Hello Dear Reader,

You all do often like the ‘how to’ blogs I write, so here’s a how to make mince pies. These took me an hour to make, including cooking time, and I was eating my lunch whilst they were cooking. Cost - about £1.50 for 12, but the fruit was soaked in brandy when I made the mince meat, so these are quite delicious.

1. Weigh out 500g of plain flour and add to the food processor with the chopping blade in the bottom.
2. Open and cut into cubes, 250g of vegetable margarine. Place in machine and switch on, until it resembles bread crumbs in about 60 seconds.
3. Switch back on, this time dribbling in cold water from a jug.
4. It will become bigger and bigger lumps until it forms one lump, as seen above. Stop and turn out onto a floured board or clean work top.

Here’s the finished pastry - so far in under five minutes. Switch the oven on, mine has gone onto 180 degrees, as I have oven chips, battered pollack in there too and that’s the temperature they need!

Gently roll out, big pastry cutter for the bottom and smaller for the top.

Go get the mince meat out of the cupboard. I made this when some one gave me a basket of windfall. It keeps for years.

I cram as much in as I can, it’s mainly apples, with some spices, some sugar, orange and lemon rind and a few flaked almonds.

Pop the tops on and bake for 25 minutes, mine went into the oven along with the fish and chips.

After cooking, leave the oven door open to warm the house up.

Finally, using a small plastic tea strainer, dust the little pies with a liberal sprinkling of icing sugar.

Leave to cool before eating! But, they are best is slightly still warm when you eat them. They can be eaten with cream (which I don’t like) or custard, but I like mine with a cup of tea.

Enjoyxxxx

Until tomorrow,

Love Froogs xxxxx

Hello Dear Reader,

On average, we eat a loaf of bread every two days. If we bought a loaf of bread from the baker’s every day, we’d pay around £1, so the cost of bread is 50p a day or £182.50 a year. That’s a lot of money for a few pieces of toast and a sandwich lunch each day. We buy 8 sachets of yeast for 60p - so 7.5p a sachet and bags of flour for 69p and make four loaves from each bag. My bread costs 19p a loaf. £34.67 a year! Homemade always works out cheaper and this simple costing shows how we can feed the two of us, two dogs and a cat for £30 a week.

How much money can you save by making it yourself?

Until tomorrow,

Love Froogs xxxx

Hello Dear Reader!

If you are from foreign climes, you may be thinking……what the heck is that? It’s a black pudding or a blood sausage. Eaten, here in the UK as part of the full monty from breakfast. The likes of Heston Bloomin’ heck have been using this with fancy food such as scallops, but with my mother hailing from Derbyshire……I grew up eating this as the main part of my meal. I still love it. They cost around £1.50 for the whole sausage, you peel off the cover (unless you’ve got the genuine cooked in guts version) and grill it or fry it. That’s it! Serve it with what you like. Don’t add any starches such as spuds as the blood is soaked up by starch, with spices and lumps of fat added and that’s it!

I served ours with a few lardons, salad, dressing and a dollop of hummus. The lighting has made it look very black and the outside is always a bit crispy as that’s the way we like it! We’ve saved half of it for another day. So 75p worth of Black pudding, some salad and a few lardons have made a very special supper. Bloody lovely!

I’m sure a few of you will turn your nose up at the humble blood sausage but here’s my theory. If you are going to eat an animal, eat it all, don’t waste any! Not even the blood. As ever, over to you dear reader…………what unusual food, that some people might find just too peasantish, do you really enjoy>

Until tomorrow,

Love Froogs xxx

Hello Dear Reader,

I really enjoyed reading about your inconvenient food, your home cooking and the simple pleasures that so many of us enjoy from some stoveside pottering. It’s at the stage of the year, where I’m driving to work in the dark and groping my way home in the dark too and I’m getting home late and tired. I’ve made two fish pies which are bubbling away, a shelf each, in the mini-oven. One will be for the freezer and one will feed us tonight and tomorrow night. I’m getting used to the same meal twice in a row and I really don’t mind. Something else I don’t mind is the occasional delve into my stock cupboard and pulling out something that makes the meal go further. Tonight, it’s some Aldi beans and carrots. They are remarkably good for tinned and very cheaply priced. There’s plenty more and I always stock up on tins when I get paid each month as I like to have a good stock pile to feed us for quite a few days.

I’ve always done this; it comes from the days when four of us lived off Dearly Beloved’s wage of ten thousand a year. We never knew until years later that we could have applied for top up benefits, but by then I’d got a night shift job in a care home and we managed by being very careful. I used to stock up on plenty of tins, frozen food and cheap cuts to see us through to the next pay day. I still like to have spare food, even though we’re better off………some habits die hard.

What frugal habits do you hang on to? Whether you need to or not?

Until tomorrow,

Love Froogs xxx

Now, as ever, I’ll hand this over to you dear reader. What inconvenience do you enjoy?

Until tomorrow,

Love Froogs