Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

foxgloves

Hello Sunday Savers,
Well, I was the lucky recipient of Dec 1st's advent chocolate this morning - a very acceptable toffee baton from the brand of chocolates now known almost as well in our household for shrinkflation (have you SEEN the purple one these days?!) as for its prevalence during the festive season. 
Had a lovely evening with our friends last night & they accepted our invitation for Christmas dinner on the 29th, so this has facilitated a greater degree of food planning than we were previously able to do do. We exchanged presents & had a good catch-up. We had both intended a leisurely day today, but have actually done quite a bit of useful stuff from a planning & budget point of view:
*Not a no-spend day as Mr F popped to the village garden centre to buy wood pellet cat litter. It's £13-99 for a big compost sack sized-bag & lasts ages. Having said that, I only provide a litter tray during bad weather, so my first saving today was telling Soot he'd have to go outside as it was barely drizzling. 1 tray's worth of litter saved!
*Soaked all the fruit in rum ready to bake Christmas cake 2 tomorrow. Neither of us really enjoy white rum so there was enough left from last year's cake as well as sufficient left for next year's too.
*Sufficient dried pineapple left from cake fruit weighing to provide tomorrow's work snack. Made up a porridge pot for packed breakfast & have defrosted a portion of chickpea & spinach curry for packed lunch.
*Did meal plans up to Dec 23rd, prioritising stuff we already have in, especially things which will free up some freezer space.
*Wrote our festive food shopping list. 
*Boozy treasure found in pantry!! We have been enjoying a half bottle of home made rhubarb & ginger gin & I asked Mr F if he could delve to the farthest reaches of the pantry & check whether we had another bottle. Not only did he find a full size bottle of the rhubarb & ginger, he also unearthed a 2022 bottle of blackberry & pear gin & a full-sized blackberry brandy (I do make fruit liqueurs every year, so maybe we aren't quaffing them as fast as usual). Then there's a half-sized blackberry & pear whisky leftover from last week when I bottled some for B-i-L's Christmas present which I stashed for Mr F over the festive period, plus about a third of a bottle of some elderflower gin I received for my birthday & an unopened Adn*ms Copperhouse gin (my brand of choice!) We have amended our festive alcohol requirements downwards - just a bottle of cava for some Buck's fizz, a couple of bottles of wine for if we fancy some & some beers for Mr F. 
*Dealt with our November PA earnings from yesterday's cash-out. £63-69 for Mr F's Personal Spends, £41-84 for mine & £20 from my 2 recent Ips*s cash-outs sent to the Appliances Replacement Pot.
*Free dessert tonight as our friends sent us home last night with leftover cheesecake.
Apart from that, it's been pretty much laid back leisure activity - reading yesterday's Guardian, doing the quick cryptic crossword, reading, knitting, etc. Looking forward to watching 'Wolf Hall' this evening. Mr F is roasting that enormous chicken & I am eying it for plenty of additional meals, as that was the whole point of buying such a big one.
Soot has had his naughty head on today. Suspicious little noises in the kitchen (sort of like a cat getting up to something untoward while trying to make as little sound as possible) & there he was up on the worktop doing his level best to remove the lid from the cat biscuit container. He didn't succeed, but he knows from previous 'successes' that if he headbutts a container down hard onto the quarry tiles from the worktop, he can often spring lids open that way. Unlucky today as he was told sternly by Mr F to get down & that he was due nothing to eat until dinner time. Soot is lovely, but SUCH a greedy rascal!
Right, time for cosy curtain closing & on with my current book -  a £1.99 charity bookshop find which I am enjoying so far & another 2 in the series so I shall be looking for those too. A relaxing evening ready for a productive week ahead.
Love F x

Makingabobor2

Your pantry sounds like a real Aladdin's cave, or should it be a Pandora's box? I really would love a big pantry

Suffolk_lass

As you know, I am one for preserving, bottling, making jams, jellies and various other things. I have some crab apple vodka from two years ago that is just coming into its own now that the vodka has softened but the apple has intensified. Round here people have malus as universal pollinators for apple trees so there are always surplus fruits to use. There is only so much crabapple jelly we can make/keep/eat!

EssexHebridean

Those little biscuits look delicious, I did very similar last year with some pastry scraps, topping mine with black sesame seeds as I recall! This year's first lump of leftover pastry (from last weekend's sausage rolls) got turned into mince pies in our house! 

foxgloves

@Makingabobor2 - It's not that big a pantry. It is a walk-in one, but as it is a conversion from the old cupboard under the stairs, it slopes diagonally down to a point as these cupboards do, so while I can stand at my full height at one end, retrieving stuff from the far end either requires me to bend myself in half or ask Mr F to reach whatever it is because he has usefully long arms (like a gibbon!).

@Suffolk_lass - We haven't got around to replacing our dear ancient apple tree which had to be felled before it toppled any further (it was heading for Victor Meldrew's summer house so our name for this particular neighbour should tell you how well this would have gone down!) & I have been wondering whether we might choose a crab apple instead. I'll wait & see how we get on with our little veg plot re-jig project which is imminent.

@EssexHebridean - Thanks for your nice comment about my little festive star biscuits. Re leftover pastry, it always amazes me just how little is required to make a pastry case to use for a quiche as & when. I have a big flan dish which comes out when I'm feeding more folk or doing a buffet & a smaller 1970s smoked glass one (Woolworths's!) which I had for school cookery lessons. The smaller one is perfect for just the two of us & many an unpromising lump of leftover pastry has actually rolled out to fill it perfectly well for a 'free' pastry case to freeze for another meal.
F

EssexHebridean

Indeed - I could actually have rolled out yesterday's for the mince pies a little thinner. It definitely wasn't going to take any mor rolling after I'd done the cutting out though, hence the scrappy tops!  I have a little set of loose-bottomed flan tins that I need to remember to use. Might get those out at christmas to make mini quiches, actually! 

foxgloves

Oh my giddy trousers, how can it be Monday again already?! It seems like just 2 or 3 weeks since we were enjoying our mini-break in North Norfolk, but that was actually September. Time is racing by & it needs to get a grip & slow down! I would dearly like this week to be a productive one & have got off to a decent start, I think. Generally budget-friendly activity as follows:
*A no-spend day.
*Made a sourdough loaf for baking tomorrow.
*Leftover roast chicken will be made into a meal tonight with home made cajun potato wedges & salad. Full rubber chicken activity will have to wait until tomorrow.
*Did 3 loads of laundry. Persistent rain today so no pegging out - pointless as no wind either. All on heated airer with some added ooomph from the dehumidifyer.
*Managed to rescue Mr F's rugby shirt which had suffered from the colour run from a new pair of jeans - not the first time they have been washed either, so I must watch out for them. I did thankfully manage to remove the blue dye using green bleach (sodium percarbonate) so the top has lived to fight another day.
*Made Christmas cake no.2, which is our cake, as the other one will be going down to London. A handful of leftover dried apricots have provided tomorrow's work snack.
*Made tomorrow's packed lunch & breakfast.
*Grimsby fish order arrived - now divvied it up & frozen. The plastic box it came in is a perfect size for 2 free seed trays so now washed & put ready to take down to the shed.
*Did my regular Monday morning budget updates. Several savings pots transfers plus grocery budget & Personal Spends updates,
*Did a survey - several surveys today looked available but then weren't, as soon as I tried to access them, so I have given up as like most people, I am not a fan of having my time wasted.
*Pick rocket & mizuna for tonight's salad - I haven't done that yet. It's my next job, as dusk is already falling & it will soon be too dark to see what I'm picking unless I take a torch down there with me.
*Put our Advent candle arch lights up in the kitchen. We don't decorate the tree until mid-December, but I like to bring out other decorations gradually throughout Advent. I haven't bought any new ones this year as we really don't need any. I can't fit everything we have on the tree & I don't like every surface cluttered with stuff (or gnomes, or singing Christmas trees or nutcracker figures & a whole host of other stuff, so I am not as tempted to buy new decorations these days as I could be, I'm glad to say).
Right, I must sign off, go & cut that salad, then I think I will have a tidy up, close the curtains & get ready for an evening of TV quizzes. 
Take care, m'dears,
F x

kayannie

If you decide on a crab apple, I can recommend 'red sentinel'. I had one years ago, the fruit is very dark red & the blackbirds appreciated the fruit in the winter.
KA

Suffolk_lass

If you are thinking of a small tree, I advise that you make sure you get a semi-dwarfing rootstock. Also, a number of growers will now graft more than one variety of apple on to a single tree. Just make sure you choose varieties in the same, or adjacent pollination groups. I'm not sure how au fait you are with these elements. Do say if you want me to say more but I risk "teaching my Grandma to suck eggs" to use one of my Grandma's favourite expressions when you explain something to someone who knows more than you do !!

foxgloves

@kayannie - Thanks, I'll make a note of that variety in case we do decide to replace the tree.

@Suffolk_lass - Thanks. Yes, I do know about rootstocks & pollinating. We'd defo go for a suitable rootstock. The lovely old tree we lost was estimated to be around the same age as our house (1930s) & it was huge - a completely unsuitable size for a domestic garden. Impossible for Mr F to reach many of its apples even standing on a ladder with our long picker pole. That's what got me reading about rootstocks. 
F