Posh De-scaler, Random Meals and Happy Finds

 

This is possibly the poshest de-scaler that I have ever used.

My kettle was suddenly furred up, a very rare occurrence here in the north-west of England, so I rummaged in the cupboard for some bog standard vinegar.  There was none to be had, I checked Alan's under sink cupboard as he tends to have sachets of de-scaler under there, nope none at all.

So I bit the bullet and tried it with some of my very out of date Apple Cider vinegar.  Oh well better for it to be used in some way as I had never gotten around to using it much in recipes ... I hate vinegar flavours. Why had I bought it then, I have no idea!! 

It worked but it took four boilings of the kettle whereas malt or white vinegar takes two at the most.

Making Alan's dinners and teas while he has been working so hard at the bungalow, means that I am going through the contents of the freezer satisfyingly quickly.  The bottom drawer is now full of homemade items rather than convenience foods and as they are used up only a few of them are being bought again.

Fish fingers are a good emergency standby for a quick and tasty, even if slightly naughty lunch, so they will be replaced ... occasionally. 😁 

These garlic Plant Menu Kyivs are also a good standby, but I don't eat them very often these days, so again another occasional purchase from now on I think

Rummaging around definitely has it's advantages, as I found a single block of homemade soup and half a garlic baton yesterday ... it made for a very tasty lunch.

Sue xx

A Week of Lunches

 

Lunch 1 - Homemade Vegetable Soup and a toasted crust of bread.

My lunches, frequently also called dinners here up North ... .with me it depends what mood I am in ... are quite simple affairs.  I've been trying to get away from just sandwiches at every midday meal and have also been attempting to use up the bitty bits from the fridge and freezer at lunchtime.  The more I delve in the freezer drawers the more I seem to find.

Also leftovers, and the last one or two of anything make for brilliant lunches.  

Lunch 2 - Fishfinger Butty and homegrown tomatoes.

Lunch 3 - Leftover Rice and Roasted Vegetables.

Lunch 4 - A Tomatoey Vegetable Medley

Lunch 5 - Homemade Soup and half a Garlic Bread

Lunch 6 - A Sausage Bun with Ketchup

One thing most of my, and our meals have had in common this past couple of weeks has been the addition of courgette.  We are in the midst of a yellow courgette glut and I am determined to keep up with the output this year.

Sometimes just a few slices and sometimes a whole lot more.

Lunch 7 - A Vegetable Omelette

It's been a very tasty seven days.  Now I have just started on a 'Week of Teas' ... we will see how long it takes me to photograph seven nights of evening meals.  I keep forgetting ... I have a lot on my mind ... but no-one wants to see a half eaten plate of food, so I will persevere.  😄

What is your favourite type of lunch?

Sue xx

It's the End of the Month Catch- up

 

It's been a strange sort of month, hot, hot weather, Mum in and out of hospital like a yoyo ... currently in once again.  The garden looks lovely ...

... and you would be able to see it, if the washing wasn't out on the line making full use of the glorious sunshine.  

I'm funni-osity ... as my Nana used to say,  I love pegging washing out but hate bringing it in and folding it all up, I think I need staff.  😄

Some meals have been so simple you can barely call them that.

Shopping has been bought, stored and in a lot of cases just eaten and then re-bought, I seem to be on a wine and fish repetition phase at the moment, well it's been hot weather, and cold wine at the end of a long and occasionally stressful day is sometimes just really necessary.  When the things that were bought to replace the contents of the jars were stashed in the lower food cupboard, they were dated as usual.

Fathers Day came and went, and as usual Alan got a card off each of my sons, and of course one off his furry Ginger son ... who also bought him a jar of Plum Jam and a few 'fingers of Fudge'.

As usual nothing off his own grown up children or his step-daughter.  He is used to that, but it still annoys me on his behalf.

The final things from the bungalow were put up on Facebook Marketplace for sale, but there have been no takers up to now.  I did have one woman from York ask if the gates were fifteen foot wide each and not in total. 

 Wow, that would be a wide driveway!!

My favourite read of the month was this book.  

As a few people warned me, it did take some getting in to, but once I did, wow it was good.  And I didn't see the twist coming at the end at all.  I have now re-donated it to the charity book table in Booths.

Talking of Booths, we have eaten and drunk in there far too many times this month, but Alan likes to get away from the bungalow and have a coffee and a bacon bun there.  I did offer to make both of the aforementioned at home for him, but I think he is afraid of then falling asleep on the sofa afterwards and not ending up back at the bungalow.

He was eyeing up the sofas in Booths café as we left today, so I think maybe he actually has a point.  Although I do keep pointing out to him that each time we pay for food in the café that is basically the cost of two floor tiles for the bungalow!!

Talking of the bungalow it has come on in leaps and bounds this month.  So here is the one and only time I will be showing the front of it on my blog.  

The plasterers are currently inside plastering the bedroom ceilings and walls, and Alan has been busy on the outside setting out the framework for the front garden.  It's been all go after a long time of planning and we are starting to see the fruits of our labour, our planning and our money ... which is very quickly running out.

Here's to July and hopefully more sunshine, more foody talk and more progress on our future home.

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

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

Living on Leftovers, Fancy Pants Pretenders

 

In this heatwave I have been careful to keep an eye on the food, even the things in the fridge so I can make sure to use everything up while it is still reasonably at it's best.

Standing out for me the other day was a chunk of red onion and a slightly sad looking courgette, so I added a few other things and roasted them, et voila ... lots of lovely cooked vegetables to add to a few different meals.

The first meal was a freshly baked baguette with leftover tuna and hummus.

With some of the hummus still leftover, I decided to add it and some of the vegetables to some pasta.

It was really tasty, and there were still lots of vegetables left over.  So they went into portion sized pots for the freezer.

They may seem like quite small pots even for a single serving, but I find they are more than adequate for me.  This is what one pot looked like on a flatbread pizza last time I did this.

Alan switches to cold drinks in this weather, me ... well I drink coffee.  Hot, black, caffeinated coffee, no iced versions or fancy pants pretenders pass my lips.  😄

Sue xx

Old Food ... or Leftovers

 

I was reading some comments on an Instagrammers feed the other day, she's the queen of frugality and uses things so well. But, as is the way when someone gets successful online, the negative nellies and keyboard warriors turn up to put their derogatory comments in, and try and get their comments 'liked' by other people.  

One of them said that she wouldn't dream of saving or eating leftovers, and that all leftovers were was 'old food' and should be thrown in the bin.  Wow!!

Happily lots of people were not of that opinion, and I am one of them.

The other night for instance, I was having some spicy potato wedges with a fish portion, and some frozen mixed vegetables and I couldn't quite finish them all.  Did they go in the bin, no they did not ... an idea came to mind straight away so they were quickly cut in half and put into a little tub in the fridge.  

My fridge seems to be the happy residing place for lots of little tubs this week and I am working my way through them all.

I tipped some frozen peas into the pot with the wedges ready for action, took a rather large egg out of the fridge to warm up, and got the little pot of Flora brought home from a meal out ... et voila the makings of a nice little meal all ready to go. 

Ten minutes later it was all in the pan and I was busy making a nice cup of coffee to go with it.

Another few minutes and I had a nice dinner all ready to eat.

That is most definitely not 'old food'.

Do you love your leftovers?

Sue xx