Oats with Everything

Analysing the annual £4,000 challenge budget resulted in an attempt to cut meal costs to £5 per person per week during 2015. As we continue our quest for financial freedom and a healthy, happy lifestyle with time to enjoy interests outside of the work place, don't forget to spend time doing what you most enjoy. "Mould your career around your lifestyle and not your lifestyle around your career." What a great quote!

The final 8 apples collected from last year's windfalls. I had no space in the freezer for any more stewed fruit, so these had been wrapped in newspaper and stored in a cardboard box. As you can see, they had begun to wrinkle, so I rehydrated them a little before cooking them. Frugal rehydration simply means I soaked them in a basin of tap water for a few hours.

After a good swim, the apples were fine for peeling and stewing down with some sugar and sultanas. Then it was time for the crumble to get added: oats, flour, sugar and margarine. Yes, we do have a sweet tooth here and it doesn't help with the fight against the flab during winter. (Or summer, for that matter!) Continue reading…

Oat and Sultana Energy Cookies Recipe

Just because we are embarking on a super-duper new food budget regime does not mean that we need to cast out all our luxuries, so here’s how we are dealing with the £5 per person per week for all meals challenge.

Breakfast is nearly always porridge, as a 1kg bag, costing 75p, provides sufficient for 20 servings. But I prefer to think of it as 7 days for 2 people will use up 700g porridge oats, leaving 300g each week for baking or other recipes.

PORRIDGE
2 x 50g scoops of porridge oats
5 x 50g scoops of water
Sprinkle of salt
Cook in microwave on high for about 5 minutes (depending on wattage)
Serve with a little milk and 30g of sultanas
7 days for 2 people will use up 700g of a 1kg bag of porridge oats, leaving 300g for baking. Sultanas are one of our 5-a-day and a 30g serving per person per breakfast for two equates to just 420g sultanas, leaving 80g for baking. So here goes...

OAT & SULTANA ENERGY COOKIES
100g porridge oats
80g sultanas
200g SR flour
100g sugar
170g melted margarine

Mix all of the above into a soft dough.

Split into 24 pieces, roll into balls and flatten into round cookies,

Read more here …

Day 2 of Making it in March - Frugal Room Fragrance

Day 2 of 31 Days of Making in in March

All Natural Air Freshener / Room Scent

 

Dismal day of rain and fog

My plan to make the effort to get out and walk more has ground to a temporary halt today, owing to the ferocity of the torrential rain and my fair-weather attitude to exercise. I ventured no further than a neighbour's house to hand in a cheesecake. Today was definitely an indoors type of day!

 

Where should I start? I made my bed and made it downstairs - that should count for something on a day like this, shouldn't it? I lit the fire, chatted with a couple of neighbours who arrived and then it turned into a bit of a swapathon - I love a bit of bartering! I now have onions, bacon and hash browns that I didn't have when I woke this morning, not to mention what I've made since then.

 

Making Mango Cookies

 

Mango, apricot & pistachio with fig and almond

As many of you will know, I love experimenting with biscuit baking and sweet making, so today became a biscuit day. I'm still using up the first tin of mango pulp that I bought (4 tins for £1) and I have about a dozen blocks each of the fruit paste that's meant for serving with cheese - another bulk buy for pennies. I couldn't spare any eggs today; neither the hens nor the ducks are laying, so the mango pulp and fruit paste got added to the cookie dough. I didn't weigh or measure anything - I had the last of a bag of wholemeal self-raising flour to be used up, I melted some cheap margarine along with the two fruit blocks, added a spoonful of sugar and then started mixing in the flour, using the mango pulp where I'd normally use eggs. I split the mix, as I have only enough space for one tray in my mini oven, and the remainder of the cookie dough is in the fridge for another day. Next time, I'll omit the sugar.

 

Making Cheesecake

 

Blackcurrant cheesecake

While the biscuits were baking, I made two of the packet cheesecakes (4 packs for £1 from Approved Food*) and left them to set in the fridge while making the blackcurrant topping. It's just a tablespoon of homemade blackcurrant jelly mixed with a couple of handfuls of blackcurrants. I still have about 5kg of garden grown berries in the freezer, so no shortage of these here. One cheesecake went to the neighbours and one we have kept.

 

Making Knitted Blankets

 

The long-awaited pink blanket

Owing to the awful weather, I decided to spend this afternoon finishing off the long-awaited, pink, fluffy blanket. This is the third blanket I have knitted over the past year and this one is for youngest grand daughter, as she loves pink and lilac. I really do hope she likes it - it is so warm and fluffy, but a bit of a nightmare sewing the strips together after having knitted them on large needles! I am pleased with the finished result and equally pleased that it's completed.

 

Making Frugal Fragrance Air Fresheners

 

Citrus fruit, cloves and cinnamon stick

I first saw this 'recipe' on a site called 'The Yummy Life' when it was shared on Facebook. This is my 'frugalised' version, as I used what was to hand rather than wandering outside to rummage in the rain-battered herb garden. I had 3 limes waiting to be sliced and frozen, so I used half and froze the other half. From my baking cupboard, I found cloves (I use these mainly for marzipan fruit making) and a small cinnamon stick.

 

Recycling another jar

Find yourself an empty jar and a piece of something bright - I found this lovely little piece of ribbon among my crafting stash, just long enough to go around the neck of my jar. Warm the jar slightly by swirling some hot water around in it, then place all your ingredients into the jar and cover them with boiling water.

 

 

 

That's it, a simple case of infusing whatever scents you like in a jar of hot water. In the original instructions, which can be found here, the infusion gets simmered and can be used in place of oil in a burner, but I found my combination a strong enough fragrance vaporising from the jar cooling in a safe corner of the room. 

 

I now can't wait to experiment with other scents that look this pretty. Many years ago (about 40!), as a child, my friends and I would do this with rose petals, lavender or mint in jam jars of rain water, shaking them every day and making our own perfume. Today's make reminds me of those days, so let's think of today's scented make as the 'grown up' version. Come summer, of course, I love nothing more than the heady aroma of sweet pea blossoms, which I try to have in all the downstairs rooms.

 

Confession Time

 

I tasted my room fragrance! All the ingredients were food quality from my kitchen and this smelled so good that I had to taste it once it had cooled... and yes, it could easily make a lovely twist for a wee dram of whisky or even as an addition to cheap lemonade. In fact,. with a bit of sweetening - honey, perhaps - it could make a refreshing drink all on it's own! I reckon the liquid would make far better ice cubes than plain water, too. :)

 

That's it, day 2 of March done and dusted and tomorrow there will be something new to write about in the Frugaldom household. Then, it will almost be time to make pancakes!

 

NYK, Frugaldom

 

*Friend referral link

Day 8 of Extremely Frugal February - Burnt Biscuits and Leftovers

Cardboard Cooking Skills, Frugal Fried Food and Carbon Flavoured Biscuits

Frugal Fuel for Wilbur, the Pot Belly (Pig) Stove

In my never-ending quest for frugal living and to combat the problem of surplus waste, I have found plain brown cardboard to be excellent for many things - packaging, composting, weed suppressing, feeding to the worms in the Frugaldom wormery or simply for turning into cooker fuel. Once alight, it can boil a kettle of water in no time and caramelise onions within minutes.

What a cold and wet day it has been, today! I've barely wandered further than the kitchen, other than to take another peek through the living room door to admire my frugal sofa, homemade crafty footstool and my latest acquisition - a beautiful antique, carved wooden fireside box, which, as it transpires, originated from the north east of Scotland. It came to me after being salvaged by a little family business known as 'DL and Sons' in Lincolnshire, so it has done a bit of traveling in its time. Who knows what stories it could tell! This wonderful old box has now taken pride of place by the Frugaldom fireplace and holds kindling sticks, firelighters, matches and newspapers. It's meant for coal, but I consider it quite an awesome feature piece within our eco-renovation and want it to last.


Meanwhile, back on the frugal food train... my biscuit baking mostly gets done in the mini-oven, which works pretty well most times. Except today I got distracted on Facebook, forgetting to rescue said biscuits before they acquired that familiar flavour we all know as carbon. Don't get me wrong, they weren't charred black, but they had gone past the stage of 'well done'. No matter, they won't be wasted! Crunchy they may be but with raisins the price they are, wasting any is not an option. Another cup of tea to wash them down, anyone?

I didn't bother to light the coal fire, so dinner got cooked on the stove tonight again. Having taken delivery of my precious wooden treasure last night, I had a lovely big cardboard box to recycle today, so it got made into fire sticks!

Burning these along with a few logs provides ultra fast heat, high temperature and, despite some extra ash, plenty of cooking time when there's a full box to use just for that purpose.

So, what culinary delight did we feast upon this evening?



I don't think this has a proper name but if it does, please let me know. It's another one of those frugal 'bowl food' concoctions that gets thrown together in the cast iron pan. This one tasted kind of southern fried, as I had cooked the diced chicken breast in some fajita-type seasoning and then added in the leftover white and red cabbage plus the rest of last night's swede. It made for a colourful, nutritious meal and tasted lovely into the bargain.

That about wraps up today's frugal living. Other than some hot glue sticks I needed to replace, which are immaterial to the cost of running the household, I have, once again, spent no actual cash.

The kettle has just come to the boil again for making a pot of tea and we have the last slice of apple and sultana pie to eat, then it will be time to relax and pick up my knitting needles for the final stages of the latest fluffy blanket. I have vowed to complete this before doing any more of my rag rug!

NYK, Frugaldom

Frugal Scottish Shortbread Recipe

FRUGAL SCOTTISH SHORTBREAD

170g plain flour

115g margarine

60g sugar
30g cornflour

Mix lightly to form a dough. If it's too crumbly, rub in a little more margarine.

Form into a round, approx 1cm thick

Place in a lightly greased baking tray or recycled foil dish and mark into 'pie slices'.
Bake for approx 25 mins at 170C

You can also roll this dough out and cut it into individual biscuits. Festive shapes are good, or smaller circles, marked into quarters. For these, I use an old tuna (or similar) can with top and bottom removed. (Make sure the edges are smooth.) Any little round, shallow tins make really great, frugal cooky cutters!

If baking as a single, large round, you can fork round the edges for that wavy effect and pierce the surface in a dot-to-dot pattern on each triangle. I just stab a few holes in them with the fork.

Your shortbread should stay pale in colour. Sprinkle with sugar as soon as it comes out of the oven - leave to cool for 10 minutes and then transfer it to a baking rack to cool properly. I've done mine double thickness for a bit of added luxury. :)

FRUGAL TIP
Always keep a stock of flour, margarine, oil, sugar, salt and yeast in your cupboards. These are basic essentials for so many recipes that, coupled with eggs, we'd not be able to easily live without them.

For long-standing readers, this is the same recipe featured in the 2012 Christmas frugal recipes, I thought I'd repost it after someone asked about it - hope it helps you save time in trying to find it.

Enjoy!

More Cookie Dough

A BISCUIT BAKING DAY

Not to be completey scuppered whilst living without a kitchen, I do still have access to my old cooker and the sink, so cooking hasn't been completely stopped - only batch cooking and baking, preserving and pastry or pasta making have had to temporarily cease. But we can't possibly do without biscuits!

 

Being a firm fan of websites like Approved Food and Food Bargains, I have always got a good stock of tinned butter and an assortment of flours, but my last order comprised of almost 25kg of sunflower and sesame seed bread flour, as I simply couldn't resist the bulk offer. I had assumed this to be bread mix, but it turned out to be gluten free flour with seeds, no yeast added. Surprisingly, it has been a bit of a bonus, despite my initial disappointment. "Why?" I hear some ask...

 

It's flour! And the basic ingredients needed for frugal biscuit making are flour and butter or margarine, mixed with whatever else you have available. Today I tried using this gluten free bread flour to bake some cookies and they turned out just fine - and frugal.

 

With the tinned butter costing only 33p per 400g tin, I have no qualms about experimenting with baking - nothing has been wasted. So, I melted some of the butter, added the last of an old jar of honey, ladeled in some of the sesame and sunflower seed flour and then added in a scoop of oats, extra sesame seeds and some wheatgerm for good measure. To this, I blended in an egg. Would you believe... it turned into cookie dough!

*Please note that for the purposes of keeping this recipe completely gluten free, omit the wheatgerm and porridge oats, substituting with sultanas, raisins or whatever else you like.

 

Within half an hour of starting, I had two trays of biscuits and the spare cookie dough wrapped and put into the fridge for baking next time the oven's hot.

 

The fantastic thing about baking frugal biscuits is that you can add absolutely anything to them - nuts, dried fruit, chocolate, syrup or treacle, peanut butter... the list goes on and is governed only by your imagination. Almost any flour available will bake you biscuits of some description and you have full control of what gets added.

 

For biscuit and shortbread making, you can find some of our frugal recipes in the forum at http://frugaldom.myfreeforum.org plus you can follow @Frugaldom on Twitter so you can share the news from other frugalers and from some of the artists, writers, makers and crafters who are joining us in the Scottish Web Directory project (free advertising for Scottish based homeworkers and small businesses) for 2013. If you are on Facebook, check out the Scottish Web Directory page and hit 'like' if you like.

 

Until next time,

Frugaldom.

Spiced Sesame Seed and Sultana Cookies

It's Time to Make Further Savings, So Let's Get Baking.

Having decided that November should be a 'use it up' month, rather than a 'main grocery shop' month, I have been busy using up whatever I can in an effort to reduce the stockpile of food in our house.

The main reason for doing this is to ensure that I stay within my £4,000 annual budget, as per the annual Frugaldom Challenge but in trying to do that, we always run out of something.

Milk is the main thing needed, along with the occasional chicken, but I have plenty of bacon and at least 3 pheasants in the freezer, so we won't starve. We're slowly working our way through the garden vegetables, rhubarb and apples that had all been blanched or stewed and then frozen and I have plenty of dried goods, like pasta, rice and pulses.

The loss of the hens has been a bit of a blow, as we'd become accustomed to always having eggs to fall back on when a quick meal was required. Today's meagre offerings amounted to one solitary egg, laid by one of the bantams that survived the mink attack! This is the first egg that has been laid since that day - 15th October - so I'm hoping it's a sign of more to come. If only the ducks would start laying soon.

But I digress.

Having friends visit for coffee most weeks means it can get a little embarrassing with no biscuits to offer, so today's household challenge was to rake about in the cupboards and see what could be turned into cookies in time for this weekend's visitations.

The following is my basic cookie recipe:

8 rounded tablespoons flour

4 tablespoons margarine (melted)

2 tablespoons sugar

1.5 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

1 egg

Having that solitary egg was a blessing, I can tell you!

To the above, I added:

6 tablespoons of sultanas

2 heaped tablespoons sesame seeds

Quarter teaspoon mixed spice

Quarter teaspoon cinnamon

Extra sprinkle of sugar

Mix everything together until it forms a soft dough that can be easily split and rolled into balls

This should be enough for 36 cookies. Roll each into a ball, flatten them between palms and then place them on a floured tray. I prefer to have the trays sprinkled with flour rather than greasing them - they're easier cleaned if you haven't any hot water.

Bake at 200C for around 15-18 minutes, depending on how thick you made them. At this point, I switch off the oven and leave the biscuits in there for about 5 more minutes.

Remove from the oven and transfer onto wire cooling trays, where the biscuits will dry and crisp up a bit. (Always best to taste them while they're still hot, though, lest they all get scoffed before you get the chance to sit down with a cuppa.)

Cookies are so easy to make. You can add just about anything you like into the basic mix - chocolate chips (add a tablespoon of chocolate powder as well, if you want to make them double choc chip), dried fruit, nuts, porridge oats, berries, seeds, coconut, sweets, toffee chips, muesli, ginger, spice, cinnamon, fudge pieces, Smarties, M&Ms ...

If you want extra luxury, you can coat the cookies in chocolate.

If you want chunky cookies, roll larger pieces of the mix and just flatten them down a little.

If you want many, many frugal cookies, roll them thin and bake them for a shorter time, or else slow bake them at a lower temperature if you want wafer thin, crispy biscuits.

Right, that's the cookie baking taken care of for this weekend and it has saved me from spending any money buying biscuits from the shop. Result!

Let me know if you try these and what you added to yours.

NYK Media

www.scottishmultimedia.co.uk

Chilly Weather But No Snow in Frugaldom.



1st December 2010

The past couple of days have been very cold but gloriously sunny. It's actually quite warm in the sunshine, so we've been sitting out at the back door for coffee breaks in between seeing to hens, ducks and quail.

Egg laying is on the increase, so I've been able to set aside a few extras for selling and also made the first batch of stove-top lemon curd. It's just cooling now. I've also popped two trays of muesli biscuits into the oven, so bring on the visitors - we have something to accompany the coffee. :)

Keeping the stove going is a daily chore, as is trying to keep a ready supply of dry  firewood. Chopping logs and splitting sticks is a very regular occurance here - we just can't get enough of the stuff. With temperatures not getting above freezing, most days, it's going to be great once the wet weather returns - NOT!

The plan to summarise the past year fell apart. It just seemed silly copying it all over here when it's already on the old website, so that time-wasting project has been called to a halt.

Off to check on the biscuits then make lunch; can't decide between soup and bread or eggs on toast. Such are the major decisions that have to be made in Frugaldom.

LUXURY LEMON CURD RECIPE

4 egg yolks (I use our own freerange hens' eggs)
150g sugar
100mls lemon juice (you can substitute this for lime juice or do half and half mixed)
70g butter (or margarine)

Beat the egg yolks and sugar together whilst gently warming the butter and lemon juice. Add the egg yolk/sugar mix to the pan and whisk together with the lemon and butter. Keep this on a low heat and whisk regularly until the mixture thickens to resemble custard. If you are cooking on a log burner, it's easier to take the pan off the heat to whisk it, otherwise cook slowly over a low heat. Do not allow the mix to boil.
Pour into a sterilised, pre-heated jar and leave to cool. Once set, keep it refrigerated.

Did you know there are NO EGGS in many of the cheap, mass produced lemon curds?

Join us in the fun, frugal forum at
http://www.frugaldom.co.uk/