Make do, Mend and Minimise in 2015

Mrs_Smith_72

Had a minimising moment tonight! Decided to make myself some pasta for tea. Finished off a packet of wholewheat pasta which was surprisingly in date! Added slice of green pepper, an old onion, an old clove of garlic, baby courgette, baby carrot, some leftover cooked chicken and a tin of plum tomatoes best before date 2012 :eek:
Also finished off a jar of mixed herbs which were also a couple of years out of date lol.

Made enough for a tasty dinner and lunch to take to work tomorrow

Lynplatinum

Evening all

Camelot you can use a cucumber up deliciously thus:

Using a peeler - shave the cucumber into long strips discarding the thick skin bit and the central seedy bit. Mix a marinade of: (1 tablespoon) mirin or sherry; 1 of soy; 1 of rice wine vinegar (or white wine or red wine vinegar); 1/2 of honey; salt and pepper. Dunk the strips in this for about 1/2 hr before serving - will not be any good after about 5 hours - needs eating straight away. Goes well with any grilled fish/ marinaded meats/ rice salads/ marinaded tofu - preferably with an oriental type marinade!

Hope this helps!

Well MM&M today - 1st curtain finished!! Yea! :j Own sanis not bought ones for lunch! Used up some elderly carrots and elderly rice noodles in a stir fry! Mending today - does dead heading roses and cutting back rampant shrubs which were threatening to prevent entrance to my house :rotfl:

GQ you really are up early!! have had to tie my alpine strawbs up using old chopsticks and garden string to form a kind of fence in order to stop the flippin slugs!!! As the strawbs are flopping over the egg shells the wretched things can now get to me fruit!! how are you managing to keep the swine away??

Am slowly using up my freezer to the point where I am starting to fill it up with bags full of crumpled newspaper so that I am not paying to cool air all the time!

Keep on realising how much I have to eat!! Such a cheery thought! :j
Frugle on folks!

culpepper

Mum never left cucumber in its natural state, nor beetroot.
The moment it came home, she would slice them up thinly and steep them in shallow dishes of vinegar. They kept for weeks like that.
I never tasted plain beetroot or cucumber until I was an adult.

nursemaggie

Me too culpepper. I never eat either with vinegar now. Don't like vinegar much we only use it for cleaning and the WM.

THIRZAH

Picked over 6 pounds of gooseberries today-not bad for a £1 bush from Poundland. There are still some left but I'll leave them for a while longer.I've frozen some and will make jam with the rest.

[Deleted User]

Must be a glut of goosegogs as my History club tutor set out a huge dish of them plus cherries as our snack this afternoon.She buys them from the W.I. market in Rochester on a Thursday.went down a treat with our cold drinks and discussion about Samuel Pepys, Harriet Arbuthot and John Evelyn All diarists

vhalla1478

Evening All,

I just had to tell you about the bargain of the week; I needed more woodstain in the same colour and make as I had had before (I think I inherited it along with the shed), so asked a friend who was coming to lunch today if he would look in his local cheap hardware shop for me. I was lucky; a 5 litre tub for £4, and it's good stuff. So if anyone is treating garden timber here are the details; VFM Timbercare, (I use Forest Green) 5 litre tub £4. And to top it all my friend wouldn't take payment as I had given him his lunch (widower of my dear friend, Lesley who died of cancer at the end of last year, and I promised to keep a maternal eye on her husband).

Have a lovely evening, Folks.

Nearly forgot - thank you, Grey Queen, great story about Gina Lollobrigida and yes, that's what I have.

Viv xx

silvasava

Thirzah - my gooseberry has only been planted a year and I reckon I'll get a couple of pounds off it - mine was a Morrysons one along with a thornless BlackBerry that's also loaded! I've found that they have a good selection of plants and always have a look just in case;)
I bought a Jostaberry on the internet a few years ago and it turned out to be a blackcurrant - of course by the time I found out I couldn't remember where I got it from but I've just sat and topped and tailed another 2lb or so and now it's supposed to be a 'superfood' it can stay lol
Have a good evening all x

Mrs_Smith_72

Had a lovely day today at work - nice & busy!

Met my friend for lunch & we sat in the sunshine in the registry office gardens across the road from work & I ate my leftover pasta from last night

Finished knitting an Aran cardigan for my friend at work as she goes away on holiday tomorrow- don't think she'll need it at the moment though lol :rotfl: she had bought the wool & then gave me a few £ for knitting it & a bottle of my favourite hand cream! Great timing as my last bottle ran out a few days ago:D. She had bought me the hand cream to say thank you for knitting the cardigan so quickly as she only asked me to make it a couple of weeks ago!

I'm now using the leftover Aran to knit a hat for her grandson

GreyQueen

Lynp, I am in the south, in a warm and dry climate, which is less conducive to slugs than the rainier parts of the country. The last year which was bad for slugs was 2013, when I was killing anything up to 200 HUGE slugs on each and every visit, often on consecutive days. It was like a biblical plague, snails too. I took 50 off the blackcurrant bush one day, killed them all, and the following day there were another 30 on there! I was genuinely fearful of not having any produce if I didn't get on top of the problem.

By killing each and every slug I see (with a spade or grass shears) I went from several thousand slugs in 2013 to 6 slugs in 2014. Have seen about 3 this year.:beer:

Those big slugs live up to 6 years and eat twice their own bodyweight every 24 hours, so each one you get rid of saves you a lot of grief in subsequent years. HTH.