Making good use…

 …of the things that we find..! I mentioned in my last post that we’d been doing a bit of foraging again, and that has continued this weekend with another batch of plums picked from trees literally just around the area we live. We’re lucky that when the town was planned and built, one thing factored in was lots of trees, and that included a LOT of plum trees, so within a quarter mile radius of home we were able to pick this lot…

I already knew I wanted to make another batch of plum sauce - this time a darker, more “Chinese style” version, so the first step was to find a suitable recipe. One for “Five spice plum sauce” seemed to hit the flavour profile I was looking for, although we hit an immediate stumbling block there when I realised too late we had no five spice powder - oops! Thankfully we DID have all the actual spices I wanted in there - cinnamon, cloves, allspice, black pepper and star anise, so we set to grinding them up where needed. I substituted a little over the half of the stated half-cup of water for light soy sauce, and left out the half teaspoon of salt that was called for as a result. Garlic - also not in the recipe - went into the mix, and once everything else was prepped we ended up with a pan-full like this… 

It was the simplest process from there - literally bring it to the boil, then turn down and simmer for 30 minutes or until the plums had collapsed, stirring frequently. Then pull out the whole spices - I had also used some rather elderly dried galangal root so we pulled that out too as it was quite fibrous-looking - before blitzing with a stick blender until smooth. MrEH had meanwhile been prepping the bottles for it - in our usual way, a thorough clean before pouring boiling water over bottles, lids and the ladle and punnet we were going to use for filling them, then it was a simple case of filling the bottles while they and the mixture were still hot. We got 4 decent sized bottles from a kilo of (free!) plums, with the other ingredients all being storecupboard stuff, and I reckon each bottle will do 4 stir fries, so this is feeling like very decent value indeed! The sauce is every bit as richly flavoured as I had hoped, with an underlying slight heat from half a teaspoon of (smoked, in our case) chilli flakes, and a depth of sweetness and umami from dark brown sugar and the soy. 

We still have at least another kilo of plums to use - so we will be back into the recipe books today to see what we might do with those! 

Robyn

Frugal Friday…

 Time for an update on that grocery challenge I mentioned I think, don't you? 

Obviously we're now approaching the end of the month, I’m pleased to say costs have stayed generally  low in comparison to normal, and I'm beginning to feel that I am getting back to basics on the way we plan meals, ensure that food waste is nonexistent and make the best use of the resources we have.  There was a slightly bigger than expected shop in week one as I had lots of coupons from ThaT SupermarkeT which it seemed wise to use - they provide us with a combination of  additional loyalty points (and those points are then doubled in value, mostly to be used towards things which we would otherwise pay cash for) or indeed actual money off, not to be sniffed at! So we topped up on a few things, hit a spend threshold, bought a few bits which while we might not need them right now, we will certainly use, and wandered out with a not-too high spend and a nice wodge of extra points. We also took the decision to head to the Farmer’s market last weekend as we are unable to get there in February and I wanted to make sure we had sufficient meat to take us through. 

One thing I have found really helpful to make sure we make the best use of the food we have in is to run with a rolling meal plan - so once a week or so, I jot down the things I've got planned for the  next few days, then whole of the following week, and then some rough ideas to choose from for the week after that. I start with thinking about what we have in the freezer, fridge and cupboards (no larder any more, sadly!) - do we have eggs nearing the end of their date? Is there half a butternut squash in the fridge that needs using? Is there still a tub of that nice bolognese sauce I made the other week and froze a few portions of? I fit certain types of meals to particular nights of the week, too - Mondays are generally something really quick - a previously batch cooked pasta sauce from the freezer with some spaghetti for example, because who the heck wants to cook anything complicated on a Monday evening? Tuesdays I do something that can easily be split into two as MrEH has rugby training - couscous with roasted veg and some form of protein element is a big favourite - he can either eat it cold or heat it up depending how he feels, but all he needs to do when he gets home is assemble and eat. Wednesday and Thursday nights often involve a bit more cooking, and Fridays are usually something tasty, that might involve a bit more prep and cooking time - occasionally even an actual recipe! Weekends tend to be a bit more of a free-for-all depending on what else we have going on - on a Saturday I'm often just sorting lunch for myself for example as MrEH has headed off to rugby, so soup and bread or a toastie hits the spot nicely. Where possible I love to do some form of roast dinner on a Sunday - and that always provides us with more than the one meal as well. Last week's roast pork gave us a generous helping each for Sunday, then fed us again on Tuesday (with couscous) and Wednesday (stir-fried) plus there are another two double-helpings in the freezer - one in the forms of slices ready for another roast, and the other in chunks - that will probably be stir-fried in a future week.

I know I have said this before but starting with a quick review of anything you might have about that needs using is probably the best way I know of avoiding food waste, beyond the obvious planning and buying just what you need, of course!  As I mentioned the other week, it's often possible to prevent things from going past their best by making something out of them there and then - my soup was a good example. However, you can also sometime rescue things which you're not in a position to cook with immediately. Sweet peppers for example can be chopped and frozen (ideally spread out on a sheet of baking parchment or baking liner, then tip them into bags or tubs when frozen solid). Mushrooms hovering on the edge of slimy can be chopped and oven roasted with a drizzle of oil, then frozen in the same way. Green veg benefits from a light blanching in boiling water - then cool it as swiftly as possible and again, loose freeze for ease of use. we do, after all, spend a fair amount of our annual income on ensuring that we are fed - so it does make the best use of that money. 

One thing I have switched up recently is that I am doing a lot more of my shopping at a budget or “discounter” supermarket - and I do think it’s saving me money too. The one I use most these days also has a nice app which rewards you when you reach certain spend thresholds in a month - today for example I went back in after my main shop as I was able to claim a free bakery item - a nice crusty sourdough style loaf worth £1.99 - like all these things the trick is to shop normally and not be seduced into spending more to hit a particular level - although it has to be said if I was just a pound or so off one of the levels the week before the end of the month I might add something for the storecupboard into the trolley to push us over. If you shop there a few times a month, the app will probably be worthwhile for you though.

We’ve resisted the call of the takeaway this month although there was a meal out - pizza in a pub with pals last weekend, and most delicious it was!  (And also from our personal spending money, not our food budget!)

I know - not particularly frugal! (Tasty though!)

It’s looking like we’ll have about a £75 underspend on our January budget - possibly slightly less, but in that region, and I’m pleased with that. It’s been really good to properly focus back on a frugal challenge again this month, and I do feel that it’s also been beneficial to get back into the habit of proper meal planning again too.  Allowing that we are still fairly well stocked, I’m going to roll the challenge on into February as well so I’ll keep you posted on how we go. There will be no Frugal February his year I don’t think as we do have a couple of things planned through the month which will involved (planned and budgeted) spending, so having something to focus on and keep our heads in the thrifty game would be good! 

Robyn

Frugal Friday…

Happy new year all, and, let’s be honest, there is nothing like a new year to rekindle thoughts of frugality and generally making sure that we look after our money so it can look after us, eh?

It’s been a while since we’ve done a FF post but it feels like time again - probably not for weekly posts, but certainly for one every so often.  Along with a few others on the lovely Money Saving Expert forums, I am planning a “how low can we go” month for grocery shopping this month. December always tends to be a steep one for most of us for food shopping doesn’t it - from the components of the traditional Christmas dinner, through to the snacky bits for boxing day and beyond, and of course all the treats because after all, it is a Christmas! As long as they can be afforded - and even better if they are budgeted for - then all well and good, but having spent our money on it, it makes sense to extract every last inch of value from it. And after all the spending in December, and undoubtedly for many of us still having plenty of leftovers from that, January is the perfect month to really make use of the resources we have and keep our costs below budget. 

Like many of us, I bought plenty of the supermarket 15p veg in the run up to Christmas week - while some items like the broccoli got used up fairly soon thereafter, I deliberately bought extras of items I knew would keep well - including several bags of parsnips. We love them with a roast dinner anyway, but the bulk of them were always designated for a favourite of ours - curried parsnip soup. It was made today, and turned in to quite the “use it up” meal too.

I started off with some of a  15p bag of shallots, cooked off in a little knob of ghee, then added the chopped parsnips and cooked the lot off gently for a while until everything had started to soften. While that was happening, I ground my spices that I had already toasted off a little earlier - coriander, cumin, black peppercorns and black mustard seeds, plus a little shake of smoked chilli flakes for a bit of background warmth…

Those were then added to the pot along with several big palmfuls of red lentils - these cook off to nothing but add some bulk and some protein to the soup - before it was time to add some liquid. This time round I used ham stock from the Christmas gammon - made up to the full quantity with an equal amount of vegetable stock. No salt being added this time as the ham stock is quite salty already. 

Then  it’s a case of stick a lid on and leave it to simmer until the lentils have essentially disappeared and the parsnips are starting to disintegrate, then off the heat and go and find your stick blender, ready to blast the heck out of it. Make sure to keep the blender fully submerged in the liquid too otherwise our next frugal Friday task will be “cleaning the kitchen with minimal products” - no need to ask me how I know… We’re looking for a completely smooth soup here, no lumps.  

Final step - and a bit more “using up” here - to add some creaminess you want a good slosh of cream, or, in my case today, half a tub of crème fraiche which is on the very end of its date…blend a bit more, and voila…

You end up with a pan of extremely tasty - and very economical - soup. I reckon this pan full cost around £1.50 in ingredients, plus the electricity to cook it - around 25p at a guess,  and it’s made 5 hearty portions, so around 35p a portion. It’s less than half the price of  supermarket tinned soup, and far tastier! Even with fully priced parsnips, it would still be really economical (and without the shallots, I’d just use a perfectly ordinary onion). 

This will be a good start to our month of minimal grocery spending as we’ll each have a bowl of this for lunch tomorrow along with some part-baked rolls we already have (gained as a freebie at the Good Food Show!) Meals are planned for the week ahead using ingredients we already have in too - with the only food on our shopping list this week being fruit, veg and milk. And who knows, I might even come back and update you on this little challenge - we’ll see! 

Robyn

This weekend, we were mostly...

 ...making haggis. Or at least, a variation of it, as sheep’s stomachs aren’t the easiest things to come by, even when you HAVE just bought a whole, butchered lamb, as we have. You might recall that we have done this before - this time round it came from Highbury Farm who we regularly buy from at the farmer’s market, meaning that the food miles involved were extremely low! 

So - what made us decide that it might be fun to have a go at haggis? Well, first off, it tastes REALLY good. Secondly, we’re big fans of the idea that if you’re going to eat meat, then you should eat the best quality meat you can afford. It should have been well raised and looked after, treated with respect,  and you should look to make use of as much of the creature as possible, too. We’d routinely eat liver anyway, but when you buy the full animal you also get offered the heart and kidneys too, which is great except there is a limited amount you can do with 1 lambs heart and it’s (pretty small) kidneys...so we decided to go one step further and ask for the lungs too, and experiment with haggis making. 

Jumping ahead for a moment - this is what we ended up with:

The jumping ahead bit is because the first photo you use in a blog post becomes it’s “snapshot” photo, and the REAL starting point photo possibly isn’t ideal as the snapshot photo, because it’s this... (squeamish types might need to scroll on by, while those of a sturdier and more curious disposition may wish to click on the photo for a slightly larger version)

The “full pluck” as it is known - lungs at the top, kidneys in the bag to the left, heart in the middle and the liver peeking out in the bottom right. Stage one is to rinse this lot in cold water, then pop them into a large pan, cover them in water and bring to the boil. 

(“Cover with water” by the way is not as simple as it sounds - lungs, by their nature, float. No need to worry too much though - the pan is covered during the cooking and in the 45 minutes of simmering everything cooks through just fine). Once the simmer is complete, the pluck was removed from the hot stock to a bowl to fully cool overnight.

Next step is to get everything chopped up - half the liver into dice, the rest, plus everything else gets chopped very finely or you can mince it coarsely. We couldn’t be bothered to get the mincer out, but have lethally sharp knives that did a decent job...

Meanwhile MrEH set to grinding the spices - plenty of black peppercorns, mace, nutmeg and, to add a personal touch to the whole thing, allspice, my favourite of all spices. 

Time to assemble all the dry ingredients - so into the bowl with the chopped offal go finely chopped onion, oatmeal, suet, the spices, salt and some chopped herbs too - savoury and sage, along with a little dried thyme as we have no fresh. 

Everything gets thoroughly mixed together, and then stock from the cooking of the pluck added to give a moist but not sloppy consistency. 

Now, this is where things start diverging from the traditional. If making a fully authentic haggis, this is the point at which the cleaned sheep’s stomach comes into play, with the rich, spicy mix being packed in, and the whole thing then tied tightly at make sure everything is retained. As I said at the start, we didn’t have access to the stomach, nor did we want to end up with as big a Haggis as that or any of the usually suggested alternatives would give. Instead we researched possibilities for baking it in the oven, first lining our large square cake tin with foil, then piling the mixture in, well packed down into every nook and cranny. 

We then wrapped more foil tightly around the whole thing, trying to ensure a seal that would mean the haggis would partly steam slightly, and also retain some of the moisture from that stock we’d stirred in. Once it was well wrapped, we popped a dish full of baking beans on the top to weight it down a bit - otherwise there was a risk it would rise and expand in the baking and give a less solid texture than we were hoping for...

Then into the oven - gas 4, for initially 1 hour 30 minutes. At that stage we removed the foil to allow it to dry out and the top to crisp just a little, and put it back in for a further 20 minutes. The picture at the top of the post was taken when it came out of the oven - at this stage still feeling quite soft, but we trusted that it would firm up as it cooled, so set it aside and then once cold, into the fridge overnight. 

This morning it was turned out of the tin - a wonderful solid lump smelling of spices and a rich meatiness...in fact, exactly like haggis! Carefully cut into six pieces - each one will provide a meal for the two of us...

Even a small shop bought haggis is often really larger than needed for two people - don’t get me wrong, none gets wasted, but it usually feels like truly there is more on the plate than we actually need in one meal - so we were aiming for a size for each piece slightly smaller than that which we would usually buy. 

The texture is pretty much spot on - ideally it would be slightly more “oatmeally” - although we used the quantity suggested by the recipe ours was fine oatmeal where tradition would use coarse. 

The whole experiment was really interesting - from the initial wondering whether it was really possible to produce something that would even come close to replicating the usual haggis flavour and texture, to researching recipes and finding a combination of methods that would work. For any Scots reading and shaking your heads - please bear in mind we are absolutely not viewing this as a “proper” haggis, but the initial tasters we’ve had (yes, of course we have!) suggest that in flavour it’s pretty close to the real thing, and realistically, as close as we can get allowing for limitations in the ability to cook it authentically. In terms of ingredients it is pretty authentic, plenty of high street supermarket haggis these days doesn’t contain the lungs, for example, using ground lamb or even pork instead. It’s also proved a great way of making use of some of the bits of the beast which would often be discarded, and will give us several tasty and economical meals too. A success then, and something we’d certainly consider doing again! To add to the economy, the remainder of the stock that the pluck was poached in has been frozen ready for use in a future stew or casserole.

Robyn

With thanks to the “Caroline’s Cooking” website for inspiration on the baking method, Tim Hayward writing for Guardian Food for recipe inspiration and plentiful photos, and the Oakden Cookware website for the recipe with quantities. For our own future reference we used 750ml stock not the 850ml suggested. 

Sunday dinner...

 You may remember that we’re big fans around here of buying good meat, but the cheaper cuts, and then cooking them carefully to get a really tasty result. Today’s dinner was an example of his - a lamb breast bought from the farmers market a couple of months ago - defrosted through the day yesterday ready to be popped in the oven this morning. A lot of people view a lamb breast as being rather a fatty cut - and indeed it is, but cooked nice and slowly much of that fat renders down and runs out, while helping to keep the meat wonderfully juicy and succulent. It’s also a brilliant cut to add masses of flavour to. 

First job when I got up this morning was to get the oven on - set to gas 5 at first I left it to heat while I prepped the lamb, bringing it out of the fridge and unrolling to let it begin to warm up a little, I set it aside and started to get ready the flavourings I wanted. The pared-off rind of a lemon. Some rosemary, and parsley. Some garlic. Those were all chopped finely. Plentiful salt and pepper, and a good slug of rapeseed oil and the lot was mixed together and rubbed over the meat before it was tightly rolled up and again, wrapped equally tightly in foil (which saves the need to tie it with string) and then the whole lot popped into a pan and into the oven. 20 minutes later the heat was turned down to 3.

Next thing to be done was the root vegetable bake that I’d decided to serve alongside the meat. An absolute winner of a recipe this one, and brilliant for using up any stray root veggies that you might have left. Today ours used half a small swede, the final sweet potato and several regular tattles as well. Finely slice all your veg - I use a mandolin as that’s the easiest way of getting really thin even slices - then assemble.

 If you add a bit of bacon, ham, or chopped chorizo you can almost turn this into a meal on its own in fact. Just layer up the slices of your chosen veg - season with salt and pepper every few layers - and you can add some cheese in the middle for a nice gooey surprise too - I used some sliced Raclette today, but a handful of good strong grated cheddar works really well too. Then pour over a mixture of veg stock and double cream with a bit of cornflour beaten in for thickening, cover with foil and shove in the oven - today I just popped it in at the same low temperature the meat was at. 

The bake takes longer to cook right through than you might expect - a good 2 hours at that heat, but you want it to cook slowly so you get the soft melting texture of the veg and cheese combining as you eat it - there’s nothing more disappointing than a half cooked slice of potato! I uncovered it for the last 30 minutes and added a bit of grated cheddar across the top for a crunchy topping. 

This is what the meat looked like when it came out of the oven - although you can make an effort at carving it basically it IS going to fall apart, but it was every bit as tender as it looked. 

And that’s the final plateful - the meal also used up the last of the broccoli from last week’s veg box - Yep, that’s the stalks as well there, exactly the same flavour as the florets and absolutely not being wasted!  There’s enough of the veg bake left to accompany a meal another day - and also enough lamb to do another meal albeit quite well stretched out with other ingredients. The lamb breast was £3 - so economic is pretty much it’s middle name! The whole meal was delicious, and aside from a bit of prep utterly undemanding as once it’s in the oven the long cooking time means you can get on with other things. (Drinking tea and jigsawing here, mostly!)

There you go, another angle. You’re welcome...! 

Robyn

That’s Odd...

 Quite a few years ago we had a brilliant local veg box scheme - a small company run by a nice chap who really cared about the produce he sourced. Sadly his attention to detail and fresh, high quality produce actually made him too successful in some ways - he built up a sizeable customer base at which point he got an offer he couldn’t refuse from another established box scheme company, and sold to them. Rapidly from our perspective prices went up, and quality down, and we stopped ordering boxes soon after.  

We’ve said for a long while that we’re not in the least fussed about our veg being organic - we don’t buy that normally, and so there’s no reason for us to pay for a box of organic veg either, but pretty much all the schemes running currently trade in the basis of being organic. The exception to that is London based Oddbox - and I’ve been keeping a regular eye on them for the last little while in the hope that they would start covering our area, two weeks ago I popped our postcode into the box on the website and voila! “We delivery to your area on a Saturday” - hurrah! 

Oddbox work on the premise of “rescuing” fruit and veg which would otherwise go to landfill - items that don’t look right for the mainstream stores - or are the wrong size, or are just surplus to requirements. They buy it up, then sell it on to people like us who don’t care that the peppers have a few blemishes, or that I’m getting potatoes because there were more of them than the supermarkets wanted this week. 

You get your box of veg - ours was the medium Veg only box - they also do a fruit and veg combined and a fruit only box. It comes with a leaflet with some recipe ideas for some of the items in the box, and a list (above) confirming why all the items you’ve been sent are there. From my perspective the delivery time (Oddbox deliver overnight to save on emissions) plus the fact that you can see what is expected to be in your box ahead of time means that I can always be sure of fresh veg for Sunday lunch. Just getting the box means we’ll increase the amount of veg in our diet - and we were no slouches on that front in the first place.  Although this week’s offerings were fairly “usual” for us, I’m also hoping that we get some different stuff here and there to shake our meals up a bit. As for this week, there will be a stew,  a stir fry, and some salad with an omelette, as well as some spinach thrown into tonight’s risotto, and I’m looking forward to planning to use up every last scrap! 

Robyn 

The freezers - yes, there are 2...

The river Stort, yesterday... 

Some years ago we decided we wanted to enable the purchase of meat in bulk. Not in a “buy it cheap, pile it high” sort of way, but more “find a nice farmer who cares for their animals, makes sure they have good lives, a dignified death, and then takes care in the butchering”. Our freezer capacity at the time was limited to the bottom half of our fridge/freezer - a reasonable size but not huge, and, by the time all the usual frozen veg/bread/ leftovers/ ice cubes/ fish fingers sort of stuff was taken into account, without a vast amount of spare space. Coincidentally we also had a pretty much perfectly “freezer sized” space being used for assorted “stuff” - all of which could be found homes elsewhere. We added 2 + 2 together and “freezer 2” was ordered and duly installed.

Initially freezer 2 was home to “Herbert” - our first whole lamb purchase. Herbert provided an astonishing number of meals for the two of us  - the cost of a whole beast feels high but you can get so much more from it when it is butchered to your requirements, and it is this, combined with the lower per-kilo price of buying in more quantity, that makes it cost effective if you have the space.

We don’t always have freezer 2 switched on. Until the early part of last year it had been turned off - door carefully propped open for airflow - for some time, but lockdown 1 and the panic buying underlined the benefits of having additional freezer space for either yellow stickered bargains or simply to give more capacity for things like additional frozen veg. Currently, the top drawer holds home made rolls for lunches, plus sandwich fillings. Drawer 2 is frozen mince plus the ice-packs we use in the cold box when camping, or going to and from the Hebrides. Drawer 3 - MrEH’s coffee stash, and every second week a 2 pint bottle of milk for me - decanted from the larger 4 pint bottle I usually buy. The bottom drawer varies. Often a bag of oven chips and some battered fish for fakeaway F&C. Maybe a tub of ice cream.

Freezer 1 meanwhile is below our fridge and lives - as you might expect - in the kitchen. Not the same fridge as when freezer 2 first came about, but a similar sort of size. 3 drawers - the top mainly home to things frozen in plastic tubs - home grown fruit frozen as purées, batch cooked stuff like bolognese, fish fingers because the packet is exactly wide enough to sit in the front of the drawer. Drawer 2 houses main central meal components - sausages, white fish fillets, meat for stews, or for roasting. Stornoway Black pudding brought back from the Hebrides (worth a mention all on its own). The bottom drawer is frozen veg and fruit. 

As and when a whole lamb is bought for a time at least that will make our main components of meals, and essentially we need the whole of freezer 2, plus some capacity in freezer 1 for the overspill. The only way of accurately estimating the available space is to gradually start making room to transfer the contents of freezer 2, into freezer 1. A job for this week will be to start moving things across - then we’ll start to know where we stand. 

If you have the space then additional freezer capacity is a gamechanger. And so is buying a whole carcass. When you just have a couple of chops, the tendency is to grill them, a single roasting joint? Pop it in the oven and serve traditionally with roast potatoes and veg. When you have a whole rack of chops though it opens up the possibilities - hotpot, grilled, curried. You escape the tendency to be constrained by the safe option. A selection of roasting joints to choose from fires your imagination towards tagines, deliciously slow roasted pulled lamb, or a rolled breast stuffed with dried apricots, herbs, and breadcrumbs... add in the liver with deliciously creamy mash and  stickily sweet onion  gravy, or the chump braised slowly with chunks of onion, whole baby mushrooms, and enough garlic to see off a whole platoon of vampires...and THAT is worth clearing space in the freezer for. 

Robyn

Weekly planning for the freezer challenge...

Resident of Loch Skipport - South Uist. 

So - we have a meal plan!  This is a key part of our “eating down the freezers” challenge - although I meal plan most weeks anyway. The plan was written this morning - and also fed into the writing of a shopping list, we shopped this afternoon on the way back from our daily exercise. Because of the point at which the plan was written it includes today’s meals as well. 

Saturday: scrambled eggs and toast for lunch - using up the last of the big box of free range eggs we bought for 22p last weekend. They were on the very end of their date today so it seemed sensible to eat them sooner rather than later. The toast was from the sourdough bread I made yesterday. Tea this evening was jacket potatoes (cheap potatoes also bought last weekend - I think those were 12p for a good sized bag) with beans, cheese, bacon & mushrooms. The mushrooms were the last of last week’s punnet, and the bacon came from a pack which has already contributed to a pasta bake and last nights “breakfast for dinner”. The last few rashers will be used in the week.

Tomorrow: A half shoulder of lamb has come out of the freezer to defrost and will be roasted v-e-r-y slowly tomorrow morning with lots of garlic and rosemary. The final 2 potatoes from the bag will go with it, along with some fresh veg. Tea tomorrow will be cheese and crackers - a good old easy, lazy weekend favourite. Pudding will be a rice pudding with fruit compote - the fruit is from the freezer. 

Lunches on weekdays are always the same - a filled roll, with fruit. MrEH has a bag of crisps too. Similarly breakfasts are a choice of cereal, or a banana, or porridge. So the meal plan only accounts for evening meals. 

Monday: Risotto with bacon & mushrooms (yes - that will be the 4th meal that single pack of bacon has gone into. We buy decent quality bacon which has plenty of flavour so just a few rashers at a time make their presence felt). It will also incorporate some additional veggies too. 

Tuesday: Lamb couscous - some of the leftovers from the Sunday joint. With dried apricots, roasted chickpeas, roasted pepper, coriander leaf. 

Wednesday: Thai inspired fish stew with rice. This will use fish, shellfish and veggies from the freezer alongside tinned tomatoes, Thai curry paste and an onion. Highly inauthentic but very tasty! 

Thursday: pasta bolognese. I’ll probably make this on Wednesday and let it sit overnight. Mince from the freezer, and probably some veg too. 

Friday: will either be fish & chips from the freezer or a takeaway depending how we feel at the time. 

To declare: into the freezer - a pack of crumpets and a pack of fruit bagels - the bagels were yellow stickered and will do us for breakfasts at weekends. The crumpets because - well, it’s winter and sometimes only crumpets will do! 

We shopped at ThaT supermarkeT this afternoon spending just over £21. I’ll be adding a second shop for the week at Aldi on Monday morning as Mum also needs some bits from there and with the current Covid situation in the town it’s not safe for her to venture there herself at the moment. I expect that one to cost in the region of £10. 

This one was always going to be a slow-burn. We’ve done it before, and it’s about planning, thinking ahead and remember that sometimes it’s silly NOT to take a seemingly backwards step when good deals come up that need freezing. Ideally we’d like to be able to talk to Peter who we buy our lamb from at the farmers market next weekend about buying a whole butchered carcass - but realistically we will probably hold off on placing the actual order until February. Which is a shame in some ways, as we’re currently researching haggis recipes... 

Robyn 

Day 97...

The last of the gooseberries picked this morning - this is the third lot we’ve picked, and they came to best part of 2kg in weight which we were delighted with! Cooked down this evening, we’ll divide into batches for freezing once cool and that will make the fruit component of several crumbles. We’ve already had some delicious compote, and several jars of jam from the earlier pickings too, so we’re calling this year a success on the gooseberry front! 

A walk this afternoon as usual, although not quite so far as in previous weeks due to the uncertain weather. Getting a close up view of this beautiful Red Admiral on the path on the way out was a nice treat though - generally speaking they fly off before I can get close enough to get a photo with the iPhone! 

We walked up over the common - breaking part way across to take shelter in the little thicket of trees you see in the picture below just in time before the heavens opened! Thank goodness for decent cover from broadleaved trees - we managed to stay almost entirely dry for the 20 minutes or so that it hammered down! The photo shows the clouds heading off away from us once it had stopped. 

Just 5.5 miles today then - which was plenty as I was wearing my walking boots for the first time in a VERY long while, even that short distance and my feet are telling me now that they know about it! 

And rounding today off - another dramatic sky, this time from the kitchen window while the gooseberries were cooking down...

Robyn.

Day 77...

The weather has turned positively chilly again - I needed a coat on when out and about both yesterday and this morning, and even indoors today it has been noticeably less warm. As a result I decided that tonight’s dinner needed to be something warming, while still using up a few odds and ends that needed eating. I’d been browsing through a free supermarket magazine (yes, ThaT one, in case you were wondering) and two different recipes caught my eye - one for smoky spicy baked beans, and another for butter beans in a tomato sauce. The butter bean aspect appealed immediately, and anything with a warming, slightly sweet, slightly spicy tomato sauce always hits the spot, no? So I set to in a bid to come up with a variation on two themes.

Needing used up were some sweet potatoes, so job 1 was to cut those into chunks, skins left on, then they were drizzled with garlic oil, salt & pepper and fresh sage leaves and popped into a fairly hot oven and left to get on with it for a while. Both the recipes I was basing the bean dish on were vegetarian, and while we do sometimes eat meat-free that didn’t appeal for today, so a rummage in the freezer turned up some leftovers from a Sunday lunch of roast pork a few weeks ago - perfect! I sliced a large onion from the larder and fried that off until soft with some garlic and more finely sliced fresh sage, then added the chunks of pork, some smoked paprika, a sprinkled of smoked chilli flakes, and a splash of white wine vinegar, once everything was mixed together I poured in a tin of chopped tomatoes, just enough cold water to rinse round the empty can, half a teaspoon of sugar to offset the bitterness in the tomato, and brought to the simmer. Finally the beans were popped in and the whole lot simmered for another 10 - 15 minutes to thoroughly heat through. A little seasoning - just salt and pepper, and that was that, ready to serve up with the roast sweet potatoes.

Incredibly simple, just a faint warmth from the chilli, (you could add more if you wanted it more fiery) a slight sweet/sour hint from the vinegar, smokiness from the paprika, a great use of leftovers and precisely what the Doctor ordered on this rather unseasonably chilly June evening! One to be repeated, for sure.

Robyn

Day 74...

Today... A socially distanced walk with my parents and the dog, and an apparently entirely abandoned underground train drive unit, in a field...

We have no idea of the backstory that lead it to be there - as far as we can tell it’s about 80-odd years old though - late 1930’s “P” stock we think. It would have run on the District line, which makes it ironic that where it has ended up is not a million miles from where, until, the mid 90’s, the Central line terminated.

Yes - that’s the dog, looking as though butter simply wouldn’t melt. Best not to be fooled by that expression... She’s not a Poodle although looking a little like one after a “short back and sides” at the groomers earlier in the week. She was clearly delighted to have a couple more people to pay her attention today anyway!

This was today’s other triumph - my latest sourdough attempt. A little flatter than I would ideally like as it stuck to the cloth lining the bowl I proved it in, which pulled out some of the rise as I detached it. The texture however is the best I’ve achieved so far - lots of lovely air holes and a far more open crumb. The taste has been good on all the loaves so far, but it’s definitely getting even better week by week as the starter improves too.

Robyn

Day 59...

Technically with MrEH’s current 3-day week status and me being furloughed, today was the first day of our weekend. However, we’re trying to keep Thursdays (and to a degree, Fridays too) as a productive sort of day, where we aim to get things done, rather than just sort of frittering the time away as it would be so easy to do. Make no mistake, we are factoring in some full-on downtime during the actual weekends, with lots of time for just relaxing, reading or just sitting and thinking.

Todays main missions were a big stock up shop, using the car - for the most part we’re still shopping on foot several times a week, but every few weeks heavier stuff needs buying so I take the car. And some more work in our tiny patch of garden, including cutting down a conifer which has been there longer than we’ve owned the place! We’ve spent years on and off talking about removing it, trying to find ways of making it more manageable, failing, and watching it get bigger and bigger, and finally today we decided it was time to tackle it. Took us a few hours, a saw a fair few years older than I am, and quite a lot of elbow grease, but it’s down. We also took the time to dig over the area around the stump, including getting rid of the roots of some of the original planting from when the flats were built in the 1950’s, and in the process realised that when our predecessor set out bricks to create the border, he nicked a good foot of space from next door too! The bricks have now been re-aligned, handing back that space - and we’ve started thinking about what we might plant in our newly claimed space!

I have also been through the sourdough making process again today - in fact, as we speak, the flat smells deliciously of baking bread! Although the process itself is quite time consuming - it was actually started last night, with the “sponge” being left to develop overnight - it is also very simple, the bread is simply flour, water and salt, time does the rest. Today I made the dough, which then gets left to rise for an hour before being brought out, pushed flat again, reformed into a round and popped back for another hour in a warm place. This step is repeated several times before the dough gets left for it’s final prove - anything from 4 hours to overnight - today it got about 6 and a half hours. Then into a blazing hot oven for the first 10 minutes - turned down to a lower heat for the remainder of the cooking time, but how much lower depends on the progress after those first 10 minutes, and that progress isn’t always the same! Anyway, all being well, you end up with something that looks a little like the picture at the top...!

Robyn

Day 53...

We escaped! The first time either of us have left the town since 23rd of March when the lockdown started - and the first time we’ve used a car for anything other than shopping that we could not carry home ourselves too. We’d originally planned to stay local and on foot this weekend, fearing that everywhere would be madly busy, and indeed as we headed out the roads certainly had a lot more traffic...thankfully by the time we reached Amwell, a Wildlife Trust reserve about 15 minutes drive away, it became apparent that wherever all those cars were headed, it wasn’t there! A lovely walk along the canal to Ware and back, and some time at the bird viewpoint as well, seeing our first Hobby, Common Terns and Little Ringed Plover of the year.

Today also saw my third experiment with sourdough bread - technically started yesterday with the process of making the “sponge” using starter, flour and water, and the several short proves and kncokbacks. The dough was then left to fully prove overnight. I did a few things differently this time - an extra tablespoon of starter in the sponge, and a shorter final overnight prove with the dough sitting in a flour dusted cloth lined bowl. This morning I threw the proved loaf into a blazing hot oven first thing, turned it down 10 minutes later, and then went off to do my parents shopping for them leaving MrEH to remove the loaf from the oven when done...

...looks good eh? It tastes the part too  - a good chewy crust and that distinctive sourdough “tang” - although the internal texture of this one is a little denser than a typical sourdough should be, I’m less concerned about that when it tastes as good as it does! We’ll keep going anyway - at the moment I’m aiming to feed the starter once a week, a couple of days before I bake, and then keep experimenting with small differences in the method informed by researching the results from the previous bake. It’s no real hardship as far as I am concerned having fresh sourdough weekly! 

Robyn 

Day 45…

The photo above was taken on our walk back from Sainsbury’s this morning - we staged a dawn raid (well, ok, not quite dawn, but what counts for it in our world!) to see if we could track down any more bread flour having only managed to get that small bag of granary yesterday - and hallelujah there on the shelf was WHITE bread flour! We managed to get a bag of ordinary strong white each for us and my parents, and also a single bag of more expensive organic flour as I’d ideally like to continue to use that for sourdough. We will not be short of the ability to make loaves or rolls for a few more weeks now, and indeed might even splash out on pizza dough over the weekend, too!

The majority of today was taken up with more long overdue jobs outside - mainly removing the paint so shoddily applied by the so called professionals employed by the freeholder of our block when the major works were done 10 years ago. A good amount of the paint had already made its way off the walls, and when we started removing the rest, we realised why as it appears that virtually no preparation had been done. Hopefully our efforts will stay on the wall rather better as we have removed all the loose paint underneath, sanded over the entire area to give the new paint something to adhere to, and wiped down to rid it of dust and paint residue. The first coat of new paint went on last thing this afternoon and already it looks SO much cleaner and brighter out there! We’ve also sorted out some more rubbish from out there to throw away, and found more odds and ends that can head off for storage in the garage too - that will be a job for tomorrow though.

Right - I’m off to start this weekend’s jigsaw. Just remember that tomorrow, which is a Friday, is a Bank Holiday Monday though won’t you....!

Robyn

Day 44...

Well, this was today's excitement - and exciting it really was as this was the first bag of bread flour I have seen in a supermarket for several months! It was also the only bag on the shelf, so I grabbed it quickly, and covered it up in the trolley "just in case" - well you can't be too careful!

In other bread adventures I baked my second sourdough effort this morning - having tried an ultra-long prove to see what would happen. In an ideal world I would have gone for simply "overnight" rather than what it ended up as which was about 12 hours, and indeed this one didn't rise upwards as far as the first one - the texture is better though, especially the crust which has that perfect sourdough chewiness to it, there are plenty of airholes, and it tastes great so we're happy with it. I think part of the problem was the way I proved it - it sweated a little and stuck slightly to the non stick mat I had placed it on and so was pulled out flatter when I came to move it on to the hot baking tray. Experimentation will continue - well, while I still have flour anyway!

There is more baking planned for the next few days too - I got some Clotted Cream a few days ago so want to make scones again, and will also probably make something more traditionally "cakey" for the weekend as well - although I've not decided what yet. I'm really enjoying playing about with a few different recipes at the moment though - I've not baked so much in years and had forgotten how much I really do enjoy it, especially when I find easy recipes like last weekend's raspberry muffin loaf cake - actually easier than making muffins as you don't have the faff with filling the cases!

Robyn

Day 39...

Small things.... My first attempt at sourdough turning out unconventionally shaped, but tasting good.
Banter with fellow customers in the queue at Tesco - we united in laughter at a ridiculous little man who decided to be rude to a member of Store staff, and yes, we did do it fully in his hearing!
A brief chat with my parents when dropping off their shopping this morning.
Technology enabling ongoing conversations with various friends - WhatsApp, iMessage and twitter messaging.
Discovering a recipe for a Muffin Loaf Cake - easiest thing ever, and SO tasty!
Dodging the rain showers to go out and get the bits done we needed to, and then sitting indoors watching it positively pelting down outside...
Being paid! Some careful watching of the bank accounts will need doing this month though.
Ticking a few more items off my long list of “things I might do during the Lockdown” - no “musts” here, just a mix of things we might want to do, little odd jobs around the house, and some odds and ends we’ve previously talked about but never got round to it...
Feeling quite content to just spend time cooking, and fiddling about with our latest jigsaw, and talking...

What small things have made your life better today?

Robyn

Day 37...

It's one of my very best friends birthdays today - so when we walked this morning I decided to photograph the very prettiest things I saw to message to her - this allium stood out, glittering with raindrops as it was! Happy birthday lovely Fay!

I'm getting ready to do some experimentation with my sourdough starter. He (Sidney, in case you were wondering) had his fourth discard/feed cycle today, and as I can't quite bear to throw any of the discards away, I decided that I might as well have a go with baking some of it and see what happens - he might be too young, but then again he might not, we'll see. So currently I have the first stage for bread in the airing cupboard, with another tub of discard next to it which might turn into sourdough pancakes or pikelets for breakfast tomorrow. In the fridge are two more tubs of the stuff - what exactly I'm going to do with those I have NO idea! I'm now gently stepping down the overall size of the starter - partly to save on flour, and partly to save on space! I will be truly delighted if I can get the hang of producing sourdough bread - it truly is one of my absolute favourite foods, the only difficulty will be stopping myself from eating it ALL the time!

We're now on our "weekend" thanks to MrEH's 3 day week. A few plans made - as well as assorted baking, we want to get a couple of longer walks in, I want to run at least once more I think, we have a virtual beer festival meeting on Saturday morning, and a Zoom get together with friends again in the afternoon. We've ordered some more beer from a couple of different breweries - it feels like we are spending a fair amount on it of late but of course in "real life" that would be spent in various pubs or at the rugby cub - and would just be lumped in as general spending money - it just looks like more when you see it going out all in one go. One delivery should be arriving tomorrow, the other will hopefully follow in the next few days.

Robyn

Day 26...

A morning of cooking - the Choc Banana. Are that a friend had sent me the recipe for - I deliberately saved a couple of my bananas from the week for this and having had a slice earlier it was definitely worth it!  Also a leek & ricotta tart to make use of the tub of yellow stickered ricotta I got for 30p the other night. It also used up more of the cream bought to go with crumble last weekend so even more of a bonus!

This morning also saw us busy making eyepatches, fabricating bandanas, and in my case printing out a picture of a parrot that I could colour in in rainbow colours...as you do! We should have been on Lundy this week as I mentioned previously - and today was the big event that the trip was being organised on account of - Marc’s 50th birthday. As we had planned to travel  across on the boat last week with the entire party dressed as Pirates, our little gang had a virtual birthday party for him this afternoon complete with fancy dress! Great fun and excellent to “see” everyone even if just over Zoom - we’re now planning the same thing for next week.

The parrot has now been stuck to the kitchen window where it will hopefully raise a smile from passers-by - so many households have little things in the windows at the moment - my lovely friend Fay who longer term readers will remember from her “the Wind & the Wellies” blog is changing things each day to amuse their village’s one and only child resident with little messages and stuffed toys doing funny things. Many folk have rainbows and messages of support for the NHS.

Robyn

Day 12...

A nice "pottery" sort of day here - I've talked before on here about the fact that I can quite happily potter about doing odds and ends, and bits and pieces. One of my concerns about the lockdown was that I might start to find I was getting bored with that, but so far so good and I'm really not struggling overmuch to fill the extra time I've found myself with. Part of the battle there has been to let go of the feeling that I must be doing "something" all of the time - there seems to be a real feeling running through some parts of social media at the moment that we must all come out of these weeks with some form of devastating new skill, and it's incredibly easy to get sucked into that. Now if that's what you want to do then brilliant - go you. If you're doing it because you feel you *should* though - then take a step back and think of letting go - this is a stressful time, it's absolutely fine to not be OK about what we're going through, so if you're feeling a bit scared and overwhelmed about the whole situation then join the club - I certainly am! You absolutely don't need to pile any more pressure on yourself by feeling that you have to learn to play the banjo, learn Swahili or have knitted yourself a three-piece-suit using unravelled jumpers from the back of the wardrobe.

So today then - exercise this morning was a fitness session over at the playing field, called by MrEH, this was his chance to get his revenge for the running! (And as we did burpees, we can consider that he did!) The home and lunch before heading across to Sainsburys for some shopping. We've been trying as far as possible to not use the cars - basically we've agreed that we'll only really use one or other if we need to drop anything off to Mum & Dad's - which means we're going our own shopping on foot. So an amble to the other side of town this afternoon, and back again before getting another new cake recipe on the go - coconut cakes from Jane Brocket's "Cherry Cake and Ginger Beer" book of recipes from childrens books. These are actually "Mrs Banks Bribery & Corruption Cocoanut Cakes" from Mary Poppins. Rather than the coconut buttercream topping suggested in the recipe we topped ours with a glace icing using stewed redcurrants and some more coconut - delicious and just enough tartness from the fruit to offset the sweetness.

Most of the latter part of the afternoon was spent jigsawing - something we do rarely but really enjoy! We often do at least one jigsaw on holiday, and Christmas week on Lundy saw jigsaws constantly on the go on the big dining table at the house and even in the pub! We're ordered a couple more, second hand from eBay so those should keep us going for a few more weekends yet too - and then there's always Monopoly, Scabble, Yahtzee...

Robyn

Frugal Friday

Well it IS a long while since we've had one of these posts, isn't it now! Lots of reasons - I think I've said before that when you are doing pretty frugal stuff ALL the time it just becomes a way of life, so you notice it less, so it becomes harder to write about. There is also a limited amount of things to discuss on the subject - and I absolutely don't want this blog to be one of those where the same thing gets endlessly rolled out time after time - just "posting for the sake of it" either - that's boring for me to write and for you to read!

As you know I have always enjoyed a bit of a frugal challenge - and that is something that hasn't changed. Prior to Christmas we did quite a lot of eating from the freezer to run down the stocks in there, but it now seems to be reasonably full again - not a bad thing of course, and especially as quite a lot of what it is full off is stuff that has been bought at bargain prices!  I had nothing specific in mind as a challenge until I was making a stew last weekend - I went to automatically reach for a "stock pot" to throw into it for some added flavour and then remembered that in the larder were some sachets of "sausage casserole mix" that we'd been given free at the Good Food show a coup....few.....SEVERAL years ago. Now you don't want to know about the best before date, but it WAS "best before" so I opened a sachet, gave it a sniff - all smelt fine, so into the stew went the contents! However, while sorting through for the casserole flavouring, I realised that there were quite a lot of other oddments in the larder that really ought to be used, and as I KNOW that there are quite a lot of bits in the storecupboard, also, that have been lingering about for a long while, I decided that it was time for a "use it up" challenge!

This one is going to have only one aim - and that will be to use up as many of the random items that have been in the cupboards, fridge etc for a while as we can, which makes good use of the things that we have, and also should save us some money on shopping, too. I've already done a bit of thinking about the sort of things I have in mind, and have a starter list that looks a bit like this:
- the remaining sausage casserole mix sachets
- some sachets of stir fry sauce
- fajita seasoning
- Beetroot - bought yellow stickered for pennies
- a large red cabbage - bought in Aldi pre-christmas for a bargainous 19p
- garlic - I bought another pack of 4 heads without realising that I still had one in the larder
- Part used jars of various things in the fridge
- tubs of home grown gooseberries in the freezer
- individual portions of home grown redcurrants - in the freezer

There's lots more too - this is just - I suspect - the tip of a large iceberg! Although it was under three years ago we had the kitchen redone, because we ended up moving forward with the upheaval of that rather sooner than we had planned, we also ended up just boxing up quite a bit of stuff for the duration - telling ourselves that we would sort through it all when it came to unpacking again. However, by the time the job was finally completed, we were so fed up with the whole situation that what actually happened was that everything just got put back into the larder again, meaning we STILL have lots of old stuff. Then there were the bits that we did look at, but decided we couldn't justify throwing away because food waste blah blah blah... now though, it's time. I need to actively sort out what we have, and make a plan for using it.

Stir fries are never a chore, so those sauces will be a pleasure to use. The gooseberries and redcurrants can become the sweet element to go with rice pudding, or even ice cream or plain yogurt. And half the red cabbage and beetroot I have a fancy for finely slicing, combining with a red onion, also finely sliced, and turning into a winter coleslaw.The remainder of those will probably be roasted as a veggie side with a dinner at some stage.

I'm also going to continue this idea outside of the kitchen too - so focusing on reading books I already have, and that have been waiting to be read, and using the lovely array of toiletries I have as well. Books were already on my "2020 goals list" as I have accumulated a number that are now making me feel guilty - I have them because I feel I *should* read them - either they were given to me by someone who said "you must read this!" (Always a kiss of death for me!) or I have made a start on reading but failed to get engrossed - either way those are now making me feel guilty for not reading them, so they either get read, and then passed on, or simply passed on.

If you are feeling the pinch a bit after the financial excesses that often come with Christmas, this can be the perfect time of year to get stuck into a "use what we have" challenge - and let's face it, most of us have more than we realise, so taking the time to step back, evaluate, and make decisions around the things we've gathered can be really positive on more levels than the pure financial, too. If you've not done it for a while, why not have a quick check through your fridge, freezer and cupboards, and see what you might be able to use up - and maybe save a few pennies doing it?

Robyn