Oh Christmas Tree

We went for a gold and white Christmas Tree theme this year - I am lucky enough to have built up a collection of decorations that allows me to vary the colours each year.

 

Much of the last couple of weeks has involved sipping Baileys while snuggled in front of this:

 

I was so keen to find somewhere with a log burner - rare in rental properties but worth holding out for as it is a total human pleasure to listen to the logs crackling and watch the flickering flames.

Hope you are warm and comfortable in front of your tree, wherever you are.

Christmas Wreath

So much has happened since my last post, not least moving to Wiltshire Cottage - more on that coming soon.

We moved to this perfect little place just before Christmas - and one of the first things I did was to  make the wreath for the front door. Priorities!

I always make mine - I much prefer a real one and shop-bought ones are very expensive and a bit limited, usually to holly alone.

Part of the joy is the walk in the woods to gather the material, very midwinter - still and atmospheric...

 

I like a mixture of holly, broad glossy evergreen leaves and interesting firs.

 

 

I have been trained in Floristry and am very aware that this is not the 'proper' way to wire up a wreath - but works just as well.

 

First, take a wire wreath ring (£1 or so on Ebay) and make a padded base by binding generous bunches of straw to it, using twine:

 

 

Next, take even sized sprigs of your base fir (these were Christmas tree trimmings) and bind using twine or fine green wire:

 

 

Then, add your contrasting foliage by sticking the stem firmly into the straw base, and using a length of green wire to tie the tip of the sprig in place:

 

Until you are happy it is an even spread. Then, simply keep layering up contrasting foliage in this way until you are happy with it.

 

I prefer a lot of simple greenery, although you could hot glue on some pine cones or baubles if that is your thing. As a finishing touch I cheated and glued some red beads for 'berries' onto the holly.

 

 

The photo above was taken after a frost, so it looks a little sad!

 

 

 

Merry Christmas!

Celebrating Autumn

This weekend has been a glorious celebration of Autumn, my favourite time of the year by far. I have been revelling in the gloriousness of:

My lovely tweed jacket;



Glorious autumn colours at the park - no photoshopping required!



 

Chutney bubbling away as I sit with my laptop - this time Fig and Apple Chutney...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 ...and Pumpkin and Apple Chutney to start using up this lot which we picked from the allotment;

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And as I walked past the local florist which was full of autumnal colours, I treated myself to this lovely lot:

 

 

Happy Autumn!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm Still Here

Oh dear, bit of a hiatus, sorry about that.

What a busy month it's been - festivals, a weekend in Lynmouth and lots and lots of running. And not much frugality I am afraid. I have been saving a little each month - almost £400 in total now, which is an improvement, but not the strict frugality I was intending. Hopefully things are looking quiet and inexpensive between now and Christmas, and I can get my head down and save.

Its not all bad though - I have been doing a little eBay shuffling, and sold these:

 

(A little bit of me did die inside selling these beauts, but they have only been out of the box once in seven years, so a bit of a waste of space) In exchange for buying this lovely leathery creation, which I have been lusting after for ages:

Also, the focus in our household has shifted from frugality to weight loss and training for the half marathon. It's hard to do both at the same time! So far, I have lost 11lbs and am now running about 16 miles a week and swimming for an hour. We have bought more expensive ingredients as we reduce carbs and eat more protein. We are now spending under £150 a month each on food.

The running has been fantastic. I have found myself drawn to the trail rather than road running, and have really enjoyed the hills for the first time EVER! It's hard work, but the satisfaction of getting to the top and the fun down hill makes it so worthwhile. Here are some snaps I took during some recent runs:

Up on the hills near my home town.

 

 Lynton and Lynmouth, up on the top - beautiful. Yes I ran up through the forest from the bottom!

 

 That was a sore leg day.

 

 

I even found a heron, fishing...

It's hard to think about the pain when you are around such breath-taking scenery. I am going to really focus on trail running once the half marathon is over.

 

I am shocked at how easy it is to slip into old habits just be relaxing a little and taking your eyes off the frugal ball. Although our recent trip to Lynmouth was to stay in a cottage rented by LB's parents, I still splashed the cash buying drinks and food out. We stopped at a retail park on the way home and I succumbed, spending £60 on a jacket and more in GAP. I have had a (terrible!) haircut and have been thinking about having my nails done. Who do I think I am FFS - Kim Kardashian!?

 

But here I am, pulling myself back into line - just, can you believe, as my finger hovered over the mouse to buy a brand new SLR camera from of all places....Littlewoods! I know, I know. I seem to have been possessed by my evil twin temporarily.

 

No more! Its time to be sensible again and I need to remind myself of why I set out on this frugal journey in the first place - to save enough to be financially comfortable, provide some financial security in my life and to enable me to make choices - like a career change - that I wouldn't have otherwise. Also, to escape the hamster wheel of consumerism and find some peace.

 

So here I go, more posting and more grafting from now on.

 



 

Fit Frugal Friday

This blog has morphed slightly into more of a diary for me, and I am enjoying the way it forces me to be accountable to myself - for shopping, for cooking from scratch, for keeping up the allotment/garden and more recently for sticking to my fitness goals.

Frugal fat-fighting is high on my agenda recently, so I thought I could make Friday my Fat-Fighting roundup. So here goes:

Food

The fact is, I know what to do to lose weight and have done it several times in my life. The problem is more of motivation and willpower. So as both are currently in quite high supply (the impending half marathon) I have taken to doing what works for me - tracking calories. As fatclub is a frugal no-go at £20 a month, I am using a free app on my iphone called 'MyFitnessPal'. If you don't already know it, its a brilliant app which enables you to quickly and easily add what you have eaten, and which presents you with lots of lovely stats, graphs and even encouragement now and again.

This week, I have been positively angelic, well under my calorie goal of 1380 each day to enable me to save up some calories to 'spend' on what is looking to be a fairly boozy and foodie weekend of family stuff and of course, Friday pizza and Game of Thrones night tonight:

 

 

I have been eating some lovely food - generally two boiled eggs for breakfast, scoffed from a lunchbox in the car (I am a passenger!) at 150 calories and about 30p per day. Some days I have a handful of nuts (330 cals and about 50p) or like today, 1/2 an avocado on some crispbread (200 cals, 60p). I don't buy into the low-fat thing - plenty of healthy fats for me so long as I don't exceed my calorie allowance.

 

Lunch (at my desk) has been a salad of some kind, with some protein of some kind. Some days we had tuna and sweetcorn, yesterday this egg and cheese salad:

 

 

 





(eggs 30p lettuce from garden, cucumber 20p, radish 10p, sweetcorn from a frozen bag 10p, tomatoes 25p, cheese 25g 25p, red onion 5p (leftover) and salad cream 5p = £1.30 each)

 

Today at work we were treated to a pub lunch and I ordered ham, egg and chips without the chips! 

 

 

Dinners I have blogged about already, but have included sausage casserole with swede mash instead of potato, beef chilli with cauliflower 'rice' and last night, lamb steaks with broccoli and salad.

   

I have been a little bit hungry this week, but to be honest it is a nice change from being bloated and feeling greedy which sums up the previous few months. I certainly don't think I am starving, especially for someone who does a mainly sedentary job.



 

 

Exercise



Tuesday: Run 40 mins, 4 miles. I took it easy because my legs were so sore from the weekends gardening exploits. Cost - free - tracked using my iphone NikePlus app.

Thursday: Swim 35 minutes 40 lengths. Too hot to run so I went to the pool - cost £3.80.

Weekend Aim: Run 6.5 miles

Training nosedived last week due to *the joy of womanhood* but I need to get back to it if I am to keep to a respectable speed for the half marathon. I make sure I have carbs for breakfast or lunch on run days to ensure I have the energy to train in the evening.

Weight

I am going to weigh myself once a month. This is because my weight fluctuates so wildly from one day to the next - I can go up or down by 2-3lbs in any given week, and the demoralising effect of not seeing a positive result can throw me off course. So, I will next be weighing myself on 14th August - would be nice to have 5lbs off by then.

Frugally Fat-Fighting

LB and I are currently in full fat-fighting mode ahead of our half marathon in September and because of a general expansion of waistlines since Christmas - partly because of all of those frugal bakes in the early stages of my frugal journey. A quiche or muffins are cheap and filling, but they don't half make you fat! Also, I am not convinced that all of these grains are good for heath generally. In fact, I find I loose weight much more easily when I avoid carbohydrates in at least one meal a day.

But it can be tough to eat a high-protein low-carb diet on a budget. One thing we have discovered is 'cauliflower rice'. Basically, you break a cauliflower (69p in Lidl) into little florets and blitz them for a couple of seconds in a food processor.

 

 

You then put them in a microwave (covered) and blast on full for 1-2 minutes, until warm - without adding water. What results is something vaguely akin to rice and with a very mild flavour that soaks up sauce in the same way - but with a fraction of the calories. This was perfect with our beef chilli, padded out with kidney beans and red peppers to make 200g of beef go further. Yum!

 

 

Here comes the veg!

Ahh, that moment when you dig up a potato plant and find....Potatoes!

The Allotment is starting to produce and I am quite excited at all of this free food - well, not free - not yet anyway. You can keep tabs on how much my allotment is saving me here.

So far I have had broad beans, which I have cooked in a batch and will be popping cold into salads:

New potatoes - over a kilo:

And turnips - I haven't grown these before so not really sure how to use them. Probably grated cold in a Remoulade style coleslaw, or chopped like radish in a salad:

I am also regularly harvesting lettuce, perpetual spinach, radish and courgettes from the garden patch - green beans and cucumbers are only a week or so away, I recon. It is wonderful, this time of year when things start to properly produce in earnest, and all this fresh veg is great as we are both fat fighting at the moment. I just can't wait for the tomatoes and runner beans - and later the pumpkins, sweetcorn and kale. I also have some beautiful red cabbages coming along. I am not a great fan of the heat, but if you are a gardener you will always love summer!