Put away your purse & become debt-averse

foxgloves

Kantankrus - It's difficult to be specific with the fish boxes. They vary in price according to what's in them, & what's in them depends on what's in season, what's available, etc. Basically, they ring every two months to see if I want to place an order..... I'd imagine we might be at the southerly end of their delivery area. They tell me what the fish boxes are for that month. Usually there is a choice of three. I most often have haddock, smoked haddock & salmon, but I've had a box with hake instead of haddock for the last couple, while it's available. I've also had one with haddock, trout fillets & tuna. I have found the boxes have mostly cost between around £48 & £54 over the past year, I guess the market price fluctuates for fresh fish. I sometimes pay extra for a big bag of enormous raw king prawns & other things now & again. I can't remember how much in weight this price is for..... I mean, obviously I knew originally, but as I've gone on, if she says 'Box 1 is haddock, smoked haddock & salmon', I know what that will look like when it arrives. I cut it up into lots of containers for the freezer & the piece of salmon is sometimes so big, I often have to cut it in half lengthways before cutting both halves into portions for freezing. As I'm cutting it up myself, I always have a freezer tub at my side for trimmings, bits of tail, any lone fillets, etc, which make a lovely fish pie sometime that month.
Another thing I like is that the smoked fish usually arrives wrapped in paper, so I can recycle that. The salmon & white fish is packed with ice in a shallow corrugated plastic box & once that's washed out, it makes two good sized plant trays for holding lots of little pots, so I don't end up with lots of supermarkety plastic waste I can neither re-use or recycle.
For better accuracy, next time I have a delivery, I can make a note of weights if you like?
Anyway, we like having our fish boxes & will continue with them while we're able. Hope this is a bit helpful, anyway. I know other boxes have included sea bass & other fish. It varies and I just wait for the call where they tell me what they've got.
F x

foxgloves

Hello Diary readers,
Well, I'm pleased to report that the old freezer door is still sealed & no more random broken bits have broken off. The first of our replacement white goods - the under-counter freezer has just arrived & is just having its 4 hour rest before we can plug it in & onto fast freeze, so we're confident that all fish & meat will be transferred across this evening.
I'm gearing up for sitting on my bum with my book & a big coffee. I've had such an enjoyable morning in the kitchen. Needing to empty the big freezer ASAP did give me the kick I needed to get my fruit gin started, so I've been playing with blackberries & is there anything on earth which smells so redolently of autumn? I don't think so. I've got blackberry & pear gin started off & even just looking at that slowly purpling jar cheers me up - I'm easily pleased, aren't I? I decided to try a different one for gifting this year, so washed out a big kilner jar & started off some gingerbread gin. It looks blimming rum stuff at the moment, but I think it should be very Christmas's, especially as I intend to gift it with a bottle of prosecco so that the recipient (stressed teacher!) can make ginger fizz cocktails.
Anyway, I'm digressing (as usual). I had some blackberries left from the bag I defrosted & Mr F also did another pick at the top of the garden first thing, where he's been clearing triffids from behind the shed, so I've started off some blackberry vinegar. I find this soothing on sore throats, but mostly I add a spoonful or two to stews & casseroles where it gives a lovely rich flavour. So that's steeping in a bowl until Thursday when it'll be ready the next stage.... straining, sugar, etc. The remaining berries were simmered with a couple of our windfall apples to make compote & the smell was so enticing, we decided to have it on porridge for lunch! The last portion is in the fridge for overnight oats.
I've baked a loaf of bread too & sorted ripe tomatoes so as to ensure I use the ripest 600g for the slow cooker recipe I'm making tomorrow.
It's Mr f's cooking night & he's using two items up from the old freezer (yay!) so I've nothing left to do today except enjoy some leisure time..... Reading, knitting, maybe a bit of piano & enjoy watching 'Peaky Bs' tonight.
Oooh, & the man himself has just brought me a massive coffee. A good day.
F xx

jaydeejay

Hi Foxgloves
Have been following your adventures in the garden with interest and loving your descriptions, first time I've commented as felt inspired to as love your use of "redolently", thats not a word you hear everyday.
Keep up the good work
JDJ

foxgloves

Thanks JDJ - I do love a good word! In my younger days, I was good at all the subjects which required essays, poor at those involving specific right or wrong answers....... & hopeless at all which involved the donning of horrid navy blue PE knickers for prancing around in various supposedly character-building sporting activities!
So for me, words are there to be trialled, used & enjoyed and I shall continue to do so. I've started so many novels - if I spent less time writing about tomatoes, the Spendy Years & my yarn stash & adopted a more disciplined approach to longer creative writing projects, I might actually get one of them finished. I infuriate myself...... but at the same time, in my head I DO feel I'm at least starting metaphorically to sharpen my pencils!
Thanks for your positive comments.
F

Kantankrus_Mare

Thanks for the info on the fish......very helpful!! We like salmon but find it so expensive to buy as fillets in the supermarkets so could be a more economical way of doing it.

Hope the freezer is all installed and doing its job.

English was my favourite subject at school as well and I think I was in the minority during exam time when I loved the English exams. I could babble on for England and still feel that I hadn't got everything on paper that I wanted to.

My daughter moans at me when I come out with big words and asks what they mean. I tell her and she says "Well why didn't you just say that!" :rotfl: The English language has so many fantastic words so we should use as many as possible. Strangely enough.....its when I have had a drink that all these obscure words come to me.

Have had a lovely day considering I should be at work. On holiday till a week on Tuesday.

Did a step class this morning and then my son picked me up in his camper van to pick up lots of free wood from my brother's house to build some more raised beds at the allotment.

Called at mother and father in laws and they offloaded some garden pots on me. Some were really nice!! Husband found a rose for a watering can and mine at the allotment has a huge split in it so I am one happy lady. :T:T

Is it sad that I can't wait to get down to the allotment and stain the wood so its ready for my Dad to build my new beds?

foxgloves

Oooh, some good 'wins' there, Kantankrus. And no it's not sad at all! I get excited about the most ridiculous tasks. At the moment, I'm really looking forward to seeing how many free strawberry runners have appeared before I dismantle my current strawberry growing structure ready to transfer the plants to their new home in a bed currently taken up by a courgette! It can sound a bit tragic to non-gardeners, I guess, but I like being a person who finds joy in simple things (just as well!)
Yes, English was my best subject, followed by History. I genuinely liked writing essays. I was poor at maths as tended to apply my own brand of logic. I can vividly recall being about 14 & we were given ten probability questions to do for maths homework. We handed them in & the teacher duly handed everyone's exercise book back except mine. He set some work then came over to see me with my book. He said 'You had 10 probability questions for homework & you've given the answer 50:50 for all of them'. He wanted to know how I'd arrived at this answer for every single question & so he slowly read out the first question which was along the lines of 'There are 10 sweets in a bag. 3 are red & 7 are yellow. You pull out one sweet. What is the probability that it is a red one?'
And I clearly remember saying "50:50. It either is or it isn't! '....... which of course applied to all the other questions too, so I wrote the same answer for all ten. You see, to me that was absolutely perfectly logical. It would either be a yellow sweet or a red sweet and I had no interest in drilling down into statistical accuracy. I don't think the teacher could quite believe it, as I was bright enough to be doing O-levels in all my other subjects.
I couldn't see the point to positive & minus numbers either.......why would I waste my time adding & subtracting numbers which aren't there? Ahhh....... if only I had known about overdrafts at the time!
Oh yes, give me words & essays any time.
F x

Kantankrus_Mare

Love that about Maths :rotfl: so much pointless rubbish was taught in that lesson when the time could have been spent much better teaching us useful things like interest rates, how mortgages and credit cards work and budgeting.

I've got lots of runners potted up in the strawberry beds and I see there are more possibilities that I will tend to some time this week.
We can be SAD together :rotfl:

OH thought I was sad going through all the foodie magazines I brought down when clearing the loft. Some were dated 1994 :eek:
Combination of Good Food and Sainsburys magazines.

Took me a while but I have added lots of new recipes to my cuttings file and now I have no excuse for getting into a rut with meal times, and have cleared the loft of about 70 magazines.

crazy_cat_lady

foxgloves wrote: »

I decided to try a different one for gifting this year, so washed out a big kilner jar & started off some gingerbread gin. It looks blimming rum stuff at the moment, but I think it should be very Christmas's, especially as I intend to gift it with a bottle of prosecco so that the recipient (stressed teacher!) can make ginger fizz cocktails.

Aw - thanks for thinking of me foxgloves ;)

foxgloves

Kantankrus - I'd have gone through all those old foodie magazines too!

CCL - Lol at your comment. It is a highly stressful job I know. The future recipient of my gin actually had her resignation letter written a few weeks ago, but decided to stick it out a bit longer.
F x

foxgloves

Hello Diary readers,
Oh my giddy aunt, what a morning......just me & my trusty calculator & umpteen 'helpful notes' I'd left myself since my last Big Budget Day. Today, it was my intention to update the grocery budget & get the receipts paid off our 'just for points' credit card, but then I realised that it's already 16th Sept, so I needed to do some rather bigger money faffery in the form of my regular Mid-Month Budget Check-in. And you know when absolutely nothing turns out to be straightforward? Yes, exactly that. Without going into too much mind-numbing detail, I've been waiting for a sum of money to arrive via a solicitor. I haven't been through this process before & didn't realise it would take so long. While I haven't been going mad with purchases in the expectation of this money arriving in time to pay them off before they accrue interest, there have been a few things & of course, the freezer replacement recently has been another such example. And that's not the end of it, as our intention was always to replace the fridge & freezer at the same time (all ancient) with the small freezer (just bought) & a tall fridge freezer to stand where the old shonky freezer is currently wheezing its last icy breaths. I'm pretty good at budgeting now.....well, compared to the Spendy Years, I am on a different level with it, so I've been leaving myself all sorts of little notes.....yes, we've borrowed x from such & such a pot (you know when you suddenly realise you will need to pay cash for certain things, etc), this needs paying across to 'Just for points' CC no.1 when the lump sum arrives, these 3 amounts ditto 'Just for points' CC no.2, etc................& then there was the mortgage renewal issue. Talk about timing! I'm not moaning......I could not be more grateful for what Mum & Dad left me, as it will facilitate paying off our mortgage 9 years early & that isn't something I ever really envisaged happening. However, I'm still waiting for the money (again, this isn't a moan) & our mortgage discounted deal expired at the end of August. We talked through whether to renew it with a new discounted deal as we have always done to date, but because we knew were were going to be in a position to pay off the balance in full very soon, we decided to let it default to the full interest rate. My reasoning on this was that there's generally a £200 fee for setting up the new mortgage & that if we are only paying this rate for a couple of months, it will cost us less than the renewal fee. The first of the bigger payments goes out of our account tomorrow. I'm hoping it will trigger something on the psychic plane, lol, & that there will be an email from our solicitor saying everything has now been actioned. I also discovered that although we opted to renew our breakdown cover with our existing provider & we're now into the new policy year, they haven't yet collected the payment. Anyway, I did say I wasn't going into stultifying detail, didn't I? I set up a sheet of A4 with every transaction requiring an action to keep different parts of the budget straight as well as budgeting for the replacement fridge/freezer which needs to be purchased asap so as to get shot of the broken one. Rather than keep a growing stack of post-its notes with actions to do when I receive my money from the solicitor, I decided to settle everything up from our emergency fund so that I only need to make one repayment back into it as soon as I'm able. Hopefully this will be soon & won't run into another monthly budget cycle, but if it does, it does. I've chased a couple of legal things & I can't really do much else.
I actually feel much better after all that, because since becoming a reformed character with money, it's very important to me that I remain absolutely in control. With all those little notes regarding swaps between pots, fridge freezer issues necessitating action before we were financially ready, etc, I was starting to feel things might start to get away from me. My desk is now note-free, apart from my A4 action plan for tomorrow & I am confident that September's budget is going to hold up until the end of the month. The final week of this month's grocery budget will be assisted by the freezer saga & needing to get everything from the big old one into the first of the new ones, which is much smaller.
It holds a lot though, as I transferred a lot over to it this morning - meal, fish, soups, all the pots of pesto I made plus bags of home grown produce, etc. Still several odds & sods in the old one, so there might be a few random meals over the next week or so.
Oh & you'll like this.......(NOT money saving...), I've had to change cat's biscuits today because I accidentally got gin on them. Can you imagine taking him to the vet because he's acting weird & she says she can smell alcohol on his breath?!
The sun's come out now, so I think I'll have an hour or so in the garden doing a bit of clearing. I've got dinner in the slow cooker (black bean chilli) so no further effort required than shoving a couple of jacket potatoes in the oven.
Hope you've all got off to a good start to the week. If not, don't worry, just start your week again tomorrow, plenty of time for things to pick up.
F x