On Feeling Rough

I seem to have been fighting off bugs since just after Christmas when Dear Daughter & the Grandchildren very kindly off loaded some on to me :/   Just as I feel the lurgy is beginning to lift I get up next morning and feel worse!  Now I have developed a tickly cough which is embarrassing , to say the least, when in company.  The feeling starts like a feather in the throat  and off I go, coughing and coughing until the tears run down my cheeks and my nose runs.  I seemed to do nothing but cough during the night, despite taking some cough supressing medicine before I went to bed, consequently I feel worse than ever this morning.  I'm still in my PJ's as I type this ( currently 9.53am) What a state to be in....oh, and I haven't mentioned the fact that I need to cross my legs as I cough!!

Is anyone else out there suffering?  Winter bugs are a nightmare, aren't they.  Any tips to help stop this awful cough will be much appreciated....please?

Thanks for visiting.  At least, my keyboard friends, I cannot pass this bug on to you! x

Challenge Food Plan

Yesterday, I posted my shopping list for the Feed 2 People for a Week on £20 challenge.

I have to point out that I am posting a food plan for the virtual challenge.  As it would need OH to actually agree to do it in reality, and he will not, then it must be virtual one.  Firstly, I have to point out that I am not saying the plan is nutritionally correct and it's certainly not to everyone's taste.  There is a lot of carbohydrate and a minimal amount of meat, but they are the kind of meals we do eat especially in winter.  We need the carbs to keep warm :)

To start I would freeze the thick sliced loaf and take out slices as needed for toasting.  The medium one would go further for sandwiches. Freeze the sausages and take out as needed allowing time to thaw.

Day 1)
Cereal & milk
Poached egg on thick toast
Sausages (oven roast), roast potatoes, broccoli, carrots, gravy

Day 2)
Hot buttered thick toast
HM vegetable soup (onion, carrot, potato, cabbage) with bread
Jacket potato with grated cheese & grated carrot

Day 3)
Cereal & milk
Ham sandwiches with lettuce and tomato (share one)
HM cheese & potato pie, baked beans

Day 4)
Cereal & milk
HM veg soup (as above) with bread
HM Bubble & Squeak with bacon (2 rashers each)

Day 5)
Cereal & milk
Cheese salad with lettuce, grated carrot, tomato (share one)
Egg, chips, 1/2 tin baked beans (shared)

Day 6) Assumed to be Saturday
Cereal & milk
All Day Breakfast:
1 sausage, 1 bacon rasher, 1 egg, half a grilled tomato, 1/4 tin beans each plus a slice of toast
Cheese on toast

Day 7) Assumed to be Sunday
Cereal & milk
Sausages (grilled) mashed potato, cabbage, carrots & gravy
Toasted cheese & tomato sandwiches

Puddings

If there is flour in the cupboard, then I would save an egg from Day 6 (scramble one to share) and use half the tin of pineapple to make an upside down sponge with it.  This will make 6 portions either to have with the custard or to eat as cake.  If no flour available, then I would make 4 small servings of pineapple and custard to eat on 2 separate days.

Snacks

Snacks would have to be toast or cereal (there should be a little left for this) and a cup of tea/coffee

Conclusion

For just one week only I think we would manage, after all I have done it in the past but we would really struggle if £20 was all we had week after week.  There is no way I can get 5 portions of fruit/veg in this plan.  We seem to have just 2 so this plan is NOT nutritionally sound.

If we had to do a second week I would buy:

1) Rice instead of potatoes

2) Chicken (whole) which would provide around 6 portions instead of sausage & bacon

3) Make a larger quantity of soup for 3 days worth

4) Definitely buy whatever fruit I could get for my budget even if it is just one or two bananas


Thanks for popping in and please do comment.  Feedback (good or bad!) will be very interesting :) x

Feed 2 People For A Week On £20 Challenge

Simple Suffolk Smallholder has thrown out a virtual challenge of feeding 2 people for a week on just £20.  I wanted to have a go at this but I have found it incredibly difficult.  I usually spend around £30 for the two of us plus £10 for non-food items like washing powder, toilet roll, washing up liquid etc so to cut my food budget by a third has thrown me completely. There is no Aldi or Lidl that I can use so Morrisons is my choice of supermarket.  I made a shopping list as follows:

Protein

Cathedral City Cheddar 350g (on offer)   £ 2.00
Back bacon (pack of 10 slices)                    1.89
Richmond thick sausage (pack of 12-offer) 1.75
100g pack sliced cooked ham (4 slices)       1.00
6 Savers eggs                                                  .89
2 Tins Savers Baked Beans                            .48

Fruit & Veg

12.5kg sack potatoes (on offer)                   2.00
1kg bag onions                                              .69
1.2kg bag carrots                                           .69
Head of Broccoli                                           .49
Savoy Cabbage                                             .69
Pack of 4 Tomatoes                                      .59
Iceberg lettuce                                              .49
Tin Savers Pineapple pieces                        .27
 
General

750g Morrisons Fruit 'n' Fibre cereal         1.69
2 x 4 pints milk (any kind)                         1.78
2 x Savers Loaves (1 medium sliced,
                        1 thick)                               1.18
Pack English butter                                    1.00
Savers custard powder sachet                      .15
                                                                ------------

                              Total Cost               £ 19.72

This leaves just 28p which would buy either one medium loose banana (2 small if you are lucky)  If you are able to save any pennies at all on this list (and I can't really see where unless you buy reduced near-use-by-date bread for toasting) then I would spend it on extra bananas.

This list is desperately missing fruit but it should, at least, allow for some portions of your 5 a day. Where it falters is in buying things on offer so that it would collapse completely if the prices shift back up.  I make no apology for spending 10% of the budget on potatoes because, in my view, they offer great value and are great fillers of hungry tummies especially if one of the two people we are feeding is male ( my teenage son used to eat for England despite being very slim). 

I assume the store cupboard already holds:

Tea
Coffee
Sugar
Salt
Pepper
Vinegar
Gravy powder
Oil (any kind)

Tomorrow  I will post my food plan for the week. 

Thanks so much for popping in x

On Yellow Stickers and Crafting

Firstly, a big welcome to my new follower, Marlene Jones, thanks for clicking :)

Well, I promised to show you my bargain YS'd items.  As I was shopping on Monday I spotted these by the self serve salad counter....

A big 1kg bag of moist grated carrot and 400g of chopped green peppers.  I couldn't believe the price of 19p each and the use-by date was 2 days away.  I didn't want to be greedy so I just had one of each.  There were also bags of chopped white cabbage but I could only think 'coleslaw' which OH refuses to eat so I left those alone.  Anyway I have put the peppers straight into the freezer and will use them to add to quiches, omelettes and frittata.  Yesterday, I weighed 2 ordinary carrots which came in at just under 200g to give me an idea of the quantity of the grated stuff to use.  200g of it along with 85g rinsed red lentils, an onion, 1litre of veg stock (using 1 good quality stock cube plus salt & pepper) were simmered together for 15 minutes or so. The resulting soup will give us around 6 portions some of which will be frozen for later.  The rest of the carrot has been split into 4 freezer bags (200g in each one) and frozen.  I am thinking veg soup, carrot cake etc. 

Does anyone have any more suggestions how I can use it please?  And what would you have done with the bag of chopped white cabbage? Careful now...  :)

Crafting

Marlene, from Simple Living has expressed an interest in seeing more of my craft projects so I thought I might share what I did yesterday, some simple but effective new baby cards....

....and a wedding congratulations card.  I'm afraid the light has distorted the colour on this one but the card blank and the embossed layer are both bright white and the heart is a peachy lemon colour.  All are easy to make once you have the layout clear in your head.....

If you have any questions, then please do ask.  I am always happy to share ideas.

Thanks everso for popping in x

Inspired Shepherds Pie & Dodgy Maths

Quite inspired by John  at Of Brambles and Bears blog, I fancied making veggie shepherds pie last night using Quorn mince.  I had all the ingredients in stock.....

It was so easy as the packet mix added flavour.  I just chopped up the onion, sautéed it (that's posh for frying) in a small amount of olive oil, added the chopped up carrot (tiny pieces to cook quicker), mince, packet mix and 300ml water. I had some out of date (only by a couple of months!) chilli tomato puree so added a squirt of that too.  It was simmered for a few minutes to make sure it was hot and popped in a dish with lovely soft mashed potato on top.  After just 30 minutes in the oven at 190  it came out lovely....

 

Especially with a few microwaved peas and some instant gravy......(the latter added after the picci, of course) This was my portion so slightly less than 1/4 of the recipe...

 

I have tried to cost it out:

 

300g Quorn mince (3 bags for £5)   1.67

Shepherd's pie mix (Morrisons)         .29

1 Carrot (12 in a bag 60p)                  .05

2 small onions (12 for 50p)               .09

dribble of oil (guesstimate)                .02

 

700g potatoes (from big sack)           .24

splash of milk to mash..negligible

 

Total without peas & gravy           £2.36

 

This made 4 portions and it could be bulked out easily with extra veggies to feed a family.  As there are only two of us, the other 2 portions have been frozen for an easy meal another time.

 

I do wish you could have seen us trying to work out the cost of the potatoes though.  I can't do metric.  A 12.5kg bag cost us £4 (£2 at the moment in Morrisons) so I hope we came up with the correct cost. What a pair of numptys.  Who would guess that I have an 'O' level in maths?  Sorry, Miss Morrell, you didn't teach me in metric.

 

I picked up some bargainous yellow stickered stuff yesterday too but, so as not to bore you with too much food blogging, I'll write about that tomorrow :)

 

At the moment the sun is shining, melting away the ground frost, the air smells fresh and clean, here is a lovely place to be.  That is my Small Treasure for today.

 

Hope your day is wonderful.

 

Lovely to *see * you x 

 



Teenage Mutant Parsnips & Enlightenment

 

A big welcome to my new follower John :)

 

Yesterday was cold but bright and sunny so I decided to enlist OH's help in prising the last of the home grown parsnips from their warm and cosy tub of compost.  I had almost forgotten about them but...waste not, want not, is my mantra....out they came.  Wow! some of them had got so bored with waiting to be pulled up that they have grown legs!  Now how that happened is a mystery.  They are in smooth compost, not garden soil so there can be no stones to navigate around.  Wanting to escape can be the only explanation :)  It's the first effort at growing parsnips but I have been very pleased with the results.  It will soon be time to decide what to grow this year.  We only have room for one tub of something and a potato bag so I must get my thinking cap on.  Any suggestions very welcome for easy to grow stuff which can be harvested over a number of weeks.  What can you gardening folks suggest please?

 

 

 

 

 A friend has emailed some photos of the most amazing sculptures from around the world.  This one is my favourite....

 

 

It's called Expansion by Paige Bradley, New York, USA.  I think it is absolutely stunning and would rather call it......Enlightenment... totally beautiful, absolutely amazing. What a talent.

 

Another one is this...

 

 

De Vaartkapoen, Brussels, Belgium.  It kind of reminds me of the way life can trip you up when you least expect it.....

Have a lovely day, folks, and do stay warm.

Thanks for popping in x

 

 

 

 

Draw Winner & The Reason I Don't Eat Meat

As I only had two people interested in receiving my Meet The Ancestors book I decided to just toss a coin to decide the winner.

Heads: Cornish Chickpea
Tails: Pam

To make it fair OH did the flipping of the coin so well done CORNISH CHICKPEA. 

 

Please pm me with your address and I'll post it off to you.


Reading other blogs with all the lovely winter meaty recipes got me thinking about why exactly I don't eat meat.  I can't call myself vegetarian because I do eat a little fish and I used to eat meat when I was a child but even then I ate just a small amount;  the first crispy slice from a beef joint, a slice of chicken breast, a pork sandwich, a crispy bacon butty.  When the children were small and we had very little money I ate even less.  I would buy some for the family and just have a plate of veggies for myself quickly realising that I didn't miss meat at all. I also think that if you kill a living thing to eat it you shouldn't waste any of it.  My Dad used to say that the only bit of a pig which wasn't used was it's grunt which, in my view, is as it should be.  I simply can't face some cuts of meat or offal so it's only fair that I don't expect an animal to give up it's life for me.  Handbags & purses I buy are never made from leather as there is no need. The alternatives are perfectly acceptable.  However, I do wear leather shoes as I believe the leather comes as a by product of the food industry anyway and unsupportive footwear give me pain in my feet.  Hypocrytical? Perhaps.... I refuse to condemn anyone for being a carnivore but, equally, I expect people to allow me my own viewpoint. My family understand and make allowances for me but I do find problems with some pubs or restaurants who don't cater with veggie gravy, for example.

How about you? Any more veggies out there? Does anyone else encounter a problem with eating out either in a restaurant or someone else's home?

Thanks, as usual, for popping in to see me x