Resourcefulness: The budgeter's friend

foxgloves

My thoughts exactly, @PennysIntoPounds.
F x

foxgloves

Afternoon Monday Money Savers,
Another day which has quite simply disappeared at the speed of Soot racing in for his lunch! Where HAS it gone?!
Tomorrow & the rest of the week can jolly well slow down, that's all I can say!
Today's small budget-friendly efforts:
*A no-spend day.
*Sorted the clean laundry & discovered only 4 items needed the iron so that was nice & speedy.
*Garden pickings: Another 1.3kg of blackberries.
*Went on a walk partly to boost today's steps, but also to see if my little foraging spot had any useful goodies. It did! Came home with a selection of elderberries, rosehips & haws.........
*.....which I added to a small container of redcurrants from the freezer, 500g of today's blackberries & a kg of bramley apples & cooked them up in the cauldron ready for a batch of hedgerow jelly - currently dripping through the jellybag. Doesn't even the WORD 'jellybag' make you feel a frisson of mellow early autumn days & a nice fruity addition to your roast lamb or turkey sandwich? 
*Made tomorrow's packed lunch & breakfast.
*Did my usual Monday morning budget updates. Pleased to see that August's grocery budget is looking a lot better than last month's!
*Did a couple of surveys.
*Very low effort nosebag tonight. Mr F made enough lovely chilli (with chicken mince for a change) on Saturday to feed us tonight as well, so I am just intending to cook some rice to go with that. Plenty of eggs so I made an omelette for my lunch & put courgettes in it. The addition of those made it really quite filling & it was a lot nicer than it probably sounds. 
Intending to have a nice lazy evening on the sofa seeing if I can get more right answers on UC than Mr F. If it is full of periodic table questions, physics, maths, flags, U.S states, geography & sport, then I'm doomed, but there again, if it is the latter 4 topics, then so is he!!
Bye for now, 
F x

Makingabobor2

Love your foraging. We got our 2nd load of blackberries on Sunday, so about 4kgs so far.  Saw loads of  rosehips, but not got a clue what to do with them. I remember having rosehip syrup as a child as it was full of vitamin c.   How do you make the hedgegrow jelly?  Is it worth me going back up there to get some?  I really want to start doing more kitchen wizardry. 

foxgloves

@Makingabobor2 - I just use a bog-standard recipe for redcurrant & apple jelly but replace the redcurrants with the same weight of blackberries, elderberries, hips & haws, sometimes a few rowan berries. Are you a jam maker? If not, then blackberry & apple jam could be a good place to start? It's pretty much foolproof & makes a nice gift with a fancy lid-topper.
F

Makingabobor2

foxgloves said:

@Makingabobor2 - I just use a bog-standard recipe for redcurrant & apple jelly but replace the redcurrants with the same weight of blackberries, elderberries, hips & haws, sometimes a few rowan berries. Are you a jam maker? If not, then blackberry & apple jam could be a good place to start? It's pretty much foolproof & makes a nice gift with a fancy lid-topper.
F

Not made jam since I was at school....so over 50 years ago now!   I might Google a recipe and have a go.

foxgloves

@Makingabobor2 - I think there might be lots of new or returning jam makers this year as the blackberries are so plentiful. My Mum hated cooking but she could make jam. My Nan was a very keen jam maker - her cherry jam was legendary, especially in her lovely home baked pastry lattice tarts - so she taught my Mum & she taught me when I was about 12. We'd go blackberrying & also as we lived in a fenland county, there'd be roadside stalls selling fab plums & damsons so we were always jammin' at this time of year.
F

foxgloves

Hello Tuesday Readers,
I'm not a lover of hot sticky weather, but I must say that although I can feel the humidity building now, it hasn't been as horribly hot today as the forecast predicted. I suppose keeping the curtains drawn on the front of the house has helped & also getting most of my outdoor tasks completed before mid-morning. Anyway, never mind this rambling, has their been any money saving activity? Well, a bit, it's all a bit kitchen-witchery this time of year so apologies if I am sounding even more 'samey' than usual!
*Watered all the veg first thing.
*Garden pickings: Blackberries, trombonicinos (or maybe that should be 'tromboncini'), courgettes, tomatoes & few grapes to see how their ripeness is progressing.
*Took the jelly bag down & jammed the contents - 10 jars (plus a tester) of hedgerow jelly. A good batch by the looks of things & of course I did try a spoonful too. As soon as Mr F heard I'd been foraging so as to make some, he announced he'd be having it on his Christmas dinner as he doesn't like cranberry sauce, so I have put a pretty holly print lid on the largest jar & it can start off our festive supplies.
*Started off a batch of blackberry vinegar. That just needs to sit in a bowl infusing until the weekend so no need to do anything with it just yet. 
*Made tomorrow's packed breakfast & lunch.
*Emailed a company to complain about a foreign body lurking in a tub of peanut butter.
*Did a few minor bits of financial admin - one of these was correcting the grocery budget as I had forgotten to include the small stock-up we did at the eco-refill shop.....one of the reasons I prefer actual physical receipts as even when I check my emails daily, I still sometimes forget to include e-receipts in recent transactions.
*Did a few surveys. 
*Finish the neverending socks......not because I am a slow knitter, but because I'm just not putting the time in. It will be good to get them finished & into the presents bag, plus as they are knitted as a stash-busting use-it-up project, I am counting getting rid of loads of little oddments & skeins as part of my ongoing decluttering.
Can't believe it is Sewing Bee night again already. I'm really looking forward to that, especially as it is recycle week. Virtually no effort required for tonight's meal as Mr F made sufficient green bean macaroni cheese on Sunday to feed us today as well. I shall stir-fry some courgettes with garlic & a bit of za'atar to accompany it. Mr F is requesting courgettes with everything atm, which is just as well, as we are inundated with them. I thought I'd given him too many the other night but he said, "Just pile 'em on, Babe, I can't get enough of 'em!" Well, you don't need to tell me that twice during courgette glut season so if you hear on the News that someone in the North East Midlands has actually TURNED INTO a courgette, it will almost certainly be him, so I might get on the telly!
Ah well, enough of my loquacity,
F x

Makingabobor2

foxgloves said:

@Makingabobor2 - I think there might be lots of new or returning jam makers this year as the blackberries are so plentiful. My Mum hated cooking but she could make jam. My Nan was a very keen jam maker - her cherry jam was legendary, especially in her lovely home baked pastry lattice tarts - so she taught my Mum & she taught me when I was about 12. We'd go blackberrying & also as we lived in a fenland county, there'd be roadside stalls selling fab plums & damsons so we were always jammin' at this time of year.
F

I'll need to get hold of some suitable jars. what do you use?

Makingabobor2

So Google lens told me these  were rosehips, but they look  much bigger than the photo on a recipe I looked up. Are they actually crab apples? 

foxgloves

@Makingabobor2 - I re-use jars from my jar stash. 
They look like rosehips rather than crab apples (which would be on a tree) but they're not like the wild ones I pick, which I think are the hips from the basic wild hedgerow dog rose. I use the ones we all called 'itchy buds' when we were children & used to try & drop the seeds down people's backs.
F