Planning and eating!

After another weekend where my feet didn't touch the ground (literally, where Friday is concerned - keep your eyes peeled for a post later in the week with photos from my epic flight in a 1940's biplane over central London!)  I'm reminded that hectic though things have been for the past few months, they are set to get busier for a while as airshow season is now underway, just to add to everything else I have going on! I have made a conscious decision that with a lot of work to get done for the beer festival this year I will need to step back a little with the aviation stuff - a few shows I'd usually attend I've made the decision to drop for this year - the show at RAF Cosford this coming weekend is an example - I've enjoyed the last few years from a social perspective - it's great to meet up with and spend time with some fantastic folk - but not so much from a flying point of view as I've felt that for the amount of effort involved it hasn't quite delivered as much as I'd have liked. Many of the same people I would usually see there have made the decision to travel to Yeovilton this year so my decision to drop Cosford was an easier one. Sometimes when life is really busy it pays just to take a step back and analyse how time is best spent.

In the interest again of good use of time I've meal-planned this week to keep some of our tea time meals to needing minimal prep. I really need to do a full freezer audit at some stage and plan using up some of the stuff from there - the lamb shoulder I bought at last month's farmer's market will get cooked this weekend coming so I'm already looking forward to leftovers last week in the form of Moroccan coucous salad, but beyond that I confess to not only having a sketchy grasp of what is currently lurking in there. As I didn't have the time to do the audit this weekend we have shopped minimally for just the bones of our meals this week - there will be a degree of inventiveness by the time Thursday comes along I suspect!

The best way of keeping in track of what you have and saving on food waste as I have regularly said before is to check what you have in store already before you shop for more. I try to always start my meal planning each week with a quick look at the fridge and the larder - currently I know I have sweet potatoes and parsnips that need using up so chicken portions went on my list to buy this week (bought by MrEH while I was out yesterday, in fact, in the interests of full transparency!) - those will get thrown into a big roasting tin tonight with all sorts of veggies that will happily roast alongside them and can then form the basis of meals for the week. I couldn't resist a little bag of Jersey Royal potatoes so those will go in the pan with everything else, take on a little of the chickeney flavour and will then be used in a frittata along with the final couple of rashers of bacon from a pack in the freezer. (Frittata is a truly fabulous way of using up small amounts of things - if needed it can also make less eggs than ideally needed to serve the number of folk you are feeding stretch further, too). The second half of the chicken pieces will get used as the protein component to a couscous salad later in the week - essentially just soaked couscous with whatever we fancy thrown in. (It also keeps well for a couple of days in the fridge, if needed) MrEH also found mangoes on sale for 39p this week and knowing how much I LOVE a mango he unleashed his hunter-gatherer instincts to grab me one - some of that will definitely find its way into the couscous this week for a lovely summery hit of flavour. (The rest will likely get eaten by me, as it is. Nom!) Add some chickpeas, spinach leaves and halved cherry tomatoes and hey presto, one quick, easy, colourful meal which will deliver several of our 5 a day in one go.

With the "busy-ness" of the past few weeks I'm conscious that my activity levels and exercise have dropped a bit - not surprising really but I am starting to feel the effects both mentally and physically so this month I'm aiming to up the ante again. I've been off running for a few weeks with a sore knee but frankly it doesn't seem to be any better for not running on it so I'm going to ease myself back in gently and see how it reacts, I think. My habit in the past has been to just throw myself back into it at the level I was at before any injury-related break but of course that's pretty stupid really, isn't it (Yes, I can tell even the non runners reading this are shaking their heads in disbelief!) so this time I'll be starting with a 1km treadmill run tonight to see how things feel - if all OK that will be followed up by a couple of road miles tomorrow evening at a steady pace and then looking to increase that just a tiny bit each time I go out for a while. Hopefully if all goes well that will also gently get me used to running in the substantially warmer temperatures we now seem to have which while lovely I DO find a bit of a challenge to run in!

I'm also aiming to do a bit more towards my challenge this week by making some time on Friday to do the next stage of clothes sorting, and also hopefully get some stuff to the charity shop as well. I know there is a bag of stuff ready to go already - I'll be aiming to get together enough odds and ends to make up a second one also to take at the same time.  watch this space for updates on that one!

Robyn

Plastic -v- the World - part 2!

Last time I did one of these posts I was talking about beeswax wraps, and wanting to find alternatives to some of the more "disposable" sorts of plastic bags that we use. Shopping bags are easy - both cars always have a stash of re-useable shopping bags, and there is always a pile of them at home as well, plus folding ones in my usual handbag - dead easy to grab one of several when needed and we just don't even think about taking a carrier bag in a shop, these days. Once actually IN the shop though, and wanting to buy loose fruit and veg, things get a bit less simple. Things like onions are easy enough - I tend to usually buy just a few at a time, so I just leave them loose. Mostly now I don't even have to stop the assistant at the checkout trying to put them into a bag for me, either! There are other things though that either I buy in greater quantity, or that are a little bit more likely to get damaged during handling or even just in the trolley or on the way home, plus things like loose potatoes which might well have mud or dust on them that the poor checkout operator doesn't want to be dealing with, so I have been on the hunt for some reuseable produce bags.

Last week, as if by magic, I spotted that Sue over at her Smaller & Simpler Life blog had posted about buying some that looked ideal from Lakeland (well, where else?!) - and so when we found ourselves near to the H-U-G-E Lakeland store at Windermere at the weekend, I couldn't resist popping in.

Here you go - a couple of pictures to give you an idea about them - Sue has a good shot of them all laid out showing the comparative sizes over on her post so I've not bothered recreating that here also, but I love that they come with minimum of packaging, and all pack neatly away into the smallest of the bags for safekeeping too. I've stashed mine into my work bag as that means that they will at least be somewhere "known" and readily available - the challenge will be remembering to grab them when I go shopping! 

The other challenge of course will be finding the things I can actually justify buying loose over pre-packaged. Tomatoes are a great case in point here - I can generally buy nasty tasteless watery Dutch or Spanish ones loose, or British ones pre-packaged. Frankly the British ones are always going to win as I prefer my tomatoes to actually taste of something (preferably tomato!) Mushrooms, too - often the loose ones are Polish, but I can easily get British pre-packaged ones (less bothered about that as we do at least re-use the punnets they come in!). I was deeply narked yesterday to find that Tesco value carrots, in a plastic bag and hailing all the way from Spain, are cheaper to buy per kilo than the British ones, sold loose - so we are paying MORE for a product that has travelled less distance, and had less done to it. Come on Tesco - time to sort this nonsense out. Had I wanted to buy my British Braeburn apples loose, rather than pre-packed I would also have paid substantially more for them. Courgettes are from the same place of origination but it costs 11p more per kilo to NOT have someone pre pack them for you. If anyone can explain the logic of this then I'd love to hear it! In the event last night I used just one of my new bags for my (loose, British) carrots, and for the other things I purchased I either couldn't justify the price difference, or chose British & pre-packaged over foreign and loose. 

Let me know if you've found any other ludicrous pricing in supermarkets - I'm sure it can't just be Tesco doing this! 

Robyn

Plastic -v- the world...

I mentioned in my last post that one of our "big challenges" for this year was going to be to reduce our consumption of single use plastics still further. We've already made good progress on this - on the rare occasions that we buy a bottle of water (or more often, get given one free when MrEH purchases his newspaper in a location that offers a bottle for free) that bottle will be refilled many times before it finally goes into the recycling, effectively turning it into a reusable bottle. Mostly we use one of our  purpose-bought re-useable bottles - I permanently have one on my desk at work, and we have others for the gym, or for taking on days out. Similarly although not a "buy a coffee on the way to work everyday" people we do use refillable cups on occasions when we know we're likely to buy hot drinks out - I've got a couple of the bamboo keep-cups, and we both have insulated mugs which get used regularly on longer car journeys, often with the back-up of one of our trusty thermos flasks!

Within the home it can often be quite tough to break the old plastic habits - we have made a start here by re-using plastic takeaway containers for freezer storage, not purchasing cling film at all, and using our RSPB magazine wrappers as compost bags for green waste. We also always take our own bags to the shops, and indeed I have invariably got a shopping bag or two neatly folded in my handbag also. It's been bugging me for a while though that each working day we bring lunches from home, and each working day that is 2 plastic food bags, and 2 wire ties, used between us. We re-use the wire ties, in fact they often get used until they literally fall apart, but I bet when they DO end up in landfill they're not great, and as for the bags, well...! So we turned our minds to alternatives, and solutions...

Firstly we started thinking through alternatives that we already had. Things are complicated by the fact that standard sandwich boxes tend not to fit our home made bread well, and that sometimes we have sandwiches and sometimes we have rolls (also home made - so again, non standard sizes). Fruit we just carry loose in our respective bags, so it was just the question of transportation of bread-based food that we were looking into initially. Of course it wasn't that simple as having thought about it we then started seeing all the other places that we use the flimsy food bags we habitually buy, too... Cheese gets wrapped in them, opened packets of crackers get put in them to stop them going stale in the tin, we use them in the freezer for portioned out raw meat, and sometimes for blanched vegetables as well, The last few slices from the loaves of home made bread get put into a bag in the freezer as well. Greaseproof or waxed paper came to mind immediately for at least some of our applications, but they wouldn't really solve the issue of wrapping sandwiches as there would be no way of ensuring they stayed fastened, plus waxed paper doesn't recycle, and greaseproof is the subject of a whole other minefield on the compostable/recyclable/biodegradeable questions (It might be, but then it might not, basically covers it so far as I can find). Foil - no, not really - firstly it tears too easily and secondly it's just creating more waste, albeit recycleable waste. Then we found these:

Beeswax wraps. Available in a variety of sizes, positively recommended for cheese, sandwiches, veggies etc...not cheap, mind, but worth the trade off of NOT putting possibly over 400 plastic bags into landfill every year? Well, that has to be worth a try! Of course they should also work for cheese, random bits of veg, for covering leftovers in the fridge and maybe even for those random ends of loaves in the freezer too? A pack has been ordered and we will report back.

Lovely as it would be, the wraps won't work for everything - so we set our minds to a bigger plan. We'll continue to have some of the flimsy bags available for the time being - things like raw meat are difficult to store well for the freezer - often a portion is too small for the re-useable containers we have, and we don't want to be using electricity essentially freezing empty space. We will buy a supply of sturdier, heavier grade plastic bags for use with dry goods, where they can be re-used. Where we can use plastic tubs that we already have - or those that we get with takeaway foods - we will do so. I'm looking to source re-useable produce bags instead of picking up those annoying flimsy bags for loose produce in the supermarket, too. So far I'm struggling to find many options on those that tell you the individual weight of the bags themselves - as I often buy quite small quantities of loose items this is not an insignificant point! More research needed!

Robyn

Truth or Lies?

I wrote a post a while back about the ethics relating to writing blog posts - here it is if you want a read. It's something that raised its head again for me a while ago after a conversation with a friend, so I thought I'd explore it a bit more. We were talking about my Blog - my friend has said before that she enjoys reading it, especially the Frugal Friday posts, and she was remarking on my "Frugal Food February" of the other year in particular. She asked "So come on then, how much did you REALLY spend during the month?" I was a bit lost for a second...the penny dropped eventually though and I explained that the amount was exactly what she'd read on the blog. I went on to explain that everything I write on the blog is truthful - I see no reason to lie and and liars always get caught out in any event.

I wrote my Frugal Friday posts for several reasons - first that I enjoyed writing them - it's a challenge having a deadline to write for each week and for a while I felt like I needed that - it was good for me as it meant that I had to sit down and write that amount of words each week without fail. The other reason is that I know other people enjoyed them and have even found them useful - and if I can do something that I find enjoyable, which also helps others, then why not? I'd enjoy them a lot less though if I was constantly trying to remember whether I'd previously mentioned a particular purchase, or whether I'd conveniently forgotten to refer to it. Take MrEH's car replacement last year for example - I mentioned it on here because a) it was a £2k spend, and NOT mentioning it, particularly when Frugal Friday comes about, would have felt like I was lying by omission b) It was a good chance to "talk through" a process that I've done before and so find relatively straightforward, yet I already know from the feedback I've had on it that a lot of folk found some of the points in it useful to know and c) I've posted pics in the past of the old car when we've been on camping trips etc - now you're an observant lot, I know that, and so I think it's fairly likely you would have noticed MrEH's car had changed colour from blue, to red! At that point, people would be sitting there scratching their heads and wondering what else I'd not mentioned - you can be sure of that. Likewise my new camera, and lens - bought last year. Yes they were big (massive!) purchases for me (around £1,600 in total) and on the face of it, far from frugal, but in reality it WAS frugal - I'd saved up, waited until I could afford it, and until I was certain that it was a purchase I wanted to make, and that I would get good value from it. Had we had debts that needed clearing (aside from that mortgage, and you already know about our assault on that!) then the money would have gone to those first and foremost, but we don't, so I routinely save from my personal income to ensure that I can afford to indulge myself on occasion, once the money is there. Once I have though, I'm quite happy to talk about it on here, there's no reason not to and ensures I can be comfortable within my own moral-framework.

If you're a good liar, you can probably get away with it, and nobody will be any the wiser. Of course if you're a blogger who's keen on product promotion to earn money, or on getting yourself nominated for various high-profile awards, that's a more dangerous game, and it gets even MORE dangerous if you were to be that sort of blogger and a bad liar with a poor memory, to boot. A relatively small amount of research confirms that there are JUST those sorts of bloggers out there too!  Reading through various blog posts myself and a pal  noticed one or two slightly "confusing" discrepancies - discounts offered in exchange for a product promotion initially weren't mentioned at all, and was then subsequently referred to as a 15% discount, before later increasing to 25%. That's minor though and pales into significance when you consider the "Frugal" blogger who "forgot" to mention the purchase of a 20k brand new car - my memory is bad but even I'd not manage to forget something like that! (And oddly enough the tweet which gave the game away has now been removed...however a screengrab is a useful thing!) How about reading posts by someone who has regularly told us that they don't use their heating as they "can't afford it", and yet their family members have regularly been pictured wearing t-shirts in the house in midwinter, or mysterious vanishing pots of money, there one minute and dedicated for a particular purpose, and missing without trace the next? Of course it is entirely reasonable that the writer of a blog chooses what to write about, but, when that blog is of a nature that might even be considered "preachy" on matters of frugality, and its writer is never shy to castigate others for what they see as "wasting money" does it strike you as a bit two-faced, dishonest even, to take a "do as I say, not as I do" approach without making it entirely clear that this IS the approach you're taking? Another good example is the "changing or vanishing history" - where stuff that was previously posted on a blog gets removed altogether or edited to change it's context. In one case I know of that even applies to the reasons why a person got into debt in the first place - originally an honest admission of having done too much "keeping up with the Jones'es" but now apparently due to mysterious "Circumstances beyond their control"...

My question is - is there any need for this? If someone wants to write a spoof blog then that's great - it will be a good read and people will flock to it for that reason - but a blog purporting to be truthful is something very different. If people are voting for a blog for awards, don't they have a right to believe that the blogger concerned is being truthful, not leaving out or even deleting things that don't suit their "theme"? If you have voted in any of the well known Blog Awards over the past few years, are you absolutely sure that the person you've voted for is all that they seem, and as honest as they claim? If there is a little niggle in your mind, then consider doing a bit of reading, and research, then you can make your own mind up, can't you... ;-)

Robyn

#ShopLocalSaturday (Or Sunday, in our case!)

We constantly seem to see American phenomena taking off over here and getting "adopted into our culture" - from the legalised begging that Halloween has become, to the current interest in American Football when our very own rugby is available to watch on almost everyone's doorstep. One American "habit" that we could do far worse than take on board though happened this weekend, with "Small Business Saturday" being adopted over here for the first time with any degree of organisation. There has been a fair bit said about this elsewhere in Blogland and on twitter - try searching for the #ShopLocalSaturday hashtag. Team Pugh blogged about it too - you might already have seen their post.

We weren't able to shop on either Friday or Saturday this week, but went yesterday instead - having stopped off on the way to support another local small business which you can find mentioned here. From there we headed along to our favourite fairly-local farm shop - Calcott Hall, near Brentwood.  We've been shopping there occasionally for a number of years, but this was the first time we'd gone in aiming to do a full weekly shop.

I've commented before about vague feelings of guilt about the amount we end up using the supermarket. When we first moved here our local shopping area (about 10 minutes walk away) had a greengrocer. We would have been quite happy to have used it but sadly by the time we arrived the writing was already on the wall - quality was poor and stock levels were low. With no fewer than 4 large and countless smaller supermarkets in the town people simply found it more convenient to use those, instead. I'm happy to support local businesses but the quality must be right too - buying food which simply spoils within the time frame I need it for is pointless and I don;t have the time to shop several times a week. We do now have a good local butcher, and what bread we don't make ourselves mostly comes from Mayfield Farm Bakers. We have a farm shop in Harlow too - but so far whenever we have tried to use it it's either been closed, or has closed as we arrived.

So - Calcott Hall it was - and this is what we bought:

The only thing on my shopping list that we didn't buy was mushrooms - they only had dutch ones and we buy British. I prefer to buy British for all veg, but had to compromise this time on tomatoes and salad leaves - it not being the weather for either to grow well here currently. One of those cauliflowers has already been made into a cauliflower and pasta cheese too - two big dishes of it using some of our Good Food Show cheese haul, more on that in another post.

The total shop cost us £15.50 - which was honestly less than I expected, and probably not that different to what that lot would have cost me in the supermarket. With that in mind we have now decided that we will try to make at least one weekly shop per month "supermarket free" from now on. I appreciate that doesn't sound like much, but with a 30 mile round trip to shop there as opposed to the 6 mile (at the most!) round trip for the supermarket I use most often, but fuel costs and time considerations have to come into play.

Did you shop local this week?

Robyn

Frugal Friday...

These days it seems that there is organisation after organisation requesting that we had over some of our hard-earned to support their particular cause. Most recently it was Children in Need - everywhere you looked or listened on the BBC was full of bears wearing eyepatches!  Now although CiN is a wonderful cause, I'm not saying otherwise, it's not one I support actively, so I employed my usual "Quid in a bucket" approach. There are other charities that I do support actively - Hospices for example, particularly our wonderful local St Clare Hospice who were so amazing to both my Great Aunt when Bob was ill, and also to a good friend Sean who sadly lost his wife to cancer a few years ago, St Clare made Sarah's last days so much more comfortable not only for her, but also for Sean & their children. I use their charity shop regularly and it's one of the places I donate unwanted items to as well, for onward sale. The RSPB get a regular monthly membership donation from us, and we never pass an RNLI tin without dropping a contribution in. The Air Ambulance too - so many people don't realise that this incredible service is kept airborne thanks to donations.

Gadwall, RSPB Rye Meads April 2010

For those on a tight budget, donating to charity isn't always easy. I've lost count of the number of friends I've heard worrying themselves silly over the constant demands from the children's school for donations to this cause or that - no £5 doesn't seem like a lot, but to some people that represents the money they have to spend on bread & milk for the week. So with that in mind, how about looking at some ways of donating for a very small spend, or even cash-free? Even a donation which costs you absolutely nothing will be welcomed by many charities and organisations.

Mum and I routinely put together a box for our local homeless shelter each Christmas - the shelter opens from 23rd December to 1st January, proving warmth, shelter and decent food for those seeking its help.  I asked a few years ago whether they could use some basic toiletries and thought I was going to get a hug they were so grateful - it was explained that not only can the users of the centre use donations like that while they are there, they are able to take a basic toiletries pack away with them to help with the tricky business of keeping clean & decent when every spare penny is better spent on food. Since then we have expanded to include things like a nice box of biscuits, gloves, hat and scarves, and books & magazines. If you fancy doing something similar, then to give you an idea, that supermarket whose name we don't mention currently have in their value range -
Twin pack toothbrushes for 18p
Toothpaste for 25p
Deodorant - rolls-ons for 30p, sprays for 41p
5 x disposable razors for 15p
Bars of soap for 15p
Poundland and 99p shops often have multi-packs of antibacterial gels, lip balms and handy-packs of tissues.
Packs of multi-purpose wipes come in handy for a quick freshen up for someone with no access to running water other than a public toilet which might be quite grotty.
As we buy the items a few at a time, it has very little impact on our weekly budget, but makes all the difference to someone with nothing.

Heron,  RSPB Rye Meads April 2010

Another way of giving for a small spend is the Food Banks. There has been a lot in the press about these recently, so we're all familiar with the concept, and it's getting easier and easier to give with collection bins in many major supermarkets. I blogged about it earlier in the year - here. If you can spare £3 then you could put together something like I did there. £2 could buy some soup, rice, crackers and tinned veg. £1 would get a couple of packs of crackers and a jar of jam - or potentially Breakfast for a family for a couple of days. Even a single one of those items would be of help to someone, and most of us could spare 14p for a tin of potatoes couldn't we?

How about giving by means of doing something you'd do anyway?
- Tesco give charity donations in exchange for uses of their cashpoints, so if you need to withdraw money, why not do it via one of their machines rather than another provider's? (Their name is mentioned there you will note as it's in connection with something which costs THEM money!)
- If you're looking for a new top, skirt or jacket, how about looking in a charity shop rather than the high street?
- Got some clothes you're bored with, or don't fit? Bundle them up and take them to your local charity shop.
- Wanting some new reading materials? Rather than grabbing a £4.99 paperback in the supermarket with the weekly shop, head to that charity shop again and get 10 books for the same money, AND donate to a good cause at the same time!
- You know that box on the children's sponsor forms? That one that says "Gift Aid It?" with space for a tick? Well if you're a UK taxpayer - TICK IT! Read all about the Gift Aid scheme here

Kingfisher -  RSPB Rye Meads April 2010

Finally there is always the option of volunteering or donating your time. That Homeless Shelter I mentioned earlier is currently looking for volunteers to cover shifts over Christmas, and I bet there is one near you desperate for help too. Then there are independent charity shops needing help with sorting donations, nature reserves wanting assistance with  basic maintenance and upkeep...you get the idea? If you have a wool-stash and the ability to knit then how about knitting some little toys or baby clothes that can be sold at a local school's Christmas fair? A friend of mine gives time to work with her local Transitions groups, and we've volunteered with the local Conservation Volunteers in the past, and will probably do so again this winter.

There are many ways of giving beyond the obvious "Quid in a tin" - just think laterally!

Robyn

Frugal Friday...

There's been a lot of chat online recently about FoodBanks. Sad as it seems, we're now in a situation where a lot of folk have to rely on these, and they provide a hugely valuable service. When we were struggling massively some years ago they didn't exist so far as I know, and had they I probably wouldn't have felt that we had the "right" to use one in any case - at the time the £10 a week we had to feed the two of us for a while never actually seemed that restrictive, but that was a good part because we had easy access to a superb market with fruit and veg stalls and an excellent butchers, and Indian supermarkets, plus we have the basic cooking skills to be able to make the best use of what our limited budget allowed.

We took up the challenge to spend £3 and buy goods for our local Foodbank recently - and do you know, I found it really difficult. The first problem was that a lot of the stuff that the FoodBanks list on their "most wanted" list is stuff that - even when we were on that super-tight budget, we would never in a million years have thought of buying - tinned steamed puddings for example, and tinned rice puddings - had we wanted either of those things we would have bought the ingredients that would have enabled us to make them (and many more portions of them) from scratch. I repeat though - we have the skills to do that - far too many of those now relying on Foodbank donations are doing so because they don't have even the most basic cooking skills, and thus are forced to rely on eating what can best be described as processed cr*p, which costs more than cooking good basic food from scratch, and so the cycle continues....

We settled for keeping it fairly simple in the end - some basic carbs - tinned potatoes, pasta & rice. Tinned vegetable soup. Cream crackers which will go with either the soup or the Jam & Marmalade we also bought. Tinned peas. Yes, I know what I said previously about tinned -v- frozen, and I stand by that, but frozen goods aren't a lot of good to Foodbanks, are they now! Finally we added a couple of sachets of instant custard mix - the sort which you make up with boiling water. The whole lot came to £2.96 - which was worryingly cheap - and looking over the bagful of goods the main word which sprang to mind was "bland". The rice & pasta were from the supermarket's budget range and I buy both of these myself - 40p a kilo for the rice, 19p for 500g of spaghetti. That takes the price for a single of portion of either to under 4p which is achievable on even the tightest budget and of course starchy carbs are filling - important when you have limited funds to feed a family. It struck me that a tin of peas and some cooked rice or broken-up spaghetti stirred into one of those cans of soup could make a filling meal for 2 people for 25p a head plus cooking costs. It wouldn't be terribly interesting, but when you're struggling to make ends meet to that extent, "interesting" is the least of your concerns.

While as I said, the Foodbanks provide a valuable resource for those for whom the light at the end of the tunnel is nearly extinguished, as a long term solution is pretty hopeless. The only true way of solving the issue of people struggling to this extent is to start providing free-of-charge basic cooking skills courses, and over the longer term ensuring that these basic skills are taught to children in schools. The free courses could be offered hand-in-hand with boxes from the Foodbank - and also would fit well with some interaction between Foodbanks and service users - those with better cooking skills would find it helpful to get boxes containing more "ingredients" than convenience foods, for example.  Teach people how to make things like Porridge, basic vegetable curry, bolognese or chilli, basic unleavened flatbreads. Soups of course are a great one - easy, cheap & filling. Teach about the advantages of buying in bulk when funds are available to do so. Teach about buying seasonally, about not assuming that farm shops are more expensive than your local branch of "that" supermarket. The phrase "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" certainly has some truth here. Sadly I couldn't find any evidence of any such free courses being available in my area, although I have seen online that others have mentioned that this resource is being offered by their local Foodbanks.

Have you joined in with the current drive to increase donations to Foodbanks? If you haven't, and want to, then visit This Website to find your local one, and how to give. If you have, what did you settle on buying and what were your reasons for your choices? Do you know if there are free basic cookery skills offered by anyone in your local area?

Robyn

Thinking...

I keep reading things at the moment that are making me think. I know, don't you just HATE it when that happens? Don't panic, it's likely to be a while before it occurs again...

The first "thinking thing" is assorted blog posts relating to this year's Live Below The Line Project - for those that don't know, this is a 5 day challenge to spend just £1 a day for ALL your food and drink. Tea, coffee, everything. I'm not taking part in this myself but have been interested to read what others have had to say about it. I also noticed on Twitter earlier on someone had retweeted something from someone else regarding a blog he had written - in which apparently he will tell the world why "Live below the line is a load of patronising s**t" - I've not bothered reading that one though - if he can't describe his blog post in an articulate manner without using what my old boss would have called "industrial language" then I'm sure I can't be bothered to read it either - it'll probably just be more of the same anyway.

So, going back to those blogs that are well enough written for me to want to read - one blogger in particular commented on the humiliation they felt when shopping on their very limited budget - they were shopping at independent shops and market stalls - a great way of ekeing out a small amount of cash - and felt really awkward buying based on "what they could afford" rather than "what they wanted to eat". The feeling from many is that the challenge of shopping like this made them feel poor, and they didn't like it. Now the interesting thing for me on this one is that it surprised me that people genuinely hasn't experienced this before as part of everyday life. Some years ago when MrEH and I were first together we spent some months living on a very restricted income - meaning that for a whole, after everything had been paid, rent, bills etc, we had around £10 per week (That's a WEEK, NOT £5 days!) to spend on food. At various times I am aware that my own parents have had to do similar, too. Oddly enough when you have to do it you feel very little of the humiliation that bloggers have described - it's just the way life is, and you quickly adjust to what you can afford and how to make that limited budget stretch. It was the point at which we started discovering cheap cuts of meat - neck of lamb, or the diced Mutton from our then (thankfully excellent) local butcher, both of which made excellent stews. Market stalls were also a lifesaver - as they get used to seeing you and get to know you your pennies stretch further and further and we often got a bit of extra "bruised" fruit or veg thrown in for nothing. £5 spent on the market stalls would net us several huge bags of fruit and veg - often the challenge was not avoiding being hungry, but managing to use everything up without waste! It was at that time when I learnt how to stretch a very small portion of minced beef a surprisingly long way, and that shopping seasonally, and buying what is plentiful, and cheap, really pays off. Oddly enough at no point during that time can I remember actually feeling as though I was going hungry, and at times we actually ate really well (Chicken Kiev's bought on reduction in Tescos, which were also on a BOGOF offer so we got paid to take them away, effectively, spring to mind!), and more importantly to me, it gave us skills that we could take forwards to ensure that our food spending even now is pretty low, and yet we eat excellently.

The other thing I have come across is a couple of bloggers attempting to live their lives without using Supermarkets - "A Year without Supermarkets" (@teampughblog on twitter) and "Eat My Pig" (@eatmypig) are both trying this experiment - the first for a year (although I have my suspicions that they will keep going for longer!) and the second as an ongoing thing. This provoked a conversation between myself and MrEH about just how tricky it would be for anyone in our local area to do something similar. The big Supermarkets have our town pretty much sewn up - and as a result the smaller independant shops have, one by one, all closed down. We DO have an independant local Bakery, whose bread is pretty good, and of course we have our truly excellent local Artisan Bakers - Mayfield Farm - too, who are a joy to shop with. For day to day bread and rolls we usually make our own in any event, but in order to make these anything like cost- effective we need to use Supermarket flour - we love the flour from local Millers Marriages, but at 4 x the cost of a bag of Supermarket stuff, it's an occasional treat rather than a regular purchase. We have nowhere we can buy local milk. We have no greengrocers - and although there are a couple of decent farm shops around the best of these is about 12 miles away - as against 2 miles for our nearest big supermarket. We do have a new and very good butchers opened up recently and we have started to use him for meat products - we've tended away from buying supermarket meat for quite a long while (other than bacon and sausages occasionally) but until recently all our local butchers have been extremely poor. It's frustrating - we'd love to be able to make less use of the big Supermarkets, but in practical terms, round here it's not just inconvenient, it's damned close to impossible. We probably do use them less than a lot of people - our Grocery account gets "fed" with £150 per month and over the course of the last year we have amassed about £900 of that as a credit balance - ALL our Tesco spending comes from this account too, so that's a reasonable indication of how much we actually do put through their tills - that also covers pretty much all our household cleaning items, dishwasher tablets and laundry stuff. I can make a conscious effort to buy more of our veg in the farm shop - and in the summer months we buy eggs and potatoes from our friendly campsite up in Norfolk, when we're there. This is something I want to explore in more detail though, so expect to see more discussion and maybe even more thinking in due course!

How much of your weekly or months food/household spend goes to the big players? Are you blessed with excellent local shops or, like us, are you tied to the "big 4"?

Robyn

The Ethics of Blogging...

A recent conversation with a friend started me thinking - many of us just take for granted that we write our blog posts, throw them up online, and people read them, or not, in varying quantities. The majority of us who write blogs, read them too - my reading list seems to be ever expanding and contains blogs from the UK, New Zealand, The USA and Australia among other locations, relating to subject from frugal living, wildlife, cooking, and just general daily life. All of those are entertaining and many are informative. Most are also factual, with people giving you the chance to look in through a window onto their lives - quite a privilege, when  you come to think about it. Readers of some blogs probably know more about the daily routines of the writer than their family or close real-life friends might - for example, whether someone walks the dog in their pyjamas, with trackies pulled on over the top, or whether they have a pathological hatred of ironing, and as a result have learnt the best way of washing and drying clothes so they don't crease.  Their colleagues, or neighbours might not know these things, but someone thousands of miles away does, because they read a blog. There are bloggers out there writing fiction, too. Short stories, a chapter at a time of an ongoing novel - even poetry, are all available should you choose to look for them. I generally stick with the real-life ones, I read plenty of fiction away from the internet and generally find the factual blogs more interesting to read online. But wait, is that actually the case, or am I actually reading more fiction online than I think? We do, after all, only have the writer's word for it than what they are telling us is the truth. Who are you to say whether I made the rail journey I spoke of recently to Sheffield, or whether in fact the ticket did only cost me the stated amount of £6? (I did, and it did, well, plus the 50p booking fee) Of course, my blog is mostly backed up with photos taken by me - I choose not to use free-source images available online as my blog started off as primarily a Photo-Blog, and has evolved from there.

As factual bloggers, should we feel under an obligation to be open and honest when perhaps what we are saying isn't "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth"?  Let's take an an example someone who blogs on the best and cheapest way to buy a new car. We'll call them Blogger X. They refer to doing their research online, shopping about for prices, and finally playing one dealer off against another to get the best possible deal on their new wheels. Finally they give the actual price they paid, mention how pleased they are with the vehicle, and add a generic photo of said make and model of car from the manufacturers website. The following day, in another post, they casually drop in a comment which reveals that actually, they got a reduction in the price of the car as a thank you for mentioning it online, and singing its praises. The original post didn't mention this incentive, but equally, it didn't say that no such sweetner was offered, it simply avoided any mention of that part of the transaction. Is this ethical? With the best will in the world it would be hard to say that this would be either an open or honest way to proceed, and it could certainly be classified as misleading. What if someone, on seeing the Blogger X's post, had popped along to their local dealership in the hope of obtaining the same deal, on the strength of what they had read? After all, Blogger X didn't actually lie, as such, they simply chose not to mention something, and in fact possibly gave the impression that things were different - is that unethical?

Having posted their blog on buying their fabulous new car, Blogger X invites comments from their readers. However, as a result in the past of having had some spam comments with advertising links included (we're into the realms of hypothetical stuff here as Blogger's software is superb at weeding these out these days) Blogger X has played safe and decided to enable comment moderation. Would we be wrong to feel safe in  assuming that once they have checked through for anything spammy, they simply OK all the comments and up they go for the readers to see?  What if, in the middle of those comments though, there is one from a chap who works at the car dealership, saying "Hi Blogger X, glad you love the new car, and I'm glad we were able to assist with bringing the price down for you in return for you telling all your readers how fab SuperWheels are!" of course if Blogger X lets that one through, then the game is up isn't it - everyone will know that they received the previously unmentioned incentive. So instead, they decide that, after all, they state clearly enough that they reserve the right to decide which comments they will publish, so they will just "moderate" that one out. Ethical? Or not?  A little further down the list of comments, there is one from "Joe" Joe tells Blogger X that he's unconvinced that they are reflecting the true nature of the transaction as look, there is no mention of the cost of tax and insurance, as as he works in the motor trade he knows full well that the price that Blogger X has quoted is simply unachievable, so there surely must have been a further discount or deal which has not been detailed? Blogger X thinks "Sod you Joe, I'm not having you spoil the marvellous little world of fiction I've created" and hits the delete button on that comment too, in fact, they hit the delete button on any almost negative comment they receive. Ethical? Or not?

I recently posted on the subject of a blogger's responsibility to their readers and overall responsibility for the way they choose to purport themself online. To my mind, the question of ethics is a continuation of this. Of course as the owner of a blog we all have the right to decide whether to comment moderate, or not, and once that decision has been made, we have the right to decide which comments will get added to the blog, and which won't. Currently I choose not to moderate - in part because I can't be bothered, I get more than enough email already without adding more asking me to approve comments! If in the future I start getting lots of comments from "anonymous" or from people being rude or abusive (most folk in blogland, if they feel you are being straight with them, are lovely - in the time I have been blogging I have only ever had one rude comment left, which is really nice) then I may feel the need to change that, but as things stand I'm happy to trust people to comment what and when they choose. If I did go down the route of moderation, then my personal view is that negative comments must be allowed to go through alongside the positive ones - otherwise the final picture given is unbalanced. I would remove any comments that were personally abusive to me or others, or anything using foul language, although with those my tendency would be to copy them out without the offensive language and repost. Just because someone has insufficient vocabulary to post a comment in cyberspace without resorting the f'ing and blinding, should they be denied the right to have their say? I often wonder when I read a blog with contentious subject matter, or simple something that is likely to provoke debate, and then see nothing but positive comments singing the blogger's praises whether that is the whole story or whether, in fact, there is a whole raft of comments disagreeing with the writer floating about in cyberspace's great recycle bin.

So, here, for posterity, is my personal pledge -
- What you read here is fact, and anything that isn't will be clearly defined as fiction.
- If I refer to someone specifically by name, that name will, more often, be changed to protect the person's own anonymity.
- As things stand I have not enabled comment moderation, I trust you, the reader, not to abuse this faith in your basic human decency.
- If you post something personally rude or abusive to me or others, or using offensive language, I reserve the right to copy that post, along with whatever identification you have used, and copy it back as a comment so it remains on the list of comments should you decide later to delete it. Think carefully before you post something rude on someone's blog!
- Further to the above, and should you still choose to be unpleasant, I also may choose to make a feature of your comment, along with any links etc contained in your username, via a screengrab and a further blog entry.

What are your personal ethics in blogland? Perhaps you think that all that matters is the readability, and in fact whether the content is as truthful as it appears is neither here nor there? Have you ever felt "cheated" by anything you have read online?

Robyn

Better Bread...

You might remember that we are quite fussy about our food. Oh, not in a "Oh no, I don't eat that!" kind of way - although Ben is a bit funny about carrots, and tomatoes - but in that we like to know where it's come from, and that it hasn't travelled too far, and if it's been alive at any stage, that it had at least a reasonably cheery existence while it was still living. We eat relatively little pre-prepared food, don't buy ready meals, cook mostly from scratch and steer clear so far as we can of the sort of stuff that seems entirely unnatural to us - Turkey Twisslers and Quorn spring to mind....we shop on a budget, yes, but we don't eat rubbish just because it's cheap.

For the most part, we make our own bread - we have a breadmaker and we either use it to mix & knead the dough, and then bake in the oven as rolls, or let it bake right through if we want a loaf. The results are extremely good - it's not an expensive machine and yet the bread it turns out is excellent, we have no complaints. Sometimes though, something more is needed - something a bit special.....

We are extremely fortunate in that "Something a bit special" in the bread line can be found just a couple of miles along the road at Mayfield Farm Bakery. From the moment you walk in through the doors you know you've found somewhere very special indeed...you pick up your wicker shopping basket ready for your chosen loaf (or loaves, more likely!) and someone greets you with a cheery smile!

Bread in many different shapes, sizes and flavours, pastries, pies, cakes and ciabattas, whatever your "bread itch" Nick & his team have a loaf or a tasty treat to scratch it - the work of preparing and baking all these marvels takes place right in front of you too - the bakery is in one end of the building with the shop right next door, the smells defy all description but are tempting in the extreme!

They have bread variants you'll never even have considered possible, and from what we have sampled so far, they are all utterly delicious. From a straight white, to Beetroot and red onion, through to Stilton & Raisin (Raisin? Yes, really!) think of a flavour combination and not only will Nick probably have tried it, he will have found a way of combining the ingredients to make it damned tasty, too. On the right hand side of the pic above is one of our favourites - Nigella Seed & Jacket Potato.....yum!

They don't slack on the cake front either - and even better, if you simply can't resist sampling sooner rather than later there is now an on-site cafe serving their own produce - perfect for a tea & cake break!

As so often happens I ended up with a Sourdough loaf - a particular favourite of mine, you can see ours right in the front of the shot above, actually, it was every bit as delicious as it looks, believe me.

If you live in Essex or Hertfordshire, I can't urge you strongly enough to pay Mayfield a visit - small local businesses need all the help and support they can get from their local communities, and at just two miles away from here we certainly count as their local community! These guys may be small, but their products speak for themselves in terms of quality, and they work ethically sourcing as many local ingredients as they can - the flour for the bread for example comes from just a few miles up the road in Chelmsford, Tomatoes and honey from Hertfordshire, and rapeseed oil from Suffolk. If you're too far away to make Mayfield practical, then why not scout around locally and see if you have an artisan bakery nearby? You won't regret it when you taste the spoils, trust me!

Robyn



For the avoidance of doubt, I should say that although Mayfield were aware I was going to be blogging about them, they only know that as I explained when I asked for permission (readily granted) to take the photos. They had no idea what I was going to say, nor have I been offered any inducement or sponsorship to sing their praises - it is simply well deserved praise from a very satisfied customer.

Scrap Bag Saturday...Cupboard love.

Joining in with Dreamer at Living a Slow & Simple Life for this one today. Thanks for the inspiration D!

One of the things on my To-Do list since we decorated the front room a while ago has been to find some suitable bits of replacement furniture for it. Years ago we 'inherited' an elderly nest of tables from my Grandmother - they were looking a bit tired when we got them, and after ten years further use have really got past the point where we want to live with them anymore. They're laminated, and the laminate is peeling off in places, so repainting wasn't really an option, and frankly, they've served their time. To replace the nest we actually need just two new tables - a coffee table for next to the sofa, and some kind of smaller lamp table or unit for the other side of the room. While browsing round the charity shop today, I found just the thing for the second of those.....

Yes, it's an over-varnished pine chest of drawers, but on closer inspection it is also sturdy, nicely made, with proper drawer bases rather than the chipboard that bends and eventually falls out that you get in cheaper units, and that lovely curving line top and bottom at the front.....really rather sweet,and instantly screamed to me that it could be made into something far nicer. Best of all was the price - £7! A bargain like that was always coming home with us! Straight after lunch I started work - first removing the knobs from the drawers, and then sanding down the rest of the unit.

I didn't worry about sanding off every last scrap of the old varnish - I jut wanted to "key" the surface enough to ensure that the new paint would cling OK..

All sanded down, I wiped over the whole thing with a sightly damp cloth to get rid of any traces of dust from the sanding. Then it was time to get on with the painting. I still had the remains of the paint we used for the front room, and felt that using those two colours would be a nice way of fitting the unit into the room. Note the "Paint stirring stick" on top of the right hand tin - doesn't every household have several of these?!

Several coats of paint later, and while the final coat dried I had a rummage through the cupboard and found the bag of spare knobs from our kitchen units. For some strange reason our predecessors left us a bag with about 20 of these...there are only 8 of them in the whole kitchen! Two more are now in use though - screwed onto the drawers from this unit they finished the thing off perfectly...

So there you go - a £7 charity shop pine unit given a new lease of life with a few coats of some paint we had anyway. It's the first time I've attempted anything like this and I'm really pleased with the way it's turned out - I wouldn't hesitate to urge anyone else to have a go as well, I've not in any way over-simplified what I did - it was as simple as it sounds!

Robyn

The Future's bright....the future's.......MARMALADE!

I've been enjoying some debate over all things green with some friends over the past few days. it was started by Jenni, with a very sensible and well thought out post over at her A Cheerful Living Adventure blog - she's called it "Conscious Living" and that seems to me to be a sensible way of looking at things, and kind of what we've been doing here for a while now.....

We've been trying for a long while to think harder about what we buy, when we buy it, and how much of it we use. The figures on the average household's food waste each year are terrifying, just terrifying....and pretty much all of that waste is finding its way into landfill sites. We're burying our countryside under giant rubbish dumps, and the situation isn't going to get any better unless people practise what Jenni is talking about and start making conscious decisions about how they live their lives. We only have *so* much space - it seems obvious to me that the more we fill with rubbish, the less we have left to actually inhabit.

All of this has got me thinking through how we have changed our way of living over the last few years, and, to my surprise, it actually seems we're doing quite a bit:

- We buy less meat than we used to, but very rarely buy it from the supermarket
- When we DO buy meat from the supermarket (usually when it's heavily price-reduced) we only buy British, that way we know where the welfare standards fall
- All our eggs are free range. If we can't afford free range, we don't buy eggs at all - end of.
- Same thing for "Adult eggs" - free range chicken all the way
- Products containing eggs - we try to ensure use FR eggs also - we stopped buying Tesco Mayonnaise for a long while, until they gave in and started using FR eggs....
- processed foodstuffs - we buy very few, sausages mainly, but those again are higher welfare
- Fruit and veg - we buy from the farm shop when we can
- when we can't, we try to ensure that the stuff we DO buy is from the UK, preferably East Anglia - who needs potatoes from Kenya for goodness sake, when we grow some fantastic spuds in this country and they are available ALL YEAR ROUND?!
- We save leftovers and try to ensure that as far as possible everything is used up (So the remainder of the pastry for a pie for meals last week became a fruit tart for puddings over the weekend)
- We re-use things where we can - jars, bottles, milk bottles, re-useable shopping bags, newspaper for cleaning windows, microfibre cloths for cleaning rather than the disposable j-cloth style ones, mushroom punnets for growing seeds in...
- rarely using the tumble-dryer, only really for towels and bedding which would take too long to dry on the airers
- we grow as many oddments of veg as can in our little bit of garden
- We don't buy things like pizzas, pies etc - why buy when they can be made for a fraction of the price, and taste SO much better?
- bread comes from the breadmaker, not the supermarket bakery
- we don't buy jam, chutney, or marmalade....same reasons as above, the jars below cost us somewhere about 50p each...we know precisely what is in them, and the contents taste just fantastic!



So, looking at that list, that's pretty good eh? I mean, we're not doing badly at all....the question I guess is where to go from here. Well, I'm trying to walk, or cycle, where I can instead of using the car. We intend to grow edible stuff again this year, and try not to wash clothes unless they need it, rather than from habit. (I must assure you that undies are considered to require washing after one wear regardless!) Heating is turned to a level where the place is comfortable, but not so warm that we're walking around in shorts and t-shirts. I want to rediscover the enjoyment in sitting listening to music, or playing board games, rather than automatically reaching for the TV remote.

There are certainly ares for improvement, I rather suspect Jenni will give me some more food for thought in due course.....!

Robyn

Larry bites the dust....

We have bought a lamb. A whole lamb. Oh, it’s dead you understand, in fact it’s now in our freezer so it’s a good thing it IS dead. I should confirm at this point in the interests of transparency that it’s not one of the beasts in this photo – these chaps are Hebridean sheep and Hebridean sheep, as you can see, have ATTITUDE. No getting eaten for these guys – oh no, nothing that common for them – they’re too busy doing their best impression of nightclub bouncers for passing photographers…….

So – back to the lamb. We’ve been talking about this for a long while as the logical continuation of our quest to make sure that all the meat we buy is the best quality we can, and from animals that have lived as happy lives as possible. So far as we can tell our lamb was indeed happy – he certainly tastes as though he was, although I’m guessing that might have palled a bit in a sort of “uh-oh” type way when the trailer pulled into the abattoir car park……anyway, he turned up, well boxed and packed around with icepacks, on Friday, and a good part of the weekend has been spent cutting bits up and getting them into what are now two VERY well packed freezers……We will be eating quite a lot of lamb over the next little while. It’s a good thing we like lamb. For anyone considering a bulk meat purchase, it certainly seems like a good way of doing it so long as you have the space the freeze that amount. Ours has amounted to around 15kgs of meat I think – possibly a little more, some has been minced, some has been cubed. Every last scrap of the meat from the bones has been rescued and frozen. The slow cooker has been working overtime – it produced a batch of soup overnight on Friday and a batch of curry on Saturday evening. It also cooked the shanks for our dinner last night to perfection.

Robyn