Upcycle an old duvet cover into a frugal bean bag

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 2 November 2010 in frugal, making | 4 comments

(Is it just me or does “frugal bean bag” sound like a filthy euphemism? … It’s just me, isn’t it?)

As I mentioned in passing last week during my quick week-off updates, I made a bean bag from some old bedding.

We wanted a fairly sizeable beanbag for the animals to sit on in front of the stove in the office. We wanted one that could be a flat mattress (since that would suit the dog best) but also be pulled up on its side to be a taller seat for us when we needed extra seating. I also wanted one that had an inner liner and a washable cover because, well, everything has to be machine washable in this house.

Perhaps I was looking in the wrong places but my my, big beanbags with liners are expensive! In shops, they were either tiny, unlined or unwashable pleather/suede, or all three. On one website, which was recommended by a friend, it was looking like I’d have to pay about £80 for a beanbag to match my wants – £80! For a bean bag!! GAH!!! So I decided to make my own.

It’s essentially a giant square cushion covered with a removable pillow slip case – but I’ve explained how I made it below.

Mushroom hunting at Ogden Water, Halifax

Posted by louisa on Monday 1 November 2010 in wild food | 1 comment

Yesterday John, Lily-dog and I went on a long awaited funghi forage, led by Jesper Launder and organised by Slow Food West Yorkshire.

We went on another wild food walk with Jesper & SlowFoodWY in May – mostly tasting different greens and crayfish – and as our interest in wild food and mushrooms has sky rocketed since then, we were very much looking forward to yesterday’s walk. Unfortunately some local rapscallions nearly caused us to miss it at the last minute – on leaving the house to get into the car, we found someone had nicked one of the wheels! We were grateful, again, that we have a cheap runaround car that we don’t really care about – and that they’d left all the nuts etc, so we could fit the spare and get to the walk just half an hour late.

We met the group in the woods just over the dam at Ogden Water. We’d not been to the reservoir before but will return again – it was misty so unearthily beautiful – and the woods a combination of broadleaf and conifer tree, making the mushroom picking extensive and varied. The group had already picked a few different types of mushroom but between us we found many, many more as the walk went on.

As with the considerably warmer and dryer wild food walk earlier in the year, Jesper enthusiastically identified every ‘shroom we took over to him, and told us how to use them or cook them, or whether to discard them unless we wanted hallucinations and painful death. There were too many different types to remember but I did get confirmations on some that I had been unsure about – and got to try eating some I’d seen & identified previously but not wanted to cook up for fear of that painful death stuff.

Some of the ones we got to eat and I’d happily pick & eat again:

• The Deceiver (Laccaria Laccata) – something I’ve seen before but not concretely identified, small and unsubstantial but good in a mixture
• Amethyst Deceiver (Laccaria Amethystea) – something we’d found before and identified, because nothing else is quite so purple
• Honey Fungus (Armillaria Mellea) – we found a full stump of these just near the end of the walk
• Grisettes (Amanita Vaginata) – something not included in my little pocket mushroom book so not something I’d really heard of before, but a decent size so well worth looking out for
• Wood Blewit (Lepista Nuda)
• The Blusher (Amanita Rubescens)

I also got to ask questions I’d been wanting to ask since I started identifying mushrooms such as “is there anything so poisonous that we shouldn’t pick it up?” (no, even licking your fingers after a death cap is probably ok) and “how much do you need to eat of the poisonous ones before the painful death thing?” (depends on the mushroom, some it’s a lot but death caps can sometimes kill after just half a cap so it’s well worth being careful).

I also got a book recommendation from Jesper – Mushrooms by Roger Philips – which will hopefully be a useful definitive guide in comparison to my existing not great ones. If nothing else, I find it very useful to cross-referencing potentially identifications (the more pictures the better).

All in all, despite the wheel-stealing-stress and the rain, it was a great day. We met some lovely people, learned a lot about funghi and found a fab new place to take Lily-dog. I’d highly recommend a walk with Jesper and will definitely be going on the next SlowFoodWY wild food walk.

(Apologies for the lack of pictures – I forgot my camera in all the where’s-the-wheel-gone hoohah. I’m hoping someone else will post some freely licensed pictures soon!)

Week off continues – baking and making, oh my

Posted by louisa on Thursday 28 October 2010 in cooking, making, meta | 2 comments

My week off is racing by and I’m trying to stay off my computer as much as possible because it’s like a black hole for my doing stuff energy…

Yesterday was less productive than Monday & Tuesday – a long-long-long-awaited trip to the hairdressers (which made me feel more detached from mainstream society than ever!) and then into Bradford city centre to go to the wonderful Texere Yarns & around the charity shops at Ivegate. I bought some band-less but otherwise perfect balls of tweedy yarn from their £1 bin – and started to turn it into a pair of slippers last night. I’m about three-quarters of my way through my first one at the moment – can’t wait until they’re finished as they already feel snuggy and warm!

Today I’ve mostly been playing with water and flour – I started making a papier mache chicken shaped moneybox this morning (hopefully will be dry enough for a second layer this evening) and this afternoon, I’ve been baking, including making Atomic Shrimp’s Honey-glazed Fennel Seed crackers. They’re currently resting before baking – another “can’t wait until they’re done”, they smell ace! I’ve had a lot of fun making them too – will definitely make them again and post my own recipe variations here soon.

Spicy butternut squash soup recipe

Posted by louisa on Wednesday 27 October 2010 in cooking, recipes | 2 comments

I made this spicy butternut squash soup for lunch for John, Strowger and me yesterday; Strowger liked it so much that he wanted the recipe so I thought I’d put it on here :)

For us spice fiends, it’s more flavourful rather than head-exploding spicetastic – if you’d prefer the latter, just add more dried chilli flakes. The flavour comes more from the cumin & ginger than from the chilli.

If you don’t have a blender or stick blender, using a potato masher to squash the … squash when it’s ready. The resulting soup won’t be quite as smooth but it should break down easily to give a chunky soup consistency.

Week off fun: apple pressing, egg pickling, bread baking & bean bag making

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 26 October 2010 in charity shopping, cooking, making, preserving | 0 comments

Hurrah! My week off has started well.

Last week was a busy one – working as usual during the day, then in the evenings, Tuesday through to Sunday, I was at Bingley Little Theatre for one reason or another (mostly rehearsals/show nights for the weekend’s studio productions). That ate into my fun making-and-doing time somewhat so I’m glad I’ve got the week off this week to catch up on fun stuff.

When I got back from the theatre at 10:30pm on Friday night, John had just started pressing some apples for cider. We had to give back the borrowed fruit press at lunchtime on Saturday so I was enlisted to help. We pressed until just after midnight then again for a couple of frantic hours on Saturday morning – got through about 40lbs of apples – about half-and-half from John’s Grandma’s apple tree and windfall from John B (who also provided the loan of the press). We’ve got 2 gallons of cider on the go now and there were a few litres left over which John’s drinking as juice.

Sunday was chore day – I cleaned out the chicken coop as normal and let the girls out into the wider (not fenced in) garden for the first time too. Lime and Blue were the only ones interested in exploring and they de-weeded/scratch-scratch peeked the bed nearest to their coop. I’ll definitely use them again for that before planting out time next year!

So to yesterday – my first full day off. It started slowly, stretched out in the sun with the animals and catching up on the weekend papers, but then I pickled some more eggs (this time it was garlic & pepper, recipe to follow) and tried a new bread recipe for the first time, a new dough recipe to make layered rolls. When I’m learning how to bake something new, I like to “grind” it – a video game term for doing a repetitive task over and over again to “level up” – so I’m going to make those at least every other day this week. Mmm, bread rolls.

Later on, after a walk with the Lily dog, I made a giant bean bag for said hound – using a very retro-cool single duvet cover I found in a charity shop in Guiseley on Saturday. It was easy to make but I’ll write a full how-to soon, mostly because I have several comedy photos of the cats and dog “helping”.

Today has had another slow start but I think it’ll continue with some soup making, maybe some biscuit baking, some jamming (since we did our once-every-six-weeks shop last night and had to pull some blackberries out of the freezer to make way for half price ice cream), and since my sewing machine is out, some more stitchery. Woo!

Zero waste pets: the chickens

Posted by louisa on Friday 22 October 2010 in chickens, green, zero waste | 0 comments

Back in July, I wrote about our efforts to make our pets zero waste, starting with the dog. Switching between food types recently has made me think about the chickens and waste.

Food
We buy layers pellets in 20kg or 25kg bags. These are usually plastic sacks, which can, for now be reused around the garden for weed barriers, storage etc. I suspect we’ll reach saturation point on that though, so we’ll have to find some other way to reuse or recycle the bags. (Some food, for example, the Golden Yolk stuff I mentioned in the consumption post, comes in thick paper sacks. That is obviously better from a zero waste point of view, although I’d worry about it in the damper months.)

Treats
At the moment, now the garden is mostly sleeping, their main treats are corn (20kg plastic sacks, which last for ages and ages) and kitchen scraps.

The latter is interesting from a zero waste point of view – they’re actually helping reduce our waste by eating scraps and leftovers. Admittedly most of the stuff they’re getting would normally go into the compost so it’s not reducing landfill, but it’s making better use of it.

Downshifting again

Posted by louisa on Thursday 21 October 2010 in frugal, meta | 2 comments

Last week, I called it a day on a contracting gig – my main external work – which made up over half of my not-exactly-massive monthly income.

In many ways, it was a great job (and I’m not just saying that because I know three people from the company are probably reading this… ;) ) – I could do it from home, I like the team, it wasn’t exactly mentally taxing – but my heart wasn’t in it, it felt like a just-a-job-job, it was taking up more mental space than I would like from a part time job and I felt it was holding me back from making the best of my own projects.

I feel like I did when I first downshifted, when I left full time employment in 2006 – a little anxious about money and the future, but largely hopeful. Back then, my job was leaving me in tears of frustration and anger every night: I left to preserve my sanity and have a couple of months off to think about what I wanted to do next. We had lower-than-now living costs and the plan was to give myself a tight stipend from my savings each month to live on. As it happened, coincidentally, a couple of hobby projects took off the next month and they paid my way – and continued paying (and evolving to include other projects) for another 3+ years. It was when the main earning project started to tail off last summer (damn recession) that I took on the position with the company I’m now leaving.

I’ll still have a little money coming in but not much. I’ll have to rely on John a little more than I would like. I will though have some more time on my hands – to hopefully drum up some new exciting projects but also to downshift again – more time for baking, for growing, for making, for doing in general. Having the time to, hopefully, save us money and improve our Really Good Life.

(Photo by GiniMiniGi – does it remind anyone else of the Judd Nelson freeze at the end of The Breakfast Club? The Bearfast Club. The Breakfast Cub. … I’m sorry, I’ll get my coat.)