Put away your purse & become debt-averse

foxgloves

Thanks for popping by, Enthusiastic Saver. Yes, I agree, there are so many tasty filling meals which can be made from good old mince. I like to make curried mince & peas, too, it's a slow cooker recipe from 'I love my slow cooker' & although it uses quite a lot of mince.... I think offhand it's 750g....it makes a nice lot. It's tasty & filling and is nice on a jacket potato. Mr F makes a nice spag bol with turkey mince, too.

foxgloves

P. S I am aware that the amount of times I have just used the word 'nice' in one modest paragraph would not have got past my first year English teacher! Please put this lapse down to having spent most of today in the company of tomato plants.
F x

HairyHandofDartmoor

It's nice that you spotted your lapse Foxgloves .

foxgloves

Very showery day forecast here, so unlikely to be outside with my hoe & secateurs. Have decided to do today's essential tasks, including baking bread & I shall need to pop down the garden to cut more salad, but apart from that, I'm going to award myself a day of leisure. Mr F has the car for work, I don't fancy getting soaked out on my bicycle or hanging around at the bus stop, so I will be staying at home & this will mean a big fat zero spend...... & that will be just fine by me!
F x

PurpleFairy26

foxgloves wrote: »

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

Pant audit. Top man you have there foxgloves

foxgloves

Lol, PurpleFairy, he's not a bad lad on the whole xx

foxgloves

Just a quick check-in. I was intending to pop a post on mid-afternoon when I stopped to put the kettle on, but then I saw I'd received an email from the solicitor dealing with Mum's estate, & it was flagging up something I needed to crack on with straight away because of a problem with the Probate Registry. My heart sank, as it was over something I thought was all sorted, but I've now done as he requested & in doing so, actioned the only bit of this that is within my control, so I may as well stop worrying about it.
On the frugal front, as that's what this diary is about......well, a decent day. Not massively productive, as I decided once I'd baked a loaf, tidied the kitchen & cut some salad, I'd have a day of leisure, which I did, until the solicitor's email jumped into my inbox. No money spent & cooked a cheap & cheerful use-it-up meal - Quesadillas (or my version of them) which are a great way to use up leftover tortilla wraps. We all know what they're like, don't we? Open a pack, turn your back on them, they've morphed into cardboard. I find freezing any surplus ones immediately instead of dithering another day as to what I might do with them helps a lot. As long as you can still bend a stale tortilla wrap in half, you can make a quesadilla. They're toasted in a frying pan, so cardboardiness of wrap doesn't matter in the way that it would if you were trying to foist it onto somebody uncooked as a filled wrap in their lunchbox.....though I admit to foisting all sorts of leftovers off onto mr f. So tonight, I stir fried a chopped onion & about a teacup full of chopped peppers (from my Very Useful Pepper Tub in the freezer), a chopped clove of garlic & stirred in a teaspoon of fajhita spice mix (I make my own these days, found a recipe online). I used that with some of the refried beans I batch cooked a while back, plenty of chopped coriander & some grated cheese, folded the other half of the wrap over it & just toasted it in the pan both sides, as usual, until browned & the cheese & insides were nice & melty. They look quite fancy when they've been divvied into little wedges with the pizza wheel, & we ate ours with a nice big salad & mayonnaise. I have just one wrap left now & I intend to try using it to line a flan dish for a low-fat quiche base tomorrow........I try to avoid pastry 99% of the time, as I have a bit of a naughty gallbladder, so am hoping that this will work as well as I've heard it does. Oh well, I always say it's worth a try & if I don't like it, I don't have to bother myself ever to make it again, do I?
Time to put my feet up now & imagine how great it would be if there were biscuits in the house (there aren't).
Take care, all.
F x

Onebrokelady

Loving the idea of a pant audit:rotfl:

foxgloves

Me too, OBL. It did make me laugh x

foxgloves

Hi diary readers,
Busy morning cleaning the house, then did next week's meal plans & shopping list, cut more salad, wrapped a parcel & baked biscuits. And after all that, amazingly still no rain, so decided to go & have a really good look round the garden to see how everything's going after this wet chilly spell.
The beans & greenhouse veg would like some sunshine, ditto strawberries & some of the squash plants, but there are some things which have clearly loved the much needed rain. My herb bed is green & lush. If we get some dry days next week, I must cut & tie some more bunches for drying. There are little courgettes forming, the recently planted out sweetcorn is establishing well & the potatoes have put on a decent amount of growth.
The flower borders are full of colour. A few things have been knocked flat by the rain, but mostly big oriental poppies & I'll be cutting those back soon anyway. The sweet peas are loving the rain. I've picked my third bunch today, added a few stems of alchemilla mollis & they look & smell gorgeous on the windowsill. The marigolds are also looking so bright & cheery. I just went along my big borders shoving a couple in wherever there was a space, as mine is very much a 'cottage garden' style & so I like things informal. An even better think about these marigolds is that I grew them from saved seed. I collect some ripe seed heads every year to sow the following February & they are so easy. I grow the old pot marigolds (calendula) & because I grow them from saved seed, I get a real mixture.... singles, doubles, orange & yellow. Sometimes I dry the petals & bake marigold scones..... for two reasons really.... I like eating them (or any scones!) & it feels like a nice summery thing to do. I read somewhere that calendula petals have been used in the past as 'poor man's saffron'. Anyway, towards the end of summer, I shall be popping out with a paper bag & scissors to snip some ripe seed heads & then I can continue to produce these fab drifts of orange & yellow blooms next year for free.
I love seeds. Magic!
F x