Easy marrow and ginger jam recipe

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 31 August 2010 in cooking, preserving, recipes | 10 comments

After writing up the wild plum jam recipe the last week, I realised that I hadn’t written about the super easy marrow and ginger jam I made a few weeks ago.

We’ve had a lot of marrows this year – more by accident than design — too many courgette plants to keep up with. I used the early ones to make my marrow cake and misc cheesy marrow bake, and I gave some of them away – but we’ve still got maybe half a dozen to use up – so I’m jamming and chutneying like there is no tomorrow.

This jam recipe is very sweet but very easy. If you’re not a fan of sweet stuff, you might prefer to use less sugar and certainly not add the crystallised ginger.

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Bargain books and photo frames

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 31 August 2010 in charity shopping, frugal | 0 comments

Hope everyone had a lovely long weekend – we continued our fun/unfun activities from earlier in the week: blackberrying in the gentle rain (and then having to give up half my harvest to horses, to get them to let us out of their field) & relaxing on Saturday, 10 hours of decorating at the old house on Sunday, then our normal Sunday chores/lazing on Monday.

I made a few bargainacious purchases. First up, two books from a charity shop in Shipley:

Since my September will include both a first time fishing experience and a stretching of my limited woodworking skills (I want to make more planters and maybe a bench), these finds were both well timed. There were a number of similar fishing encyclopaedias available but this one, for £2, looked about the best. I suspect I can find a lot of this information online but I like browsing through books as an introduction to the subject.

At £5, the woodworking book was a little more expensive than I’d usually spend on a book at a charity shop but aside from the glue smear on the front, it looks brand new and has an RRP of £30 (Amazon has it for just under £18). Again, I could have found a lot of the information online for free but I’d much rather take a book outside for reference while working on something than my laptop.

Finally, while buying sugar soap & scrapers from Wilkinsons on Sunday, I spotted some basic clip frames on their super-sale shelves.

I really like the idea of having a lot of photos up on a wall but nice wooden frames are so expensive when you’re thinking about buying 20 or 30 at a time. Clipframes are obviously a lot not quite as pretty but far cheaper – these were frightening cheap to start with (at 60p for three) but in the clearance bay, disturbingly cheap at 10p for a pack of three. I bought all ten packs on clearance – 30 clip frames for £1. Now to fill them with some free prints…

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The fun and the unfun

Posted by louisa on Friday 27 August 2010 in admin | 0 comments

I had a couple of days off this week – to do some fun stuff and some less than fun stuff.

First off, one with a picture illustration (even if it is just a quick phone camera snap), I added a quick-and-easy new perch to the chicken run and Blue took to it immediately.

I had my second day of smoking on Wednesday! More details soon but in the smoker this time was more cheese but more excitingly, eggs and chillis!

While that was brewing away, we carried about 1.5tonnes of wood chips down to replenish the chicken run. We carried it a dustbin full at a time, down 3.5 flights of steps – an exhausting 90mins! It was already breaking down so surprisingly warm and fragrant – the chickens were most perturbed by all the activity but seem to like it now (the pic above is before adding the woodchip, the ground is now covered to about the second rung of the ramp). That was one of the unfun things; the other unfun thing was spending all Thursday decorating our old house in our ongoing attempts to sell it. Unfun because I’d rather spend my decorating energy on our new house and I know that when someone does buy it, they’ll probably immediately paint over all our handiwork anyway. I did find an old signature under the wallpaper though – I think it says “P Joyce 1st November 1966” – pretty cool!

We finally went blackberrying on Tuesday evening – got 2.7kg before having to return home for dinner. I definitely need to make a foraging bag – even if it’s just the genius idea of a modified milk bottle on a belt. Two handed foraging would be far faster.

Said blackberries were supposed to become a jam on Tuesday evening but something came up and I can’t remember what. Then they were supposed to become a jam on Wednesday evening but I was too tired after the woodchipathon, and a friend came around for dinner anyway. So the blackberries are now in the freezer. I’ll have a jam/chutney day next week.

The next batch of blackberries we collect, probably this weekend, will be for a wine. John’s plum wine is bubbling away nicely.

Finally, not particularly a frugal thing but we had some of our double glazed windows replaced earlier today. Most of the units in the kitchen, study and bathroom had misted up over the years and generally made the place look scruffier than it was. At first I wasn’t bothered about having them replaced – since they still functioned as double-glazing for insulation if not actually as windows – but it’s only now we’ve had them replaced that we’ve realised quite how obscured they’d become and how much light they were blocking — they’re freakishly clear now! The guys that did it were great – and no nonsense. At the quote stage, I gave them the opportunity to upsell and they refused to take the bait, dismissing the more expensive glass as a gimmick. They were also nearly 50% cheaper than the first company’s initial quote. Anyway, I’m mentioning this because 1) just in case people don’t know it’s CONSIDERABLY cheaper and less wasteful to get just the glass units replaced rather than than the full (uPVC) frames etc and 2) I asked to keep all the smaller old units. They’re mostly misted up but will still be good for one project or another!

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How can you tell when something is good quality?

Posted by louisa on Thursday 26 August 2010 in bad buys, frugal, green | 0 comments

This is another cross-post between The Really Good Life and my recycling blog, How Can I Recycle This?

The first stage of the recycling triangle is Reduce – reduce the amount of things you buy/use and buy items that’ll last and can be repaired rather than ones that need replacing frequently. A key rule of frugal living is similar: don’t pay twice for something – a more expensive quality item might last two-three-four-times longer than the cheaper alternative.

But how can you tell when something is good quality – that it’s worth the extra money and it’ll last?

Back in the day, it used to be all about price – better quality items made with better quality materials cost more. But the rise of all powerful brands put an end to that. Now poor quality items made from poor quality materials command a huge price if they’ve got the right logo on them. And once respected brands have lowered their quality, or spun off lower quality ranges, without dropping their prices, hoping we won’t notice the difference. I’ve used a picture of clothes because the fashion mark-up is really obvious with them, but it’s an issue across the board: clothes, food, homewares, tools, electronics, cars, cleaning products…

Whenever we’re making major purchases, we look up reviews online/tap the expertise of friends on Twitter to ask their opinions but people have a habit of suggesting the thing they have/use rather than the best thing: partly because it’s often all they have experience of and partly because the more people who join them helps justify it’s their decision. Most people I know have their own area of expertise – for example, I know a lot of geeks and they know from painful experience what computers should be bought and what should be avoided like the plague – but outside their area of knowledge, they’re at a bit of a loss.

So how do you tell what’s good and what isn’t? What cues tell you when something is worth the extra money? And when it definitely isn’t?

Do you have a particular area of expertise? If so, tell us all about it!

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Getting ready for winter: insulating jobs to-do list

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 24 August 2010 in frugal, green | 0 comments

We moved into our new house at the very end of September last year. The first weekend after we moved in there were gales which felt like they were blowing through the house and then we had the coldest winter in a long time — we very quickly learned how poor the insulation/draught-proofing was here and realised in hindsight how snug our last (considerably smaller) house had been!

I pledged to spend the spring/summer months completing small insulating tasks to get the house ready for winter this year – to save wasting energy and therefore money — but here it is near the end of August and I’ve hardly started, so I think it’s time for a to-do list which will hold me accountable for my actions!

• Check/fix the rubber seals around all the external doors Most of it is there but some of it has fallen off. I’ll restick it into position. As we have a lot of external doors, this should cut down a lot of draughts.
  Subtasks:
  • Find out what glue will be needed
  • Buy glue if necessary

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Wild plum/cherry plum jam recipe

Posted by louisa on Monday 23 August 2010 in cooking, growing, preserving, recipes, wild food | 11 comments

So last week, we went fishing for fruit on the mystery fruit tree outside our kitchen window. We collected 5.5kg of the plum-ish fruit, probably sacrificed as much the floor gods, and there is still a fair bit up there (albeit not terribly accessible). We’re not sure if they’re wild plum or cherry plum as everyone seems to have different opinions on what constitutes one or the other. Whatever they’re called, they’re very tart but also very sweet.

John wanted to try making plum wine (more on that another time) so I only commandeered 2kg of the harvest for our first batch of plum jam. (I’ll do another smaller jamming once he’s decided how much wine he is making tonight.)

The recipe calls for preserving sugar but granulated sugar would work just as well – preserving sugar is more expensive but the bigger crystals result in a clearer jelly. You don’t need jam sugar (sugar with added pectin) as there should already be enough pectin in the fruit.

UPDATE: Just a quick note to say that in 2011, I added a few drops of vanilla essence to the jam and it added a lovely round flavour. I can’t remember exactly how much or when (I think it was after the sugar so it wouldn’t be cooking too long, but wanted to mention it anyway, because it was delicious :)

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Thoughts on Ken Rockwell’s How To Afford Anything

Posted by louisa on Friday 20 August 2010 in frugal | 2 comments

Already respecting his views on photography, John was interested to find an old article by Ken Rockwell called “How to Afford Anything” a few weeks ago.

Reading it in parallel, we quickly noted that while there wasn’t anything completely mindblowing for us, it was a mostly excellent article, we agreed with most of it and I would highly recommended reading it regularly. But there are a few points that I disagreed with though and I want to discuss them here. (I’ve quoted random bits of the article so it seems very disjointed but I’ve tried for each quote to make sense within itself.)

Don’t eat out: unless you’re eating off the dollar menu at fast food (as I have always done), cook your own food!

I like food too much to never eat out. We ate out more in the past than we do now but we still eat out once or twice a week. We don’t go to the most expensive restaurants but not the cheapest either: we rarely choose where we’re going based on price.

One thing though: we don’t spend a lot of money on drinks. I don’t drink alcohol and John doesn’t drink wine so we might have a soft drink/beer respectively when we arrive but will then switch onto tap water. We also invariably have better tea & coffee at home than the restaurant can offer so that’s another saving. Not having a restaurant-cheap bottle of wine and after dinner coffees saves us at least £20 a meal – and when the food bill is only £30, that’s quite a “saving”. (Ken does touch on this later.)

I’d class enjoying food as a hobby – I would never spend £2000 on a camera like Ken would, I’d spend it on 200+ curries instead.

Everyone has their own luxuries. Speaking of which:

“A luxury, once sampled, becomes a necessity.”

I personally both agree and disagree with this. Yes, some “luxuries” become necessities (the day I upgraded to a decent bra from budget ones was a special, special day indeed: my perky boobs never looked back) but it’s not always the case – we went on a really expensive (for us) holiday a few years ago but I’ve equally loved holidays since then which have been considerably less glamorous & far-flung – and have cost a tenth of the price. I’m also happy to eat frugal homemade food the rest of the time to pay for those two meals out a week – mostly because our frugal homemade food can be super tasty, but I think I’d feel the same way if it was more humdrum. Well placed luxuries provide variety in life.

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