Riding the wave

Keep_Buggering_On

A quiet weekend at home, well we can’t currently afford anything else! Despite that, it was a very enjoyable weekend. I started a model kit I wanted to make and spent some happy hours cutting and gluing bits of cardboard together. I really enjoy this as its relaxing and I can do it in the living room whilst my wife games so we can have a good conversation whilst also doing things that we both enjoy! I popped into the village on Saturday and spent a grand total of £2.50- 50p on a toy car in the charity shop which is the right scale for my model railway (compared to £10 each for the same thing in the model shop!), two packs of potato bread in the chuck out for 50p each and four packs of Malteesers reindeers down to 25p each for a sweet treat- me and OH shared a packet with a cuppa and they were yummy!

I managed to get a mammoth baking session done yesterday- a homemade steak pie, buns, jam tarts and home made hob-knobs, plus I found a bag of rhubarb lurking at the back of the freezer from last year so me and the kids had home made rhubarb crumble and custard after tea last night (OH is very disappointed that she can’t eat rhubarb so had to miss out). OH gets her UC through on Wednesday, so we are just trying to hold on until then! Lunch today was a (tasty) combination of things found in the fridge and the back of the freezer. DS had to have a jam sandwich instead of his usual biscuits for his supper last night- I thought I would get winging, but apparently jam sandwiches are awesome and he was very happy with the substitution! Wednesday will be a shop to refill the cupboards- we definitely won’t starve, but we are out of a few things so having to do some substitutions until we can restock! Compared to both my parents and my grandparents generations though, we really have nothing to complain about!

peb

Sorry to hear about the piggy, always so hard.

Hopefully the time til June will pass by quickly and you have a grand holiday

Keep_Buggering_On

The end of another week and the big news here is we have a lovely new addition to the family- a five week old little black kitten. She is unbelievably cute and is sat on my lap whilst I type this, watching the cursor move across the screen with great intensity! She is tiny, but very sassy already and our other cat hates her! Every time she sees the kitten, we get hissing and growling, but last night she did decide that sleeping in front of the fire was worth putting up with being in the same room as the kitten for! Hopefully she will get over her hatred and they will settle down in a few weeks and tolerate each other, at least the kitten isn’t phased by the hissing!

I don’t get paid until Tuesday, so it will be a quiet weekend again, but I have my model to finish I started last weekend, and if the weather holds I would like to get the grass chopped and maybe make a start chopping up some of the wood in my pile for firewood for next winter. I feel the fuel prices will rocket this year so all the free heating I can get I will take! It definitely feels like a time I want to be at home, preparing some resilience for the future, both financially and practically, and I am not really feeling the need or desire to go off out doing things outside my garden gate.

Having said that, despite not being exactly flush, I do have a busy May ahead of me with things on most weekends- celebrating DS’s birthday next weekend, going up to my Mum and Dads, a WW2 event at the local steam railway (tickets already bought and paid for) and a cinema trip with DS at the end of the month to see the new Star Wars film (we are both big geeks!). Nothing too big or expensive, but plenty happening anyway.

Keep_Buggering_On

A very pleasant weekend at home- got more of my model built (another couple of weekend’s work to do but its coming together). The weather was so nice on Saturday afternoon than me and OH sat out in the garden with a couple of beers in the sunshine which was very nice. No baking this weekend- still got a bit left in the tins from last week and DS is having his birthday this week so there will be cake left over. I made a very nice butter chicken curry on Saturday night for tea, but rather than the expensive chicken breast portions, I boned out some thighs and chopped them up- not only are they tastier but a lot, lot cheaper! I paid £3.51 for 1kg, with seven thighs in it. I used three for the curry, and divided the rest in half so will be using two for a chicken supreme tonight and the other two for fajitas next week. Three meals for four of us, with left overs for my lunch, for £3.51’s worth of meat seems pretty frugal to me! Meat is the most expensive ingredient (twas ever thus), so we do tend to eat the cheaper cuts and luckily none of us wants or needs massive portions. I made one of my Mum’s recipes for ‘pop overs’ for tea last night. This uses ¼ of a 500g pack of mince (so 125g) and feeds four of us comfortably.

You mix the mince with a tablespoon of tomato sauce, three tablespoons of flour, herbs, paprika and seasoning and then make up meatballs which are put in a greased bun tin (lard for the best results), one per section and then have batter poured over and in the oven for half an hour on gas mk 7 before serving with mash, veg and gravy. If you are hungry, make eight in a couple of Yorkshire pudding tins with a batter mix made from 4ox flour, 2 eggs and ½ pint milk. That is normally a bit too filling for us, so I make 12 little meatballs and put them in a bun tin with half the amount of batter. My kids love them, they are very economical and as Yorkshire puddings are filling, you are certainly not going hungry! I am glad my Mum taught me to be a traditional family cook, rather than anything fancy. My food may never look pretty, but its cheap, tasty and hearty and most of it is homemade from scratch so you know what's gone into it!

joedenise

I used to do something similar when my kids were little using the meat removed from sausages. Also used to make sausage meatballs in a sweet and sour sauce - they preferred these to chopped up pork!

Keep_Buggering_On

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81978767#Comment_81978767

Thanks, thats a good idea as I have a pack of sausage meat in the freezer I picked up cheap after Christmas and I wasn't sure what to do with it…

Keep_Buggering_On

8.10am on payday and I am already going 'arghh' at my bank balance! In fairness I have paid off my overdraft, transferred money to the joint account and OH for the bills and made a payment on both credit cards/Klarna etc. plus taken money out and put in envelopes for different things this month and put something in the savings, but it is still a little depressing to see it go out of my account as quickly as it went in! I am in awe of people who have money left in their current account by the end of the month, I would like to have some left at the end of payday!

in_need_of_direction

if you are only using your current account as an in box, I’d focus more on getting a balance in the envelopes or the joint account.

Keep_Buggering_On

End of the week and we are being naughty tonight with fish and chips from the chippie in the village- its DS’s birthday and he chose this for tea so it’s a nice treat, followed by Birthday cake and his choice of film (Lego Batman) after school tonight. Tomorrow we are off to the local big city for a day out with DS’s girlfriend so he can go and spend his birthday money. Lunch will be in McDonalds, not my favourite but DS likes it and its not expensive! After that we will have a quiet bank holiday weekend at home, hopefully the weather forecast is wrong and it’s a bit nicer than predicted!

Little kitten is coming out of her shell and big cat has realised that she is not going anywhere and is actually fun to play with so there is a lot less hissing and growling, but more mad cats charging round the house chasing each other! She has brought a lot of joy and after losing the guinea pig, although not a replacement, she is a much needed tonic. Tomorrow will be the longest we have left her on her own, so we will see how that goes but we will leave her with plenty of toys and some biscuits so I am sure she will be fine.

Keep_Buggering_On

Bank holiday weekend was very nice. We had a lovely fish and chip tea on the Friday for DS’s birthday. I haven’t bought fish and chips from the chippie in ages, so it was a bit of a shock when two fish and chips (not sold as haddock or cod, so probably pollock) and an extra fish came to £22! OH put the mushy peas on and did the bread and butter whilst I ran into the village to save a few pounds! This was still a massive amount of food for the four of us, but we didn’t leave much behind! It was a lovely treat, but I can’t imagine paying that much out every week for a single meal.

On the Saturday we had a day out in Leeds so DS could spend his birthday money. We don’t go out shopping very often, so again it was a nice change, and we picked up DS’s girlfriend on the way and it was very sweet to see the pair of them chatting away. They were handing out free samples of posh cat food in the shopping centre and both me and OH got nabbed separately by the sales people who pressed packets of food into our hands- we came out of it with six boxes of Gourmet cat food, each with four pots in them. It’s the expensive stuff and we tried it with our big cat on Sunday morning and she loved it- she is only getting it once a week so she doesn’t get a taste for it! Its Asda own brand the rest of the time- if we are on a budget, so is the cat! As a freebie though, I was very happy to come away with them.

I spoke to my Dad and arranged for me and DD to go up this coming weekend. He sounded completely exhausted. Although my mum has carers in four days a week, its only a few hours a time and Dad is there 24 hours a day with it, including Mum being up at 4am every day needing help going to the loo. She has a condition called PSP, or progressive supranuclear palsy, which is a bit like Parkinsons, but much rarer. She has been getting worse over the last four years and is now pretty much unable to do anything on her own. Dad says the hardest part though is that she has difficulty speaking and being understood, so he misses the conversations he used to have with her, and its not always clear what she wants. We went through the caring with my MiL, so I understand just how hard it is for him and although her carers are lovely, it does fall mostly on Dad to do everything and I think he finds it a bit lonely and isolating. Me and DD will go up and give them a distraction for the afternoon, and I will see if there are any jobs he needs me to get done whilst I am there. I try and get up once a month, but it is three buses and 2-3 hours each way to reach them, so I can’t just pop in easily.