Shopping Catch Up for the End of the Month

 

24th  Aldi - £19.88

I didn't really need anything but on the way back from somewhere else Alan suggested calling into Aldi for the few bits he needed, so of course I volunteered to come in and push his trolley for him.  😁

A few cool salady bits, some ready cooked salmon ... gosh what a splurge ... and some ice-lollies.  Also they finally had Gingers favourite Tasty Licks in, these are really good for hiding his thyroid medication in twice a day, luckily he is addicted to them.

As we shared a trolley, we also shared the receipt, my things are in the box.

24th  Barton Grange Garden Centre - £3.29

So that's where we were on our way back from before the Aldi shop.

These buns are a bit expensive but they are delicious, and they make a nice treat every now and then.

27th  Aldi - £17.85

I may have splurged on some more salmon, this shop seems to be a bit fishy and winey, perfect for the hot weather.  

The receipt for posterity.

I had planned to write this post today, but after reading Sue's blog first thing this morning, I thought I would also add up everything that I had spent this month on food for myself.  Seemingly it has been a grand total of £113.39.

All these little shopping trips really do add up don't they, especially when I keep buying fish and wine.  But I guess life's little pleasures are never to be sniffed at, if you can afford them. 😄

The little laughing face is there because the cash is quickly running out on the bungalow renovations, so I might have to tighten the belt a little bit over the next few months.

Sue xx

June Renovation Updates

Last week the bungalow was fully rendered on the outside, so now it now looks neat, crisp and very smart. 

 I think the neighbours are starting to really appreciate that the worse house on the street is now looking much better and no longer lowering the tone of the area.  Of course, once the skip and the outdoor toilet are able to be removed it will be better still.  😄

While Alan was able to fit all the outdoor plug sockets, lights and other accessories, the solar panel guy came back and installed the electric car charger.  Don't worry Alan's work will all eventually be signed off by a fully competent and qualified electrician, before our building inspector signs the property off as now being ready to be lived in.

This was the state of play yesterday when I went round to the bungalow to do a pre-plastering walk through ... today this has changed already.

I can hardly keep up at the moment, the three plasterers, a grandad, dad and son work together so well and so speedily, they are a sight to behold.  How they have worked so well in this heat is beyond me ... however when we went round a couple of hours ago they were all topless!!

 https://youtu.be/-8ZCVRLmqw8?si=GIPTqtflrVKmRoRx

Hopefully the plastering will all be finished next week, at the speed they are working at perhaps even halfway through the week and I can do another walk through.  

Today we were actually sat in Booths ... where is was SO much cooler than home ... with a coffee and a cold drink each, designing the front garden and the off road parking area.  It won't be done for a while but Alan needed to know what stones to save before putting the rest in the skip and sending it away.

Exciting stuff, well it is to us, I do hope that you are enjoying the updates too.  😃

Sue xx

Seven Different Ways I Have Saved Money This Past Week

1.  Making one meal go further.

Alan was feeling exhausted after working with at the bungalow all last week, so we splurged and had a chip shop tea to round the week off.  It was just too much for me, so I saved half of my fish and chip meal for the next night.  It warmed up beautifully in the Remoska, but it's always a shock to see how much fat comes out of fish and chips when it's reheated.  😮

Enough to put you off getting it again?  No not really, once in a while it's perfectly okay to have a little treat, especially when it actually lasts over two meals.

2.  Using up sad looking vegetables.

I've been using up the contents of my fridge this week, so the tail end of carrots, celery and onion were roasted together, to make us a sort of carrot wellington.  It's on the menu every week at Mum's care home and we have always said that we should give it a go.

Once cooked it was all wrapped in some homemade pastry and cooked until beautifully golden brown.

  Unfortunately, my camera has been playing silly b*ggers recently and deleting random photos, especially the last one in each series I take ... so my gorgeous pastry extravaganza has now vanished into our stomachs and the ether.

I thought I had  gone mad so I did test it out, and yes out of a set of three photos, the last one vanished!!

I am now double checking and taking duplicate where needed ... another money saving thing as I really don't want to have to buy another camera.

3.  Making good use of free food.

I had half a sachet of a 'freebie' tomato ketchup, so I found a burger in the freezer and made sure I used it all up.  It might have been free, but even so I wasn't going to waste half of it.

4.  Using what I already had open.

I wanted a bit of sweetcorn to add to my tuna salad sandwich mix, so rather than open a full can I stood at the worktop and picked some out of the frozen mixed vegetables.

5.  Shopping Lists

A letter came for me with a blank A4 sheet of paper added for some reason.  As I was just about to write out my shopping list, I turned it into six shopping list sized pieces of paper and used one straight away.

6.  Replacement for breadcrumbs.

There were a lot of Weetabix crumbs left in the tin last time I refilled it, so I tipped them all into a jar ready to add to banana and walnut muffins ... I forgot to do that.  So instead I thought I would try them as breadcrumbs to coat two mashed potato and tuna fishcakes.

It worked a treat, and surprisingly didn't taste too much of Weetabix.

7.  Free guilt-laden napkins.

On Sunday when we were getting our motorway services lunch on the way back from seeing Mum, I headed back to the table before Alan, telling him that I would get the napkins.  I had forgotten that he is a bit deaf in one ear at the moment and he didn't hear me ... so he too picked up some napkins.  I felt guilty but there's no way to push them back into the dispenser, so instead I will make good use of them at home.

Just seven of the ways I can think of that I have saved us a little bit of money this week.  Of course there are probably many more, but so many things are done without even noticing yourself do them after a lifetime of watching the pennies.

What have you done recently that helped out your budget in some way?

Sue xx

Catching Up - Bread, Doughnuts, Fights ... and Experiments

 

It was a tough visit to Mum on Sunday so the doughnut on the way home at the service station, eaten after the lovely, and for once hot, vegan sausage roll was definitely needed ... although, wow, they are super sickly sweet.  Thank goodness for a lovely black coffee to take the edge of it.

We both ate up, and then sat and people watched for a good ten minutes just to decompress.  You do see all sorts of folks at the service station, I do still get cross with the messy ones though, especially when they have children with them and just wander off leaving all their mess for someone else to clean up.  Just what sort of an example are they setting for their kids?  

Yes, I will be turning into a loudly tutting old lady soon.  😞

We got home on Saturday after a couple of hours picking up building supplies ... yes most weekends are now spent browsing the delights of Wickes or B&Q ... to find that Ginger had just been in a spat with another cat defending his garden.  His poor little nose was dripping blood and over the course of the afternoon his face swelled up quite alarmingly.  He looked like he had done a round or two with Mike Tyson.  I had washed it thoroughly, he's a gentle cat and he let me do it with only a minor wriggle and complaint, and we both spent the rest of the day monitoring it closely.

By bedtime he could see out of his eye again, and these photos were then taken the next morning so I can monitor if any infection sets in.  I think for his first ever cat fight he has gotten off quite lightly.

19th  Booths - £1.60

This was literally my only shopping for this week, and sadly it is not very nice bread.

As they were much larger slices than the bread that I usually buy, I thought I would have a little play this morning.  I made myself three mini 'quiches'.  I cut out circles, pressed them into my muffin tin and left them in the warming oven, while I chopped some pepper and let an egg come to room temperature.

You can see each stage in this photo.  First chopped pepper dropped into the lightly toasted bread base, then a little sprinkle of cheese, and then finally one beaten egg divided between all three.

It made for a very tasty little breakfast, eaten an hour after my Weetabix, yes I am still on Hobbit breakfasts.  😄

I've been doing quite a bit of playing with my food just recently, and it's always nice when it works out.  

Sue xx

Saving Money - Absolutely No Waste

One of the first steps to saving money is to have absolutely no waste.

To use everything up of everything that you buy, whether that be eating all the leftovers and composting all the vegetable bits that are inedible, or making good use out of every last drop of something in a tube for instance.

I have spent years now cutting the ends of tubes to get out all the hand-cream, face cream or as in this case toothpaste.

It's surprising what is still left in there after you have already spent a week squeezing, shaking and scraping down the tube for all your worth to get the product out.

Of course I don't want the product to go hard or go off with the tube cut into pieces, so I always cut out a middle section then use the bottom as a top.  It works a treat.

My little nail pencil, which was once the length of a normal pencil, is now just over an inch long, it's hard to sharpen it these days, but I will persevere.  While it is still there, I am still using it.

All I ask of life at the moment is to live simply, to have enough of what I need, to make the best of what I have ... and to be grateful for each and every day.

What is one money saving tip that you would add in the comments to help others that might not have heard of it?

Sue xx

Connie Onnie Butties ... and Other Memories

 

My brother, my Dad and me, around 1971 or 72

It's hard to date some photos isn't it, I tend to look at what I'm wearing, how old my brother looks as he's four years younger than me and then where we are.  This was taken at Pontins, the Middleton Towers camp I think, we only ever went to two of their camps, but this was my parents favourite one.

I went down a rabbit hole of thinking about the past yesterday after watching the YouTube channel British Nostalgia while I ate my breakfast.  They are good videos if you can get over the AI voiceover that occasionally gets his words wrong and puts emphasis in the wrong places, and if you just laugh at the photos not always matching the commentary.

This is the video that I watched.

https://youtu.be/bKSB3X1kXWU?si=rwyhxygZ_By1xL9c

It was very true of a lot of the meals we ate back in the 60s and 70s in Manchester, England.

It's funny, as children we never thought of ourselves as poor, although we lived in just three rooms.  They were the downstairs rooms of my Nana's house.  We shared the bathroom that was upstairs and had to be quiet so as not to disturb her whenever we used it, but I never minded that. When I was thirteen in 1973 we got a brand new council house and moved out ... much to my Mum's relief.

We ate simply and cheaply, and I could cope with most foods, although even then I hated meat.  But I was forced to eat it, we always had to clear our plates ... 'or the starving children in Africa would be upset'.  Even as a child I thought that Mum's statement was ridiculous.  Mum was not a good cook, which was slightly ironic as she was a school dinner lady!  We ate the most basic foods, overcooked to within an inch of their lives, hence my hatred of Brussels sprouts to this day ... and my brother's pea phobia .

So watching this YouTube video brought back a lot of memories, good ones and bad ones ... liver and onions when overcooked would be useful for a cobbler, he would be able to resole leather shoes with the liver glued on with the gloopy onions.  Well my Mum's version anyway. 😖

But one thing we never had, but my ex-husband did, was Connie Onnie butties, or sandwiches if you from the posh end of the street. 

 It was simply condensed milk spread on white bread and topped with another slice, and eaten over a plate or at the very least away from your clothes as they dripped.  My ex also regularly lived on 'sugar butties' as a child, just as it sounds they were simply buttered white bread with a spoonful of sugar sprinkled over the butter, then the two slices pressed together, usually taken outside to be eaten while you played or just sat on the front doorstep.  No wonder he had so many missing teeth even when we first met!  My cheap sandwich of choice was a salad cream butty, just that bread and salad cream, they were very tasty, but Mum didn't really approve.

Of course it was the days of corner shops and very small 'supermarkets' when they first arrived.  Our local corner shop had illusions of grandeur when it purchased two shopping trollies.  With only two narrow aisles and the meat and cheese counter at the end of the shop, if someone had a trolley in use anyone else shopping with the more usual wire basket, had to follow the trolley pusher around until they finally reached the till, or else try and squeeze past if the person stopped at the meat counter.  Luckily I think we were a lot more patient back in the day. 😄

What 'poor food' did you have as a child, or were you 'proper posh'?

Sue xx

The Food Comes in Two by Two

 

14th Aldi - £34.83

This is the post I was going to do on Monday, but I simply did not have the energy and needed to decompress after Sunday ... and then I needed to get it all out of my system yesterday. 

We called to Aldi on the way home from visiting Mum, and I think you can tell that I needed some treats as well as a few necessary bits.  Two bottles of wine, chocolate, two packs of cheese and pasta, two of so many of the items in my trolley.  I think I just get in the habit of picking up twos when I am running out of something, which is no bad thing really.

I did limit myself to one block of chocolate ... but only because I already had some at home.  😁

The receipt for posterity.  

The wine and fish definitely bumped the cost of this shopping up, but I was still happily surprised that this was all I spent, I was expecting it to be more.

When I got home I realised that I had taken the photo of the shopping in the trolley before I had added the eggs to it.  So I laid it all out again for your perusal.

I really could have gotten way with not shopping this week, but sometimes your sanity tells you that it needs some wine and chocolate.  

I did sort of need more pasta though, as I had tipped the last of my smaller sized bags of penne into my large pasta jar on Friday.  It used to come in 500g bags, now it seems to be only available in 1kg size. I seem to have lots of spaghetti in my store cupboard but I was down to no replacements of penne, which is obviously my favourite.

So, that's the rice jar and the pasta jar freshly filled, and the shelf is looking very healthy at the moment.

Sue xx

Not Normal Service

Morning Coffee    by Mary Bradish Titcomb 1858-1927

Mum was rushed into hospital once again, in the early hours of Sunday morning this time with breathing difficulties.  We were literally ten minutes away from visiting her at her care home on Sunday morning, at the more respectable time of 10am, luckily we were still on the motorway when my brother phoned to say that a voicemail message had just come through on his phone, it had been left in the middle of the night but he has his phone off then.  My phone is always on, but for some reason this time they didn't call me. 😕

Anyway a quick re-programme of the Satnav and we were headed for the hospital where after a lot of chasing round departments and wards, as she had only just left the A&E department, we finally found Mum looking very frail and very confused.

We are quite confused too, as there is nothing they can do for her except make her comfortable and give her oxygen, something they could very easily have done at her care home, especially since she has instructions on her paperwork not to send her to hospital except in a real health emergency.  Which happened a few weeks ago when she had yet another bowel blockage.  They are a nursing and hospice type care home as well as residential, so they have a lot of very qualified staff.  

We were most concerned that the hospital seemed to know nothing about her.  Luckily we arrived just as the cutlery was being delivered to the beds ready for lunch, she was about to be given a 'normal meal', something she cannot eat now as she is on a NHS Level Five diet.  They also didn't realise that she is completely bedbound, doubly incontinent and has dementia, so is unreliable to ask any medical questions of, hence them being told by her that yes she can have any sort of food.

I had a good chat with her nurse and then we had to come away as you can't visit during lunch time.  You wouldn't think that this was that stressful really, well I wouldn't have years ago, but when it's been going on in one form or another for over two and half years on a very regular basis it's starting to have a real build up effect.

I sent an email to the care home when I got home, not complaining as such but asking why I wasn't phoned this time, and also suggesting they had some sort of Patient Passport type document, just a photocopy from their file, that could travel to hospital with residents when necessary to give the nursing staff at least a head start.  It would save a lot of stress.  It turns out they have this in place already, although the system keeps letting them down and the document goes missing somewhere between the paramedics and the A&E staff and then never makes it to the ward.  They are now going to be raising this matter urgently.

I needed to get all this down in writing so that I have it for future reference, and my blog seemed as good a place as any. 

Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.  😄

Sue xx

'There's a Woman in My Mirror ...'

 

Art by Lisa Asiata

There’s a woman in my mirror

And she looks a lot like me,

Though there’s lines around her eyes,

And her hair is wild and free.

She is plumper than myself,

And she is definitely grey.

Did I miss the day this happened

Has she always been this way?

And this woman in the mirror

Has an air of something calm,

Like a tide that’s going out,

And a beach that’s soft and warm.

She has seen the world in colour,

She has learned to know the truth.

There’s a wisdom in her wrinkles,

There’s a knowledge brought from youth.

And she seems to move more freely,

As though released from earthly binds.

Is she made of something lighter?

Perhaps the weight she left behind.

Like the press of expectation,

And the need to yield and bend.

I like this woman in the mirror,

She’s fast becoming my best friend.

Donna Ashworth

From ‘to the women’:

https://amzn.eu/d/0j4xR15k

Tomato Ketchup Jackpot ... and Books

 

Alan hit the tomato ketchup jackpot today when we went to Booths for breakfast.

The guys that are rendering the outside of our bungalow couldn't come and do anymore today due to the heavy rain that we currently have.  So Alan said he fancied a later more leisurely start to the day, and a bacon butty and a coffee in Booths while we had a catch up on all things renovation related, before he headed to the bungalow to continue stripping the wallpaper off the ceilings.

He ordered his usual bacon bun and was given two tomato ketchup sachets without asking, and as I have him so well trained he just accepted them without question.

They were added to my little stash as soon as I got home.  I haven't had to buy ketchup for a long time now.    

Yes, they are all lined up in date order ... I am that organised. 😁

On the way out of Booths we have to pass the charity book table, and after weeks and weeks of me being very good and not buying anything, suddenly there were four books that looked well worth a read.  So they came home with me too.  It was only when I got home that I remembered I was being so good so that we would have less books to move house with.

Oh well, at least I have my reading mojo back at the moment, so I will continue to donate all the books that I read that are deemed not really worth keeping.

The book I am currently reading, which also came from the book table a while ago.

What are you reading at the moment?

Sue xx

This Weeks Shopping ... and Right Door, Wrong Furniture

 

6th - Aldi  £11.42

This weeks shopping was from Aldi at the weekend, again I was just buying the things that I either really needed or really wanted.  I'm just keeping it simple while I slowly eat my way through the things in the freezer, buying just the few  fresh things that I need to compliment what I already have.

The receipt for posterity.  

I wonder if one day I will look back on this and marvel at how cheap everything was.  😄

6th - Booths £6.65

While we were in Booths having some breakfast I bought a couple of things that I needed.  I bought two cartons of milk as it was on special offer again. One carton lasts me about ten days as I only have it on my Weetabix.

9th Booths - £6.65

That confused me briefly looking at the photos, as the total for these two small shops was exactly the same.

I called into Booths yesterday as Alan asked me to get him some bread, and also a sandwich and drink for his lunch while he was at the bungalow.  He takes a flask of coffee and a banana every day, but as he was staying longer he wanted something else.  

The new front door had been installed the day before so this was the first time I was seeing it.

Sadly although it is the right front door, it has all the wrong door furniture on it.  It was supposed to be in black so that it ties in with the anthracite grey window frames a bit better.  It looked relatively okay on the photos Alan had shown me the day before, but in person the chrome was a bit insipid.

The French doors in the main room look fantastic though.

The room is now flooded with light, which is exactly what you what you need when it's the main living area in such a small property.  These door handles are right as they need to match the chrome and steel elements of the kitchen.

The main jobs of this week are having the outside of the bungalow rendered in brilliant white, and Alan is indoors stripping off remnants of wallpaper from the walls and the ceilings, ready for the plasterers to come in later this month.

Sue xx