A Frugal Failure

Not everything that is cheap and home made and based on natural ingredients is good.
Back in the middle of Frugal February, I decided to make my own washing up liquid. I didn't mention it at the time because from the start I wasn't convinced it was worth recommending. I got the recipe off the internet and it was a mixture of washing soda, soap, white vinegar and lemon juice. I can't remember the quantities and it doesn't matter as no-one will want to make it.
I knew it wouldn't bubble like detergent and I could have got used to that but I found it made the water feel unpleasantly greasy. Maybe I was using too much to compensate for the lack of bubbles. It made plenty, in fact I still have half a tub left:

 And sometimes the cleaning was as good or better than  the bought stuff, in particular lifting tea stains off mugs but yesterday I gave in and bought this:

Why make myself unhappy or at least irritated and annoyed on a daily basis for the sake of 59p?

Back to the joys of bubbles once more.

More About Soap

The quest for perfection continues......
I am for the most part quite happy with my soap recipes, the fragrances are those I like and the texture is good. I have for the moment settled the problem of moulds in satisfactory economical recycling fashion. In the garage left over from when we used to make chutneys and flavoured oils, were 5 wooden boxes used to present a bottle of oil in. When lined with heavy duty rubber sheet (which I also had lying around the garage) these make a good standard mould for the soap to come out in bars ready for slicing.

If demand takes off I shall either buy commercial moulds or make longer wooden ones. I have even reconciled myself to the fact that every bar is different. These are hand made soaps and people are not looking for standardisation in size and shape.

What is bothering me still is the colour. I like the colours of natural plant dyes but some that I have used do not match the fragrance. Lavender (top left hand corner) is fine, the Apricot Skin Softener is the colour it is because it contains turmeric which has benefits to the skin including reducing the signs of ageing (no wonder it is my favourite!).

No, the one that really bothers me is the Verbena. At the moment it looks like cheap cheddar:

It is likely that this orange colour will fade to a soft peach as the curing process takes place, but even so verbena (aloysia triphylla) is a green plant with delicate white flowers that smells strongly of lemon:

To my mind the soap needs to be green or pale yellow. It is a shame that the Gardeners soap came out like this as this is much more suitable for Verbena.

So I have made another batch of the Gardener's Soap (contains pumice, tea tree, pine and lime oils) and tripled the amount of spirulina used to colour it. Hopefully this will give me a much darker green, freeing up the pale green for the Verbena.

The other colour problem is for the Lemon and Lime which is meant to be a fresh zesty soap suitable for the morning shower. When I was making it, the yellow of the beeswax looked so strong that I left it uncoloured, however it has developed into a beautiful cream colour

This is fine and attractive but it doesn't say Lemon and Lime to me (although I've had lemon flavoured ice cream in Italy that was very similar). I've decided to keep this natural cream colour for Honey and Oatmeal (fragranced with a hint of vanilla) and am still working on what combination of natural colours will work to produce a pale muted lime.

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

Frugal February Looking Forward to March Madness

White Rabbits once more! I know February is the shortest month, but it seems to have gone by very quickly despite a cold grey period in the middle, when I just wanted to stay in bed until it was warm again.
Now it is warm again, well, 8 degrees compared to 2, does feel warm, it's surprising how small a rise in temperature is needed to make the change from shivering under the bedclothes to being up and about doing things. Better still, it now gets light at a reasonable time in the mornings and the dawn chorus is singing away before six, encouraging me to get outside as there is stuff going on. This morning they encouraged me to hang my washing out at 6.15 am. It was still dark then, but it is a task out of the way and the washing should dry now, during the day, at no cost to myself or the environment.
February, was all about the February Frugal Challenge, which was very much about battening down the hatches and getting through the dark days of winter, spending as little as possible. On food spending I did pretty well, the total spend for the month was £72.83 nicely under our £80 budget, but overall I am £50 over budget. This is pretty well accounted for by £26 on a new tyre for the car, £12 on buying an extra pack of computer ink to gain a £4 discount and £10 more than budget on new pyjamas for Oliver. None of it is exactly frivolous stuff but I am still annoyed by the day I was late for my business course and was charged £13.50 for 4 1/2 hours parking by parking where I knew. The following week, a bit of time taken to research parking, found me in a nearer car park for £4.50. A total waste of £9.
I am not too concerned about the overspend though, as my overall spending was still pretty low, including mortgage, insurances, energy costs etc, the spend for February was about £800. Adding £200 as a security net for contingencies, I now know, that I need to generate about £1,000 a month to cover costs, which does not seem too unreasonable. My previous salary was £35,000 but I will be much happier on £12,000, having to watch the spending and make all the economies, is more than made up for by the freedom to spend my time as I please.
Looking forward to March, the emphasis will be on how I am going to generate that money, and hopefully will be a whirl of activity on the soapy business, ready to launch ourselves on the unsuspecting world in April.
As cold process soaps take 4 weeks before they are safe to use, (time for the caustic soda to become fully neutralised), this means I have to make all the soap I want for the launch, this week. Yesterday, I made a soap for the gardener. It has ground pumice stone in it to help clean off the engrained dirt after a gardening session and tea tree oil, which is a natural antiseptic for scratches and prickles. I wanted to colour it a subtle green using spirulina, a sort of dried algae, but I don't think I used enough and given the base colour from the beeswax, it is now an odd sort of dirty grey yellow. I'm hoping it will mute nicely over the four weeks as the lavender soap did. Today's Soap of the Day I think, will be lemon and lime, a nice zesty soap for early morning showers.

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).

Cakes and Quail

Living the frugal life as we are, I feel the need to make sure there is a constant supply of cakes or biscuits in the house to keep everyone on course and stop them succumbing to temptation in the supermarket or newsagents. Sometimes I can be too successful though and feel that I am having to bake every day. On Monday I made a dozen fairy cakes and about 8 iced buns, by teatime this is all that was left of the buns

 and this is what was left of the buns, although I had managed to get two of them into hiding in the freezer.

 

It is all well and good people enjoying what I bake but I have other things to do in my life than to be baking constantly. What I needed to find was a recipe for a biscuit that was just okay, good enough to have with a cup of tea or a sweet snack but not good enough to disappear in one sitting. Of course when looking through recipe books there aren't many that are labelled 'Not Too Nice Biscuits' or described as 'the family will be unenthusiastic about these fellers and leave them in the biscuit tin' but I succeeded. Here they are the Crunchy Oatmeal Biscuits

and they have the added bonus of using up 2 oz of All Bran Golden Crunch cereal which we received as a free sample and didn't really like. I was worried that my scheme had gone awry when Rosie declared they were tasty but all is well, two days later there is still a mass of them in the biscuit tin. I was going to write up the recipe here but think it is unlikely that anyone except me will be looking for not too exciting biscuits. If you do want it leave a comment below and I will post it another day.
It seems only fair when talking about cakes that I should report my failures as well as successes. Yesterday I made some flapjack but somehow got the proportions of ingredients wrong. Rosie says it is like oaty toffee

It tastes good, like buttery toffee but it is so hard, each piece has to be sucked for a while before it becomes soft enough to bite. Delicious in its own way but not what you expect from flapjack.

Now unlike the biscuits I feel my quail news is really exciting enough to deserve a post of their own but I couldn't pass up the chance to use that title, so here is a trailer for my next post.

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.

A new purchase!

I have just bought something new from a high street retailer. This is not my style at all. I am very much of the reduce, re-use and re-cycle brigade so my first choice for purchases is the shop attached to our waste disposal site (a fabulous place), then ebay, then if I have to buy new I search the internet for the cheapest price. On this occasion though I found myself standing in a large retailer wondering what to do. Normally I am fending off sales assistants with a polite 'Just looking thanks' but today there were none in sight. I wanted to buy a freezer and could hardly pick it up and take it to the sales desk. I did eventually manage to flag someone down who could help me.
I wanted to buy it new, so I could get the most energy efficient I could afford. According to http://www.sust-it.net/running-costs-of-old-appliances.php if my chest freezer is twenty years old, which it well might be, a new one is on average 62% more efficient . In addition the seal has gone on the old freezer causing it to let warmer air in and  start icing up within a week or so of switching it on. I knew it wouldn't be energy efficient but since switching it off I have noticed a saving of 2-4 units of electricity a day at a cost of between £80 and £160 a year. I could buy a new upright freezer to tuck just outside of the kitchen at the top of the cellar steps for £150 which is claimed to cost an average of £25 a year in electricity. It is smaller than the old freezer, but then the old freezer was rarely crammed full and if need be I can still use the old one in an emergency. For I intend to keep the old freezer, I have room in the cellar and I will use it as a mouse proof food storage place in the meantime, although I will have to remember to prop the lid up a little to allow air to circulate.
So at the moment, I have a new freezer sitting in its cardboard box in the back of my car, I'm afraid I shall have to get the Weakest Girl in Yorkshire to help me carry it in but maybe Oliver can give us a hand.

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.

Sowing seeds for summer sustenance

I expect with a title like the Wood Be Good Life you were expecting this blog to be all about growing things and gardening and you were probably wondering when I was going to get on with it.
Well, today is the answer to that.Today I went through my box of seeds, removed the Thomas the Tank Engine toddler sock (don't know how that got in there) and sorted out what I could use, what needed to be thrown out and what I needed to buy.
Then I got down to it and planted two types of tomato (normal and hanging basket), peppers, onions, basil, lettuce and cress.

The tomatoes and peppers are planted in carefully accumulated empty cream cartons not only as it makes it easy to throw them away after use but because the little clear plastic lids that come with cream cartons do a really good job at keeping the warmth and moisture in the soil whilst the seeds are germinating.
Now with the exception of the onions, lettuce and cress, these seeds are all going in the airing cupboard where they will sit on the bottom shelf of the electric clothes airer until they germinate, after which they will go on the south facing windowsill of Rosie's bedroom.
I need to buy sweet pea and nasturtium seeds as I want to mix flowers and peas and beans climbing up all the fences. Also I am wondering of the practicality of starting parsnips off in bigger cream tubs and then cutting the base out when I come to plant them out. Or cut the base out now maybe?

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.

Stocking up - Part two

So after making a stash of carrot cake, malt loaf and oat cakes to see us through the week, I thought I would have a go at making cheese.

 Making a soft cheese is really very simple, you just take milk (I used 4 pints), heat it to 32 degrees and then add rennet according to the instructions on the packet and leave it to set. After several hours it will look like this :

Chop it into cubes and heat again to 32 degrees. This will encourage the whey to drain from the curds. It can then be turned into a muslin lined sieve to drain.

Once it has drained to the desired consistency turn it into a bowl and add salt and any herbs to taste. A little milk or cream may be added now as well.
So I had my cottage cheese, but what to do with it? One answer was to use it as a filling for ravioli so naturally I had to make pasta then. I made it by mixing 6 eggs into 600g of white bread flour and attempting to form it into a dough. My mixture however was incredibly dry and didn't want to stick together so I instead of adding more egg, I cheated by adding a little water. This seemed to do the trick although compared with bread making the dough still seemed very hard to knead. Eventually I had a lump which looked like this:

  Taking approximately a quarter of this dough I rolled it out until it was thin enough to force it through the rollers of the pasta maker, like so:

Then I kept on passing it through the rollers, moving them closer together each time until the above lump of dough had been rolled so thin, I had been forced to cut it in half and turn it into two pieces like so:

I then did the same with the remainder of the dough. Although I was going to make ravioli, I had far more dough than I needed so I used one third to make spaghetti and another to make tagliatelle:

These have both gone in the freezer for another day. Cost for all the pasta about 54p.
The ravioli I wanted to make was this recipe by the Hairy Bikers http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/ricotta_ravioli_with_a_25270 for Ricotta Ravioli with Soft Egg Yolk, Brown Butter and Pan Grattata. Obviously I was using my own home made cheese instead of ricotta. Translated the recipe called for large ravioli parcels to be filled with a ricotta and parmesan mixture and then have an egg yolk placed gently on top of the cheese like so

 and covered with the top sheet of pasta. This is then poached in simmering water for two minutes to give you a lightly poached egg inside ravioli.It is finished off by being  topped with garlic breadcrumbs and melted butter poured over. Here is the finished article after I cut into the egg to show off the glorious golden yolk of our eggs.

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?

Tasty Treats for Frugal Families

No-one can be healthy all the time, everybody needs a small indulgence now and then. Also I find if you are trying to steer your family into frugal eating, it is much easier to keep them on board if you make them something sweet, tasty and unhealthy . For these times I recommend Toffee Popcorn.

Ingredients
40g popping corn
2 tbsps oil
40g demerara sugar
40g butter
2 tbsps golden syrup.

Heat the oil in a large pan with a lid (if you can't find the lid, a baking tray placed on top of the pan will do instead). Cover the bottom of the pan with the popping corn. Allow to pop, shaking the pan from time to time to prevent burning.Turn the popped corn into a large bowl. Meanwhile put the sugar, butter and syrup into a bowl and heat together in the microwave for several minutes. Drizzle over the popcorn, tossing the popcorn to try to distribute the  toffee sauce evenly. Remember that the toffee will be very hot and the coated popcorn should be left a couple of minutes to cool down before tasting. I didn't.
This will make a large bowl of popcorn at a cost of 38p, comparing favourable with the £1.50 or so it costs to buy it in the supermarkets. It also tastes delicious.

Frugal Food

I went for a walk this afternoon with the friend I got Jess from and Jess's sibling Inca. Like most siblings they started bickering as soon as the saw each other and kept up the jockeying for superiority most of the afternoon. They were literally fighting to be top dog.
As is normal at this time of year, the conversation turned to money and the need to economise on food and I was able to boast a bit here, by telling my friend that I had only spent £40 so far this month on food. She immediately wanted to know how I'd done it and what I had bought. The answer is that we had made sure there was nothing thrown away from Christmas ( in fact the last of the turkey is being brought out of the freezer and cooked in the slow cooker overnight ready for tomorrow's dinner as turkey casserole), we have eaten out of the freezer and store cupboard and I have baked a lot of biscuits, cakes and bread.
My friend asked me to recommend recipes and I have actually referred her to two websites, the first is http://www.cheap-family-recipes.org.uk/ which is a great website for families who are really up against it as it provides a meal plan that will feed a family of four for £100 a month. I met the person who set it up on the Money Saving Expert forum http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/ and did a bit of testing of recipes for her and can vouch for the immense amount of selfless work she put in, making sure that the recipes were not only cheap and tasty but also met nutritional needs. I still use her recipe for carrot cake and also the risi e bisi recipe.
The second website I recommended http://mortgagefreeinthree.com/  is more than just food (although it has a fabulous recipe for oatcakes on it), it is more inspirational than that. Please don't let that put you off looking at it though, in the belief that it is run by some dreadful self help guru. Elaine Colliar who runs the site seems to be a whirlwind of determination, making much out of nothing and bringing not spending to a fine art. As the title said, she has pledged to pay off her mortgage of £125,000 in three years. I don't know how she will do it, as she is a single parent of two boys, currently on an income of around £10,000 but I have faith that she will.

Sometimes You Can't See the Wood for the Trees

Sometimes in life, things become very familiar, so much so that we stop seeing them.
A year or two ago I rearranged my welsh dresser so that all my dried goods: oats, sugar, peas, beans, lentils etc were on display in storage jars. They look nice, they are to hand, I can see when I'm running out and it freed up cupboard space for less decorative items. I didn't quite have enough jars to fill the shelf so there were a couple of gaps waiting for the acquisition of suitable jars.
Yesterday, I noticed this jar at the top of the cellar steps:

I'm not quite sure how long it was been sitting there, my guess is about ten years and I'm not even sure what was in it. From the look of things when I prised the lid open, it may have been spicy orange slices. I must have passed it daily without noticing it.
It is now cleaned up and filled with butter beans and has gone to join its brethren on the shelf.

 Very like the ending to a Victorian children's book, the moral to this story is that you might already have what you want if only you have the eyes to see.

Bread and Butter

No, I don't mean that figuratively, I really do want to write about bread and butter.

After Christmas and the New Year, I was left with a pint of double cream that we had not got round to opening for various reasons, much as I adore cream and indeed most fats, I was not going to eat a pint of double cream by myself so I decided to make butter with it.
It isn't difficult, simply put the cram into the food processor and beat as if you were whipping cream and then got interrupted at the point when it is whipped and left it to go very stiff. At this point add a cup of cold water and beat again until the butterfat separates from the buttermilk and it looks like this:

Pour off the buttermilk into a bowl and beat a little more, before turning the remaining lump of butter out on to a chopping board. It is then necessary to work the butter with a pair of wooden spatulas or spoons to get the remaining water out. You can buy specialist 'butter hands' which probably do the job much better but if you only make butter occasionally it isn't worth it.

After a few minutes squeezing and rolling, it looks like this:

Now is the time to add salt if you want, and work that evenly into the butter. 

So there you have a nice piece of butter ( I checked out of interest and it weighed 9 oz), and a bowl of buttermilk, which is obviously calling out to be made into soda bread or possibly buttermilk scones.

On this occasion it was soda bread:

It didn't stay like this for long, a few minutes later it looked more like this:

Muffins and the Perfect Poached Egg

Having new laid eggs again, made me want to make Eggs Benedict which is basically a poached egg on bacon on half a toasted muffin with hollandaise sauce on top. Delicious.

All I needed was to pick up a pack of muffins from the supermarket, but then I thought it would be cheaper and more fun to make my own.For bread makers amongst you, it is a pound of flour (I used half and half strong white and wholemeal) and then uses milk instead of water, the recipe said 12 fl oz but as always, I added more liquid when it looked too dry and then had to add more flour. A teaspoon of dried yeast (I use the sort that has to be reconstituted as I find it more flexible to have a tub rather than sachets), a teaspoon of sugar, a teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon of butter. Put all that in the dough maker and set it to dough and go away and leave it for a while, or thump it around for ten minutes if you are kneading by hand. My bread-maker was the cheapest model available, is now three or four years old and is invaluable, but I only ever use it on the dough setting to take the effort out of kneading and give the dough a good start that it wouldn't get otherwise in my none too warm kitchen.

When the dough was well risen ( I went out and left it for a while but I'd say a couple of hours after the dough programme had finished), I rolled it out and cut it into 3 1/2 inch rounds and left them twenty minutes or so to prove. The recipe said to sprinkle them with rice flour or semolina, I had ground rice in the cupboard which worked just as well but I don't think it would have mattered if I'd skipped that bit. Certainly not worth buying anything specially.

Then came the interesting bit of cooking them on a griddle which I haven't got so used a frying pan instead.

It said cook on a medium heat for 7 minutes each side but I found myself turning the heat down so they didn't become too brown too quickly. Probably because my frying pan is too thin.

So there you are, eight large muffins for maybe 30p. Four of them have already been tucked away in the freezer to stop me eating them all at once. Another time I would make a double batch, as it was a bit of an effort for only eight, I would also make them thinner as they are too fat for my toaster.

So this morning, Rosie, said she would like a poached egg on a muffin. The huge benefit of keeping chickens is the freshness of the eggs (when they lay) and the ease with which they will poach. All that is needed is to slip the egg into an inch or so of barely simmering water like this:

And a couple of minutes later, you have the perfect poached egg, like this:

DIY with help

Today is my day for looking after my grandson Oliver who is nearly three. It was a beautiful sunny day  so I thought we could be outside in the garden with Jess the pup, whilst I tackled a DIY project that I have been putting off for a couple of months.
I have been wanting to give the chickens a roof to their coop or at least one corner of it. Last winter they hated the snow so I covered the run in a tarpaulin which worked for a while but sagged when full of heavy rain and made the run darker than it need be. So I thought a quick solution would be to screw clear PVC panels to the roof.
 My first worry would be whether I could get the 8ft length of them into the car but we just managed it.

















That was in November and somehow the panels were put into the garage and left there. Either the weather was wrong or I was busy with something else or it was Christmas but today there were no excuses.
It was a lot easier than I'd imagined, it would have been even easier if I hadn't had a toddler climbing the ladder behind me saying 'What you doing? What you doing?' on a loop/ Pup also had to be shut in the house when I needed to get in the run with the chickens and then whined piteously the whole time.
Still it is finished now and will give the chickens a nice dry place to go to.

I was intending to post this last night but had one of those unfortunate accidents that happen when you have a toddler, a puppy and a bowl of soup. I left the laptop overnight to dry out and things seem okay now.