Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

foxgloves

And now for today's post:
*Picked up the last few items on this week's grocery list from town - even with a small beer allowance for Mr F, we will come in under budget this week.
*Visited my favourite little hair salon for a much-needed cut. £10. As I always say, I don't know how they do it at that price, but my stylist says a dry trim, even my graduated & layered bob, requires no driers, hot water or expensive colours or treatments so there is no need for them currently to charge more.
*Did not succumb to the siren call of the coffee shop, despite having unexpectedly to call at Waitbl00m because there was no crystallised ginger in town & I am keen to make my rhubarb jam on Monday. We have planned an outing tomorrow which will involve a nice lakeside woodland walk & a sunny courtyard breakfast, so we have saved our Spends for that.
*Baked a sourdough loaf.
*Made courgette fritters for lunch. We froze some leftover ones to see how they freeze & re-heat. Mr F intend to take some for his packed lunch on Monday & if they do freeze & re-heat successfully, I will make some more for freezing as it is a good use of courgettes & we both like them...especially with a nice smoky chutney or chilli sauce.
*Checked veggie garden - will need to pick a couple of tromboncinos later, but everything else can wait until another day. As expected one of our Guatemalan blue squash plants has carked it, having produced one small fruit. I will still let it cure, as we had a similar one last year & it was perfectly usable. The other plants are doing fine. I need at least one big squash to mature so I can harvest some more seeds, as they are a heritage variety. I was first given some by someone on the MSE Small Things thread & they are lovely squashes - similar to butternut inside (though not on the outside!) but I find them easier to grow than butternuts.
*Cleaned house between us using minimal products as usual. Thought kitchen sink was a bit whiffy so I blasted it with a bicarb & vinegar fizzbomb.
*Mr F girded his loins for a chatbot session with our internet provider. I'd read recently that they were offering a 'pod' to internet customers in cases where the internet was not available in all rooms of the house. This defo applies to us. Can't get it in the dining room at the back of the house. He actually found he was chatting to a PERSON & was asked to use an app to measure the strength of the internet in the dining room. Result was "Zero internet" so this pod thingy is being dispatched & we will receive it next week. Free - as I gather the purpose of it is to boost customers up to the full extent of what they are paying for. We were considering buying a wi-fi extender so worth trying this free gizmo first.
*Still on tech money-saving - Had a discussion over the cheesy courgette fritters about options for a recent TV issue. We think as our aerial is old, that the rainwater from all the recent deluges got into it & affected functionality. Since the weather changed, it's worked perfectly. We have decided to 'Watch & wait'. That's the free option. The others are to pay £5 extra a month plus a £35 set-up fee to rent a box from our provider or to buy a new TV aerial or to purchase a Humax box. We favoured the latter until we realised they still require aerial input so would need both. Hmmm. I'm glad he's flagged it as a potential expense going forward, but at the moment, both of us are happy to see how we go. As Mr F said, there are people on our planet who walk miles a day for clean water, it's not a problem if we have to wait until we can watch a programme on iplayer or whatever - a sentiment with which I entirely agree.
Well, m'dears, that's it from me today. It's not my cooking night & I've done all my jobs, so I intend to read my book & crochet some more granny squares.
Peace & love,
F x

Moorviews

Sounds like a lovely plan for the evening and tomorrow. It’s really quite nice out today for a change. 

I only need a dry cut too but it is still expensive so I just get out my scissors for a trim every now and again. I wish I lived near your hairdresser!
It was great to read that your results thus far are okay. I have a fair few tests coming up myself and am just trying to consider it routine, although this doesn’t always work. 

1930s houses are one of my favourite styles of home. I love the look of the usually leafy streets, pretty front gardens and those long back gardens. There aren’t that many in my area and most now seem to have been subject to huge extensions and large expanses of paving to accommodate  modern needs for parking and bigger rooms. It’s completely understandable and acceptable to enlarge and modernise but I think sometimes some of the charm of the original design and scale of the street is unfortunately lost along the way. 

I also wish I lived nearer so that I could help out with the courgettes!
Hope you have a great weekend and I look forward to seeing the little crochet cat blankets 😊

Humdinger1

I'm wondering if 'Day of the Triffids' should be republished as 'March of the Rhubarb'.  Love it but it does have an inexorable, resistance-is-useless vibe, no?

Suffolk_lass

I just wanted to mention that our traditional TV aerial is in the loft and that works well. No brackets deteriorating or big birds landing on it. You could consider this option if it comes to a replacement

Baileys_Babe

Suffolk_lass said:

I just wanted to mention that our traditional TV aerial is in the loft and that works well. No brackets deteriorating or big birds landing on it. You could consider this option if it comes to a replacement

We have also done this.

doingitanyway

Courgette fritters with a smoky chutney...yum...

doingitanyway

Courgette fritters with a smoky chutney...yum...

foxgloves

@Mooviews - We don't have the leafy street often associated with 1930s houses, but we are a riverside village with a very active local conservation group, so we have plenty of greenery & attractive planted up wildlife areas to look at.
@Humdinger1 - Yes, that would defo be a fitting sequel. I have never known our rhubarb get so big, even in past good-cropping years & it is so robust that this morning, I couldn't even pull some of the stems & had to resort to my big chef's knife. I'm sure one morning I will awake in the half-light of summer dawn & the rhubarb triffid will be standing over me waiting to strike when it senses movement.......that old 1981 TV edition of 'Day of the T's' starring John Duttine has a lot to answer for!
@Suffolk_lass &@Bailey'sbabe - Thanks - yes, this is on our list of considerations. Atm, the aerial problem seems to have righter itself so we are adopting a 'watch & wait' approach.
F 

foxgloves

Good afternoon campers!
I couldn't say that today has been an exciting day - very routine in fact, as my Mondays usually are, but I am grateful for this as we had a cat drama yesterday afternoon & it got rather stressful. Our lovely stripy boy Ash developed breathing problems & thankfully, as our vets are open at weekends, I managed to get him seen half an hour before closing time. We had to leave him for x-rays but it was 4 hours before we could collect him. He was 'quite a challenge' to sedate (he is ex-feral & very nervous of people he doesn't know), but they did eventually manage it & are pretty sure he has asthma, but that we have caught it early. So he is on steroids & also anti-bios just as an added precaution & needs to be seen again in a week. Definitely not money-saving will be the bill, which we haven't seen yet, as it was late & we were told we could pay when we phone to book the follow-up. Thank goodness for our Meow Fund & pet insurance! Anyway, he is breathing better today & we are all trying to have a calmer day. Soot started his contribution to the calm day by bringing in a drowned earthworm & depositing it on the kitchen floor, which was a great help, NOT!
Anyway, today's small money saving positives:
*Sorted yesterday's line-dried laundry & ironed only what absolutely needed it.
*Mended one of my favourite summer dresses which tore yesterday when I was flying around getting ready to dash out to the vet.
*Baked bread.
*Did my regular Monday morning budget updates. All now nice & straight for mid-month budget check-in which I will do tomorrow or Weds.
*Today's garden pickings: Rhubarb, coriander, tomatoes, lettuce, spring onions & courgettes. Am leaving greenhouse windows open overnight & opening the door first thing every morning for ventilation as it's one of the few things I can do against the dreaded blight. No signs of it here yet, but as I've mentioned previously, my friend's tomato plants have succumbed to it. Fingers crossed we can get our crop ripe first.
*Prepped rhubarb ready for tomorrow's planned jam-making - it is macerating in sugar overnight.
*Sorted jam jars from my recycled stash.
*Did a little knitting for the presents bag over my lunch break.
*Mr F reported back that the Courgette Fritter Freeze/Re-heat test had been a success. He took a couple of experimental frozen ones for his packed lunch today, heated them in the microwave & ate them with a little pot of home made chutney. They were apparently exactly the same as fresh & his only gripe was that you need 3 to make a decent lunch & he only had two! Large courgette glut atm, so I will make some more of these for freezing & make sure I batch them in threes.
*Did a very few surveys but it is slow going today. I am still trying to remember to check though.
Still to do.......
*Make tomorrow's packed lunch & breakfast.
*Count up pile of cat blanket squares & crochet the amount still required for the first of the new autumn blankets.
I am listening to a very interesting audiobook atm - a book by Naomi Klein about climate change & the vested interests who collude to stop any real meaningful inroads into tackling it. I can get heaps done in the kitchen when I am listening to something engaging. I need to fit in some piano practice too or my lovely nocturne is destined always to sound more like chopsticks than Chopin. I definitely need to rediscover the discipline of daily practice as I really enjoy seeing progress when I do this.
Tonight's meal is the one we didn't have time to cook last night because we didn't get home from the vet until 8.30pm & ended up just having toast, so I need to get some potatoes on to boil ready for making a chilli potato side-dish from one of my Indian recipe books. It's easy, cheap & makes a nice addition to fairly simple things like grilled meats.
Right m'dears, I had better crack on. 
Take care all,
F x

EssexHebridean

Oh Foxgloves what a drama with poor Ash - glad to hear that he is seemingly on the mend, and as you say, thank goodness for savings pots and insurance. 

I thought of you yesterday as MrEH made plum jam from foraged plums that we picked around the neighbourhood on Saturday. In the process of the foraging we also discovered a couple of fairly prolific trees just round the back of the new house - so those will feature heavily in the future I'm sure!