Hard Times: How to cope with everyday living.

Hardup_Hester

Another cheap recipe
Bacon scraps, sliced onion, sliced potato, layer in a dish starting & finishing with potatoes.
Make a thinish white sauce, pour over the layers, sprinkle with bread crumbs, cook in the oven til potatoes are done & breadcrums are crunchy.
Hester

monnagran

DebtFree2012 wrote: »

Hi there - thanks for the recipe, do you dilute with water to drink I assume? Sorry for the dumb question

It's not a dumb question at all. When you first see it the drink looks too pale to be concentrated, but it is and yes, you do dilute it with water.

HH: Thanks for the recipe. I thought I'd done everything you could possibly think of with a chicken, (no giggling at the back) but this is a slightly new twist.

Northern_Princess

vegasmags wrote: »

Hello everyone

Corned beef, onion and potato pie - gently brown the onions, then bung in a sauecepan with a cubed tin of corned beef and cubed raw spud. Boil up with a beef stock cube and some water, simmer til tender. Allow to cool then use as a pie filling.

Home made biscuits - the roll out kind. Still using the Christmas cutters bought 40 years ago!

Home popped popcorn - little oil in a pan, add the popcorn and don't remove the lid til it's stopped popping - although some smart alec always had to look 'to see how it was getting on'. Add salt and a bit of melted butter. A small handful feeds an army and feels like a treat.

I feel so sorry for all the families struggling to cope but am really heartened by all the resourcefulness people show.

This REALLY made me smile reading it. I often read but rarely post. My mum often made 'savoury pie' with corned beef and I still do. I cube and boil the potatoes with the onions, cube the corned beef and mash it all together when the potatoes are cooked. Add a dash of tomato sauce to taste and make short crust pastry pies. They freeze really well after cooking them off. We often only eat 1/2 of a huge pie between us and take the other half for packed lunches between the 3 of us as they are lovely cold with salad and really filling.

We still make our own popcorn as well. There's nothing like warm popcorn

Northern_Princess

vegasmags wrote: »

Going to spend the day working on my homemade Christmas presents

I've made most of our presents for family this year. I started back in the summer with strawberry and raspberry jam (strawberries from the garden and picking wild raspberries) and also bramble jam and jelly. I grow most of our own veggies so also made piccalilli and various chutneys. Most of our aunts and uncles appreciate home made conserves and chutneys as well as mini Christmas cakes (which I bake in the small baked bean tins as their an ideal size for 1 person), tablet, peppermint creams and mince pies.

Has anyone bought a real Christmas tree yet, and if so, how much did it cost? I do love a real tree but would like to have some idea of how much to pay before I go shopping.

Asda had potted trees for £15 that looked lovely.

tiff

I didn't see the original post that was deleted but I'm afraid the whole point of a user I'd is to remain anonymous and we have to take things at face value. its not for us to question why someone would post under an alter ago. If the response from "old stylers" isn't appreciated by the op it will still be useful to someone else.

Gigervamp

Hmm...I had an email notification that Karen of Sussex had posted at 2.11pm but it would appear to have been deleted.

katep23

Hardup_Hester wrote: »

Cheap Recipe
This is one of the recipes I use when doing rubber chicken.
Cooked chicken, cut into chunks
Bacon scraps, they are 99p a pack round here & a quarter of a pack is enough
Fry the bacon scraps along with some sliced onion, I always add sliced mushrooms as I always have a few in the fridge.
Add a little extra oil. Sprinkle on some flour, about half a tablespoonful & stir it in.
Add milk stir over heat til it makes a thick sauce.
Place half of this in an oven proof dish cover with pastry or savory crumble, cook & then serve with mash, veg & gravy.
Add extra milk to the remaining mix to make a runnier sauce, serve over cooked pasta.
When I cook a chicken I usually make it in to 4 or 5 meals at the same time, it stops the problem of the family stripping all the meat off the chicken for snacks.
I try to make one chicken stretch to:-
Sunday roast served with yorkies, stuffing, roast spuds & veg.
Chicken & ham pie
Chicken & ham pasta bake
Special fried rice, using up the smallest scraps.
Chicken soup made from the bones.

Thank you - just made the chicken and ham pasta and it was lovely

gayleygoo

Find out when your local butcher prepares their bacon, they are often happy to sell off the "misfits" cheaply. Lidl is great for this too, about 2kg bag of perfectly good bacon, sometimes huge chunks, for £1.49!

I use cloth wipes (made from old clothes, sheets, towels etc) for wiping my toddler's bum at nappy changes, and very often use them myself when I go to the loo, (ladies, particularly at that time of the month when loo roll is used much more!) I hate buying cheap loo roll, so I buy better stuff when on good offer and then try not to use it too much :rotfl: I use homemade cloth sanitary pads and cloth nappies, and reusable cloths instead of kitchen roll etc. My sewing machine is invaluable and I make the kid's jammies out of old fleece or flannel blankets or our old clothes, as well as clothes for us all, washable napkins, curtains, hats, slippers, whatever. I knit too but it's not always cheaper by the time I've bought the wool! DS gets most of his clothes from his cousin who is a year older, I've hardly had to buy anything for him!

All our furniture is second hand and often re-painted or spruced up. Houseplants can be expensive but we have tons of spider plants and "money trees" that we pot on from the babies that fall off.

If we have a roast dinner, I buy enough of a joint to do several meals, slow cook it, and do lots of extra spuds and stuffing (made with saved breadcrumbs and pot-grown herbs) and make "leftover pie" or bubble and squeak the next day.

Leftover Pie, in case you've not tried it...
- Chop up leftover meat, mix with leftover veg and gravy (make more gravy if you need it) and put in an oven dish.
- Mix mashed potato with other mashed veg, and layer n top of the meat & gravy.
- Layer leftover stuffing over the potato, like a crumble.
- Cook in a moderate oven until warmed through.
Yum!

I keep scallions (spring onions) in a jar of water and cut as needed, they last ages longer. If you don't use a whole celery, chop it up and freeze for adding to dishes when needed. Pasta soup is a regular lunch here.

We brew our own cider, ale and wine etc. Very cheap and easy. No garden to grow more than a few pots but a couple of trays of salad on the windowsill will save loads.

I've not managed to read the whole thread yet so apologies if I've repeated stuff! But I do love reading through all these excellent threads when I can :T