Piccalilli

I find the more I make at home, the less I want to buy in the shops. I am appalled by the prices and dissatisfied with the quality. This can lead to the odd crisis, when I fancy something that we have run out of. I can't bear to purchase an over priced substandard substitute from the supermarket so I have to do without until I can find the time or the ingredients are ripe, to make it.
Piccalilli is a gardener's pickle really, as it infinitely flexible in what can go in it and in what quantities. My recipe book only calls for 6 lbs of mixed vegetables, suggesting beans (dwarf, broad or runner), red or white cabbage, cauliflowers, cucumbers, celery, gherkins, marrows, onions, shallots, peppers and green tomatoes. You get the picture, ideal if you have a glut of something or alternatively not enough of something else to make a meal out of.
This year my gardening has been deficient so I had no runner beans to put in and as I only have about four green tomatoes left, I decided I would rather leave them out and coax them into ripening instead. So I was left with an overgrown courgette and a bought cauliflower, cabbage, pepper and onions. They have to be chopped up small and left to soak in brine. The book says 'cut into uniform small pieces' but I prefer to judge it by what size vegetable I would like to meet in a cheese and piccalilli sandwich. As for the brine the book recommended a pound of salt to a gallon of water but I probably used half of this, and then left the vegetables soaking in a bowl with a plate on top to hold them down.
I actually did them on Monday, but was then occupied with garage doors and Oliver until today (yesterday's outing was only slightly more successful than last week's by the way, I got stung by a wasp, we only had time for half an hour on the beach and ended up lost in rush hour traffic in Hull).
So here are the vegetables ready in the pan with the brine washed off :

Now to make the sauce.
For a hot sharp piccalilli which is how I like it blend
 3 teaspoons turmeric
 8 teaspoons ginger
 8 teaspoons mustard powder
and 6 ounces sugar
with two pints of distilled vinegar and put it all in a large pan with the vegetables and bring to the boil and cook for twenty minutes. Then using a slotted spoon, scoop the vegetables out of the spicy vinegar and pack into jars.

The wide necked funnel is a left over from my chutney making days and is really useful for any preserving job.

After all the vegetables are out of the vinegar, mix two ounces of cornflour with a couple of tablespoons of vinegar and add to the spicy vinegar in the pan and boil to thicken it. 

Looks a bit like custard in the photo but I can tell you it smells nothing like custard!

Then pour the sauce over the vegetables in the jars until covered . I jiggled about a bit with a spoon to make sure the sauce was distributed equally and that there were no air bubbles in the jar.

The book recommends that the piccalilli should be left four to six weeks to mature and I think this is reasonable because at the moment the sauce is very sharp and vinegary, it needs time to mellow.So there we are, 6 and a half jars to add to my store cupboard. That should see me through the rest of the year and possibly the year after.

All Talk and No Action

I had the family home for the weekend, Maddie down from Scotland, Ellie over from Hull so there is little to report. It was very much talk rather than action because that is what they do best.and amongst the jokes, stories, film reviews and several people talking at once we gradually manage to catch up on each other's lives. We tease Maddie because once at a family gathering when she was about 6 she leapt on a chair and shouted 'Me, me , look at me!' but sometimes it is necessary to fight for your share of attention.
I did take the time though to take a picture of our frugal equivalent of an Indian takeaway.

I made the korma and bhuna using the same 'Curry in a Hurry' base for both, made the chappattis and rice, fried the poppadums and bought in the starters, cost around £10 for five

The Balanced Scorecard- 2013 to date

It is cold and grey and I have been feeling more than a little lethargic recently so I thought it was a good time to review the year to date and see what progress I'd made in the main headings.
The balanced scorecard is a concept from accountancy which means setting targets in areas of the business rather than just financial ie no good congratulating yourselves on record sales if your safety record is dire and customer service appalling. When I worked for a clinical waste company that tried to implement this, the drivers had to record if they had missed any collections and why (normally accidents or traffic holdups), it  then amused me to discover that they were allowed to input a code meaning tactical miss as if it could every be a part of a company's tactics not to service its customers. In practice these were occasions where to stop at a clinic to pick up one bin of waste would make the driver too late to pick up 20 from a hospital. Still no tactical misses allowed here.
So the headings on my scorecard in no particular order are:
  Poultry
  Bees
  Garden
  Frugal Living & Food
  Soap Business
  House & Garage
  Personal Development
  Crafts
  Wildlife

Possibly I should have one for health and wellbeing but I think the list is quite long enough so I will roll that in with personal development

Poultry
This has been going well, there was the sad loss of Amelia (or was it Edna they looked very much alike) but to offset that Edna is laying well and I managed to partially roof the run and also get their wings clipped. In the incubator upstairs are the 11 little quail eggs, committing me, should they hatch to sorting out first a brooder box and then a cage for them. The brooder box would also be able to be used by chickens in due time.
Bees
I'm also satisfied with the bees. Truthfully there is little I can do in winter apart from ensure they have enough food and the hives are protected from mice and woodpeckers but to see all three hives were alive and active mid February was encouraging. I have also booked to attend the British Bee Keeping Association Spring Convention in April which I'm sure will fire my enthusiasm to learn more and there is my name down on the swarm collection list for summer.
Garden
Progress has been made, seeds have been sown, currant bushes pruned, larger trees cut back at risk to life and limb. As always there is much more to do, more seeds need sowing, the greenhouse needs cleaning, the prunings need chopping up and disposing of, the vegetable plot needs digging and preparing but I can take satisfaction from the fact that I haven't been ignoring the garden throughout the cold weather.
Frugal Living and Food
Here I think I may have been concentrating too much. I have done terrifically well on my frugal food challenge but possibly at the expense of other items on the scorecard. I have already posted that I seem to be baking everyday and as I write I do have a carrotcake in the oven (made with dried cranberries instead of raisins for a change and because I had them in the cupboard). Going forward the challenge will be to try and turn the efforts I have made since Christmas into normal routine but  to keep them in their place. I want to keep on making my own bread and cakes and biscuits but to make the freezer take the place of the convenience store. As Rosie has decided that she does like Chicken Korma, the Curry in a Hurry curry base will become a regular in it as will other dishes that allow me to concentrate on other things some days.
Soap Business
The other things will mainly be the soap business which I am ashamed to say has not made huge progress since Christmas despite being my hope for an income this year. I have attended a course at the Chamber of Commerce (run on a Wednesday which is why postings can be scarce on that day) and I have had regular meetings with a business mentor who has been helping me with my business plan and cashflow forecast to be submitted to a board who should approve me receiving Enterprise Allowance. I feel that all this guestimating future sales and doing market research on the natural cosmetic industry has distracted my attention from the important parts of the business namely making a good product with attractive packaging. Must try harder.
House and Garage
I haven't been doing too much in this category either, I have done some mild decluttering, bought a new freezer which will reduce my energy bills and we now have a working shower once more. There is much decluttering left to do and a list of DIY projects as long as my arm but I am relaxed over this, I am sure I will do more in the warmer weather.
Personal Development
Well this is quite a wide category, I include it, as it is part of the balanced life that I should keep learning and keep trying new things. Writing the blog has been very pleasurable and I would like to do more writing in future. Joining the reading group will also be good for me as it will make me read books I would not have chosen myself. I have also agreed to go on a dry stone wall building day, I can't see any immediate use for that knowledge but it will be interesting. I suspect that I am falling back on the health and exercise front since Jess left. The compulsory twice daily walks were getting me fitter and keeping the calories at bay. I shall have to do more about this before summer as I need to drop a dress size having bought a wet suit in a sale that was a size too small. Ho hum. I've also learned that I am not a dog person, although Jess left us because she was not getting on with Oliver, I didn't find enough compensation in having a dog for all the work and time involved. I may have liked the image of me strolling through the countryside with a dog at my heels but not the reality. Jess is now living with someone who finds having a dog all over you every time you sit down, enjoyable.
Crafts
I am a craft person, I enjoy almost everything that involves making things with your hands. Sadly I am not artistic, I can't paint or draw but I can sew and knit and embroider and hook rugs and generally have a go at anything which involves reading a set of instructions and visualising what they mean. In the last few years I have been extending this to try to tackle DIY projects ie plastering, fence building. Last summer shocked by the price of a new one, I attempted to build a bee hive which is basically a series of wooden boxes. I managed it but also discovered that I can't cut straight. As I need two more bee hives (or at least brood boxes) and a quail house and a broody house then I think I will be learning a lot more about woodworking this coming year. I was going to go on a course but had to cancel as I couldn't leave Jess alone in the house for two days. Likewise I couldn't do any knitting whilst she was with us, as she kept pouncing on the wool, but I have wool and the pattern for knitting Oliver a sweater.
Wildlife
The part of having a dog that I did really enjoy was being forced out for a walk and seeing wildlife. I really enjoyed seeing the small changes that happened almost daily. I can't do anything about this as the twice daily walks were taking up too much time and leading to other things being neglected, but I am going to make the effort to get out once a week at least. I have my tree spotting to continue and I am of course missing the kingfisher.

Apologies for the very long post but I have found it helpful, it has reassured me that really I have made progress since the start of the year and it has pointed out areas where I need to spend less time (food planning) and areas where I need to spend more (soap business).

February Frugal Challenge -Part 3

Well the February Frugal Challenge is still going well, the spend on food since the last update has been £9.25  bringing the total spend for February up to a paltry £52.83. I have mince, sausages, meatballs and turkey steaks left in the freezer so still plenty of potential meals.
 As the point of the challenge was to see if it was worth busting my £20 a week budget in the first week of the month to take advantage of the Lidl offer of £5 off on a spend of £30. I am now into the third week and have caught up with the overall budget so the answer has been yes, it is possible to have your cake and eat it by sticking to a budget and taking discounts offered.
However...... I have been bored. I realise that I don't like planning my meals more than a week ahead, it is annoying to read a recipe and realise I won't be able to make it for three weeks as I don't have the budget for it. So I have been looking at recipes that I don't usually make but that I already have most of the ingredients for which led to me making Chicken Korma on Friday. This used Elaine Colliar's fabulous 'curry in a hurry' curry base http://mortgagefreeinthree.com/2012/05/curry-in-a-hurry/ which has left me with 6 individual portions left over in the freezer for another day, maybe to be used with yellow split peas for dal when I am on my own (Rosie doesn't share my enthusiasm for pulses or liking for curry). Elaine's recipe for korma called for 3 tablespoons of coconut powder. Now in Tesco coconut powder is £2.90 for 300g which I was reluctant to spend if I was to try to stay within budget, so instead I used desiccated coconut and ground that in my food processor as finely as it would go. I expect I could have got it finer if I had used the coffee mill but it was just for me and I wasn't bothered. So the extra ingredients I needed for the korma were, ginger, chillies and cream and cost £1.35.
I hadn't finished there though, as I fancied chapattis with them. These turned out to be ridiculously easy to make. It was simply wholemeal flour (8 oz should be enough for four people unless you are overcome with greed which you may be)  mixed with water to a soft dough, kneaded as if for bread and then divided into small balls and rolled out to the size of a plate and cooked on a griddle or dry frying pan for 30 seconds on each side. Fresh out of the pan they were far nicer than any chapatti I've had from a takeaway.
So there we are, my Friday night takeaway, the korma arranged on a bed of rice like a 1970's Vesta curry with chappatis on the side.

February Frugal Food Challenge - Week 2

Just a quick update to say that the FFF Challenge is going well and I have not spent anything on food this week. Meals during the week included Eggs Benedict, Turkey Schnitzel (with the Lidl turkey steaks), spaghetti (with HM pasta from the freezer) and Pasta with cheese sauce so I still have plenty of meat left. Today I think I will roast the chicken as we will probably be out tomorrow, if not we can have it cold and there will be some left for another chicken based meal either pie or risotto plus stock for the freezer. I still have two packets of turkey steaks, three packets of mince and some sausages.
The things I will need to buy before the next two weeks are up, are milk (used 6 pints in a week), bread flour (used 1 1/2 bags but not helped by interventions from the dog, first the dough and later in the week, half a loaf) and maybe oats, I have used 500g this week, I have another 500g bag unopened and about the same in  the storage jar. I will also need to buy butter, that too has been subject to ravages by dog but was also used in the hollandaise sauce for Eggs Benedict.
I have not done much baking this week so the store of cakes and biscuits has gone down but I have all the ingredients for another batch of carrot cake and am also fancying trying my hand at digestive biscuits.
So at the moment the budget of £20 for the next two weeks does not seem to be in danger.

February Frugal Food Challenge

I was doing pretty well with the budget food strategy of not buying anything unless it was strictly necessary but then Lidl which is my main supermarket offered £5 off if I spent £35. I didn't particularly want to do this as it would mean I'd spent nearly half my monthly food budget (£80 for 2 adults and a child who eats a lot at nursery) in the first week but I thought if I plan this carefully I could buy nearly everything I need for the first three weeks. I shouldn't need to buy anything extra in week 1 which would leave me £10 a week in weeks 2 & 3 to buy milk and fruit etc and then £20 for the last week. This should be doable.
So this is what I bought:

I reckon there is enough meat there for at least 10 meals and then these will be mixed with pastas, soups, risottos etc. We will see.

It wasn't quite all I bought, I got to the checkout and found my trolley added up to £34.60. I was forced to add these to bring it over £35.

Life is tough sometimes.

Lemonade

I had a bunch of lemons sitting in the fridge left over from Christmas, bought in the delusion that we are the sort of family who might fancy a slice of lemon in their drinks. I have these delusions at Christmas, at least thank God I have fought off the delusion that someone might like to eat dates at Christmas.
So something had to be done with them, I could have made a lemon meringue pie but as only I like that it would be encouraging gluttony, I could make a lemon drizzle cake but I actually fancy cherry cake at the moment, a practical answer would be to freeze them so that I always had a lemon available in the house, but what I actually fancied was home made lemonade.
Very simple to make, take the zest of 3 lemons and put in a bowl, add the juice of 6 lemons (obviously that includes the 3 you have already zested, don't go buying 9 lemons).

 Add 6 ounces of sugar, pour on two and a half pints of boiling water, stir to dissolve the sugar and leave to stand overnight. Strain in the morning and you have your lemonade. Drink as is or pep it up and make it last longer by adding something fizzy.

 This is where I thought I'd dig out the soda syphon:

Cue daughter saying it looked like something out of the seventies. Well durr, of course it does, who bought a soda syphon after the seventies? It also looked filthy as it had sat in the back of my cupboard since the eighties. I cleaned it up, found the little gas cylinders to fire it up with, and then was foiled as I couldn't find the black plastic bit that screws the gas cylinders onto the syphon. I gave up and bought a bottle of Lidl's basic lemonade at 17p instead. Probably cheaper in the long run.

A Life in Food

My mother was given the above recipe book as a wedding present. On the flyleaf she has inscribed her wedding date and her name, possibly the first time she had written her new name after signing the register in church. It was October 1949, food rationing was coming to an end and there must have been hope that the a recipe book was now appropriate as a present, that the ingredients would be available and the family members would be there  to eat the special meals. So it became part of our family life, she would write in recipes that she had been given, like the malt loaf recipe or stick in ones cut from newspapers or magazines like the Christmas cake recipe. I don't know when she acquired that recipe but it was the one we went to every year, the picture of the chef in the newspaper acquiring a blue pen beard and moustache as we girls waited to be allocated jobs, chopping almonds or cherries for the three Christmas cakes made every year in September to mature for Christmas. Naturally when I needed to make a special cake for Oliver's christening it was that recipe I went to.

When I left home to go to university, I started my own book and this too became a record of my life. My mother's recipe for home made bread being the first entry. It charted all the fads and fancies, the diets and the health kicks, the frugal recipes and the splurges for special occasions. Amongst them were recipes that became standards in the family, the sticky chocolate cake and the cookie recipes. It was useful too, when I went on self catering holidays, I took it with me as having all the key recipes I would want to make. This was my undoing though, I took it camping to France with me in 2011 and somehow, incredibly, it got lost. I mourn that book as a part of my life, lost.

It was too useful not to be recreated but now I am going digital, I am slowly typing my recipes onto the computer from where I can transfer them on to my kindle and carry them around with me that way. It will mean that I will always have them on back up and ready to be sent to student daughters at the call of a telephone. It won't be the same though, I will never be able to tell favourite recipes by the way the book falls open or remember cooking disasters by the stains on a page. It can never look like this:

I will never have that recall of exactly how I felt when I wrote a recipe down. There was a recipe in my book, Haddock Monte Carlo I believe, made with haddock and tinned tomato soup and rice which I never made after my first year at university, but reading it recalls the excitement of being independent and having to cook for myself and make choices as to what to eat. Remembering Haddock Monte Carlo they weren't necessarily good choices. This is what nostalgia means, a fond recall of things that weren't always that good.

Stocking up- Part One

So, three quarters of the way through the Super Frugal January, I have spent £49.35 on food which is good but I realize the cupboard is looking a little bare. Time to stock up. First off, I set some bread going in the breadmaker, an experimental mix of white,wholemeal and rye flour, some porridge oats and a handful of mixed seeds, with ingredients like these it will probably need a long rising time but no worries it can take all day.
Next it was off to the supermarket:

 A very satisfactory total of £8.14. The margarine and oats I will not use today , they were just needed to keep the stocks up, the mince was an impulse buy reduced to £1.04 it will go in the freezer but there are so many ways to use mince there is no danger of it languishing there.
Now to the baking, firstly  I made a batch of oatcakes. but knowing I was making a carrot cake I didn't cook them immediately but left them until the carrot cake mixture was ready so that they could share an oven. The carrot cake recipe was from here;http://www.cheap-family-recipes.org.uk/recipe-carrotcake.html?opt=rsnack and very satisfactory it was too:

 

Next, I wanted to make maltbread. At least we have always called it maltbread but it is made from a wartime recipe which contains no eggs or fat or indeed malt. It was given to my mother by Mrs Sunman of Ivydene, Collingham and here is the recipe written in my mother's recipe book. As you can tell it has been well used.

The maltbread turned out a bit lopsided but who's to care? I'm sure it won't affect the taste.
A satisfactory refilling of the cake tins for a morning's work:

 I will of course be freezing most of the carrot cake and two of the malt loaves, creating my own store of convenience food. Now for a cup of tea and a quick snack, but what to choose?