Put away your purse & become debt-averse

foxgloves

Oh dear, Blackcats, my shopping from home philosophy has resulted in sulking cats..... & not my own cat, for once! Hope your mogs have cheered up by the time you read this. We have used the pipette flea treatments on all the cats we've owned. None of them have liked it. Current cat not toooo upset by it because he will do anything for a certain cat treat..... you know, the ones which are like crack cocaine for cats. I think the liquid probably stings & also smells horrible. But these pipettes are not cheap, & at least you are using them up & not wasting them, even though your cats think you've been a bad Meowmy.
F x

foxgloves

Greetings Diary readers,
It's been another successfully frugal day. I've cleaned the whole house, baked a sourdough loaf & done next week's meal plans. Still working hard on coming in on budget for groceries this month, so a strong meal plan was key.
Decided to begin with a box of unopened & forgotten about lasagne sheets discovered when I was up the ladder turfing out the pantry earlier this week. The Beloved makes a fab lasagne so I decided if he makes a nice big one on Saturday, it will do us two days and I can also separate a wodge of mince off first, to make quarter pounders for another meal. I will serve those in pittas (already have some in freezer) with salad, as I've plenty ready to pick in the garden atm. There were some chicken thighs in the freezer plus 3 leftover tortilla wraps. The chicken will do tomorrow with home made jacket wedges & salad. Two of the tortilla wraps will be used for fajhitas, using some of the refried beans I batch cooked a while back, & I intend to line a flan dish with the final one & make a butterbean quiche. Then a jacket potato night with 'whatever we fancy on top as long as we've got it in' and that was my meal plan done & I used it, as usual to write a shopping list.
Mr F had a half day today, due to a very long shift earlier in the week, so he arrived home, made a sandwich, & instead of decamping to the lounge to shoot up some aliens, he announced he was going back out to get the grocery shopping done! Well, yay to that, & a big massive yay to the fact that we were nicely under target. We need to get a couple of baking potatoes tomorrow from the market & a box of cat meat for the furry horror, but we will defo still be within budget.
City centre trip tomorrow. Am primarily going to buy a couple of birthday gifts, & because I'm no longer spendy, I shan't be coming home with two or three new items to wear, very possibly shoes too, three or four magazines, a bag of goodies from M&S Food & all manner of other bits & pieces I couldn't afford. I'm much happier these days only spending my money, rather than somebody else's. I still see things I like, but mostly decide I'd rather keep my money (with all the possibilities still contained within) than buy the items & take them home instead.
OK, the knitting needles are coming out now. Enjoy your Friday nights, all,
F x

carrielovesfanta

Blackcats wrote: »

Good morning. Unfortunately I write with a formal complaint from a pair of cats from down South. Yesterday was time for flea treatment which usually is administered in tablet form hidden in a delicious, expensive luxury meal of tender chicken slices in a delicate broth. However as I had neither the tablets or the tins of luxury food I shopped from home. I had 2 pipettes of the hated drops for the back of the neck. My cats seem to have a built in radar to know when these pipettes are in my hand. I don't know if it stings them or it's just the affront of liquid on their skin but they loathe the processes. In the interest of frugality they had to suffer yesterday. They sulked and skulked for a couple of hours and would like it to be known that they hold me and you responsible for the ignominy of the process.

My poor little puss hated it too. You used to have to catch her lying on all fours and sit on her with your legs together to prevent backwards wriggle escape. She didn't sulk, she just used to meow really pitifully

foxgloves

CLF - They all do a really good line in 'pitiful meows', don't they? We tend to adopt big ex-street cats who have been living rough a long time, & even they can utter the most pathetic sounding little meows when they consider they're being extra badly treated.
F

foxgloves

Morning all,
Just updating to say that I did get through my planned week of frugality. The grocery shopping which Mr F went out to do on Friday afternoon came in within budget, even when we'd added cat meat & baking potatoes we needed to pick up the following day.
Our city centre trip on Saturday went well too, with lots of little things in our favour. We did treat ourselves to coffee & toasted teacakes, but paid from our personal spends, so no effect on the budget at all......or 'budget neutral', as I believe these occasions are called! Mr F, somewhat optimistically wanted to return to CEX to see if a Blu-ray he'd seen in there last time (a few weeks ago) was still there. He didn't think it would be, but not only was it still on the shelf, it came up on the till as £8 instead of the £10 on the label, so he considered that a good deal, as it's apparently a fairly hard to find item.
As for my own purchases, I wanted to get a couple of items I'd seen last time for a birthday present & couldn't believe it when we went in the shop & those exact items, in the design I wanted, were 30% off. Similar little win in the B*dy Shop when one of the sale items I'd gone in to buy was priced at £6 instead of the £7.50 I'd seen online, and I also discovered a £5 voucher on my loyalty card, which meant that my other item (a nice hand cream) was free, so yay to that!
Yesterday was supposed to be a dry day (after a really sodden week here), so we planned a visit to a nice old site/lake/gardens not too far away. We took a flask of coffee & a couple of home baked mini-muffins to avoid coffee shop spends, & a picnic lunch to save spending out on paninis, etc, & that was when the weather forecast turned out to be a complete & utter fib!! We managed to find shelter under a corner of abbey wall to eat our picnic, then ran for shelter........in the gift shop........but, no, we were very well-behaved & didn't wipe out our canny savings by spending on touristy bibs & bobs or expensive packets of biscuits with rustic country-sounding names but all baked in big factories. And we managed the rest of our walk when there was a break in the rain. However, the black clouds looming caused us to give up early, & go home via the supermarket with the nice free coffees, as it had dropped a lot chillier by then too. We tend to pop our travel coffee mugs in the car now, if we are going out, for just such occasions, so we bought a very affordable cinnamon bun each, & picked up two free magazines & a Sunday newspaper. It was only when I realised I'd got a lot more change in my purse than I thought I should have, that I looked at the receipt & discovered I had been given a free newspaper even though I hadn't bought £10 of qualifying items. I think that because the two mags are only free to loyalty card members, that they went through at £3 each, then the paper, followed by the buns & another tiny item, & then the algorithm they use to take off the free items kicked in. Anyway, a lovely free hot coffee in our mugs to warm us up while we ate our sticky buns & an 'Observer' to read when we got in was much appreciated.
I was going to chat to you about mince, but it's starting to look a bit grey outside, so I think I just need to go & check on all the laundry I've got pegged out at the moment.
I'm quite sure there is nobody out there unable to carry on without first perusing my musings on the subject of mince, so I'll sign out & maybe chat later.
Wishing everyone a peaceful & productive start to the new week.
F xx

HairyHandofDartmoor

Very strongminded moneysaving on your rainy picnic Foxgloxes, I'm impressed. The rain scuppering your plans could have been the perfect excuse to spend money in the shop or cafe but you resisted . Free newspaper and coffees sound like a win too .

foxgloves

We were pretty good all weekend, HHoD. Just shows it can be done. Mr F used to be worse than me with overspending. When we got together, his debts topped anything I'd managed to accrue on my own. These days, I actually struggle to get him to spend anything. I nearly collapsed laughing in town on Saturday. I'd got a voucher in my purse & I asked if he wanted to use it to buy some new undies, which he'd been talking about doing imminently. He said 'No, not today....' (and get this.....) 'because I haven't audited my drawer yet'. The thought of him carrying out an audit of his pants just made me nearly double up......partly because it's funny in itself, but mostly because of him having been worse than me back in the Spendy Years, & now he's reluctant to get his wallet out unless he's done the full assessment of what he needs to buy! Soooooo different from how we used to be.
I much prefer it though!
F x

foxgloves

A productive day in the veggie garden today. Mostly greenhouse maintenance. I removed a plague-ridden cucumber (I have one of these every year......reluctantly kicks out one cuke then decides it is no longer for this world). Replanted with a self-sown tomato plant. I was intending to pluck this out & compost it, but spotted it was coming in to bud, so thought I'd give it a try. Also:
*Weeded greenhouse border & planted out another tray of basil.
*Cut a big bunch of coriander, top-dressed to encourage another flush of leaves.
*Sowed more coriander for when the first pot is finished.
*Removed side-shoots from tomatoes & tied them in.
*Staked aubergines - if you get rockets land in your garden on bonfire night, & you are a veggie grower, save the long wooden sticks for staking peppers, aubergines, etc, they are perfect & free,
*Pruned grapevine back where it was getting a bit a r s e y & thinned out bunches of grapes to get rid of little tiddly ones, which is supposed to put all the energy into the bigger bunches.
*Wrote new label for grape vine variety with waterproof pen on a nice big smooth seaside pebble - looks way nicer than plastic.
*Watered rest of veggie garden & weeded outside tomatoes.
*Hoed a squash bed.
*Dispatched two naughty snails to the wild patch at the back of the apple tree where our resident thrush will find them & it'll be escargots for the nestlings tonight.
*Fed a bowl of kitchen scraps to worm composting wigglers.
And while I was doing all that, I was visited by a beautiful cinnabar moth - what a pretty creature. We have such a lot of critters in our garden, it's the main reason I won't use chemicals.
*Oh, & took another basket full of useful free stuff down to the shed. - a nice big jar for my chutney making jar stash, a clear plastic tray for a seed tray cloche, two more home made bottle cloches & a couple of decent sized terracotta flowerpots I found indoors while I was decluttering.
So a useful day.........
Oh, hang on, I was supposed to be talking about mince.........
Bugg*r - new post.......
F

foxgloves

You see, this is what I do.....I say I'll be back on to talk about one thing, then I get sidetracked into woffling on about my garden. You'll think I spend my entire life up to my armpits in compost. I do spend a fair amount of time outside this time of year, but I am quite capable of glamming up too, should I be in the mood. Doh, I'm doing it again!! Mince time!
Back when I first started posting on the DFW forums, I can remember making a quip about fighting debt through the medium of mince & lentils, & I think I still do that, to a degree. They are both just such versatile affordable ingredients, aren't they? I like things which I can stretch to roll forward into another meal or two.
Anyway, I'd meal planned for lasagne & salad on Sunday & Monday, as Mr F makes a really good lasagne & enjoys cooking at the weekend. He bought 1kg of mince from A*di for £5.49. Now, I'm sure I could have sourced that cheaper, but I like the 5% fat mince, rather than the 20% stuff which is what we had growing up in the 70s, when mince was just mince, you didn't get la-di-dah fancypants fat content percentages on the packaging. So, 1kg of mince for £5.49. What did I do with it? Well, the important thing was to ensure that the Beloved actually divvied it up & froze it in useful portions BEFORE being tempted into making a colossal lasagne & us eating way more than a sensible portion. I can be a bit of a pig & I've said before that Mr F is built like a brick privy with an appetite to match! So the mince has made a generous 4 portion lasagne, which did us two days, two nice chunky quarter pounders, which I shall serve tonight in pittas with a big mostly homegrown salad, a 2 portion lasagne made at the same time as the big one, which has been frozen for another week, & there is sufficient meat left for me to make spaghetti & meatballs at some point too. Because we cook practically everything from scratch, we have a good store cupboard & have had to buy very little else to make these meals & I worked out that £5.49 worth of mince made 10 platefuls, at just under 55p each. If we'd been on our uppers, I know I could have stretched it further by making a tamale pie (the recipe I use only requires 100g mince to make a filling meal for two people) and/or a cottage pie, to which I'll sometimes add a tin of cannelini beans in order to get 4 good portions.
All this dividing up portion cost & being economical reminded me of my old school cookery teacher who when demonstrating how to make spaghetti bolognese, told us we should aim for 2oz meat per person. She also said that a single serving of steak is 4oz. When I told mr f that, he looked at me as though I'd lost the plot! She was quite an elderly teacher & I think she & her Home Economics cohort were probably still working on portion sizes from when the UK had food rationing. It does go to show how much bigger portion sizes have got though, doesn't it?
But really, this post is all about hurrah for mince!
Bye-bye xx

enthusiasticsaver

I will second the joys of mince and lentils too. Cottage pie, minced beef hotpot, chilli con carne, meatballs, spag bol and lasagne. Sometimes I will bulk up a cottage pie with a tin of baked beans rather than tinned tomatoes for a change and if that is all I have in. My DH once made spag bol with a can of tomato and orange soup instead of tinned tomatoes. That was interesting. Tasted ok though.