Put away your purse & become debt-averse

foxgloves

Hello diary friends, 
I'm just popping on for a chat while I'm waiting for potatoes & parsnips to cook... I fancied doing parsnip & potato mash on top of the cottage pie I'm constructing.
Pleased (& thankful) to say that I finished those face masks today. I was so tempted to do other activities, but I'd already bought the fabric & elastic & didn't want to waste it and we will need extra mask supplies if we do manage to go away next month..... which hinges on whether we go into Tier 3. Have I actually done anything else today except sewing? Um.... I've wrapped a birthday gift for a distant elderly relative, I've stewed up another big pan of apples from our tree. Mr F has suddenly discovered a liking for stewed apple & is positively hoovering the stuff, which is saving on yoghurts, etc. I've liaised with a yarn supplier over my order & they have kindly offered me a free ball of yarn to help with a bit of a supply issue, & I've taken delivery of B-i-L's Christmas present & popped it away ready to wrap next month. We decided to buy him a nice backpack as he enjoys walking. The one I originally liked was £69, which I felt was too expensive, but when I looked again more recently, they were all reduced to £30, so I couldn't let that go, could I?
I've also sorted out my music basket & found a nice space for it at the bottom of one of our book shelves. The stuff I'm currently playing or learning has gone inside the piano stool, so that was two more piles of clutter homed. I just need to do a list of jobs I could usefully do in town tomorrow, as Mr F can drop me off. I can test out one of my new face masks. I shan't get lost in the fog in these! Bright pink with big turquoise & white blobs, which make me think of C*dbury's giant buttons, except they're not brown!
Well, I must crack on. Will I be a Tier 3 pariah by the end of today?. Or just a person with a big cottage pie? 
Peace, 
F xx

Onebrokelady

My DD was looking at her colleagues messaging each other today at work and there are now 17 positive patients in my hospital that's almost as many as we had during the first wave and we have all of winter to go yet, even though I'm down in the Southwest my city is a hotspot and although it's nowhere near as bad as the North I do wonder how bad it's going to get now. There's idiots all over FB still denying it even exists and that it's a government conspiracy, people have lost the plot 🙁

foxgloves

They certainly have, OBL. I think the pandemic has been very badly handled by the Government & they do need to take responsibility for some poor decisions i. e £12 billion for a Track & Trace system which is regarded as having only a marginal effect on stemming the tide of virus cases, also ignoring the findings of Operation Cygnus in 2016, but why do these conspiracy theorists think ANY government would fabricate a situation with such devastating effects on the national economy?
It was ever thus at times of plague. During the Black Death in the 1340s, people thought it was due to all sorts of things.... including foreigners poisoning the wells & dragons breathing it over in their fiery breath. But these days, you'd hope people might have a smidge more scienrific knowledge. I heard a university student say on TV news recently "It's just a cold, isn't it?"
Unbelievable!!
F x

Blackcats

Glad MrF is enjoying the stewed apples.  I've been enjoying stewed apples too.  I remember as a child when asking "what's for pudding?" - the worst answer was stewed apples or semolina.  Best answer was strawberry angel delight, next would be jelly and evap and next best would be a slice of raspberry ripple ice cream in a wafer.  We only had an ice box at the top of the fridge that was big enough for a packet of fish fingers or findus  savoury pancakes, a packet of peas and an ice cream block.  Clearly as a child I embraced sugar, unnatural colours and flavours 😋.  I made an angel delight recently For the first time in years but chose a sophisticated 😁 butterscotch flavour served with sliced banana - yummy. 

I realise now that stewed apples and stewed plums were a way of using up home grown produce and of course because they are seasonal they appeared a lot in the autumn but I didn't appreciate the efforts my mum made with apple pie, apple crumble etc.   

foxgloves

Ah, well you see, Blackcats, we were children of the 70s  - I suspect you & I are of a similar vintage. I too remember the ice box at the top of the fridge. You are right, it held very little & we were always concerned there wouldn't be enough space for the Sunday brick of ice cream! When my parents bought a freezer, it was like entering the modern age! My Mum totally embraced it as she loathed cooking, taught in the evenings & could fill it with stuff that just needed heating up when we got in from school. Do you remember all that boil-in-the-bag stuff? My Mum must have kept their company shares buoyant - I often wonder how much hormone-disrupting plastic we must have ingested from all that boiled plastic! I liked Angel Delight as a child, especially the butterscotch one, but I bought one to try as an adult & felt for me, the nostalgia was better than the product. Findus crispy pancakes were the talk of my class when they came out.....I don't think we ever really got to the bottom of what the orange pancakey-bit was made from......it it was indeed batter, it was like no other batter I've encountered since, but as children, we thought they were quite sophisticated. We also used to have a bizarre chicken thing in a tin. You pierced the tin - I guess so it didn't actually explode - stood it in a pan of water & boiled then you opened one end, which was a solid lump of gluey rice, & at the other end was some quite tasty but doubtless very highly processed watery chicken supreme/stew hybrid. 
We all liked stewed fruit - very occasionally, Mum would bung some in an oven dish & spread some sponge mix on it for a fruit sponge. That was nice, but mostly we had desserts from the chilled section that required zero effort.....plastic pots of mousse, plus fruit yoghurts, etc. Despite not being a foody, my Mum very much liked the M&S food hall when she was able to get further afield for shopping than our small town, so we did look forward to our desserts on those nights.
F x

Dottles1

I remember my dad always made us jelly and blancmange for tea on Sunday, it was quite a treat.  Unfortunately he would put it outside on the windowsill to set inn winter and we had to pick out bits of soot from the open fires of the day.

foxgloves

Friday again already! What's that all about? You'd think with Covid worries & day-to-day constraints that the time would be crawling along, but it seems the exact reverse. I can't believe it is nearing the end of October already. Truly a year we will all want to put behind us & hope that 2021 brings some progress.
Hello Friday Frugalistas, it hasn't been the day I expected today, largely because I didn't read an email properly. I had intended to go into town this morning, but thought my Hermes parcel was coming, so waited in. Realised later that it was only with the company, not the courier. Never mind, I am going in on Sunday anyway, as I want to visit the craft market stalls. 
Spent the morning doing my big weekly house clean & put away several more out of place items. Sent a big pile of items down to the shed as no need for them to be lingering in our lobby. Amongst them was our kitchen bin. It takes up quite a lot of space, can't go where it used to sit as we now have a pantry door & a radiator and so I've decided we will try out doing without one. Disadvantage will be needing to pop outside to the wheelie bins with our kitchen rubbish, but the advantages may well outweigh this......no bin to wash out, no stinky bin in summer, more space, not tripping over it when I've only got the fairy lights on in there.....
No need to cook tonight, as I made sufficient cottage pie yesterday to feed us for 2 days, so just a bit of veg to do. Went down with the colander to see if I could get a last pick from the french beans & was amazed to find almost 500g. Those 2 packets of seeds have truly delivered this year. Scrunching through the leaves on the way down the garden made me want to make a seasonal display in our front window - it's a bow window, so can look nicely theatrical if I bother to make the effort. I cut 2 stems of red firethorn berries & some trailing variegated ivy & arranged them in my favourite purple glass vase. Next to that, I've got an old 'long tom' style clay flowerpot, two knitted pumpkins (yes, my sister knits pumpkins!) , my glass decanter filled with fairy lights & a tea-light in a glass jar with black cats on it. It makes me smile when I go in the room. I suppose it is helping to bring the outdoors in at a time when none of us are really going out to all the lovely places we'd usually be visiting this time of year. And it was free - my favourite word, after so many years of spending ridiculous amounts of the bank's money on fol-di-rols for my home.
Other stuff - all very routine: Packed away a couple more Christmas gifts until it's time for wrapping, printed out a knitting pattern & found no. 9 circular needle ready to start a present for my friend, read the meters & uploaded onto energy provider's website - credit balance still increasing - I'm watching this very carefully. Did a survey, then cashed out of another site for a J*hn Lewis voucher, as I'm stashing those towards possibly an oven. Also placed an online order for some new tights & undies. Honestly, I was pegging out the laundry recently & I thought 'These don't even look like MY KNICKERS!!' I haven't had a city centre shopping trip since just before Lockdown & I'd been waiting for just such a trip to stock up on all sorts of essentials. Don't fancy going to Tier 3 city though......& if I am living in Tier 3 too, when the imminent announcement is made, I don't think I'll be able to shop in the other nearby city centre as I think it is a Tier 1. Oh, these times! Although if my main concern atm is knickers, I know I am in a better position than a great many. 
I can tell from the hot bready smell floating up the stairs, that my loaf is going to be ready very soon, so I won't take up any more of your time with my daily ramblings, I shall go & deal with that, then sit down with a cup of tea & my book. 
Love F x

foxgloves

Dottles2 - Sooty blancmange has made me smile, so thanks for sharing that. We didn't have blancmange - my Mum wouldn't eat anything with a skin on it - I think she had been traumatised by school custard in the 1940s.
F x

Blackcats

Oh yes!  Boil in the bag dinners.  We mainly had cod in parsley sauce or some sort of chicken and mushroom casserole and because I was very cosmopolitan I had boil in the bag prawn curry with rice.  The Vesta chicken chop suey (might have been chow mien) was a culinary adventure.  The crispy pancakes were mysterious - very bright colour and a strange texture but I loved them.  Savoury mince or cheese were my favourites.  I remember another couple of frozen masterpieces - chicklets and some sort of goey cheese in breadcrumbs type coating.  Dottles sooty blancmanche made me smile. 

The window display sounds lovely. 

Tescodealqueen

foxgloves said:

Dottles2 - Sooty blancmange has made me smile, so thanks for sharing that. We didn't have blancmange - my Mum wouldn't eat anything with a skin on it - I think she had been traumatised by school custard in the 1940s.
F x

I'm with your mum on that Foxgloves. I was made to sit in the school dining room until I ate the Manchester tart, a jam tart thing with rubber set custard with a thick skin which made me wretch. I wouldn't eat rice pudding skin because of that experience or blancmange  or anything remotely like it