Ding! Ding! All change, please... (now replaced with new diary on MFW)

foxgloves

You've got off to a great start, @EssexHebridean. It's so satisfying having a morning of tidying & getting a whole host of little random household jobs out of the way. That's what I'd planned for today, & I'm still hoping I might, but I fell in town this morning & am now feeling battered & sorry for myself. Reading about all your jobs has motivated me at least to have a go, though. Just another coffee top-up & I need to get myself moving. 
F x

Seasidegal58

....and a Happy New Diary from me too EH!  🥳 I always enjoy your posts and look forward to reading many more!😀👍

EssexHebridean

Oh Foxgloves I do hope you’re not feeling too bruised and sore today - I’ll pop over to your diary in a minute and see how you are! Welcome aboard SSG - great to have you along for the ride! 

Cracking night last night - lots of friends met up with and some nice beers drunk too. Got home just after midnight and as there was a massive queue for the taxi rank so didn’t bother waiting and walked back instead - I’m calling that a small MSE win! 

Possibly a slightly slow start this morning…😆 Did manage to get the weekly shop sorted before our online voluntary role meeting at 11am though - a lightning dash round Al’s resulted in a £20.97 spend which was probably rather less than I might have spent if I’d spent a bit more time there! Meeting was an astonishing quick one (for us!) at a little over 2 hours - I wasn’t expecting that! The rest of the day has been a few odd jobs but mostly spent with the sofa, TV and a blanket! I’m currently binge-watching old series of Casualty - currently on  about 2010! 

MSE stuff: banks checked and all good - most of the start of the month stuff has gone out but of course the weekend is now getting in the way! £25 Premium Bond win for us this month - first we’ve had since March so hopefully that might start the ball rolling again on the prizes! 

Just under £25 left in the grocery budget this month - which in theory means we could just scrape it…we’ll see. I’m definitely thinking the budget will have to increase next year though, not least as we rely on a bit of excess building up in the grocery account here and there to account for some bulk buys of various things. We need to order more Rapeseed oil this month anyway. 

The £67 credit has gone to the energy account - so helping to build a nice little credit there. 

Humdinger1

@EssexHebridean have subscribed and am cheering you on! Always good to reconsider plans when major things change otherwise you can plough on regardless and not enjoy the original destination when you get there.  Love Humdinger xx 

Seasidegal58

EssexHebridean said:

Just under £25 left in the grocery budget this month - which in theory means we could just scrape it…we’ll see. I’m definitely thinking the budget will have to increase next year though, not least as we rely on a bit of excess building up in the grocery account here and there to account for some bulk buys of various things. We need to order more Rapeseed oil this month anyway. 

The £67 credit has gone to the energy account - so helping to build a nice little credit there. 

Another here who is going to of increase the budget for food/household - I've had it at £120 per month for a while now but keep creeping over lately. ☹️

EssexHebridean

Welcome Humdinger - lovely to have you here! And SSG - I think an awful lot of us are in a similar position of needing to increase budgets right now. I'd love to resist it, but realistically, it's not an option!

Well good morning MSE'ers - hopefully everyone else is sharing in the sunshine and clear blue skies we have this morning - chilly though, first full frost of the year with us and to add insult to injury I had to scrape MrEH's car windscreen too - I far prefer heavy frost when HE's coming into town too then he gets to do the scraping!  

Lovely evening yesterday - met up with a RL pal who is also on here and had a nice meal whilst catching up on loads of chatter too. Fab to see her! So spendiness there -  £26 in P1zza Ex-press (tasty pizza though, and a lush Billionaires Truffle sundae afterwards!) and I also topped up my Oyster card when I got back to Farringdon as I wasn't totally certain it would let me back through the barriers with such a low balance even though I had a feeling it had enough left on it to get me back to Epping. Another £10 there. Pizza came straight from my personal spends account, and the Oyster top-up is on the CC and will need transferring from the joint account. 

Having noted that we are now sent for a period of "nippy" conditions, the heating got tweaked up a little last night, and will probably - the front room one at least -  get another tweak tonight. At some stage we also need to bite the bullet and switch both the other two heaters on - mainly to check that they are actually still working OK - that might be a job for the weekend though as one at least needs a fair bit of additional clearing round it beforehand. O was pleasantly surprised to see that the tweaks so far hadn't increased use over night hugely though - and it definitely makes me think that a little more tweaking will be cost effective! frankly we're not prepared to be cold, AND not prepared to let the walls get too cold either, so it's needs must anyway.  

Meal plan this week has gone a little fluid as the veg box necessitated some on-the-hoof changes. Tonight will be a fairly standard Tuesday night tea but I've not yet decided whether it's an omelette for him and a buddha bowl type thing for me, or whether we'll both have couscous. If I go buddha bowl then I'll have some feta style cheese, assorted veg and probably use a sachet of microwaveable rice/grains for the base. I also need to find a use for a massive lettuce, TWO cucumbers, and the world's biggest savoy cabbage (honestly - it as the size of MrEH's head!) - so thinking caps need to be firmly placed into the ON position. I did use a small swede, a sweet potato, the tatties from the previous veg box and a parsnip and make a root veg bake on Sunday - in fact I made two - MrEH had the individual sized one for his tea last night, the bigger one will do for tomorrow, probably with sausages alongside. We need to take the contents of the fridge in hand though as a backlog is building up! While it's not exactly the ideal weather for salads, Thursday might well end up being a bacon and egg salad as that will get us through at least some of the salad veg and I can throw the bacon & egg on warm!

Other than that all is pretty quiet at the moment. MrEH needs a further nudge to feed the two regular savers that still need a manual transfer - he was going to do it last night then realised he needed to head out to pick me up from the tube - allowing that I'd already had one cold wait for a connecting train en-route, I wasn't complaining about him planning to be at Epping to get me when I arrived!  No real plans for the rest of this week - his travel spends will be slightly higher this week as he has to be in the office three days not two - which in turn butchers my plans to take my stray half day holiday on Thursday as that would now mean bringing two cars in. I'll plan it for next week instead. 

 

Blackcats

Could you stuff the cabbage?  No offence to your giant cabbage 😋
you can par boil the big leaves and then stuff with a rice type concoction - Then lay the rolled up leaves into a baking dish on a layer of tinned tomatoes, sprinkle with cheese and bake or grill.
I've had a nice afternoon using up veggies - a very yummy celeriac and apple soup, roast vegetable for a pasta bake which used up the aubergines, courgettes and tomatoes from my Lidl fruit and veg box.  Also cooked up more of the home grown apple stash.  Feeling very virtuous except despite all that healthy food I 'm actually craving a couple of chunks of galaxy! 

foxgloves

Snap! I was also going to suggest stuffed cabbage leaves a la Black cats, but she got there before me! We also like Savoy cabbage shredded very finely & wokked with garlic & chilli.
F

EssexHebridean

Ooh stuffed cabbage is a good thought - I'll have a think about that as I definitely have some mince in the freezer that would work to make a sort of biryani type stuffing. Thanks Blackcats! (And yum to Galaxy - you've made me fancy some chocolate now too!) Foxgloves my default for cabbagey types of veg these days is usually to lightly stir fry in sesame oil as a veg accompaniment - SO much nice than the limp boiled cabbage from childhood memories! In fact, some of the monster cabbage will definitely get done that way tonight to go with the root veg bake. Some more of it will get factored into a stir fry with noodles and probably chicken, plus satay sauce again, as we both really enjoyed that last week. 

In the end it was indeed buddha bowl for me, omelette for him last night - tasty and filling, as well as being suitably quick all round. I used chick peas in mine - the other half of the tin are now in the freezer. Tonight is the veg bake and, as above, probably stir fried veg, so again should be filling and quick. Theoretically it's a bit protein light but I'll add sesame seeds to the veg, and the bake has cheese in it, so it's not as bad as it first seems really. Need to sit down and make a proper plan for food though - specifically "using it up" - I'm leaning towards scouring the freezer to see what we have for a roast on Sunday as that would deal with some tatties and parsnips. Might also consider pickling some cucumber as there's no way I'm going to use two before they reach the squishy stage! While we're thinking of pickling, Mr EH could do some more beetroot as well...  A good solid meal and use-up plan will also of course reduce what needs spending in the weekly shop next weekend, which could perhaps mean we can scrape through in budget? I need to slightly update my grocery challenge figures as there was a small additional spend on Sunday at Sainsbugs - spendiness across 4 areas in fact - as I bought slippers for myself (so my clothing budget) plus part of a christmas present for a pal to use a 500 nectar points on a £15 Tu spend, and we stocked up on tealights as we had a voucher for extra points on homeware. The groceries was mushrooms plus two packs of posh pasta - but we had vouchers for those so they were free which I'm calling an MSE win! 

Banks checked and all good - although I'm not sure why my Sant-And-Er ISA has paid no interest this month - I'll have a look on the banking board in a minute and see if anyone else is saying the same. The Octopods are now showing a good lump of credit on our account with them as the monthly DD has gone from pending to showing - although as the monitor told me we'd used 21kWh of electricity (Just over £3) before we even left home this morning (albeit almost entirely at night rate) we'll be rattling through that before long I should think. Monthly payment plus the Government help covers until we get to £5 a day - after that we'll be into using the accrued credit and after THAT we'll need to make manual payments. 

We're doing some plotting and planning around future intentions at the moment. Not quite sure where that will take us as it needs more consideration, thrashing out, but it's quite exciting - I do love a bit of a planning session as you probably know! We also need to properly plan what's going on over Christmas now - we'll be at Mum's for Christmas day itself, and we're booked to be away for a few days between Christmas and  new year too - I need to remind myself when the balance of the accommodation for that is due. 

Other MSE stuff - nothing much, really. I MUST get back to the gym tonight as I'm keen to see that "per visit" cost come down into the £6's, and realistically I'm not coughing enough now for it to be a problem. I am massively put off by how flipping cold it will be cycling there and back mind you! Still, it's December, so it should at least be quiet when I get there! No spendiness planned today at all - or tomorrow come to that, although MrEH could blow that if he needs an Oyster top up. The car will manage without diesel until the weekend - we'll definitely throw some in at that point though. One plan for the weekend is to do a bit of a blitz on the spare room which is an absolute bomb-site right now, but that should incur NO cost at all!

beanielou

I did my spare room a couple of weeks ago & it is looking a lot better apart from being the laundry room 😂