Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

Makingabobor2

The weather put pay to some of my planned jobs as well. I was hoping to get in the garden as still have some plants to repot and a couple that I got from the garden centre last week, still waiting to be put in.  I did at least get out and do a bit of veggie tidying, before the rain started.  

Sun_Addict

I also have a lever arch binder full of recipes I still haven’t got round to making 😆 They are fairly organised and indexed though. I have a cull every so often. I have a smaller ring binder where I keep the ones I’ve tried and enjoyed/make regularly. 

Is the dead wood pigeon courtesy of Soot 😬

Makingabobor2

This talk of recipe folders has made me think I should sort mine out. I have them in a folder with sections & they are either ones I cut out of magazines....years ago,  or ones I have copied out. There are a couple, including me favourite " go to" choc cake, that are the originals given to me by my mum, in her hand writing. Would like to get those laminated actually. 

Blackcats

 Nothing exciting done here today either unless renewing my library books counts?

marionmgcars

I have a file with recipes of things I have made too, and recently culled a few out.  However my knitting patterns files still await attention.  

Money saving day, travelled using my railway retired pass then bus pass for free travel, and got to knit and read for the journey - stops me buying snacks too 👍 x

foxgloves

I'm definitely going to have a 2nd recipe cull then copy the keepers into a nice hardback notebook. Some are my own recipes, others I've altered or changed & I often comment on their origin, etc, so I think making a book will feel a lot more personal. 
F

joedenise

I have a hardback book which was my nan's so all in her handwriting which is lovely.  Unfortunately most of the recipes use lots of fat and/or sugar neither of which I tend to use but it's still nice to have the book.  I think a handwritten book will be lovely @foxgloves.

badmemory

Some of my recipes have been adapted so many times over the years that they have some ingredients in ozs & some in grams.  I've also changed the ones with self raising flour into plain flour - it saves on storage space. You can thank Nigella for that as I believe she didn't like the American self raising flour.

foxgloves

Hello Friday Frugalistas,
Thanks for your comments about recipe files/books. I am defo going to re-do mine sooner rather than later. I have already weeded out recipes I haven't made for years, but am going to re-visit the cull & remove 'so what' recipes - ones which might be fine if I cba to make them but I probably won't & have other better, very similar things. Looking forward to this as a decluttering project, actually.

Oh, & @Sun_Addict - Yes, the finger of suspicion is firmly on Soot for crimes against the woodpigeon. He isn't usually that bothered about birds. They are both cracking mousers, but that's actually helpful as we have an annual incursion of mice here & the situation has (touch wood!) been better since Soot & Ash came to live here. I'd rather have the occasional dead one dumped in the hall than have a family of them raiding our pantry on a nightly basis.

Odd day today. Mr F's day off, so we began with a leisurely breakfast together & decided to split the Friday house cleaning as we both had other stuff we wanted to do. He made good inroads into re-organising those 2 exploding CD units (he is SUCH a muso/anorak, I don't know how he's actually managed to live with them in that state for a whole week, but he has!) when his phone rang & he had to rush off to work to deal with a potential problem (don't want to go into details, but think along the lines of the unrest the country has been seeing & combine that with the fact that Mr F works in an area with a lot of ASB). Sounds as though this was just rumour spreading from very little rather than anything concrete, but obviously he had to go & put procedures in place, so that was the end of his day off! Meanwhile, back at Foxgloves Manor, I have been quite busy with the following budget-assisting efforts:
*Did some cleaning with the usual minimal products & washable cloths.
*Turned 2kg tomatoes into chutney. Have pretty much run out of nice labels for jars, so am using up some plain ones I was given ages ago rather than buy new ones just now. At least one of these jars will be gussied up with a topper & go into a festive hamper later in the year.
*Baked a sourdough loaf. It over-proved a bit as I needed the oven for jar sterilization but it smells lovely & they are such a natural product that they do tend to come in all shapes & sizes when baked at home.
*Entered 2 competitions.
*3 surveys done so far, though will check again before I sign out shortly.
*Cut a beautiful bright pink zinnia which was trying to come in the front door. It's now on the piano in my flower bottle. Grown from a packet of free seeds & nice to see, as I don't usually have a lot of luck with zinnias. It has just occurred to me that I think Zinnia would be a good cat name. 
*Water greenhouse veg. Not done yet, but it will be done shortly to keep those food supplies coming. Yesterday, the vegetable crumble I made contained homegrown tomatoes, aubergine, courgettes, garlic, shallots & coriander and it was served with a mixture of homegrown carrots, french beans & cavolo nero. We don't by any means have an enormous veg plot - certainly nowhere near as big as an allotment, in fact I think not even half of one, as only 1/3 of our garden is given over to growing food. It does show that it's worth doing though. Mr F has requested that we have veggie crumble again, so I shall get the base made & frozen while we have all the produce freely available.
Well, that's been the money-saving bits of today. Off to get the hose out now. 
F x
Oh, & this might raise a smile.......I opened up my lap-top earlier& was horrified to see a crack in the screen rising up from one corner. I simply couldn't think how it had happened, as I am careful with it & always put it away in its case when I've finished using it. Ran my finger over it in dismay.......& it moved. Yep, a cat hair!! 

PennysIntoPounds

Conversely, I am constantly trying to get stray hairs off the soap bottle before eventually realising they are the curvy lines of soap bubbles, inside the transparent bottle