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

Edited: She sat at the back ...

 

The Mud Maid sculpture, representing a sleeping woman.

Located in The Lost Gardens of Heligan, in Cornwall, in the Southwest of England.

The artists are brother and sister Sue and Pete Hill.

"She sat at the back

and they said she was shy,

she led from the front

and they hated her pride.

They asked her advice

and then questioned

her guidance.

They branded her loud

then were shocked by her

silence.

When she shared no ambition

they said it was sad

so she told them her dreams

and they said she was mad.

They told her they'd listen

then covered their ears

and gave her a hug

whilst they laughed at her

fears.

And she listened to all of it

thinking she should

be the girl they told her to be

best as she could.

But one day she asked

what was best for herself

instead of trying to please

everyone else.

So she walked to the forest

and stood with the trees,

she heard the wind whisper

and dance with the leaves.

And she spoke to the willow,

the elm and the pine

and she told them what

she'd been told,

time after time.

She told them she never

felt nearly enough

she was either too little,

or far, far too much.

Too loud or too quiet,

too fierce or too weak,

too wise or too foolish,

too bold, or too meek.

Then she found a small clearing

surrounded by firs

and she stopped and she heard

what the trees said to her.

And she sat there for hours

not wanting to leave -

for the forest said nothing,

it just let her breathe."

Becky Hemsley, Breathe

Edited to add:  I am absolutely fine, I just LOVE poetry and this one resonated so deeply with me.  

As girls and women we are so often told that we are this or we are that, and are led to believe that we are who they say we are.  When we find our voice, our feet or our freedom and break away to be ourselves, there are almost always those who would try and cram us back into the original mould.  The sooner we learn to break that mould, the sooner we are ourselves.  I broke mine many years ago.

The trees know the truth. 🌳

Sue xx

Food Cupboards ... and Weekend Watching

I've had many food cupboards through the years, and just through the years that I have been a blogger I have had more than my fair share of kitchens and cupboards.  So here a few of them, and this very plain one looks so unassuming ... until you open the doors.

This one was by far my favourite food cupboard, the best proper pantry cupboard that I have ever had.  All the food in one place and empty jars ready for filling were kept in there as well.  I did a lot of shopping from Approved Foods in the years I had this cupboard which was in our little 1930's bungalow in Berkshire.

As this alternative photo of it shows!

Gosh, I have so many photos of this particular food cupboard with it's many layouts of food ... I could bore you for hours!!

Some cupboards were smaller, but almost as well stocked.

 Some were smaller and held less, this was when the freezers were more in use, and usually filled with home preserved goodies from the land outside the house.

Sometimes a cupboard would be sparse, in this case I was doing the Live Below the Line Challenge, living off £5 for five days and raising money for charity.

I could go on and on, but I won't ... I fell down a time consuming rabbit hole of immense proportions when I typed the words 'food cupboard' into my old blog's search box and found all these photos.

Instead I'll share a couple of YouTubers who are doing Store Cupboard Challenges of their own for you to watch at your leisure.

https://youtu.be/C3kPIi4C6HY

On Little Mountain Ranch it's not so much of a challenge, but wow, what a larder. 😀

https://youtu.be/IgJ9VYxo080

And someone with possibly the lowest stock of food in her cupboards is Rebecca, over at Rationbook Rebecca.  She lives on wartime rations off and on and has a lovely channel.

https://youtu.be/_LHS4J5vDEU

I hope you all have a lovely weekend.

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

The Food Cupboard ... and Guess What I Forgot to Do?

The Food Cupboard as she will from now on be known, the star of my kitchen and one of my favourite pieces of furniture.

She is actually a Welsh Bread and Cheese Cupboard, and for those of you who haven't read about her before you can read more about her on this post on my old blog.   And here is a slightly more expensive looking one that I found online.  Anyway to move on, I never know whether to call this my larder, my pantry, my store cupboard or what, and giving her the full title seems silly.  So from now on she is simply The Food Cupboard.

What do you call your food storage area/cupboard?

I showed this photo on the 'mince pie' post the other day, but I'll put it on again as it shows clearly what the top section looked like until sort out day.  Lots of foods thrown in slightly willy nilly and the things at the front of the top shelf hiding all my big storage jars and putting me off struggling to get them down.

I'd call it organised chaos ... but it's not actually that organised!!

The left-hand side of the bottom cupboard ...

... oops I had started emptying it before I remembered I was supposed to be taking photos!!

The things on the floor were from the gap in the photo higher up.

These are the contents of just the left-hand side of the lower cupboard.  You can see now why I am sometimes known as the Tetris Queen!!  Wow ... just how did all that fit into half of the cupboard?

The other half was somewhat easier to empty as it contained baskets of food, the top two held all sorts of sauces and jars and the bottom wicker one was full of pasta and nuts.

I got all the food out a section at a time, checked the dates on everything and put anything that had a 2024 or beyond date to one side.  

All this was done in fits and starts with lots of rests in between, so in all this sorting and organising took me the full day.  By the time I finished it was too dark to take any photos, as the light in my kitchen is awkward at the best of times and not good for photographing inside anything at night.

So here are the photographs I took the next day.

The top cupboard now holds all the foods that I need to eat first, anything with a Best Before date sometime in 2023 or earlier ... and as you can see this actually goes back to 2020 in the case of  some the homemade jams and marmalades.

And hiding behind the lower doors are all the foods with a date of 2024 and onwards.

At the front are my big storage jars, this is so much safer than me struggling to getting them down from the top shelf of the top cupboard, and of course now that they are more easily accessible I should use them more.  Behind them are all the canned foods, jars and everything else that is later dated.

The basket still holds all the pasta with the newest being on the bottom and the ones to be used first at the top.  While I was doing all this I looked through the little drawer unit that sits to the right of the food cupboard for the tins of potatoes that I knew were in there ...and found a whole drawer of pasta.  So a s well as being the Tetris Queen it seems I am also the Pasta Buying Queen!!

It took me a whole day to do it all, but it was so worth it.  I keep peeking into the properly organised cupboards while I'm waiting for the kettle to boil for a cup of coffee ... yes I'm sad like that.  😄

And what did I forget to do ... yep, I was supposed to be making an inventory!!

Oh well, as least my mind has been refreshed and I know what I have to menu plan from for the next few weeks months.

Sue xx

The Final Freezer Based Menu Plan

 

Week four of my menu planning and it's still going well.  I need to turn this into a regular habit and carry it forward as I begin on the predominately food cupboard based meals.  What is it they say, do something for 21 days and it becomes an easier habit.

If you look at this photo of last week's meals, you can see that I am getting quite good at sticking to the menu now.  I don't always eat the meals on the day that I say I will eat them, because sometimes when you have something written down for one day later in the week you suddenly find yourself really wanting it NOW.  So I do, and simply cross it off as I eat it.

Alan shared the Quorn and Vegetable curry meal with me and offered to buy a chippy tea the following night ... I was hardly going to turn that down now was I.  😄  

There are a couple of other things not eaten but obviously they are still available to eat, so the quesadillas have moved forward to this week, but the Miguel Barclay Potato and Leek pasty will have to wait until I make some pastry.

I am having a quiet day today as I really attacked the food cupboard yesterday, emptying it all out in sections, cleaning, reorganising and refilling.  I had to do it all in little bursts as it was tough on my back with the lifting and stretching and on my foot when I was kneeling on the floor.

But:

'Something then rest ... '

Is better than nothing at all, we should all be kinder to ourselves.

But oh boy is it nice looking into the cupboards now!  I'll show you the photos on here tomorrow ... I promise.  😀

Sue xx

Moving on ... and Distracted by Mini Mince Pies

I think it's almost time to think of moving on from the freezer emptying challenge.  

This week will be the last week of the foods being mostly from the freezer, and then I should have made enough space to be able to put any excess portions that I make into the freezer as there should be at least one totally empty drawer.  What is left in there should be just additions to the meals that I can make from the food cupboard stash, the garlic, vegetables and any sauces that remain.

I opened the food cupboard on Saturday morning with the intention of stocktaking what I had in there, I made a little start and then realised that I simply didn't have the space or the inclination to empty it.  

What I did spy on my half-hearted effort to empty the top shelf was this box of mini mince pies leftover from Christmas.  If you look at the first photo they are on the top shelf, left hand side, between the cereals and the crisps and under the two packs of biscuits.

I slid them out and noticed that their Best Before date was literally that day ... it was imperative that I rescued them ... so leaving the cupboard to it's own devices I grabbed the squirty cream from the fridge, made a cup of coffee and retired to the comfy seats to have a very tasty little elevenses while I watched a couple of YouTube videos.

 The break did me the world of good, and I came up with the game plan that I will be executing today.  I am going to remove from the food cupboard anything that is dated 2024 and beyond.  Leaving in the cupboard just the things that are either out of date or dated with any date during 2023.

Now I need to set to and make this weeks Monday Menu plan ... while it is still Monday ... mostly from the freezer for the final time, and then move on to the Food Cupboard to see what delights await me in the lower cupboard too.  I have found a box and will take out all the longest dated foods and then clean and restock the cupboard ... making an inventory as I go.

Oh, and Alan helped me finish off the final seven mince pies, which we ate whilst watching my recording of Friday's Death in Paradise.  It was tough, but we buckled down and chomped our way through them all ... phew!!  😁

Sue xx