The Hiatus

I went away! And now I am back. I know the golden rule of blogging is not to fuss over a hiatus, but in truth, it has been a busy one. And after a successful(ish) No-Spend November, a decidedly not very frugal December and January, I am sorry to say!

There was beautiful weekend in Copenhagen around Christmas. People, language, food, culture, place all perfect - I would move to Denmark in a heartbeat. Maybe I will one day.

 

There was Christmas spent at home...

 

 

There was a ring!

 

 

And there was a week skiing in beautiful Finnish Lapland.

 

 

None of it planned and all very impulsive - and completely the opposite of frugal. I don't know how I feel about this - in one way it has been a fantastic few months, in another I am disappointed not to have kept my frugal commitments, and have not saved a penny!

There is a constant battle in my mind between seizing the day and planning for the future. The former won over this time, but both the Lovely Boyf (or Lovely Fiance now I suppose!) and I are both in agreement, that it is time to calm things down. Especially with a wedding to plan and save for.

 

 

 

 

 

 

No-Spend November Update and Wow, Where Has Time Gone?

Wow! Has a fortnight gone? I blinked!

Between writing enormous bids for work, speaking at conferences and attending exhibitions, I can honestly say my feet haven't touched the ground. Thankfully now, this afternoon, I have just clicked on 'send' and it is all over (well, apart from the university essay due in next week, but hey, what are weekends for?).

 

I loathe public speaking, but it went well - I practiced and practiced and practiced.

I did manage a walk around Canary Wharf  in London one evening after a meal out (expenses, of course!). It really is a different world to my sleepy Wiltshire village and rural office.

And while I have been this busy, I have spent very little. Here is a 'No-Spend November' update:

Since my last update, I bought:

£8.70	Groceries	Budget
£41.98	Vets (Jabs)	Budget
£5.00	Work Dress	NONE
£11.00	Jumpers	NONE
£9.05	Asda	Budget
£35.47	Aldi	Budget
£21.10	Beer	NONE

I am amazed at how far we have stretched the food budget by just eating what we have. So far this month we have spent £132 on food, so with one more shop to do we will come in under the £200 budget.

I did buy a work dress and two Linea (a quality brand) 100% wool jumpers in a charity shop though, for £5.50 each. Very bad. I have no excuse other than I was forced to spend an hour in the town waiting and found myself browsing.

Easy to feel virtuous when charity shopping, but it is still spending money. I am pleased that I bought a work dress though (£5) and that the jumpers will see plenty of wear and are excellent quality, so with a bit of care, will last a long time. I adore charcoal grey, it goes with so much and I feel sophisticated wearing it!

 The pub was naughty too - £20 gone in two hours. I won't be repeating that this month. I resorted to it as a stress reliever, which was the wrong choice. Plenty of things I could have done instead.

I have squeezed some frugal food into the madness, cooking a quiche and vegetable soup to use up the manky veg in the fridge, coleslaw and some bhajis using old sprouts, onions and carrot - these were so tasty that I am afraid I don't have a finished photo, just the mixture (add egg, gram flour and cumin). Mmmm

One problem though... I have put on 6lbs! Sitting on my bum beavering away, eating like a lord while on the company business and all this frugal but filling food - oh dear. Really need to get this under control, my jeans are so tight. Was it Bridget Jones that said the moment you get one area of your life under control, something else goes spectacularly to pieces?

I have barely had a moment to appreciate what's around me either - far from the mindful behaviour I was trying to develop. I think not blogging hasn't helped - I love how this and others' blogs inspire me to take pictures and 'look up'.

So, on that note, as I am working from home today, I am going off to take the dog for a nice, long walk in the chilly November sunshine.

Yarn Along 11/11/15

Joining in with Ginny for Yarn Along.

Tantalisingly close to finishing the baby cardigan. I am fairly pleased with it so far - although I have sewn the arms on the wrong way (the raglan seams should have been visible) - so they will need unpicking and re-sewing. Nervous about the collar too as it is a bit out of my comfort zone!

Slow progress, but I am getting there! Reading is not so slow - this is the new Stephen King. It is a murder thriller rather than a supernatural story and it is excellent - very fast paced. I thought I would take a break from my usual self-help books, just for a bit.

No Spend November Week 1 Update

 

 

So, its been just over a week since my frugal experiment began. So far, so good. Here is what I have spent (apart from rent and standard bills:

 

£2	Groceries	Food Budget
£22	Haircut	Exception Budget
£54.98	Groceries	Food Budget
£22.69	Groceries	Food Budget
£4.10	Country Living	Exception Budget
£5.00	Wine	Pocket Money
£10.00	Bonfire night	Pocket Money

 

I am really pleased that we have managed to eek the grocery shopping out for what will be 11 days between shops - and even then I suspect I will only by fresh veggies, milk and eggs. We still have plenty of tinned stuff, frozen meat and dry ingredients in the store cupboard. By and large we have stuck to the meal plan.

 

I have definitely cooked more from scratch, making soup again to take to work (I worked out that my potato and leek soup cost 45p per portion!). A major win has been making bread again. This is something I used to do a lot. By not 'popping out' for a loaf of bread and facing temptation to buy all the things in the shop, I have avoided wasting money on food.

 

 

After the first beating. I use this recipe when making bread by hand. It is something I taught myself the hard way - many, many inedible loaves. But now I am so glad I did.

Delish for a veggie sausage and egg breakfast sarnie!

 

 

 In all honesty it has been such a busy week that I haven't had a chance to spend anything, so I have found week 1 pretty easy. I could have done much better on the 'pocket money' front though - so far £10 down out of the £20! This was because on Saturday someone very kindly offered to dogsit for us, and we went to the local village bonfire night display. Our dog HATES fireworks with a passion, so I haven't been to a display for five years.

 

 

 

 

The chance was too good to miss, so I bit the bullet and paid the £6 entrance fee, and the rest went on mulled wine and a portion of chips -  which was dinner. Not ideal and I am going to have to really avoid any expenditure this week to make up for it. But compared to a normal month when I would have spent hundreds by now, it's not bad!

 

I am facing another very busy week this week and am away at another conference, so I will be bulk cooking later tonight so I can just come home and heat something up. Here is the plan:

 

Day	Sat	Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri
Breakfast	Sausage + egg Sarnie	Porridge	Eggs	Porridge	Eggs	Porridge	Eggs
Lunch	n/a	Noodles	Leftover Risotto	Homemade Soup	Homemade Soup	AJ: Pesto and Pine Nut Pasta BT: Eat at conference	BT: eat at conference AJ: Hoops on toast
Dinner	Pork Chops	Butternut Risotto	Cheesy Fish and Spinach Bake	Pork Chops, mash and veg	AJ: Cottage Pie/Mixed Veg BT: eat at conference	AJ: BT: Eat at Conference	Pre-cooked curry or pizza

Here goes! Thinking about those lovely debt payments and the greenhouse of my dreams to keep me on the straight and narrow.

 

5 Things Friday - My Dream garden

I am joining Amy this week for five on Friday. Thanks Amy!

I am sorry to say that apart from admiring the beautiful autumn trees on a misty, early 2hr drive through the Cotswolds one morning with a colleague, I have failed to be present and enjoy or even find, the beauty in this busy, busy week.  Must try harder!

But I have been having very strong yearnings for a garden of my own this week. I have studied with the RHS and in the past have had and adored my own garden, even being self-sufficient for a time in veg and soft fruit. But life takes various turns, and although my professional career is in a good place (finally!) I don't have the time or money (yet!) for a garden of my own. I have had an allotment recently, but gave it up to study. Although this was a wrench, there is nothing sadder than a neglected allotment. I miss the rolling of the seasons and the connection to the earth so much.

So, my 5 this week are the 5 things I would be doing in the garden of my dreams this week, if I had one!

1. Composting!

My heart breaks to be throwing away veggie peelings. I know how amazing homemade compost can be for a garden and I love the concept of recycling in your back garden.

One day I will have a set of huge compost bins so that I can turn the compost regularly and get the mix between woody and nitrogenous grass clippings just right.

2. Leaf Mould

I can't walk past all of these lovely fibrous leaves without fighting the urge to rake them all up, store them in net sacks or a chicken-wire bin and turn them into precious leaf-mould! It can be sieved with topsoil to form potting compost, added as a mulch to enrich the soil...so many uses, and here these leaves are, just turning to mush in the rain!

 

3. Flicking through the Seed Catalogue

Not spending, obviously as it is No-Spend November! But that lovely winter job of circling what you want to grow next year and dreaming about fragrant tomatoes warmed by the sun and nice fat cabbage heads. I almost always used to grow more than I could possibly fit in, and have to re-home all of the refugees with neighbouring plot-holders and on Freecycle. I must still be on the mailing list, so will have a wistful flick through one evening soon.

4. The Autumn Tidy Up - Or Not

It is really satisfying having a good chop back of dead seed heads - although not in this garden - my parents', down the road. They let me take up the turf last summer and re-plant in the style of dutch designer Piet Oudolf. It is 'naturalistic' - that is, perennials and grasses crowded together and intermingled and because varieties are selected which look good when they are dead, you just leave them over the winter. They are all quite architectural seed-heads and stand up well to wind and rain. The idea is that it looks just as nice in the winter, covered in frost, as it does in the late summer.

5. Chooks

This time of year is usually a great time to give the henhouse a clean out ready for winter. I always kept chickens when I had my smallholding and one day I would love to again.

Is it Friday yet?

This whole week has been a total blur. Today was fairly typical and went something like this:

1. Wake up, shower, blow dry, make-up, out the door (I live 3 minutes away from work - although I am still late most days);

2. Work like stink catching up all morning having spent two days out of the office at a conference. Dash home to walk dog, notice the torrential rain and so change bed sheets and put a load of washing on instead;

3. Work like stink all afternoon, fuelled by serious amounts of coffee;

4. Return home, work like stink on university work from 6.30-9.00 with 30 minutes to gobble down a jacket potato in the middle. It turns out I have two important deadlines at work and one important deadline at university all due in the week of the 25th November. that is going to be a good day - not;

5. Keep body and soul together by going for a run in the dark at 9.30pm. I drove 5 minutes into our local town to run around the pavements, as our village is not lit. It was actually quite therapeutic - I tried to be as mindful as possible rather than thinking about work.

It is a meditation of sorts, although I am SO unfit. I ran a measly 2 miles in 23 minutes - very slow, but I am easing myself back in. It felt really good to be doing some exercise after what has been weeks. I don't know why I left it so long.

6. Drive home and get the slow cookers fired up. Thank goodness for slow cookers!

It took me six minutes to chop a leek, potatoes and an onion, cut a sprig of thyme from the garden and crumble a stock cube and some boiling water into the pot - worth it for our lunch tomorrow, blended, loosened with a little milk and with a bit of stilton crumbled in. I would have tried something a bit more exotic, but time was short and I couldn't be bothered to find a recipe.

7. Chuck 1 cup of porridge oats and 2 cups of water into slow cooker 2 ready for breakfast tomorrow morning. This will go down a treat after what looks to be a wet dog walk - it is lovely to have your hot breakfast waiting for you.

8. Blog! I realise that the trivia of my daily life probably isn't the most riveting stuff for anyone else. Especially as life is basically eat, sleep, work, repeat at the moment. But it really helps me to gather my thoughts and keep on track, as well as being nice to look back on.

And now it is time for a quick shower and to disappear to bed with a Stephen King - I really can't bring myself to read anything remotely intellectual tonight!

Roll on the weekend...hope you have a good Friday.

Waste and a Conference

Did you see lovely Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's documentary about Britain's waste problem?

 

It made my heart break to see how wasteful we have become as a society. 

As a household we are pretty good at using everything up rather than wasting it - and I don't think I will ever see the day that a pot of hummus lasts long enough to expire! If it smells ok, we eat it and largely ignore best-before dates.

I can't bear to bin anything, so usable items go on ebay,  Snaply, Freegle or the charity shop. Our waste clothes that are worn out go in a bag which gets handed to the charity shop as 'rag bag' - they get it collected and recycled for sofa stuffing.

The subject of waste was on my mind today as I stood for hours at an industry conference, on our exhibition stand. 

Professionally, it was a good day. But what a waste! Metres and metres of carpet was laid on the floor of the enormous exhibition hall just for the event.

I naively assumed that it was permanent, or at least stored and re-used. But unbelievably it isn't- it gets 'recycled'. 

After two days it is hardly dirty. Next week there will be another conference, and every week after that for years to come - what amazing waste of resources to use fresh new carpet every time.  Every stall has pens, stuffed toys, stress balls and brochures, USB sticks, diaries and desk tidies - all will one day end up in the bin- and all so that various companies can sell each other software. 

Makes me even more determined to live a simple life. I hate 'stuff!'

On the plus side, I haven't spent a penny today (that wasn't on the company credit card) and have eaten very well, so no-spend November is still going strong.

Christmas Cake

 

(Written on Sunday):

 

This years' Christmas cake is in the oven and the kitchen smells divine.

 

I was in two minds this year whether or not to make one. If I am being frugal, the most sensible decision would be whether I could make one for less than I could buy it.

 

Here is what I was up against:

 

 



 

Aldi do a 'Rich Round Fruit Cake' of a comparable size for £4.99.

 

I used this recipe with a bit of a tweak to use up what I had, rather than buy lots of expensive ingredients.

 



 

Here's what it cost:

225g/8oz plain flour 27p

¼ tsp salt 2p

½ tsp mixed spice 3p

½ tsp ground cinnamon 3p

200g/7oz butter 75p

200g/7oz dark brown sugar 25p

2 tbsp black treacle 50p

1 tbsp marmalade 10p

4 free-range eggs, lightly beaten 1.75

1050g/1¾lb mixed dried fruits £1.69

100g/3½oz blanched almonds, chopped £1.10

brandy - gift

Total: £6.46

 

This was included in my monthly shopping budget - but is way over the Aldi own version. Not a particularly frugal choice then - especially as there were a few items that I had to buy a whole packet of (black treacle for one!) which I wouldn't otherwise have bought.

I suppose I will know for next time. However, making a Christmas cake is a lovely British autumn ritual which feels like the right thing to be doing this misty, chilly November night. 

I will be feeding it copiously with Brandy between now and Christmas.

No-Spend November Kicks Off

Well, No Spend November Starts Here!

I spent yesterday preparing to get off to a good start.

First off - before I did anything else, I made sure I paid off as much debt as I could possibly afford this month. Getting rid of my disposable income to pay off my debts means I will have no chance to spend it!

Here was the debt situation before:

Littlewoods	109
Family Loan	350
Credit Card 1	451
Lovely Boyf	960
Credit Card 2	728
La Redoute	28
Total Debts	£2626

And very gratifyingly, here is the situation after:

Littlewoods	109
Family Loan
Credit Card 1
Lovely Boyf	960
Credit Card 2	728
La Redoute
Total Debts	£1797

I have gone down into the 1000's at least! The Lovely Boyf is thankfully a very patient creditor  - I owe him for a last minute holiday earlier this year (stupid!). He has insisted I pay off the credit cards with the horrific interest rate first, as his loan is interest free.

I paid all of my rent and bills. I got my hair cut at a Supercuts salon, having a dry trim for just £22. They have done a really good job and although would be nice to have the full 'salon' experience and not to have to dye it myself (which I will do this weekend), I can do without the £83 bill for my usual treatment.

This means that I now have my modest budget for food, £20 pocket money and vets budget left for the rest of the month.

After a bit of a stocktake of the freezer, I recon we have more than enough meat and fish to see us through the month, so no need to buy any more. I went to Aldi and did a big food shop, which came to just £54.98. This included a lot of items which were to feed our two sets of guests this weekend, which also came out of our budget, and included a bottle of wine.

I had to top this up at Morrisons with another £22 shop for eggs, milk and dogfood as Aldi doesn't do organic and I find Morrisons dogfood is better quality and still reasonably priced. I have spent more than our £50 per week budget, but I think this shop will see us through for two weeks at a push.

Then, I set about making a meal plan that we can follow this coming week to make sure nothing at all goes to waste:

We may chop and change the order a little depending on the weather and what comes up during the week. I am at a conference for two days and so will be late home and eating lunch out (on expenses, of course!) so it is going to be a busy one.

So come on No-Spend November, lets do this!

Halloween

 

 

 Happy Halloween everybody!

 

I do try and remember the roots of Halloween, or Samhein as it is known to Pagans. Samhein is a festival that celebrates this time of ethereal beauty and apparent decay and death, where the 'veil between the worlds' is at its thinnest.

 

It is a time to remember loved ones and some Pagans set a place at their dining tables on Samhein for those they have lost recently. I think this is a beautiful and really poignant gesture - quite at odds to the commercial horror/gore/Disney appropriation of this ancient festival.

 

That said, this evening we have a good friend coming over to watch a scary film, so a spot on the sofa with pizza reserved for my dearly departed Grandmother might not go down so well! I may light a candle for her though and leave it in the window.

 

I do recognise that children enjoy the festivities, so as our office had a carving competition and provided us with pumpkins, we are prepared for any trick-or-treaters:

 

 

We have also averted the risk of any 'tricks' without breaking the bank. These sweets were from Aldi at just 27p per bag, a grand total of £1.09 (the bucket is recycled from last year).

 

 

 



 

 

Last night we had another good friend over for dinner and looking for a cheap dinner idea but one that felt like we were making an effort, I dug out the fondue set we bought on a holiday to Switzerland years ago.

 

What a winner! We added two packets of Aldi Gouda/Emmental cheese (£2.28) to half a pint of ale (£1.25) and a garlic clove (6p) to make the fondue, melting it on the hob then adding it to the basin within the set.

 

To dip we went authentic Swiss, with various pickles (£1.87); a bag of baby potatoes (£1.49) and a loaf of nice crusty bread, cut into cubes (£2).

 

 

 

At £2.98 per head this was more expensive than a meal we would usually cook for ourselves, but it was a really delicious and different dinner - our guest (who also bought hummus and asparagus) loved it!