Friday 28 October 2011

No Waste Tastes Great - 28th Oct

I think I did well this week...

Top shelf - spread and cheese
Middles shelf - nothing
Bottom shelf - jar of beetroot (that will be there for a while!!), some broccoli, swede, sprouts and a chilli (I took them out of the drawer to prove I wasn't cheating)
Left drawer - condiments

There are 3 eggs in the door that in date (just!!)

Probably have an omelette this weekend to use up he eggs and chilli and Quorn burgers (out of the freezer) to use p the veggies - perfick!!

Thanks Jo for the continued inspiration.

Saturday 22 October 2011

Upcycling

One of the unexpected side effects of getting rid of lots of stuff is discovering what you really don't want to get rid of but that you know you won't use for it's original purpose.  That sets the old grey matter going to see if there is another way to use whatever it is so that it gets to stay!!

Take an old faithful jumper (hand knitted by your sister many years ago) and a big cushion...


Some scissors, some unwound wool and a bit of imagination...



And you end up with a re-purposed jumper doing a very good job as a cushion cover!!

No Waste Tastes Great

Ok so I know it's Saturday but I took the fridge photo yesterday!!

So what is in the fridge this week then...
Top shelf Pure spread, cheese, sour cream and ricotta.
Middle shelf - half a tin of beans (a different tin to last week!) and a pack of wafer thin ham
Bottom shelf - jar of beetroot and a lemon (minus some of it's zest!)
Left drawer - condiments
Right drawer - pack of spinach, 1 red chilli, half a small marrow.
In the fridge door there are 4 eggs.

The spread, cheese, condiments and eggs are all in date. As are the beetroot and condiments.
The sour cream, ricotta and lemon are left over from the cheesecakes I made last weekend. I was thinking I must be able to make some sort of carbonara type thing with the ricotta, ham and spinach.  I have a recipe for sour cream muffins that I will have to check the quantities in and see if I can adapt it for the amount I have left (that'll also use up an egg)

All in all I don't think I did too badly this week!

Thanks to Jo again for keeping me inspired. 

Sunday 16 October 2011

Spending Update - Sept/Oct

Well it's payday again and time for the monthly update. I have to admit I've still failed to keep track of what I'm spending money on but maybe one month I'll manage it!!

I did well this month overall due to an error in my accounts spreadsheet.  Yes I am a bit nerdy and track my spending on a spreadsheet. I have all my monthly bills set on one worksheet so when I get paid I copy and paste them all over and I can see what I have left to live on for the month. As the month progresses and I take out cash or make a debit card purchase this gets added to the sheet therefore keeping it up to date and letting me know what I've got left.  Normally twice a month I print out a bank statement from my online banking and reconcile it against the spreadsheet to make sure I haven't missed anything and that we both think I have the same amount of money!!

Well last weekend my spreadsheet was telling me I had a grand total of 35p in the bank and a week left of the month. Oops thinks I. Oh well, better check it against the bank statement in case it's worse!!  As I'm going through the statement I discover my error...I had transferred some money out of my PayPal account and into my bank account. My mistake was to put that amount as a debit in my spreadsheet rather than a credit...move the amount over to the right side and all of a sudden I've got money again...whoop whoop!!!

This 'extra' money enabled me to get a couple of things I'd been putting off and still have some money left at the end of the month!!!

So at the end of the month...
£200 transfer
£1.00 in my wallet
£35.99 change
£39.15 in the bank account

Grand total - £276.14 - the highest amount so far.

I'm thinking if I made it to almost the end of the month with the error maybe I could up my monthly transfer a bit and get away with it???

I also intend to try harder on the meal planning and food shopping to keep the costs down.

(Oh and I sold another load of stuff on eBay too!!)

Friday 14 October 2011

No Waste Tastes Great

Jo over at http://simplybeingmum.com/ does a weekly 'No Waste Tastes Great' post and shows what she has left in her fridge at the end of the week. I have been trying to follow some of her suggestions, (the main one being to plan what you will eat that week and only buy what you need for that), to try and get to the empty Friday fridge.  This leads to less food waste and therefore less wasted money. They also get to have a takeaway on a Friday night if the fridge is bare (I like that idea a lot!!)

For the first time I think I can say I just about managed it this week.

On the top shelf is a tub of Pure (marg type spread) and a tub of Philadelphia cream cheese both in date. The middle shelf is empty. Bottom shelf a (large) jar of home pickled allotment grown beetroot, half a tin of baked beans and a tub of fruit salad.  Bottom right drawer is sauces and condiments and the left drawer is a leek, an allotment grown small marrow and allotment grown parsnips.

In the door there is some soya milk which lasts well and gets drunk as hot chocolate, a couple of cans of drink and some butter.

I went to my Mums for lunch today and I've had my main meal of the day so I'll use the beans up on toast for tea! The fruit salad was from Mums and will be fine for a couple of days.  I'm planning on roasting the parsnips with some allotment potatoes for dinner tomorrow and will probably include the marrow in the meal somewhere!!! Now all I need to do is plan the rest of the weeks meals and do some shopping!!!

Wednesday 5 October 2011

Some rediscovered space

I took the day off work today as I wanted to re-arrange my bedroom. It's never going to look like this...

...but I loved the idea of not having a 'real' bed frame. Now I can't afford a new bed frame but couldn't see any reason why I couldn't just put the mattress on the floor.  To do that though needed all the stuff under the bed clearing out (and that was quite a bit of stuff!).

If you look at this post from the start of my blogging http://lessismoreihope.blogspot.com/2010/11/chaos-that-is-my-flat-at-moment-this-is.html you can see pictures of the bedroom (and the rest of the flat) as it was almost a year ago.

After today's endeavours it now looks like this...
I now have a dressing/work area
 And the chest of drawers separates the sleeping side

The huge wardrobe is still there but I can promise there is a lot less stuff in there now than last year. It's not finished yet. There is still more de-cluttering to be done. And there is still a pile of stuff in my front room that I haven't quite found a new home for but it's definitely a step in the right direction and the room feels so much bigger.

Monday 3 October 2011

Pinterest...

...have you discovered it yet? No. Well off you go then...http://pinterest.com/

Pinterest is an online scrapbook, bookmark, general dump for all that interesting stuff you find on the internet and don't want to lose. Now, you could argue that a minimalist shouldn't be keeping this stuff in the first place and some people may agree. I, however, don't. The old me would be cutting things out of magazines and piling them up somewhere in my flat never to be looked at again (except for when I had to move them to 'tidy up'!). However now if I see something in a magazine I want to keep, you can basically guarantee there will be a website. Jump on the computer, pop to said website and 'pin it'. That saves it to whichever 'board' you want it to go to within your pinterest account. You can add comments to remind you of specifics of that particular pin and for even more details you can then still click through to the original website. Perfect. But even better than that...users can categorize their boards and tag individual pins. So not only do you have the whole internet at your disposal to pin but you can also search pinterest itself and see what other pinners are finding around different subjects! Oh and you can follow people on there too.

So now I can keep all those quotes, furniture and craft ideas, recipes and general lovely stuff saved online where I can find them easily so that when I've cut all the other junk out and have all that spare time I can actually do some of them!!!