Getting Ruthless ... I'm Eating the Ornaments

Well Halloween has been and gone and the little pumpkins have been sat in the kitchen waiting to be used.  I didn't get around to making the soup the other day, so I did it today instead.

It was a simple enough job to slice the pumpkins in half, remove the seeds ...

... and then chop them up a bit smaller and add them to the Remoska with a chopped onion, some celery and a couple of big fat garlic cloves.  With a sprinkle of salt and pepper and then a glug of oil they were then left to their own devices for an hour while I read my way around blogland with my morning coffee.

Puttering away while I enjoyed my coffee.

Once everything was lovely and soft, I tipped the vegetables into a pan added some boiling water and a teaspoon of stock powder and left it to cook on for another 10 minutes before whizzing up to a lovely thick consistency.

So my two tiny pumpkins and their veggie friends gave me two gloriously colourful bowls of soup.  One for lunch immediately and one for tomorrow ... if I can wait that long.

And my little Halloween display has changed for a while ...

... to this.

My painting, the one done by my son which is usually on the wall here is currently at the framers being framed, so I thought I could get away with a little blue-ish display for a while.  I'm making good use of your card Sue.  😀

Sue xx

Less Books, Behind Closed Doors and Shopping Lists

 I'm loving my streamlined bookcase so much.

Sorting through the books and selling so many of them over the weekend has made a huge difference.  To you it may not look that much different, but I know what was there, what has gone for good and how it is making me feel.

I guess I need to go around the books I still have and have one final count of them, just to see how many have left the lodge.  I am seriously thinking of having a non-book buying year next year, or maybe allowing myself a set number so that I choose wisely and only buy the most important ones. 

 Yes, there are important books to me and there always will be. 😀 

Next on the agenda is checking once again behind closed doors.

 I did most of this before the table-top sale on Sunday and added things from under the bed and from the cupboards to the boxes of things that we took with us.  But still hidden away in there are the things that wouldn't have been saleable, and I really don't need all of them anymore.  My coursework for example for my nutrition courses and recipe files from the Happy Pear courses that I did.  I am going to go through all the recipes printouts and only keep the ones that I know I will use again and again.

I did the first folder this morning, this one was full of all the information that you are asked to leave for the house sitters when you leave them in charge of your home and pets.  We have decided that we won't be leaving the dogs with other people again now that they are older, instead next year's holidays will include them in our travels.  Ginger will be happy to go to Jason's house, or Jason will be happy to come to ours now that he's discovered that our Thursday market has a brilliant and very large bookstall ... and my son is as into books as I am.

I didn't waste any of the paper and recycled it for my own use as shopping lists or just scrap paper.  I'm going to have a lot more of these by the time I have gone through the other folders.  I may never need to buy note paper again.

Sue xx

Random Jobs, Filters, Dishcloths and Souvenirs

Alan has just got himself a brand new Gtech upright cleaner and a little handheld one to accompany it.  We know these are good as I bought this K9 version for the caravan and during closed season we had it at home in Wales for a quick daily clean around to save getting the Dyson out.  Then I used it at the flat and now it's with me here in the Lodge.  So when his Dyson started playing up a bit and the large cleaning head on it broke he decided to bite the bullet and get himself a Gtech too.

Well his sparkly clean new one put mine to shame so the other day I set too giving it the biggest clean of it's life up to now.

Everything was stripped down and cleaned.

Everything that could go in the sink went in the sink and soon everything was nice and clean.

Well except for my dishcloth that I decided to use to clean it.  

No matter I still have more new ones in the pack I bought long before I moved to this new home.  They do last well these cloths and I highly recommend them, Not I hasten to add for the 'antibacterial' properties, this really annoys me ... we need bacteria in our lives to some extent to help us keep our immune systems in good working order, so why is everything anti-bacterial these days.

Anyway the old cloth has now moved down a peg to floor cloth and the new one is on the kitchen sink ready for daily pot washing duties.

While I was having a clean up I came across these ... the only souvenirs that I brought back from our holiday in Spain back in May.  A triangular sachet of sugar from a café on the sea front in Port of Alcudia and two little shells off the beach at the front of our hotel.

Happy memories, at virtually no cost.

Sue xx

Single Use Plastics, Re-using, Re-purposing and Recycling

 

Single use plastics and people talking about them seem to be everywhere I look at the moment.  It's funny isn't it that when you think about something and maybe read about it or watch a programme about it, suddenly it's everywhere.

I was sat mindlessly chewing the legs off my Christmas Gingerbread Man ... you have to eat them legs first so you can say goodbye to his face ... watching a Youtuber teaching me all about re-using plastic bags when I suddenly thought 'you're teaching your granny to suck eggs here'  ...

... because in my kitchen draining over the cutlery tub before being put away for possibly the fifth time was a zip-lock bag, a regular occurrence here in the lodge.

It always makes me smile when I think about how many times I use some things, just take my green Stay Fresh bags from Lakeland for instance.  At £6.99 for just 20 that might seem expensive ... indeed at 35p each it is ... but when you think that I usually have around four on the go at any one time and these get used and used and used until they can longer be used and then they are suddenly very good value.  I can honestly say that I have used each of my current on the go ones more than 35 times each making them less than one penny each.  And thinking of the money they save me by keeping my vegetables fresh for such a long time I have saved so much money.

I remember last year visiting my Mum and she was really upset after watching a programme about cotton buds and their environmental impact when they had plastic sticks.  She had a new pack purchased months before waiting on her table to remind her to ask me what to do with them.  'Should I throw them away' she said 'and get some of the new ones with cardboard sticks'.  It only took me a moment to point out that if she used them one by one as she occasionally did and then throw them away it would be much better than putting the whole tub in the bin and  rushing out to replace them.  They would be thrown away in either instance ... but we should use what we have first. 

And that's just it isn't it, those of us of a certain generation were brought up to use what we have, keep what we buy for so much longer and not to replace things for replacing's sake.  We grew up with the milkman delivering our milk in returnable glass bottles, using our own shopping bags to carry groceries home from the shop.  Having our fresh produce and our fish and chip suppers wrapped in paper, and in the case of the chips it was actually recycled newspaper.  I remember taking a pile of newspapers to the chippy with a friend and being rewarded with a scallop each ... the Manchester version, which is a thin slice of heavily battered potato which was deep fried with the fish and usually for sale at 2d each.

Google Image

I think we were the original re-users, re-purposers and re-cyclers.

Sue xx

I KNEW it Would Come in Handy!!

 

I had a couple of crusts of bread in the freezer that I decided to turn into garlicky fried breadcrumbs to top the pasta bake that I showed on the last post.  

I forgot to take a photo but I can assure you that the addition of crunchy garlicky breadcrumbs to the top of the luscious cheesy pasta bake made for a very tasty meal.

Of course two crusts made a lot more breadcrumbs than I actually needed so my saved jar from THIS post, you know the one where we all sat in a circle and said 'my name is .......... and I hoard pretty empty jars',  came in very useful and the rest are now safely stashed in the fridge for another day.

It's been quite a cheesy weekend because I decided to use part of one of the shop-bought ready rolled rolls of pastry from the freezer, along with the last of the Vegan Ch**se Sauce and some red onion to make myself a nice big pasty.

I've all but given up on cutting out a circle for a pasty and now I just slice off the right size width of pastry straight from the roll and fold it over and crimp.  Anyway I love the edges 😄

I used one of my last five remaining potatoes to pad out the pasty a bit and add some body to the filling.  Gosh it was tasty.

I'll be back tomorrow with what I did the rest of the potatoes, because as well as it being a cheesy weekend it was most definintely a pastry filled one too.

Sue xx

For those of you who had a minor panic attack or were worried about my literal 12 hour vanishing trick, it was done by me for a very good and specific reason and there is nothing weird or wonderful going on.  For those of you who didn't even notice ... this makes no sense whatsoever, and I thank you.  😁

Do I Still Do the Things?

 

The fridge is fuller after a weekend shopping trip you can stop worrying about me now  😉

Someone asked me the other day if I still do 'the things that I used to do'.  

The short answer is Yes.

I still drink my coffee black, still eat the same foods, in this case yellow stickered strawberries with my morning Weetabix.

I still pick up the unused sachets etc if we eat out and don't use all the condiments.  This was from a couple of weeks ago.

And this from yesterday.

If we need anything from Dunelm ... and this week I needed a Winter-weight duvet for my bed ... we tend to go first thing on a Sunday morning.  Before getting our shopping we usually treat ourselves to a coffee in the café and for the last few months you have been able to buy a bacon bun for just a pound with each cup of coffee.  Now obviously I don't eat bacon but we still take advantage of the offer and get one each,  Alan then moves the four slices of bacon from one bun and adds them all to the other.  Meaning he is getting a well filled bun and a lot less carbs, which is the best thing for a diabetic.  

Well you know me rather than seeing a bread roll go to waste I scoop it up along with any other condiments and take it home wrapped in a poly bag if I've remembered or a serviette if I haven't.  I usually have a couple of twin packs of Lotus Biscoff biscuits in my bag so I have them with my coffee.

Yesterday we called to Aldi on the way back for a bit of shopping so I treated myself to a tube of Stackers, their version of Pringles, to go with the bun.  Which once home was filled with cheese, spring onion, mayo and iceberg lettuce.  It was a lovely lunch eaten while watching back to back episodes of Martin Clunes in Manhunt, series two.  Gripping stuff for a Sunday afternoon.

So the answer to the question is most definintely yes I still do all the things I have always done, eat the mostly the same things, buy yellow stickered bargains when I see them, pick up the spare condiments and binge watch pre-recorded programmes on the television so I can whizz through the adverts and not have to wait until the next day or week to see the next episode.  

I'm sure there's a lot more things that I 'still' do, but at the moment there are a lot of things that I can't do because of my ongoing health issues, which is very frustrating but I am working on things slowly but surely and I can see a glimmer of light at the end of this long tunnel.

Sue xx

Fences, Sheds and Sticky Backed Plastic

 

Yesterday the fencing guys came, and in the space of one day almost completed the fence in the back garden, quite a feat considering that they had to jack-hammer out the concrete blobs that had held the last fence in place.  

Our neighbours have been brilliant in letting us remove one of the fence panels from the old fence during all the works, which enabled us to take everything we needed to the back of the house and remove everything we didn't need via their driveway and back garden.  Having the annexe attached to the house means that we have no access to our back garden from the front ... which is great from a security point of view but a bit of a hindrance when you are completely renovating both a house and a garden.

So to thank them for this we are paying for the new fence at the back and they are just sharing the cost of a matching but lower fence at the front.  Very fortunately, and completely coincidentally they have been away all this week, so when they get back tomorrow all the fencing will be finished.  The guys have been very careful not to disturb any of their garden on the other side ... which is mostly grey stones anyway, but it is nice to see how carefully they peeled back the membrane leaving the stones ready to be raked back into position once that final panel is in.

The old fence panels are not being wasted at all as they are going to form the back and sides of my new tiny shed ... and Dave our handyman has been steadily acquiring used pallets to form the front.  I really wanted it to look rustic after finding this photo online ...

... so hopefully it should look a little bit like this once it is done, minus the side window and the raised front porch.

While all this was going on yesterday and Alan was busy working in the office I spent an hour lining the drawers of my bedside cabinet.  I used the Radio Times to make a template so I didn't risk wasting any of my precious wallpaper.

It turned out quite well, and once the paper was cut to size it was covered in clear sticky back plastic that I had found in the charity shop at just £1.50 for a whole roll, just to give it a little bit of longevity and make it wipeable.

It's the little touches that make a home feel complete isn't it ... even if it isn't quite complete yet!! 😄

Sue xx