Cheap and Nutritious Meals

More than halfway through January and we are already looking ahead to see how we can save extra and do more during February. Time flies when you are enjoying yourself, especially when juggling a fresh, new budget. Meanwhile, we still have meals fit for a King, priced for paupers and easy enough that even the kids can make them - what could be better?

The new regime for 2015 involves slashing the grocery budget to an average of just £5 per person per week for all meals, so it is taking come creative thinking. The above soup no longer will have just a carrot grated and an onion chopped into it. Instead, it will have a portion of mixed vegetables served with every bowl to make it up to 2 portions of our 5-a-day in one meal.

We do have the advantage of a well stocked kitchen and the additional benefit of home-grown and freely foraged foodstuffs in the freezer, plus a full cupboard of preserves, all made from free fruit, but in order to reduce the overall average, I now need to focus carefully on both the nutritional values and the costs. I guess that's why we Scots love our oats - we can eat them with practically anything! So, after a hearty breakfast of porridge, sometimes with a handful of sultanas or berries to boost the '5-a-day', it's onwards towards soup-making for lunch.

At the moment, you can buy cooking bacon for 80p per 500g pack, so I recommend this for making your stock. Along with a 500g pack of split peas or lentils, plus a grated carrot and chopped onion, this combination can cook you up 3.5 litres of soup without a problem and leave enough stock for flavouring the meals you make with the resulting cooked bacon. I made the most of the current Asda offer for half price lentils and now have 10 kilos of them in stock, as they worked out cheaper than their split peas!

After slow cooking the 500g of bacon to make stock, this left about 350g of what looked like streaky bacon, so it was all chopped up and separated - lean meat in one tub, streaky bits in another. I salted the water, as the bacon isn't smoked. This is how I intend using the meat:

7 Main Meal Suggestions: Continued…

Foraging for Free Food from the Garden

Frugal Blog - Foraging for Free Food from the Garden

Frugal living, as a lifestyle, comes as second nature to those of us who have followed the path for some time. The debt free good life was one I aspired to for many years and it took many more to achieve it, but we still are nowhere near self-sufficient. So this got me thinking seriously about 'what if we had absolutely no money?’

Could we rustle up a meal from the Frugaldom garden?

Don't panic! We don't eat any of our own livestock, they are kept more like pets! But we still need to feed them and they still need to contribute to the overall 'welfare' of the microholding project.

Octavius and Septimus help manure the fruit beds, dig holes and eat grass. They also love raspberry leaves! But that doesn't feed us!

Read more here

These Cheap Boots were made for Frugal Walking

A photo diary about walking and frugal footwear!

Farewell to my faithful, frugal foot-friends!

My annual challenge budget for clothing and footwear normally comes in at under the £100 mark and this needs to include everything, so it helps to know where savings can be made when footwear is important.

This fun and photo-filled blog post is the tale of my old boots and the many miles they have trudged over the past year, showing without a shadow of a doubt that you can, indeed, get plenty of mileage from just a few pounds. In fact, looking back at this, I think I should award ‘Regatta Outlet’ the Frugaldom badge of excellence.

This is not a sponsored post, this is simply a look back over how well my frugal footwear has served me and I hope that it helps others in making decisions about taking up walking as a hobby rather than sitting it out because you don’t have the right shoes or boots.

Click here to read more and see what I think is an amazing little photo album

Saving Money in the Kitchen with Frugal Meals

Another Frugal and Filling Meal - Pea and Ham Soup

Having bought a large, smoked ham hough (known elsewhere as a ham hock) for £2.00, it seemed frugally fitting to make sure I got my money's worth out of it - so I did!

After about 3 hours in the slow cooker, the ham was removed, stripped from the bone and used to make ham and cheese pasta. By using all the ham plus a whole 500g pack of pasta, there was enough for at least two meals for us, so we're off to a good start.

The water used to cook the ham was then topped up and the slow cooker set in motion to make 5 litres of lovely stock for soup-making.

Once strained and returned to the pan, I added carrots, onions and a full kilo of split green peas, plus the usual salt and pepper to season.

That's it! Let this lot simmer away slowly for a few hours and give it a stir now and again to make sure the peas are all cooking evenly.

My slow cooker is a 6.5 litre, 300w model. By the time the soup was ready, I had 5 litres of the most delicious, thick and very filling pea and ham soup. Protein from all those pulses and some vitamins from the vegetables - nourishing, warming and frugally filling.

Thick Pea and Ham Soup

Ingredients

5 litres of ham stock (homemade)
500g chopped carrots (homegrown)
1 large onion, chopped (homegrown)
1kg of split green peas
Salt and pepper to season

If the soup gets too thick for your liking, simply add a little bit more water. I like to keep mine topped up to the 5 Litres, then serve it thick with a slice of home-baked bread.

You could, of course, use lentils or yellow split peas, but I fancied some nice green pea and ham soup, which freezes just as well as any other type. This recipe can also be used with homegrown peas.

Considering one tin of shop bought soup serves two people, then 5 litres of homemade soup should provide you with up to 25 portions for a total cost of around £1.30, including the electricity you used for cooking. It's quite a luxury at 5p per serving! Mine cost a bit less than this, as I had bought my split peas in bulk while they were on offer at 49p per kilo.

Estimated costs will be slightly increased if you need to buy stock cubes, carrots and onions. We grow most of our own and plan on growing all our ow veg as soo as the new garden is fully up and running.

Dried pulses may have 'best before' dates on the packaging but they should last for years if kept in air tight storage containers. The same applies to dried pasta, flours, sugar and, lest we forget, chocolate. I never miss a chance to stock up on any of these items when they are cheap. As always, the rule of this game is only ever bulk buy foodstuffs that you know you will use. Food waste means automatic disqualification from the game, otherwise.

Moneysaving and Frugal Keep Fit!

Sometimes, I am astounded by my own stupidity!

Working from home in a small, rural commuity means that all the work post needs to be ferried to the nearest village post office, which is three miles from here.

In true frugal fashion, I try to limit post office visits to four trips each week, so I've been thinking about ways of cutting these associated costs by any means possible.

The obvious solution is to walk to the post office, but I can be lazy and I hate to get soaked through when there's nowhere indoors here for drying wet clothes. I might try the walking option next summer, but it's dependent on time of day for traffic, as the narrow lanes aren't all that safe when there are tractors trundling up and down towing all sorts of lethal looking machinery, plus there's no pavement running along the main shore road once I reach it, an 'A' route that's like a free for all as far as speed driving is concerned. I had all but given up hope and couldn't see the obvious choice I should be making!

Don't laugh, but I had one of those 'Eureka' moments down in the village earlier this afternoon. My moneysaving solution is so simple that I have astounded myself!

Normally, the journey to the post office or local store is a 6 mile round trip in the car. I have a budget of £25 per month for petrol costs, so that doesn't really allow for many trips further afield. I also try to fit in one trip per month to the nearest town, which is almost 20 miles away, so my £25 worth of petrol does't take me far.

By making this one incredibly simple change, I should be able to save myself one sixth of my regular weekly petrol costs and get a little bit fitter into the bargain. Have you worked it out yet?

If I park the car in the layby half a mile this side of the post office, I can walk the remaining distance, thus shaving a mile off my driving costs each trip and reducing carbon emissions. On top of that, the mile walked while carrying the mail will burn nearly 100 calories extra on each trip. That's only 17.5 (best call it 18) trips to the post office to burn off the equivalent of an extra half pound of fat! Coincidentally, 18 is the approximate number of times I need to visit the post office each month! How ingenously simple is that? Better still, if it's raining, I can simply take my huge golf umbrella, bought free with my eBid buddy points!

But there's more! There are other lay-bys, so it needn't be restricted to a one mile walk each trip. There's a much larger parking area on the shore about a mile from the post office. I plan on using this one for dry trips when the mail bag isn't too heavy. Who knows, by next summer I could be a frugal, slender 'green goddess'!

Frugal fun, frugal fitness, frugal moneysaving to help make owning the car more affordable.