’t like showering, I wash daily and bath weekly. All of our sinks have washing up bowls, so if we wash, even our hands, we tip the water down the toilet. My mum always thinks I’ve left the floor washing bowl in the sink. Visitors often ask and people are often surprised to see six full buckets lined up in the bathroom, where I save the bath water for the toilet after my weekly bath. It take two bowl fulls to wash my hair but it does make me feel very eco!

I’m off to bake more bread, more batch cooking for the freezer and sweep (it saves electricity instead of vacuuming) the floors. Until later, Froogs xxxx

Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.

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Today, my job as a mum, was much like the metaphor I’ve chosen to explain it…………like jumping through hoops of fire. My daughter, through many complex reasons, has been homeless for almost a year(even though she could live with me, her dad, her grand parents and a whole host of other people) and has been living any where from squats to sofa surfing. On Saturday, when she reached the lowest point I had ever seen her in, she called me. Thirty minutes later, she was in my car and on the way home with me. She’s asked for help and told me everything. All I could do was listen.

Today, the ring master doused the hoop in petrol and held a lit match to it, and I jumped through it over and over again. I’m a bit singed but I’ve lived to tell the tale. First of all, we had to get through to Directgov. After 40 minutes of answering the same question we completed an application of Employment support Allowance(not that she’ll definitely get it!) We then had to open a bank account for her. Now bear in mind that DD has twelve pieces of metal in her face, a mowhawk and dreds and the bank looked us up and down as if she were crap and I were the crap peddler and did everything to get us out of the bank as soon as possible. They fumed when we had all the right ID and they still managed to spend ages on the phone to passport office whilst they verified who she was. Reluctantly, they gave her the paperwork to sign and now she ‘exists’ and has a bank account.

Hoop number three awaited us at the doctor’s surgery. Now bear in mind (there’s a lot of bearing in this email) that she has been treated for clinical depression for three years and is chemically dependent on stuff that would give Amy Winehouse a headache and; they offered counselling and a repeat prescription. They also treated her in a manner that surprised me, she was a nuisance and they didn’t hide it. I asked, at what point would there be a referral to a clinical psychologist and they told me when they referred it and not before. So, go and see a counsellor, let that fail and still drink three litres of white lightening a day along with anything else you can get,and when you’re pissing yourself in a police cell, then and only then, after you’ve gone on the game to get the ketamine, we might give you some support with your mental health problems! The next time you see an alcoholic, urine stained wino slumped outside Marks and Spencer’s, then she may have well have asked for help and may have been packed on her way with a repeat prescription of anti-depressants and a cheery ‘We’ll see you in a fortnight!”

Any way, enough of the slight irritation! After she sobbed to the doctor’s surgery and home again (she did warn me that they always treat her with indifference and seeing it for myself almost reduced me to tears!). The rest of the day improved. She cooked dinner with me, we talked and she helped me fold laundry.

I’m hoping she’ll stay at home for much longer than usual, that she’ll take the counselling and turn up for it, that she’ll get the benefits she’s legally entitled to and we’ll find her somewhere permanent to live. I was thinking today, of the lovely readers who left me comments about their partners not being frugal, of their partner’s waste of money and the struggles they have to convince other family members that the frugal route will save them all in the long run. I’m sorry folks, you won’t be able to change them. You can do what you can, where you are, with what you have. You can’t influence the outcomes of the lives of others, even if they are family, even if you lead them the right way or even if you have any influence. It doesn’t stop you from jumping through hoops, even if it feels futile, you do what you have to do. People are hard work; love them any way!

Until tomorrow, Froogs xxxx

Dear Reader, here’s a message from Froogs to you.

http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post

Yes you. You read and log on to see how I’m getting on, the money I’ve saved, how I eke out every little bit. Today, I am talking straight to you. You see, you’re the one who is standing on the edge and you dare not go any further. Maybe, it’s because people will think you are ‘no fun any more’ or maybe you think that people like me should ‘get a life’. For what ever reason, you have not trodden the frugal footpath yet. You’re still consuming and you have plenty of excuses to do so. Let’s think about those reasons: you have to be smart for work, you’ve already booked the holiday and you will lose the deposit if you don’t go, you’ve worked hard and it’s your money and you’ll do what you like with it, you’re in a mess but you’ve looked into debt management, you’re in a mess and debt management is tough so you’re considering bankruptcy…….and I could go on.

I’m still talking to you and I hope you’re still with me. Take a look at Froogs in the photo above. Faded old wellies, charity shop fleecy top, £1.99 Primarni top, and Ebay second hand jeans, home dyed hair and the only evidence of a day out, is a walk on the moors. Well, you know what…………you want to live my life but don’t dare; well I am daring you. Come with me, walk the frugal line. Cut up every credit card because you are never going to borrow money ever again. Write a budget, and this time, stick to it. Go around the house right now and turn off every light, of every room where no one is in it. Get online and apply for a water meter. Go to any of the comparison sites and check that you are paying the least for your utilities and say to yourself that if you don’t need it you can’t buy it and if you can’t afford it, even if you need it, you still can’t buy it.

Now look back at the face in the photo above and this time, don’t see meanness, don’t see a woman who needs to ‘get a life’ but take a close look. That is the look of peace and contentment. It comes from living a simpler greener life. A life which is about being and not consuming. If you’ve been reading, just looking at another life that you would really like to try but don’t dare, well gather up your fortitude because my life is tough but deeply satisfying and this time, take the first step and come with me.

Admiration of enterprise

Earning extra money

Our daughter is still at home but much better today. Her lifestyle choices have left her very run down but she is picking up and eating anything and everything I cook for her. I left her with Dearly Beloved and went to Lidl as I’m running low on everything. As I’m on a water meter, I daren’t get the Karcher out of the garage and usually pay to get my car cleaned once in a while as it’s no cheaper to run the water myself at home. I really admire the boys who clean the car next to the Lidl car park in Saltash. They are always there and a team of them clean the car to showroom condition in minutes. (The photo above is not the aforementioned car wash service, but I didn’t have my camera with me).

The youngs guys who clean the cars are teenagers or in their very early twenties, and any one of them could double up as a young Omar Sharif (not that I noticed, of course!) and scrub wheel trims with toothbrushes whilst on their hands and knees in puddles. Their enterprise and industry really impresses me. I’m sure they are economic migrants and as there was no car wash service in the town before they started up, no one’s losing out. It does make me wonder how many young, local unemployed young men just wouldn’t do that work. They are there seven days a week and for ten hours a day and they charge £5 a car, including waxing it so they must have to wash a lot of cars to make any money. They are pleasant, happy, polite, speak impeccable English and my car was gleaming and waiting for me when I finished the shopping. It makes me wonder why so many young people would rather claim benefits than do something enterprising and it must be possible if two young men, from a far away land can come here and make a successful living with a bucket, soap, toothbrushes and a pressure washer.

Inflation to rise by 5%

Saving money

Dear Merv!

I can tell by the look on your face (both sides of it!!!) that you are a worried man. The economy continues to shrink, the national debt increases, jobs are disappearing and prices of commodities just keep increasing. According the BBC, the rising costs of hotels, restaurants, furniture, transport, fuel and alcohol are adding to the rate of inflation. Which is why, and sorry to rub your nose in it as I can see you’re in the sticky stuff and you’re up to your armpits, I have not felt the increase in VAT or general price increases.

I’m just making matters worse for you all round. I don’t feel your pain because I’ve given up shopping. I ration water and energy, I walk or cycle and only use the car when I can’t possibly get there by any other means. I use old knickers as dusters and I’m sitting here in three layers so I don’t have to put the heating on. I go without anything I can’t get from Freecycle and I can spread ‘Flora’ thinner than anyone else who has ever tried to get into the Guiness book of records.

I’m just not helping am I Merv? You and the rest of the bean counters in the Bank of England and your mates in the treasury, will just have to hold your nerve. But then, sorry to point this out, but you are in your older years and we’ve been here before……………many times. We had mortgage rates of 15% and could only get a mortgage at three times our income with a reference from our employers, six months bank statements and pay slips and a 25% deposit. Credit card limits were equivilant of three months wages. People forget how tough it was to get a job and some where to live at the end of the 70’s and beginning of the 80’s.

Well, we’re back here again and like you, I will see this pattern repeat itself. Well you and the rest of the city boys can continue this all you like, but I, and the rest of the frugal army will not be fighting on the side of consumerism and ‘growth’ ever again. We will do little to contribute the debt, we will do nothing to add to the up turn or down turn, in fact we will sustain from as much economic activity as possible. In future, there will be more and more of us who will say no to credit, no to shopping, no to new gadgets and yes to bird watching, yes to star gazing, yes to quilting and yes to rambling. I’m sorry I can’t help you with the economy but I’m abstaining from involvement. From now on, if I’m fed, if I’m wearing a clean pair of knickers and the roof over my head doesn’t leak; then I’m done.

Yours truly,

Froogsxxx

Shop local, save fuel and time

Saving money

The shadowy photograph is of our local butchers. I buy just what I need. On Saturday morning, I walked down and bought: four rashers of bacon, four pork sausages, half a black pudding, half a hog’s pudding, half a pound of kidneys and a pound of stewing steak. I may not have saved money, but I am doing what I can to save a local shop, wastage and my time. I was home again in five minutes. There is something so amazing about a local butcher’s shop, where they still saw up joints on a wooden block and will wrap meat in greaseproof paper, no matter how small the order. If you are ever in Liskead, visit Ough’s. It has never changed and I hope it never will.

In response to someone who asked - what’s Hog’s pudding. It’s white pork meat sausage, with rusk, it’s peppery and spicy. You slice it and grill or fry it. It’s sold cooked and you re-cook it. Black pudding is blood, rusk and pork fat and spices and although it sound disgusting, it’s much loved.