Anyone had a lightbulb moment with anything OS-related ?

toffifee

sunset_gold wrote: »

What is bread improver? My girls won't eat my HM bread either, only when I make it into garlic bread with spag bol. What does the improver actually do? Is it expensive? Where abouts on ebay did you get it? Thank you.

Bread improver is a floury powder that you add to the dough ingredients. It contains various things that help to improve the texture and taste. Without improver my loaves are quite solid, but with improver I think they're just as nice as a wholemeal loaf from the shop.
I get mine from brilliantbakerysupplies (haven't done a link before so don't know if that will work ) and they usually have sample packs for you to try out for maybe £4 including postage that will do around 20 500g (of flour) loaves. They do different kinds of improver: white; wholemeal; sour dough; general purpose... The blurb on ebay says that all of the ingredients are natural.
They send instructions about how much to add based on the weight of flour that you're using. I've found that 2 tsp for a 540g loaf works OK for me, but I think that's a little bit less than the instructions say.

Lakeland also sell it and I've bought a pack to try but it's more expensive.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any more questions.

shelleuk

I have been lurking on these boards for about 4 years but never really posted much. Last year we had a few bad months financially and i really embraced the 'old style' way of cooking. I bought a bread maker (just made my first banana loaf yum yum), been making meals from scratch and making meals in the slow cooker. I always read the threads regarding vinegar etc as a cleaning product and how you don't need to buy all the commercial sprays and liquids that are available but if im honest i thought it was a load of nonsense and in order to have a clean house i needed a different chemical for every job. Last week i was looking in my sink cupboard and calculated that i had approxiamtly £350 worth of cleaning products in there. Thats when i had my lightbulb moment (i got really upset, nearly started crying that i had spent so much money, how pathetic). We don't have any money worries anymore but i was discusted that i spend so much on them. With 2 adults, a 9 month old baby, 2 and 6 year old and a boxer dog in the house i think i may have become obsessed with cleaning products. I don't think being a stay at home mum helps because i spend a lot of my day cleaning. I bought some distilled vinegar cleaned all my windows and made a spray containing tea tree oil and lemon juice. Sprayed a bit on my conservatory rug where the dog had an accident and what do you know it got rid of the smell that cleaning products would't shift.

What made everyone else have their 'old style' lightbulb moment? Was it cost issues or realising that life was just has easy this way?

Im never gonna buy those cleaning products again. I don't know how im gonna shift half the stuff i have in the cupboard. 4 bottles of cilit bang, why?

CommitedToChange

I invested in my first bottle of stardrops just before christmas as I'm having to cut my spending right down, I can't believe how well it cleans everything.

I made a spray of stardrops, vinegar and water and used WAY too much first time as I treated it just like the expensive cleaners. They're such a waste of money. This has made me realise how good OS is :-D

meritaten

because they make one for each room in the house? and i strongly suspect they are all the same inside the bottle anyway!!!
my cleaning cupboard contains
a bottle of cheap but thick bleach
some soda crystals
the vinegar left over after pickling (about a quarter of a gallon plastic container) which gets used up even though its crystallised its so old!
washing up liquid
and because my OH is obsessed with the darn stuff (I never use it myself) the all purpose cleaner from Aldi.
Oh and one of those round tins of furniture wax polish my lovely corner shop always stocks at about half the price of everywhere else. Wont use spray polish.

er - must be less than a fivers worth!

I didnt have a moneysaving light bulb moment - what I did have was a severely asthmatic son and I read that some proprietary cleaners have a bad effect on asthmatics so did a purge and tried to use only non aerosols or cleaners which didnt stink or I could rinse off easily. that was about 23 years ago and i see no reason to rush out and buy a product when ordinary soap or a bit of vinegar will do the same job - only better usually!

beemuzed

Not really an OS lightbulb moment - OS was the way it was when I was growing up as a youngster in the 50's. I'm not sure when I myself realised that actually Mum and Nan had had the right ideas and although we could afford to spend more, there really was no point in wasting money!

MooBag_2

Great thread, Shelleuk! Really lovely to read the different responses. Here's my story in brief......

A child of the "Greed is good" eighties, born to a contradictory poverty stricken family who lacked in education and held the mantra "get what you want without working for it by gaining debt". I hit my twenties and strived to work hard and changed myself to resemble nothing like my roots. Problem was that meant living a middle class life without the funds so I quickly acquired debt to pay for the expensive, quality things I never had as a child. My OS values weren't embedded in my day to day living but lurked in small occasional habits.

Now I'm 30 I had my epiphany last week And like you, am appalled at my cleaning items! I thought just because I was buying Method products that was good enough for the environment......Maybe so BUT not so great for my pocket! I think I really lacked appreciation for how things were and how that can continue to work in a modern, fast paced world!! My life for so long was built around convenience and now, I'm realising the enjoyment of handy OS tips and books like Oxfam's Green Granny Tips Highly recommend it as a good introduction.

gizmo111

I've always been OS with food, but slacked off as I started working longer hours and bought a load of rubbish convienince food. The kids never stopped moaning about the meals and we were all tired and irritable all the time, I was spending a fortune around £150 per week and we still never seemed to have a decent meal, or anything for lunches, so I was paying out forthat as well. About Aug 09 I started planning, shopping and cooking properly again after probably a 3 year gap, my food bill went down by a huge amount of around £300 per month:eek:. Now I've just got a routine of batch cooking and using leftovers etc, we're all thinner happier and my bank balance is healthier as well. We are also never without something good to eat very quickly.

Re the cleaning stuff I have used stardrops for years and tend to not buy the faddy stuff although I do like flash with bleach spray for the kitchen worktops. And I am a smoker so usually have a candle alight at night and use an air freshner from aldi to take away the smell.

Peartree

I have been a sucker for a cleaning product that promises - well anything - although I am now reformed. But £350 worth!!!!! Please put me out of my misery and tell me what you can have hoarded that added up to £350 and how it fitted it in a single 'sink cupboard'? What expensive cleaning products can have passed me by?

bluebag

It was a gradual process for me rather than a epiphany, it came via ten years of digging myself pound by sorry pound out of awful debt.

Pink.

Hi shelleuk,

I didn't have a lightbulb moment as Old Style is a way of life that I was brought up with and it's almost second nature to me.

These threads will tell you how others became interested in an Old Style way of life:

Anyone had a lightbulb moment with anything OS-related ?

WHY are you old style?......

I'll add your thread to the first link later to keep the replies together.

Pink