Saturday 21 October 2017

Food Planning, Budgeting, Shopping & Cooking – Part 5

I’ve fallen a little behind, it’s been busy and my head has been less than good, I suffer from depression and sometimes struggle with just ordinary daily tasks, so as much as I am enjoying putting pen to paper….or fingers to keyboard……I do sometimes struggle, so please forgive absences, I’ll try not to be away to long!

So onto our week…..this is the week of 9th October.

The shopping bill looked like this….

  



We also had to get some extra bits not available from Lidl and we chose to shop in Tesco, so here’s the bill for that…..




On Monday Little Lady had a friend over and we all made homemade pizza.  I don’t have any photos, but the excellent pizza dough recipe is from the ASK Italian cookbook.  We use our breadmaker and put the ingredients in it in the order suggested for bread...yeast, flour then sugar, oil, salt and finally the water.  Our dough setting takes 45 minutes, of course you can do this by hand, but we use the time to chop and grate all the toppings!




Tuesday we had Prawn Stir Fry, I marinated the prawns in some Indonesian soy sauce, Chinese five spice powder, fresh crushed garlic and sweet chilli dipping sauce.  The veg was ribbons of carrot, kale left from the meals we didn’t make last week, mushrooms, broccoli and baby sweetcorn, the sauce from the marinade was enough to flavour the whole thing and we had it with a selection of noodle ‘bits’ gathered from opened packets of half crushed blocks of noodle….sounds a bit yuk, but they were in date and once cooked….how do you know?!  (you can always use these noodle bits instead of pasta in a Minestrone soup)
  
The Curry was a couple of leftovers that we had frozen, so we had a prawn one and a vegetable one, we served it with brown rice, homemade naans also from the freezer and some Indian nibbles bought this week in Tesco.  I’ll try and remember to get hubby to shown me the prawn curry recipe and post that one for you as it is completely delicious.

Friday night we chose to have the Beachside Paella from earlier in the week….its a hairy biker recipe that husband adapts slightly, really delicious…there’s a link and here's a photo….




Along with husbands delve into homemade batter for his fish, we made our own wedges instead of chips and I made chicken nuggets for Little Lady from Jamie Olivers Family Classics Superfoods book where he batch prepares these tasty little gems…..click to follow the link to The Happy Foodie who shares this recipe.  Here's a photo......




Sunday was Beef, Beer & Butterbean Stew and Dumplings….I always look up beef stews on Pinterest...like this one....




......and try different ones each time, if they don’t have butter beans in then I add them, likewise with beer which I swap out of stock quantity….I just like testing different ones, but I always stick to the same dumpling recipe (which I will also post another time) and make little changes, this time it contained fresh parsley, you can use fresh or dried herbs….or how about making sweet dumplings for a dessert with custard…plain with a drizzle of golden syrup and custard is gorgeous….or how about finely grating chocolate and adding it with….mmmmm…..chocolate custard or ice cream….

Ok…getting carried away there!

So that was our weeks food and minus the toiletries, a gift and Halloween lollies for any lucky callers and adding in the trip to the butcher, our total food shop for the week was…£80.95.  A bit more than was hoped for but we did buy meat and seafood for 5 meals…what a difference that made!

But I mustn’t forget that we also froze leftovers and bulk made meals such as the chicken nuggets and beef stew and fed a visitor on Sunday….so not bad.

I must also confess that I spent £1.50 on a charitable donation when I helped myself to a bag of windfalls from a cottage on my way back from work Friday afternoon.  They have an honesty box for our local Hospice, so I feel it’s a good exchange, the charity gets some much needed support and passers by use up the surplus that the homeowners kindly put out.

From these apples I made apple spice cake, an apple crumble and 4 jars of apple puree (lovely on Greek yoghurt).

So that’s the round up for this weeks food adventure….I’ll be going straight into last weeks in a day or 2!

Chat soon...toodle-pip,
Nora xxx

Monday 9 October 2017

Food planning, budgeting, shopping & Cooking - Part 4

Yet again the week has flown by....hello!  How are you?

The week started as planned with the ragu and chilli....both delicious.  Kerry Ann's Chilli could have done with being more liquidy, so we added a second tin of tomatoes.  The final thing produced 12 meals so there's a good 8 gone into the freezer and I had a small helping with the leftover couscous for my lunch one day.

Wednesday we took a curry and naan's from the freezer, we couldn't be bothered to scratch cook as we were both so tired!  And on Thursday, we both fancied fresh, so we had jacket potatoes with beans, cheese and tuna mayo and a huge salad.  It used up lots of bits from the fridge and we cut another batch of salad leaves from those sewn in early September by Little Lady.

So the pie was moved to Friday night....gosh it was good, but Little Ladys foraged sweet chestnuts were a faff to peel!  I can see why people buy the vacuum packs of chestnuts and why they are quite costly.  But this wasn't about cost, it was about walking and foraging and making use of what we gather....if you have time, it's well worth it and a delicious recipe.

Saturday we visited Mum-in-Law, a 4 hour round journey.  She needed some bits so that added to the bill slightly......we ate at the care home and had snacks when we got home.

On Sunday we exhausted ourselves again with some clearing and sorting that needed doing in our storage unit, the aftermath of closing our business....we are gradually moving to smaller and smaller units as we sell and donate our equipment.  It meant that Saturdays meal was cooked Sunday as we all fancied a warming, simple something and lentil meatballs fitted the bill.  We used Jamie Olivers 7 Veg Tomato Sauce recipe for the sauce..it was sooooooo delicious, a great combo.

So the receipts for the week total £88.06, but only £64.82 was ours, and that included 2 new shirts for hubby making the food shop £47.82.






We sort of have a plan this week, but not much thought has gone in to it, its just a list of what we fancy!  And some choices by Little Lady who is having a friend for tea tonight.

It looks like this: 

Monday - Homemade Pizza
Tuesday - Prawn Stir Fry
Wednesday - Vegetable Curry and Naan
Thursday - Seafood Paella
Friday - Date Night (to be decided)
Saturday - to be decided
Sunday - Beef, Butter Bean and Ale Stew with Dumplings

We have now started to put together the outgoings for September so we can see the total spend....and what we managed to squirrel away in savings too!  Another step closer to retirement.  

We can also see that apart from our wages, we have additional income from things such as deals on our debit card, eBay sales, Quidco cashback and other odd bits.  We hadn't thought about these during our budgeting, so I'll come back soon and talk you through those, anyone can do this stuff you just need to know where to look!

My motivation is still retirement.

Each time I want to spend I ask myself if I REALLY need this, or is this just reducing my retirement pot and forcing me to work longer!  

Don't buy stuff, buy time to live your life!

See you soon....bye.
Nora xxx

Thursday 5 October 2017

Recipe - Nigella's Breakfast Pancakes

First off....freezing the pancakes and toasting from frozen in a toaster on the frozen setting worked!

Little Lady convinced us that they were delicious, so we tried one each....she was right!  We were surprised....pleasantly surprised.

This now means that everytime we have fresh pancakes, I will make up double the amount and feeze everything that's leftover for speedy breakfasts.  Great!

We did have one slight niggle and that was that the reheated ones weren't as thick and fluffy as we'd have liked.  But to be honest, I think that was more down to the size of the egg....it was HUGE!  Next time it'll be medium sized eggs or a touch more dry mix....maybe 165g instead of 150g....that should give a thicker mix.

Being such a success I thought I'd share the recipe.  This is not mine, it is from Nigella Lawson's book Nigella Express.

This is what you're aiming for:




The recipe goes like this: 

600g of flour
3 tbsp of baking powder
1tsp of salt
2 tsps of bicarbonate of soda
40g of sugar (can be flavoured sugar such as vanilla or cinnamon)

These ingredients can be mixed together and stored in an airtight container for use as and when the pancake lust overcomes you!  Remember though to use your mix before it goes out of date....use the dates on your dry ingredients to decide when this should be.  I think I'm going to make up at least double this to keep on hand.

The next step is for making up the batter to cook.

For each 150g of dry mix (or with a large egg maybe 165g) you need:

15ml of melted butter
250ml of milk 
1 egg

(For the melted butter I pop about 15g in the frying pan I'm goig to use to cook these and use the heat from the hob as it is warming to melt the butter.)

You heat a frying or pancake pan or griddle on a medium/low heat, you won't need any oil.

Mix all your ingredients together, I do this in a jug so that it's easy to pour the batter into the pan, these cook quite quickly, so it certainly helps with the production line technique!

You'll need around 11/- 2 tablespoons of batter per pancake.  Don't spread or fiddle with it.  Just pour or spoon it into the pan, it will spread where it wants to be all by itself....clever batter!  It'll only take 30 seconds or so to cook.  Look for the holes appearing on the raw side, you will only be seconds from flipping to cook your second side.




You can tell the order that these ones were poured by the stage of cooking.

By the time the bottom left pancake has holes and is dry round the sides, the top pancake will need to be flipped, then just flip at the same pace as you pour so that you know they are all evenly cooked.

After we had eaten as many of these pancakes as we could wanted, I layered the leftovers in a box between baking paper, labelled the lid and put them into the freezer....perfect!




As I said, next time, I'll make them thicker by using a smaller egg or slightly more dry mix.  It really is a case of experimenting a little.

EDIT: We made these as round as banana slices and layered them on to kebab sticks with bananas and strawberries drizzled with honey, we've also made them larger and stacked 3 for an American Pancake style brunch!

Next up, I think I'll share the fishcake recipe, until then, bye-bye.
Nora xxx