Day 28 of Extremely Frugal February - Pizzas and Cannelloni

It's the Final Day of February! We Got Triple Nominated!

First of all, some exciting news! Our frugal blog has received three nominations into the 'MAD Awards this year - isn't that great? If you would like to nominate, the web address for this blog is http://frugaldom.blogspot.co.uk and you can vote for us either via the badge on the right hand side of this page or else by going to http://www.the-mads.com/ and nominating from there. We have been nominated into categories for BEST THRIFTY BLOG as well as BLOG OF THE YEAR and MOST INNOVATIVE BLOG, but I'm not quite sure how that happened. :)

Now look away if you are easily offended by weird food concoctions and past BBE dates!

Cheap bread and roll mix - 99p for 3.5kg

Last night was a late one - we met up with neighbours and went walking in the hope of catching a glimpse of the Aurora Borealis after seeing the alerts for sufficient solar activity to bring it this far south. We stayed out until about 1am and saw nothing. I was so disappointed, having convinced myself that we would catch a tiny glimmer. It just didn't reach our corner of Scotland, despite being reported as far south as Essex. I did spot four meteors/shooting stars streaking overhead, though, and the sky was amazing with the millions of stars on display.

By way of compensation, my Approved Food* order arrived today, all £15.01 of it! 400 bread rolls' worth of mix for £3.96, so that's less than a penny per roll and enough to see us to the end of the year. Bit disappointed in the quality of the potatoes but I have my seed potatoes at the ready to start chitting (sprouting prior to planting) them soon. With luck, we'll be eating home grown by summer.

Now for some really extreme frugaling!

 

When opening the orders, they are always strapped with the nylon braided tapes. I have used these in the past to make streamers to hang in the garden as bird scarers but I thought I would try a bit of weaving. Seems to work, so I won't be throwing any more in the bin - I'm sure there are plenty of other things that can be made from them.

 

I used up the remaining 4 mini-naan breads from the open pack with another tin of tomatoes, herbs, pepper and a single portion of cheese for each of us - I had my usual pickle with mine.

Last night's chilli con-coction was too much for two people and H doesn't really like chilli, so I can't serve it 2 nights in a row. I went rummaging again and came up with a plan - but now the leftover chilli and rice has turned into another 6 meals! Look away now if you don't like to see the 'before' version of frugal meals...

Mixing the rice and chilli concoction with sage & onion stuffing

I mixed a cheap pack of stuffing with last night's leftover chilli and added the rice into this, as well.  I haven't a clue how this is going to turn out but I do have a vague idea of how I expect it to taste.

Filling the Cannelloni tubes with the mix 

I've less than half a box of the cannelloni tubes left but after filling the 11 of them, I still have some of the chilli mix left to use - I spy cabbage!

Filling in the gaps to use excess mix

 I peeled off a large cabbage leaf, split it and wrapped this around the remainder of the chilli concoction mix - haven't made stuffed cabbage in a while! The last scoop of mix got packed into the corner of my dish.

Frugal version of cannelloni - Frugalloni

I poured the jar of tomato and herb sauce over the filled pasta tubes and used half of the 25p tin of cheese chopped over the top. The other half has been wrapped in tin foil and put in the fridge for later use. This is my largest lasagne baking dish, which usually provides enough for 6. Everything was crossed in the hope this tasted OK.

Looks OK to me! Tasted lovely!

Baked the dish in the mini oven for about an hour and then gave it a quick blast under the grill to bubble the cheese. It tastes excellent to me, even H was quite impressed with it! We followed our Frugalloni meal with a bowl of 10p strawberry instant whip - not the healthiest option, but there has to be some vitamin and calcium content in milk dessert, hasn't there?

This living on £4,000 for the year is still fun! I have been doing this for years and, as all the debts slowly disappeared and savings began to build, I stuck with it to enable me to build up more savings. This year is no different and it's certainly no easier, what with the price of electricity, coal and fresh produce forever increasing in price. Hopefully there will be a point at which the garden has been sufficiently reclaimed and redeveloped to provide all the fruit and vegetables needed by the household but, until then, most foodstuff needs to be bought. Spending during February has been kept to an absolute minimum, although there were still a few pounds spent on non-essentials.

My £4,000 is for absolutely everything relating to the household except Council Tax, as I have no control over the price of that - it is compulsory and costs just shy of £1,000 for the year. We don't pay the waste water part, as there's no drainage system where we live, but we do have mains water here, so that chare is included in your Council Tax if you live in Scotland. Extremely frugal February has seen the following spends:

Groceries: £36.39
Electricity: NIL - I topped the pre-payment meter right up to last us all winter
Coal: £70 for 5 bags
Other: £6.32 + £7.52 in vouchers for coffee filters, firelighters and some thermal mugs.
Telephone & Internet: £15.79 (line rental paid in advance for 12 months)
Deliveries: £10.50
House Insurance: £145.78 (buildings & contents for 12 months)
Donations: £5.00 to a very brave friend who is doing a charity abseil down the Forth Bridge in May. (See here for details)

Total cash spends for February £289.78

Monthly average budget is £333.33, so I am about 13% under this month, despite a couple of big spends. I haven't ventured further than neighbours' houses other than our late-night walking expedition in search of the Northern Lights.

Tomorrow is day 1 of 'Making it in March'. It's about making absolutely anything except debt - food, gardens, clothes, gifts, recycled goods, savings, money, changes, amends... almost anything goes, you decide! You can join us free in this forum (registration is free). Before anything else, I still need to sew my blanket together!

NYK, Frugaldom

*Friend referral link.

Day 24 of Extremely Frugal February - Beef Pie and Leftovers Pudding

Day 24 of 28, a Bit More Bullying for the Beef.

On day 11, I cooked a little piece of roast beef and began counting out the meals it could provide. At 600g in weight, there should be sufficient for 6 meals but, at £1 per 100g for the beef and a budget of £1 per day per person for ALL meals, I need to stretch it further.

The original post is here if you missed it and we have had two meals each (4 servings) from the beef, so far.

Tonight I made a large pie that will provide two of us with three meals each (6 servings), so that will be 10 meals from the £6 piece of beef. I had saved the gravy juices from the meat after slow cooking it, so that had been frozen for later use, too - I simply defrost it when needed and thicken it with some cheap, instant gravy granules.



Homemade roast beef and onion pie just out the oven

Pastry is great stuff, isn't it? I use 50g margarine, 50g lard and 200g plain flour with a pinch of salt and some water to bind it. then roll it out in plain flour.

Making pastry

I always use the cheapest available ingredients, so I am currently baking with tinned, pasteurised margarine bought at 3 tins for £1. I am by no means a good cook, but I'm led to believe that keeping everything chilled is the secret to good pastry; I try my best and am not scared to scrub up and get stuck into mixing by hand.

Greasing the plate with the lard wrapper

Right, what have we got so far? A plate, some flour, lard and margarine and one small egg from the garden hens, so I am able to glaze the pastry - this always enhances the finished look and makes it appear much less like leftovers wrapped in a pie case.

Rolling out the chilled pastry

The 200g of plain flour is sufficient to make a large family pie, big enough to serve 6. I use the same recipe for all my short crust pies, whether they are sweet or savoury. Apologies for this next photo, I forgot to switch on the flash. My beef and onion pie filling wasn't really emitting a golden glow.

Glowing like savoury gold - roast beef with onions in gravy

I freeze most things in margarine tubs, so the above is the rolled pastry with half a tub of beef plus gravy - I used a dinner plate for baking it. Paint around the edges with beaten egg so you get a food seal between bottom and top of the pie pastry. You can use milk if you have no egg or just seal it with water if all else fails, then press the edges together with a fork. Make a little hole in the centre to let out any excess steam.

Use up the pastry trimmings to decorate your pie

It was either Fonzie, Bernice or Mrs Splashy who laid us a tiny egg this week - they are our Pekin bantam hens - so I beat this up and glazed the pie top. Now I have pastry offcuts and the remains of a tiny egg leftover from pie making. Excellent! Enough to make pudding!

Making pudding from the leftovers

The leftover pastry was enough to roll out and line two small flan dishes, so I put a scoop of homemade blackcurrant jam into each. The egg... I creamed a little sugar and margarine, added some self-raising flour and beat in the little bit egg with some water and used this frugal sponge-like mix to cover the jam in the pastry cases.



Leftovers being turned into fruit sponge in pastry

The little fruit flans with sponge got cooked in the mini oven while we were eating dinner. Ordinarily, these flan dishes make individual servings but one was enough between two of us when served with some instant custard. We do like or food here in Frugaldom and I find that an average of £1 per person per day for all food is quite sufficient, although this does take some practice while building up basic stores of ingredients and dried goods.

 

Fruit sponge flans made from pie-making leftovers

Having savoured the flavour of the pie at dinnertime, I now have two thirds of a meat pie and one small fruit sponge flan for future meals. The steak pie was served with potatoes and mixed vegetables and I'm guessing that we'll be having similar for the next couple of days, as I can't refreeze the pie. But let's face it, in the Frugaldom household, beef for three days on the trot is sheer bliss and then that leaves only Thursday and Friday to see me through to March ... and another new month of challenges! Yeah!

NYK, Frugaldom