Ultra-Processed ... Me?

 

So I finally finished my book. 

Over the past few weeks it's been a case of pick it up, read a bit, think about things, check things out for myself, do more back-up reading and generally really let what I have been learning sink in properly.  This was no quick and easy read and I felt it was important enough ... to me anyway ... to read this book properly.

I liked that the book tells you right at the beginning not to throw away all your ultra-processed foods but to spend more time reading their labels and assessing how they make you feel ... and boy have I been doing this.

The ingredients for a simple cheese and onion toasty that I was making one day last week. 

 While the toasty was cooking I read the labels of the spread ...

... and the 'cheese'.

I don't find them horrific in any way but they are things that I have been re-evaluating.  I won't buy this particular cheese anymore but the spread will stay as it is one of the better ones I have found.  I do want to avoid eating so many starches, extracts, lecithins etc etc

Of course I had to look at my chocolate bars too.

Fingers crossed for good ingredients here!

The Aldi white chocolate is delicious and although the ingredients list is long I will still be eating it occasionally, perhaps just a little bit more occasionally than I have been recently.  😄

Overall I have found that virtually all the Deliciously Ella products that I have in my cupboards have been in amongst the best foods and treats ingredients-wise.  Take this chocolate as an example, just four ingredients in the chocolate and all of them very recognisable ... and it's tasty chocolate too!

What I will be doing from now on is keeping the NOVA scale in mind when I'm shopping and eating and just trying my best to cut back a bit on the foods that are in the Ultra Processed Foods category.  I doubt I would ever be as close to the 80 natural/20 UPF aim that I would like but I will be a lot more mindful for sure.

Now it's time to relax with a book that is a lot lighter reading.

Afloat

Sue xx

Flowers, Good Deeds, Books, Seeds and Deliveries

I was gifted a lovely bunch of pink carnations three weeks ago as a thank you for a little good deed I did via our town Facebook group.  They were unexpected and lovely, and have just lasted and lasted.  No doubt they will be going over in the next few days but while they were here they added an unusual splash of pink to my living room shelf.

The shelf is looking a lot more cluttered than usual at the moment, with my overflow of books having taken up residence since our holiday.  But do you know what I really like it.  There is just enough colour co-ordination to keep it looking organised and not over-crowded.

Well that's my opinion.  😁

A close up of the books for all of you lovely book addicts.  💖

My August edition of Kitchen Garden arrived this week with it's free seeds, which reminded me ...

... I have not yet read the July edition, or sown the red lettuce seeds that I meant to.  I must remedy that over the weekend, and I definintely want to get some cabbage seeds sown in pots ready to fill gaps that will start to appear in the wooden beds soon.

Although it will be a while for gaps to appear if I keep picking my spring onions one at a time. 😄

 I love being able to pick exactly what I need from the garden and not having to buy a whole bunch of something and having to find a use for it all.  Just one of the many perks of growing my own even in a much smaller space than I used to have.

We are off to the Welsh flat tomorrow to start kitting it out ready for use.  Fingers crossed that the first delivery arrives on schedule, it's the bed ... without it we will be sleeping on the floor!!

If you would like to see the flat, I will try and make a small film, or at the very least take lots of photos of it before we put things in.  And then maybe again afterwards, I guess I wouldn't be a true blogger if I didn't now would I.  😀

Sue xx

Homemade Oat Milk, Menu Planning and Ingredients

 

I'm getting to the stage of the Food Cupboard Challenge where I am mostly running out of ready made things.  I say 'mostly' as there are still some pasta pot type things and I'm sure there must be some things in the bottom cupboard that I could just tip into a pan and call a meal.  But I have been concentrating on the top cupboard this past couple of weeks.  I went in there yesterday to get a carton of almond milk and found I had already used up the last one.

So with no time to soak almonds (they need at lest six hours or preferably overnight), I decided to make some oat milk to go on my morning weetabix. It's a simple milk to make:

 I just soak 60g of oats for half an hour or so in my Nutribullet cup, drain them, rinse them a couple of times and then put them in back into the cup with 450ml of fresh cold water, and blend for about 30 seconds.  Strain through a fine sieve ... I usually do it twice ... and then decant into a clean bottle and put into the fridge, it's much nicer chilled.

These measurements give you a pint of fresh oat milk.  You will have to shake it up every time you use it as without emulsifiers it does separate.  It's not my favourite sort of homemade milk but when you're waiting for your breakfast it's a nice quick one to make.

I added the leftover oat 'mush' to some scones later that day.

The original recipe is in this book, on page 20.

I haven't been shopping for a few weeks now and I am starting to miss the supermarkets, I've actually found myself watching more YouTubers than usual doing food hauls to get my fix!!  But I quite like that things are visibly finally starting to go down both in my cupboard and in the fridge.  In fact the fridge is so bare I have been wiping down the shelves as they empty ... it's like a long drawn out spring cleaning.  😄

I thought I would make a menu plan for this week to make good use of what's left in there, incorporating some things from the cupboard and the freezer too. Before anyone jumps in and says that I'm not eating enough veggies etc etc, I will be adding things to these planned out meals, but I'm not restricting myself to writing down what ... I'll wait until the actual mealtime and see what I fancy, sometimes I am in the mood for lots of vegetables and sometimes I have to make myself eat peas.

The main point of this particular menu was to space out the last four bread rolls and three slices of bread that I have in the freezer.  I want to try a week without bread next week and I know if there's some lurking anywhere in the lodge I will cave in and eat it, so what I have in has to be used up this week.

Now it's time to grab my hummus, chop some celery and carrots and have my lunch.

Sue xx

A Case for Slow Living ... and Ultra-Processed People

... and read books in the sunshine.   

I love this meme, it really resonates with me, so I thought I would share it.  I've added my little bit underneath it to remind myself to read outside for a while each day. 

 I started The Year of Miracles a couple of weeks ago and have dipped into it a couple of times but it's not grabbing me.  You know the way a good book does when you feel the urge to pick it up at every opportunity.  It's not that it's a bad book as I love the way it's written, so maybe it's just my mood. In fact when Miguel Barclay's new cook book arrived with a thud on the doormat last week, I downed my book immediately and read his from cover to cover instead.

So when I read Sue's post this morning and she mentioned her new book it reminded me that I bought this book a couple of weeks ago and have yet to start it.  Maybe putting down my book and starting on another will make me enjoy them both.

I wonder who will finish reading 'Ultra-Processed People' first ... my money is most definintely on Sue.  😄

Sue xx

Books, Reading ... and Housework

I've been really into my reading at the moment, and also rather weirdly looking over to my various book storage areas on a regular basis.  I've been almost drinking in watching the books that are patiently queueing for their turn to be read.

It's the time of year when you can quite legitimately grab a book and sit outside for a while in the warmth of the sunshine, when it decides to show it's face.  The forecast for the next two weeks is for much better weather, so perhaps some more of my books will be joining me outside on the patio.

Maybe books need vitamin D too.  😁

Books as ornaments ... hell yes!!

These books haven't been touched for far too long, dusted yes, read no.  I will remedy that at the weekend and take the first of the Helen Forrester's away with me.  Tuppence to Cross the Mersey is one of my favourite books.

I often wonder which of my books I would choose if I had to pick just my favourite one hundred to keep and have to lose all of the others in some strange book disappearing calamity ... this would be among the ones kept for sure.

The Garden Cottage Diaries would also be on the list.  

The last book I read, Chicken Boy was really good if you have an interest in chickens and has earnt it's place on the shelf ... if not on The Top One Hundred List.

I've read all but the Kate Humble book from this little decorative pile.  Rather weirdly I don't even remember buying the Kate humble book!!

And that concludes a tour of all my living room books, I could count them I guess and see how many I actually own at the moment ...

... but I'm too busy reading to count.  😄

Could you choose your top 100 books and jettison all the others ... or do you not even own that many?

  My eldest son owns one book ... is he even mine, while my younger son owns hundreds.

Sue xx

Books, Bedding and Chickens

 

I finished my latest book this morning.  It's nice when you have enjoyed a book so much that when the last page comes you just close the cover and sit and stare into space.

This book has made me want chickens all over again. 

Poppy and Daisy

Especially my beloved Lavender Pekin bantams, they were such characters.

To take my mind of the end of my book I stripped the bed, aired the winter-weight duvet, washed all the bedding and then after a few hours of it blowing gently on the line in the sunshine, used the same bedding to remake the bed this time with the summer-weight duvet inside the cover.

I should sleep well tonight, dreaming of chickens while tucked into lovely fresh cotton.

Perhaps I need to start on the next book on my pile and quash all notions of chickens running around a cute little homestead.

But maybe I'll just read a few of my old chicken posts (and another) first just for old times sake, you understand ...

Sue xx

What Shelley Said ....

 

On my post the other day about the end of quarter round up of my non-challenge Challenge, Shelley commented that perhaps I should still accompany Alan to the supermarket for the 'pleasure of getting out ...' and that perhaps I would 'learn to enjoy browsing'. 

What a brilliant idea I thought!!

So I went with Alan on Saturday morning to Aldi, yep ... as you can see from the top photo it didn't quite go to plan did it!!  😂

In fact it went to pot before we even stepped inside the doors.  Alan had gone to grab the one trolley that I would push for him while he shopped ... I didn't need one I wasn't shopping!   I stood looking casually in the direction of the plants ... that for once all looked very healthy ... and what should I see but TOMATO PLANTS.  I haven't even sown my seeds yet and here were some lovely tomato plants all ready to nurture.  I decided then and there that I would buy two pots.  One pot has a single plant and the other has a little bonus seedling, so it's a sort of buy two get one free.

There were no small trolleys available so Alan had to get a large one so I put my plants in the child seat and left the body of the trolley for Alan to fill up ... he had a long list.

Then I spotted the Iceberg lettuces and knew I was about to run out so I picked one up, moved the plants along a bit and placed them in a cauliflower bag that I found on the floor.  That's it I told myself firmly, there's nothing else I need ... oh except for some Corned Beef for Mum and Alan's butties on Wednesday, oh and some paracetamol ... ooh look hash browns, oh well I might as well get a bottle of wine .... oooooh the dark chocolate biscuits are back.

You get the picture.

I'm not a natural born window shopper or a browser ... and it's amazing what you can fit into the child seat of a supermarket trolley when you try.

I'd go and practice this browsing lark again, but I am swiftly running out of money so I daren't risk it. 😄

I spent a total of £27.47 in Aldi.

Then I got home and my birthday present to myself arrived in the post.

I've wanted this book for ages and when I spotted it on Ebay I just knew it would be my birthday present to myself.  It was £20 ... gulp.  

But as it was priced at £20 plus £3 postage and packing and I made an offer of £17 which was accepted, and so I got it for £20 in total, I do feel a little bit better about it.  And I absolutely love it, so I am happy, happy happy ... and what price happiness. 💝

So just one day later and my cash in hand total now stands at just £17.72.

Ooops  😁

I have my vouchers and my Nectar points too, so I am not even slightly worried about lasting until the end of May.  This week I will be raiding the freezer and the cupboard and not spending any more money ... and also not going anywhere to browse, to window shop or to look at food of any description.

Sue xx

Three Months Into the Non-Challenge Challenge

 

Well it's three months into my limited spending challenge and I thought that was a good time to do a few sums and see exactly how I'm doing?

If you remember back at the very beginning of January this year on THIS post, I set off to try and live for as long as I could on the money I had saved up from last year.  I had made the cash by selling my excess belongings on FB Marketplace and at the two table top sales we did.  It was to be used for anything that I needed or wanted.  

There were no real restrictions and the only thing I really wanted to do was to bring down the food stash.  I have quite successfully done this, well to a level where nothing jumps out at me when I open the food cupboard door now and I can easily slide out the freezer drawers without things being jammed in.

 My grand cash total was £ 592.20 ... was there any left?

Yesterday I went carefully through my diary and added all the purchases up, over the first three months of 2023 I have spent:

Food = £340.66

Haircuts - 3 x £23 = £69.00

Car MOT = £45.00

Non-Food Items = £78.20

A total of £532.86 in cash spent.

(And one £10 Booths Voucher)

Leaving me with £65.61 in cash, a new £10 Booths voucher, £21 in M&S vouchers and around £15 in Nectar points.  I think I will be using all my vouchers and points over the coming month in a bid to hang on to as much cash as I can.  Even though I have averaged £175.67 a month for the last three months, April should be a much cheaper month for me, the only family birthday is mine, so no cards or presents to buy.  My next hair appointment is not until May and obviously the car is now MOT'd.

So I have my fingers crossed that I can get at least one more month out of my little non-Challenge cash pot.  What I really need to do is to try harder not to shop, to eat more from the foods that I have already got in the cupboards. I am so easily tempted when Alan says those eight little words ... 'Do you want to come shopping with me?'

Confession time, I have to admit that £37.70 of the 'non-food item' spending was spent on books.  I clearly remember saying that I wouldn't buy any books this year ... oh well I guess most of you realised that that wouldn't happen even if I rather madly thought it would!!

Well the wine might be all gone ... but the books remain.  😄

Sue xx

Three, YES Three Lots of Shopping ... including Rule Breaking

 

I broke a rule, but hey, it was only my rule, so I've given myself permission to break the rule.  The thing is, when you break a rule and you've gotten permission ... it's nowhere near as much fun!! 😁

Haha ... well I saw that Jack had brought out a new book, read a bit about it, including from all the twizzoks who always knock her down when she's barely gotten up from the last attack, ignored all that and thought I would treat myself to it and make my own mind up.  I decided to actually buy it because I know me ... and borrowing it from the library would have only delayed the inevitable purchasing anyway.

First spend of February - Book £10 

Second Spend - Aldi £20.41

Alan went to Aldi, 'Do you want to come?' he said.  'I don't really need anything except bread' I replied.

The outcome is in the photo.  Gosh there were a lot of good things to tempt me and as you can see some of them did!!

Having space in the freezer is a dangerous thing.

(The corned beef is for our next visit to Mum's, for Alan and Mum to have on their sandwiches.  I do not eat corned beef.)

We had to call to Sainsbury's and they had the recently launched plant based Cathedral City ... I just had to try it.  I'm not entirely sure why I bought the Puff Pastry, but I did.

Third spend of February - £4.70

Total Spend up to now this month - £35.11

I think I just need to stay away from the shops and start planning my Spring seed sowing instead, I really do not need to buy any more food ... as we all so clearly know!!

Sue xx

Reading, and My January Spending Round Up

 

As well as keeping my spending super low this year I wanted to get myself back into the habit of reading more ... it's not going that well.  

Over the course of the last month I have finished this little book and I still have three others on the go.  It just seems that I'm not getting myself in the mood for reading, and at this time of year especially that is really unusual for me.  I really must try harder!!

Anyway onto the spending round up for January.  

I shopped four times over the course of the month and the things I bought are in the photos below to refresh my memory.

6th January - £27 (including my haircut)

12th January - £7.80 - Booths

No photo for this one but - 22nd January - £7 - on a dairy-free birthday cake to take to Mum's.

26th January - £5.85 - Sainsbury's

27th January - Voucher Spend of £10

I am really happy with a total cash spend of £47.65 and a voucher spend of £10.

This leaves me with £547.55 in my cash stash and as you have seen from the previous blog post  ... still a lot of food in the food stash.  The freezer contents, which I have mostly been eating from during the last four weeks, have gone done really nicely, and I should imagine once I have finished eating from this weeks menu plan my inventory will have shrunk from three pages to just one.

So it's all going really well on the food front, I just need to up my game on the reading side of it.  This really is The Year I Stopped to Notice.

Sue xx

Yet Another Treaty Breakfast, Five a Day ... and What a Lazy Pug

Sometimes using up the contents of the fridge makes for delicious birthday breakfasts. 

On Alan's birthday I took him over three of these delicious looking and tasting Cinnamon Swirls, and of course I had the other three.  😁

I have to go through the fridge sometime in the next few days and check the dates that are on everything I have left, to make sure that nothing gets wasted.  Now I know for a fact that there is a box of Pan au Chocolates in there ... so that could be yet another breakfasty treat for us both!

The good thing is that if there is anything that needs freezing I have already made space in the freezer so that will be possible.  It would have been totally out of the question just a few days ago.

Breakfast this morning was a much more normal bowl of grapefruit.  I checked the can to see how many portions you are supposed to get out of one tin and as luck would have it the answer is three portions.  Which is exactly what I have already have whenever I open a can.  And it also says that one third of a can is classed one of your five-a-day.

Which is interesting as I was literally just reading about the Five-a-Day thing yesterday in this book.

Seemingly it was never worked out by health professionals ... as I had assumed it was ... but was originally launched back in 1991 as a public/private partnership between the National Cancer institute and the Produce for Better Health Foundation and was sponsored by fruit and vegetable companies, general produce companies and chemical companies that produce seeds, fungicides and insecticides. 

 So it was essentially just a marketing campaign not a health one.  

In 2010 they tried to find medical evidence to back up the benefits but couldn't.  So your five a day are only good for you if you eat your five a day in place of junk or processed foods.  A 2010 study, called the EPIC study, involving over half a million people across Europe for over eight years, concluded that eating a particular number of any random fruits and vegetables did not show any positive effects on health or any medical condition.

Sorry to get all semi-quote-y but I find this sort of thing fascinating!

And I won't show Suky this photo that her Dad took of her yesterday!!  

That's no way to photograph a sleeping lady.  😄

Sue xx