Living richly; simply and debt-freely

gallygirl

greenbee wrote: »

mozzarella freezes well..

Not in this house it doesn't :rotfl:.

Tilly_MFW_in_6_YRS

Excellent news about Bee Tee - makes life much easier having someone competent both responding and explaining - happy days.

What a bargain finding the mozzarella :beer:

Tilly xxxxx

Greying_Pilgrim

Good Evening :hello:

Greying Towers is bereft of buffalo mozarella..................'coz we've scoffed it :j:j:D:D

joeyjimbles - you made me laugh - that is exactly how I cook/interpret recipes I use the influence of the written recipe and work with what I've got Thanks for the link

gally - It takes me great discipline to transfer the pouches to the freezer without transferring the contents to me gob first

Tilly - it's a first, never seen buffalo mozarrella for that price

Well, today has been a lovely day. I got me hoof down and went and did all the necessary tatting about early on, before it got too hot. We traversed miles, but were back at the homestead well before noon I did spend 'recklessly' today, purchasing 2 dvd's for £1 each from a charity shop. The one film Jul1e & Jul1a I've seen loads of times, so it was just to have my own copy. The other one, eAt, l0ve, PraY - I've not seen (read the book) and decided that even if I made popcorn, a movie night at home could be had for a fraction of the cost of one ticket to the cinema.

Baby Greying got oohed and ahhed at, and took it like a pro Remaining resolutely asleep when the one old dear ooohed and ahhed and pressed a fiver into my hand - 'for the baby's savings account' I was very touched - £5 is alot of money. And it will go into the account tomorrow

Tea this evening got inspiration from California, but with a distinctly British feel I made a version of the Californian Barley Bowl, utilising gifted runner beans (still not quite got to the bottom of the bag), and a gifted courgette. I topped it with half (each) of 1 of the 2 remaining avocados - which again was perfectly ripe :j and sprinkled toasted seeds and walnuts over. I also doused it with a lemon vinagrette. Very summery, used up gifted produce and filled a gap in our tums



Today I am grateful for these 3 things;

kindness - numerous instances of kindness heaped upon us today

teamwork - I chose a mountain of washing up, he chose nappy changing duty _pale_

generosity

Thanks for popping in, reading and commenting. i greatly appreciate it.

Greying X

Cheery_Daff

Aw Greying, what a lovely lady to give you money for Baby Greying's savings account! There really are some wonderful people in the world :j

I love reading your diary not only do you eat far better and tastier looking things than me (which always makes me hopeful that I too, one day, will eat things like that), you remind me to be grateful every single day for the little things

So today I am most grateful that you came back after having Baby Greying :j :j :kisses3:

greenbee

Cheery_Daff wrote: »

So today I am most grateful that you came back after having Baby Greying :j :j :kisses3:

Ditto :beer::j:T:A

Greying_Pilgrim

Cheery_Daff wrote: »

So today I am most grateful that you came back after having Baby Greying :j :j :kisses3:

Oh Cheery - I've got all wibbly , but I have to say, I wish various bits of my anatomy would come back-to-where-they-were after having Baby Greying :rotfl:

Greying wanders off in search of a tissue............:o

XX

Cheery_Daff

Aw, don't cry! have some cake instead and just accept your body bits in their new locations :rotfl: which is easy for me to say with no children, although my body isn't quite what it was either :eek: :rotfl:

Greying_Pilgrim

Good Morning :hello:

Well, looks like it might be a little bit cooler for us today - certainly we've started with cloud cover rather than sunshine Mind, I suppose it could still be warm - muggy warm

Tea last night ended up being a salad bowl. We ate late. Trying to weave in homestead chores along with safely looking after a baby is difficult isn't it? Hate DH being up ladders etc alone.

So the salad bowl comprised; African Black-eyed bean salad, Morrocan Beetroot Pickle and Lebanese runner bean salad with boiled brown rice. Picture here;



The runner bean recipe is from D1ana Henry's book 'F00d fr0m Pl3nty'. I'm sure it used runner beans in the book, but the recipe I linked to uses green beans. Either or. Interchangeable. It meant that I was able to use up the last of the gifted runner beans I think the recipe inferred that you served it hot. But I allowed the beans to cool to at least room temperature - by design and default really - as I think alot of Middle Eastern food is actually served at room temperature. Gives the ingredients chance to meld too

I am so glad that I invested in a pressure cooker. It is no bother to boil up beans on a hot summer's day. Contrast back to a kitchen full of muggy steam when cooking beans the conventional way Although it was way worse cooking the beans in the winter like that I think, the condesation just transformed into damp

The cherry tomatoes were from lidl - nice, but I noticed that the stems had started to go mouldy very quickly I have removed them and hope that the remaining tomatoes don't succumb to mould either on or in the fruit.

I used fresh ginger in the pickle - so it was very zingy. However, as luck would have it, I recycled the ginger powder jar the other day - there had only been a bit of powder (clumped) left in the bottom - only to find that I had purchased a bag of ginger powder from the asian grocery, last time I was in the metropolis-next-along. Now I have no jar to put the powder in DOH! :rotfl:

I put the £5 into Baby Greying's a/c yesterday. Must write a thank you note to the lady

We've some admin to attend to today, so we should get a walk out and about on the back of that. I haven't heard a weather forecast, so I don't know if it will rain. Hopefully not. Although I'm sure all gardeners are desperate for rain - surely the courgette harvest must have depleted to nothing in this drought............ :eek::rotfl:

Right, best get up and at 'em. Thanks for popping by, reading and encouraging me to eat cake. Always appreciated. Always

Greying X

Greying_Pilgrim

Good Morning :hello:

Well, signifincantly cooler here today, to the extent that it could be a day in October

Yesterday was pretty spiffing, and not. Baby Greying was a little grizzly (and I do mean a little, no melt-downs or anything) and so we ended up staying close to the homestead. It quickly got very hot outside, so we only went out for a little walk after 5pm for a breath of fresh air and a change of scene. It was still very, very hot - muggy as much as the bright sunshine, but I'm definitely glad that we got out and about

Yesterday was, therefore, a NSD :j Don't think I have had one of those in yonks

We delivered a thank you note to the lady who gave BG £5 Manners cost little

A little bit more tidying was done at the homestead whilst BG napped.

Mumma managed a quick power nap for once too whilst BG napped :j

DH finished the chore involving ladders and did so safely and without incident - for that i am extremely grateful :T

We have been gifted more runner beans and courgettes :T

Tea last night was soup - again, not something that has happened for yonks. It was supposed to be a lebanese soup that is served at room temperature/cold in summer, but mine was a little on the hotjustcomeoffthestoveandintothebowl temperature I made Anissa Helou's version of Makhluta, a pulse and grain soup. I can't find the exact version she gave on the web, the closest I can get is HERE. I only used chickpeas, as I hadn't any cannellini beans to hand (the 2 pulses AH used), my lentils were the brown ones, not red spilt lentils and I only used rice to thicken the soup, AH used a mix of bulghar wheat and rice. I used up the leftover rice from our salad bowl the night before. In addition, I put in some Lebanese 7 Spice to the soup - not too sure if that was in AH's version (if so, her version used coriander in place of the fenugreek), or a Greying Peculiar, but it adds interest to the soup. I topped the soup with some natural yoghurt, a swirl of pomegranate molasses and some sumac. Picture here;



It was OK, used up store ingredients/leftovers and didn't break the bank. I used kala chana (brown chickpeas) for the first time. Mmmm, jury's out on them. It became a bit of a brown 'worthy' eat...... but at least I know I've had my fibre intake for the day :j, week...... year........... _pale_:rotfl:

Prompted by hummus chat on Tilly's thread, I think I am going to have a go at making hummus with kala chana. I think that it may well yield tasty, if somewhat unattractive looking hummus Possibly disguising the chickpeas by using something like red pepper or beetroot may yield the best of both worlds

Tea this evening will most likely be pizza and something (chips or maybe salad........) I'm thinking the pizza may be mozarella....... :rotfl: But then again.....................

Right, best shift a tail feather. Time is a-Whooshing.

Thanks for popping in and reading. Greatly appreciated. By me

Greying X

Greying_Pilgrim

Good Morning :hello:

Well, here we are again, and here we go again.... mmm reminds me of a song..... definitely too old if I'm chanelling my inner wh1tesnake :eek::rotfl:Oh my goodness, it's followed by Journ3y's don't stop believing - you know, the original, before H1gh Skool musically got their mits on it...... I remember that first time round too :eek:

Still, I ain't on my own, and I ain't lonely, so perhaps it t'ain't my anthem after all

However, I was having a ponder - after reading Fortune's thread - about fresh starts, new directions, change........

I do laugh everytime my eye catches my first post on this thread - about it just being the two of us that any mad cap moneysaving scheme would affect. Well, that's changed......... And unless we're lucky on the lootolottery, i can't see early retirement happening - in fact, 'retirement' as a concept.......... Inadvertently putting our lives into future facing, full-throttle mode, has made 'retirement' somewhat redundant. Don't think we'll have time to stop.

Whether I just need a new diary or whether I need to........... I dunno really. We've experienced such change, in a relatively short time slot. We're not the first, and I'm not trying to claim that we are. And being 'older' has benefits and it has drawbacks. Thankfully not healthwise, but I have already butted heads with organisational sillyb00gers, and I expect that to continue for the next 18years at least... and as for schoolgate politics....

We've already found that we've wasted 'alot' of money on stuff that has been useless. Ironically, most of the stuff that we have been given has been a godsend. And I am so glad that I dropped on a s/hand pram for less than a day ticket to the cricket. Baby Greying has been trundled about - in comfort - come rain or shine. I'm not convinced that it would have been made significantly easier if I had spent more - certainly the lifts would not have moved miraculously from the backs of shops/shopping centres and car parks, to the convenient/accessible front. And m&$ would still be as pram/pushchair unfriendly. It's a wonder parents have any lifelong loyalty to that shop. Perhaps we all forget quickly.....

Thinking about it, planned purchases have worked much better than anything bought in a knee jerk reaction. So there is a lesson to be learnt and adhered to there. I am grateful that I got into sling wearing and that our local sling library a) exists and b) has such willing and commited volunteers who give so much to make the system work.

But all this is chicken feed, it's ignoring the elephants in the room. Greying Towers being unsuitable to bring a child up in longer term - due to circumstances beyond our control; raising BG to experience as much in life as we can expose them too, without financially crippling ourselves ; instilling some of our values and morals in BG without making them the 'odd kid out'

Somebody told me the other day that the secret to raising kids was to never do anything that made them stand out........ Whilst I see exactly what they meant, I don't know how I am going to manage that one. We were talking about vegetarianism. I actually don't have any problem with BG wanting to be a meat-eater. What I'm going to have problems with in the short term is exposing them to meat to eat. I'm not really prepared to cook it - simply because there would only be BG eating it. DH doesn't like meat and I can't eat it now - my system has totally changed, and it would make me ill to eat it (I know as I ate sausages out of politeness to hosts.........) I wonder whether the parents of all our Olympians took the line of, 'oh, you mustn't be different.......' I know what I suspect, but I'm quite possibly wrong.

We certainly need a new budget. We've changed how we use mobile phones - as we now get much more for our outlay, but also changed how we pay for them (DH used to pay for our PAYG), so I need to make the adjustment to the household budget. We are paying more in our heating and lighting budgets , so again, adjustment is needed. The woodburner, which we installed at a time when we had the time, energy and contacts to source and process 'free' wood has become something of a white elephant and now 'costs' to run. It is also a reflection of the popularity of woodburners, 'free' wood is now coveted by more people

Mmmm, kick up the bumpshun time at Greying Towers I think......

---

We had HM pizza and chips for tea last night. I decided to make cheese and tomato, using some of the cherry tomatoes from l1dl in the end. The chips were from h3ron foods. Picture here;



Lawks..... we're onto the Th0mpson Twins now....... better get out of here... we've already had D3pech3 m0d£. If we have S1mple m1nds and the Wat3rb0ys we've the full set - arggghhh :rotfl:

Greying X