In a bind...

I love new notebooks. They are full of possibilities; I could keep a journal, write poetry, make endless lists, change my life... They can also be beautiful and I am often to be found admiring them in the stationery aisle. They are also expensive so I have been playing with making my own.

 

I found the instructions in my "Homemaker" magazine which I have been given a subscription to. There is a similar set of instructions here. The paper was also free in the magazine and was designed by Alice Potter. 

It was a fun project, and a lot quicker than my usual makes! I am thinking that they would make unusual presents. After I've written that poetry and started my journal!

Hot Cross Pudding

When I was a child, hot cross buns were a once-a-year treat, consumed eagerly on Good Friday; toasted and dripping with butter. I have always enjoyed them so I was pleased to find a yellow-stickered packet at the supermarket at the weekend.

I had been looking out for some as I had spotted a recipe for bread and butter pudding made with hot cross buns on Frugal Feeding. Like its name suggests, this blog is dedicated to producing excellent food cheaply. Bread and butter pudding is a great way of using up stale bread; it is a favourite of mine so I was keen to try a variation.

The recipe, (here), was clear and very easy to follow. The results were lovely; real comfort food. Everybody cleared their plates and demanded seconds - you can't get a higher accolade than that!

Bread pudding

What do you do when you find large loaves of bread reduced to 35p in the supermarket? Fill your freezer and make bread pudding of course!

I used a Delia Smith recipe, but there is a very similar recipe on the BBC Good Food website. I used value mixed fruit, which has candied peel mixed in, so I didn't add any extra peel.

It's not the most elegant of desserts, but it tastes wonderful. We had it with custard for pudding. It should probably come with a health warning given the amount of calories, but I only had a small slice. Honest.

Feed the birds...

Tuppence a bag! It might have been cheap to feed the birds in Mary Poppins' Edwardian London, but it can work out quite expensive in today's England.

DH and I had a "How much?!" moment when looking at bird tables in the garden centre the other day, followed by "I could make that!". So yesterday DH got out his saw and put together a hanging bird table from some left over fibre-board and bamboo canes. He did have to pay for the chain so all together it came to £7.50.  It won't last forever, but it will do the job! The local robins found it very quickly.

Inspired by their father, DD and DS decided to make some bird feeders from oranges, lard, wool, seeds and mealworms. They used the instructions on the Blue Peter website here. They were very brave and got completely stuck in, mealworms and all.

Mealtimes are now turning into bird-watching sessions, and the children are learning to tell their sparrows from chaffinches.

A new crock!

I have been thinking about buying a slow cooker for a while now, enticed by the idea that it uses less power than my main oven but unsure if it is really worth the outlay. However, I spotted this little beauty on offer today in the supermarket. How could I resist? After all, it will save me money in the long run. Honestly.

So now I've just got to learn how to use it! I know that lots of you in this corner of the blogosphere use one, and I am looking forward to getting to grips with it.

Tuna fish cakes

After our main meal yesterday I had some left over mashed potato and sweetcorn. I never get the quantity of mashed potato right. Why is that?!  So, inspired by Shara at Mama's Mission II, I adapted my usual salmon fish cake recipe to use tuna and sweetcorn.

To start off I boiled and mashed some more potato. The quantity doesn't matter too much; I normally make as much as I would for a normal meal. You need enough to bind the fish together and if you have too much you end up with fish flavoured potato cakes! I added one 185g tin of tuna, the leftover sweetcorn and some seasoning to the potato, mixed it together with my hands and shaped into 8 fish cakes.

It doesn't look very appetizing at this stage!

Then comes the fun part! I set up bowls of flour, beaten egg and breadcrumbs in a production line. 

 

Each fish cake gets dunked in each bowl in turn until you end up with something that looks like this:

These are then fried until the breadcrumb coating is crisp on each side:

They can be served with salad but this time of year we have ours with veggies. They make a tasty, simple meal. I used a value brand of tuna, (still caught by pole and line), so it was also ethically sound and cheap. I like it when these two things combine!

Sealed Pot Challenge

I stumbled on this over at Sft's entertaining blog "Life After Mortgage". It is such a brilliant idea that I just had to sign up. The basic idea is to save loose change in a sealed pot. Hopefully after a year this will be a reasonable amount of money which can be put towards a specific goal. 

I have decided to save up towards a family trip to the theatre. I would love to take the kids as it is something that we have never done. I looked into going to see a production for my birthday in September, but couldn't justify spending that much money at the time. Don't get me wrong, we are very fortunate in that we have a reasonable income, I just like to use it wisely! 

I had great fun making the pot. It started off life as a jar of hot chocolate! I have decided to collect all the 50p and 20p coins that come my way. It may be we have enough to go and see the local amateur dramatic society, or it could be a trip to London to see a musical. I'll find out in a year's time!

Is it really cheaper to make scones from scratch?

In our family we have a bit of an addiction to cream teas. Whenever we visit the West Country we seek them out; we have been known to fit in one each day of a holiday. We also enjoy making our own at home, especially when the weather is as miserable as it has been this weekend. I think it reminds us that summer will come again!

I enjoyed writing last week's post on the cost of baking Victoria Sponge from scratch so I decided to take the same approach with scones. I didn't buy the cheapest "value" scones, as these contained fruit and DD considers cooked dried fruit to be an Abomination, only tolerated under sufferance. The scones I did buy claimed to be made with butter, so this time I used proper butter in my baking.

The ingredients!

The recipe I used was similar to the one on the BBC website here, except that I used milk rather than beaten egg to glaze them. This time I coerced DD into helping measure the energy used. Following Angela's advice I baked twice the normal amount to save even more energy. I froze half before they could be eaten!

Mine are the scones on the left.

My scones turned out to be the same weight as the shop bought scones. Mine worked out at 8p each, and the shop bought ones were 16.7p each. The shop bought scones looked neater, apparently mine have "character", but the home made variety were much lighter. So now the only question is, cream first or jam?

Creating a Victorian boy

DS is studying the Victorians at school at the moment. So far he is loving it. In a few weeks he will be off on a school trip to Preston Manor for a Victorian day, where he will spend the day as a Victorian servant. I think this may come as something of a shock!

Of course, he has to look the part. Fortunately the school has cut back a bit on dressing up days. I have known parents pay out quite a lot of money for a costume on the internet. I wanted a waistcoat, but I wasn't about to spend much on something for just one day! I trawled the charity shops and came up with a small adult shirt:

It was actually quite a nice shirt and I felt a bit guilty chopping it up! I shortened it and cut off the sleeves and collar. Once I had hemmed all that I took it in a bit at the sides so now it looks like this:

It's a bit more "Little Lord Fauntleroy" than "Oliver Twist" - he will have to be a valet rather than a gardener!

After all that sewing I am now determined to overcome my phobia of sewing machines. My Mother-in-Law gave me hers last year but I haven't had the courage to use it yet! I think my fear stems from being absolutely useless at needlework at school. There are so many things I want to make, I just need to have some gumption and get on with it!

Is it really cheaper to bake from scratch?!

One thing that I often read on the blogs that I enjoy is that it is cheaper to cook from scratch. Being of a scientific and mathematical bent I decided to conduct an experiment to find out if this is actually true. I promise I won't befuddle you with calculations!

I decided to bake a Victoria Sponge from scratch and compare the results with the shop bought variety. To be fair I used the cheapest ingredients I could find and bought the value brand sponge, (for research purposes you understand!).

I was a bit dubious about using the "spreadable" butter-like spread. I usually use value butter but the spread claimed to be suitable for baking and it was considerably cheaper, so in the basket it went. I couldn't bring myself to buy caged hens' eggs, but you can get free range eggs fairly cheaply these days.

I use the weighing eggs method as I have a rather nice pair of kitchen balances. I am not going to write out the recipe here. (The words "suck eggs" comes to mind!)  It is available here, although this recipe promotes rather more expensive ingredients.

While the oven was heating up and the cake was baking I measured the electricity I used with an energy monitor. I sat there with a stopwatch and the monitor watching the little light on the oven go on and off. I really need to get out more...

In case it isn't obvious, the one on the left is mine! I then weighed both cakes and settled down to some serious work with the calculator. I was very pleased to find out that my cake cost 18.3p per 100g and the shop bought cake was 24.6p per 100g! 

But what of the taste? I found some very willing volunteers, blindfolded them and gave them small slithers of each cake. Fortunately for my self esteem they both preferred my cake. In fact, the shop bought cake is now trifle! I was also happy to find that the butter-substitute gave as good a taste as the real thing, so there will be a tub in the fridge from now on.

Of course there are a lot of other reasons to cook from scratch apart from cost. Knowing what's in your food and environmental factors spring to mind. I am now wondering what else I can compare...

Courgette loaf

This morning saw me trawling around the supermarket. Even though I honoured Stoptober more in the breach than the observance, I had more or less emptied the freezer and needed stocks urgently. I was very pleased to find some yellow-stickered courgettes and bananas lurking in the fruit and veg section.

Using bananas was not going to be much of a challenge, but courgettes? Neither of my children will touch them, not even DS, who can be relied on to finish off the salad bowl and prefers apples to chocolate cake. I had vague memories of a recipe for courgette loaf in the back of my recipe file, so I bought the despised courgettes anyway.

I had to adapt the recipe, (which originally used buckwheat flour), but the results were very well received. It makes a semi-healthy "back from school" snack. I like it spread with margarine, but the kids preferred it plain. This quantity makes two loaves, which can be frozen or stored in the fridge for up to three weeks, if you can resist them for that long!

Ingredients

350g grated courgette (no need to peel!)
2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tbsp cinnamon
165g plain flour
165g wholemeal plain flour
275ml sunflower oil
350g caster sugar
175g raisins or sultanas
3 eggs

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180C/gas 4

2. Grease and line 2 2lb loaf tins.

3. Mix all ingredients together in a bowl.

4. Divide mixture between tins.

5. Bake for about 50 minutes until a metal skewer inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean.

Mock Turkey

I have been really enjoying "The Wartime Farm" on the BBC. This is the first of the Farm series that I have seen and I have been very impressed with it. So much so that I spent some of my birthday money on the book!

I had particularly enjoyed the Christmas episode where Ruth knocked up a "Mock Turkey" or "Murkey" for Christmas dinner. It is basically made of stuffing which is  much my family's favourite part of a roast dinner. I had to give it a go! There are lots of recipes for Mock Turkey out there on the web. This one is basically sausagemeat, bread crumbs, herbs and seasoning held together with grated onions and apples. The results are shaped into the shape of a turkey, using parsnips for legs, and then covered with bacon.

As I don't suppose World War Two housewives had food processors I grated the onions and apples by hand. Onions and I don't mix, and by the time I had finished I looked like I had been weeping copiously. Instead of buying sausagemeat, which in my supermarket comes ready seasoned and "herbed", I skinned plain sausages. The psuedo-fowl was baked for an hour and a half in a medium oven.

Of course, it tastes absolutely nothing like turkey. I liked it as I am a sausage fan. DH and DS were similarly keen, preferring it to the real thing, but DD was not so enamoured, labelling it "stodgy". I still have to work out what to do with the leftovers. I am sure the original cooks wouldn't have let any go to waste!

Living Simply

As I was buzzing around the supermarket this morning I saw something that made me stop, and it's had me thinking ever since. In the magazine aisle there was a publication dedicated to simple living. It was full of beautiful photography, with articles on such topics as baking bread and country walks. It was also £4.99 a month! It had an article entitled "Things to wake up and want..."

In my little blog biography I say that "I try to live a simple life". I am trying to work out what this means. To me it means appreciating what I have been blessed with, using resources wisely, treading lightly on the earth, enjoying God's world and living in community with others. Although I do not claim to have the frugal lifestyle of some of those bloggers I admire, to me a simple life includes contentment with what I have. Needless to say, I didn't buy the magazine!

Excited by a water bill!

Back at the beginning of the year Southern Water dug up our road and installed water meters to everyone who hadn't already signed up to one. I was not happy, and not just because I couldn't get on my drive! As a family of four, where the washing machine should probably be subject to the EU working time directive, I considered that we would be considerably worse off. So I was very surprised when the bill arrived today, and it is LESS than it was before! 

Apparently we use as much water as a household of two with no garden. Now, I have not been deliberately frugal with the water. I am no Frugal Queen! We have a water butt in the garden, and when that runs out I use spare water from the kitchen. (The water which runs from the tap while the boiler gets into gear.) We don't have a dishwasher, but I do plenty of washing up. DH showers every day and DD is a proto-teenager. (Need I say more?) So, without being smug, and without expecting an answer, I must ask - what on earth does an "average" family of four use all that water on?!

Thrifty shopping

I got ridiculously overexcited yesterday when I discovered a new charity shop in town. Not that we were lacking them before, I can think of eight without effort, but this is a Salvation Army one.

This made me happy on many levels! I have friends who work for the Salvation Army, I know that they do a lot of good and their shops tend to be cheaper. Some charity shops can be more expensive than others, especially for books, which is the section I head for first. I know it's for a good cause and it's environmentally sound, but in my more selfish moments I resent paying nearly as much for a second-hand book as for a new paperback in the supermarket. However, yesterday I was very happy when I picked up a copy of "Matilda" by the inestimable Roald Dahl for 25p! My lovely son was very pleased too and immediately curled up to read it.