I'm dreaming of a crochet Christmas...

Christmas is just around the corner and I'm cracking on with some homemade gifts.

Chocolate orange covers are the patterns of the day.

The Christmas pudding was a simple pattern, though I need to find some leaves to finish this off.

A simple Christmas Tree with Five-point star.  Next step with this will be the addition of some little silver beads for baubles.

Some mini wreaths have also been made

Work In Progress includes the blanket / throw for eldest daughter.  It's coming along slowly, 30 minutes per row at a time!

At some point I will pick up the 1ply 'virus' shawl and start a couple of other projects.  I'm determined not to buy any new wool until I have used up 75% of the wool in my house... Though there are some lovely yarns out there that I'm itching to try.

Upcycling shrivelled apples into delicious yumminess

The cupbaords weren't empty, but they weren't overflowing either!  The fruit bowl had proved fairly popular but we hadn't eaten as many apples as we usually do and we ended up with a few apples with shrivelled skins that nobody found particularly appetising.  We had one egg, sugar and flour as well as milk and a bit of butter in the fridge. That coupled with a bottle of toffee sauce that the girls found difficult to get sauce from, a carton of custard that had been at the back of the cupboard for some time... an idea began to form.  Toffee apple sponge with custard.

50g sugar

50g butter

50g self raising flour, sifted

2 tbs milk

1egg

2 eating apples peeled, cored and chopped

Toffee sauce

Cream butter and sugar, add egg and milk and mix well.  Add flour. Add half the apples and mix well.

Put remaining apples in bottom of a bowl, add toffee sauce and top with sponge mix.  Cover with cling film.

Microwave in full for 4 minutes and serve with warm custard.

No photographs of finished pud.  It disappeared too fast 😋

Yogurt

I've been wanting to dust off the Easiyo yogurt maker for some time and yesterday I finally did it.  I bought a litre of skimmed milk from Aldi (49p), some skimmed milk powder from home bargains (£1.39) and a sachet of Easiyo yoghurt cultures from Holland and Barrett (£3.11).

I used 1 litre of milk, 1/4 packet of yogurt cultures (42g), 30g of skimmed milk powder, and let the Easiyo get to work.  

Today I have delicious greek style yogurt.  Served with a teaspoon of runny honey... Delicious.

Costs:

Milk 49p

Cultures 77p

Milk powder 20p

Total: £1.46 for 1 litre of greek style yogurt.

I might tweak the quantities of powder & culture next time to see if 1/5 packet of cultures would work.

Scones...

We picked up some buttermilk on Sunday.  Going cheap.  I bought two, froze one and used one to make 15 lovely scones.

450g self raising flour (aldi 45p for 1.5kg), plus extra for dusting

100g cold butter, cubed (tesco 10p reduced, normally costs £1 for 250g

85g caster sugar (Aldi 89p)

284ml buttermilk (Tesco 28p)

5ml vanilla essence (no idea how much)

I set the oven to gas mark 4, then rubbed in the butter to the flour.  Added the sugar and mixed.  Add the vanilla to the buttermilk, stir and heat gently in the microwave until warm, then add to dry ingredients.  Bring together and press out to 3cm thick on a floured surface and cut 6cm circles.  Reshape trimmings, press and cut again (makes 15-18 scones).  Add a splash of milk to the buttermilk container and brush tops of scones with milk.  Cook in oven for 12-15 minutes.  Serve with jam (and cream if you have it - I didn't but it was still delicious.

Total cost about £1 for all of them,  jam was 29p value branded strawberry jam.

Soya protein mince (H&B)

One of the main tips I have read seems to be making what you have go further.  Making mince stretch by adding lentils, oats, soya protein or a mix of all three.  I've done this before using 400g mince, 400g made up soya mince and 100g lentils but I cant for the life of me think why I stopped doing it.  Maybe when we didn't live near a health food shop and dried soya protein was not easily accessible... who knows.

I phoned Mr Cat as he made his way home yesterday and asked him to call into H&B (LS15 store) to pick up some Soya protein mince.  A 375g bag is the equivalent of 1.5kg of mince when made up.  I don't think i can buy poultry mince at 1.5kg for £1.89 or 3kg for £2.84 (they had their buy one get one half price offer on) so he picked up two packs, one savoury and one natural.

Our plan for either this or the next weekend is to make up some mince based meals for the freezer (Bolognese, Lasagne, Chilli, Shepherd's pie etc, using at least 50% soya mince to make the meat stretch further.  That and a handful of red lentils to increase protein content whilst keeping costs relatively low should help us on our journey to living a more frugal life.

I want to use this to keep tabs on what things cost, package sizes etc.  

Cat.x

We must live within our means...

We have stumbled through life these past few years and made no economies... Unless we act soon, once again we will face those awful words "insufficient funds for transaction".  There are many areas we can target to make economies.

Groceries:
Make a list, buy only what is on the list, cook from scratch, bulk cook, become friends with my freezer.

Gardening:
Grow our own fruit and veg.  We are very lucky to live with a large garden with mature veg plots and large greenhouses.  We just haven't made the best use of them.  This has to change so we can grow more of our own food.

Freezer friendly:
Batch cook foods and freeze extra portions.  Blanche and freeze cooking essentials, especially gluts from the garden.

Gifts:
Make far more gifts for people.  If they don't appreciate them, they don't get them in future!

Lodger:
take in a lodger to increase monthly income

Make do and mend.  If it breaks, fix it.  Don't buy it, wait a week or two and do without.  Ask "do we need it, can i buy it cheaper anywhere else"?

Keep a spending diary.

This will be my record of what we are going to do, what worked, what didn't and to look at more improvements.