Cluttering Up My Hallway

 

My car went in for it's yearly MOT on Monday, and to facilitate them checking the rear seatbelts and the spare wheel I always have to remove all the animal related clutter from my car.  I tend to use this time to give everything a good hoovering, the seat covers, the beds etc etc and try to remove all the dog hairs ... some hope, but I can try!!

I dropped it off at the garage looking lovely and clean on the inside, it's black interior looking ... and I guess smelling ... a lot fresher than usual.  So while it was away I set too shaking everything outside in the sunshine, leaving outside to air for a while and then hoovering in the hallway.  What a mess it makes in my small living space doing anything like this, and having all the shopping bags that usually live in the boot of my car suddenly hung and placed all around.

It was driving me mad having all this extra stuff around and I was very relieved when the garage phoned a few hours later to say that it had passed it's test and could be picked up.  You have never seen things go back to their usual place so quickly.

And then Alan went to work for the week, and the dogs were in and out of my car like little furry yoyo's, distributing their pale fur with wild abandon.  

It's a good job I love them. 🐶🐕

Sue xx

Holding Myself Accountable - Do I Cheat?

I ate the other VFC No Chicken Fillet last night for my tea.  

I decided it might be more palatable if I cut it up and had it on a salad rather than eating it as a burger, it was.  It was still not really to my taste, I guess I just no longer like the texture of some of the meat replacement food items.  Things like sausage rolls, Quorn mince and Linda McCartney sausages I'm fine with, other things like pretend chicken or beef just seem so wrong.  I would rather just have vegetables.  Anyway it made a nice lighter style tea for an evening when I just wasn't that hungry after a really painful day. 

Someone asked me why I wasn't sharing the receipts of my shopping trips while I'm doing this challenge ... and 'do I cheat?'

Nope I don't, if I did I would just be cheating myself!!  This isn't an entertainment idea on a blog earning me money, it's a sort of challenge to myself to gradually bring down the contents of the food stored at home and see how long I can make my money last ... what would be the point of cheating?

The few shopping trips that I have made have all had good reasons for not having receipts.

Number one was a haircut and a Radio Times, my hairdresser does not give out receipts, and it seemed pointless to print out a Booths receipt showing that I had bought one item.

Number two was again a copy of the Radio Times and a pack of eggs both from Booths, these were on Alan's receipt.  I don't know where that went ... but I definintely gave him the money.

Third spend was £7 at Asda for a birthday cake to take to my Mum's, I haven't got that receipt as the only other things I bought were for my Mum and I gave her the receipt.

Fourth spend, or maybe it should be called a no-spend was from Booths when I used my £10 voucher to pay for the entirety of the shopping and I actually remembered to say yes when they asked if I wanted a paper receipt, as I wanted to see how neatly it all added up to £10.   (Usually it arrives on my phone five minutes after I leave the store) 

My first spend of February was the Jack Monroe book and was another nice round £10.

The second shopping trip for February was this one, I got the receipt but it was really badly printed, so much so I have written out all the food items I bought for me as I know it will fade even in my diary.

All the crossed out items are the things that I bought for the foodbank on that trip.  Looking at this I have just noticed that the fishfingers I bought on Saturday were £1.65 ... they are £1.85 today!!   I noticed this morning while I was in Aldi again shopping for toiletries for the foodbank trolley and I had a bit of a mooch around the shelves and fridges while I warmed up after a chilly dog walk around the park.

  Wow ... 20p up in just four days, late last year these used to be £1.15.

 

My final spend ... just to hold myself unnecessarily accountable ... was in Sainsbury's, once again while I was getting some shopping for Mum and I spied the Cathedral City plant based cheese.

So I don't always remember to ask for a receipt, if I do have one I stick it in my diary, but if someone else needs it they get it.  I do go to the shops shopping every week, but this is now predominately for the foodbank not for me, it's surprisingly nice half filling a trolley and then not bringing anything home to put away.  😃

On this holding myself accountable post I will show you my final freezer inventory.

The things in the top drawer are now mostly chopped veggies from the fridge drawer that I have been putting into freezer bags ready for future use so that they don't go off, along with the pasta sauces that were in the middle drawer previously.

Everything else, including the things that are on my menu plan for this week, are in the bottom two drawers now and not even crammed in like they used to be.   So in the past three weeks I have gone from three A4 sheets of inventory to what would now just fit on one ... a very successful freezer challenge if I do say so myself.

Chopped celery for use in stews and soups in the future, now in the freezer, and some little sticks of celery for dipping in the tub of hummus that I thawed out last week which I ate for my lunch yesterday.

This weeks menu plan. 

 I need to tick off yesterdays meals and today's lunch and then I should take that half baked potato out of the freezer to thaw out in time for tea!!

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

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