Food and Budget update: 16/01 to 22/01/2016

Posted on January 25, 2016 by nicdempsey

So this food week wasn’t overshadowed so entirely by the mice but I’m still gradually replacing things. The shopping list looked like this

DSCF5143DSCF5157 DSCF5158

So there were some changes, I decided I wanted to try a new recipes so needed porridge oats, other things I bought that weren’t on the list; spinach, stuffed pasta, passata, olive oil, fizzy water. Things on the list I didn’t buy caster sugar (again), pesto and one of the replacement herbs and spices, I’m replacing the thrown out packets with jars, so loosing one isn’t a huge deal. The spinach, stuffed pasta and olive oil were all on offer and the fizzy water just tastes more interesting at the end of the day and is better and cheaper than coke, root beer etc.

The total came to £14.79, so 21p in the jar, every little helps and all that!DSCF5144DSCF5148 DSCF5154

This weeks breakfast were yoghurt and granola with peaches and lunches were a salad with bulgar wheat (along the lines of this cous cous salad) which I ate with a spinach salad. The pineapple and pears were for snacking on. 

 I’m still working on emptying the freezer, so I can defrost it properly at the end of the month. Therefore dinners where mostly from there with some additions.

Cottage pie and green beans on Saturday.

Chicken and peppers with rice on Sunday night and remixed on Tuesday.DSCF5131Soup on Monday night (and that is the last of the soup I made in preparation for my six weeks recovering from the osteotomy….)DSCF5139

Black Bean burgers and veg on Wednesday.

FNP on Friday.IMG_3716The week felt like it was tough so I’m just pleased to have got to the end of it on budget and eating well!

 

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Life Happened: All work, all the time

Posted on January 25, 2016 by nicdempsey

Last week had two goals

  • keep on top of the housework (and mice)
  • get through the week on full time hours

I did managed both but not without some issues. The week started off alright even if I had to leave the house in the dark!IMG_3726I was in migraine fortnight and the consistent night-time wake ups (from next door’s screaming kid, and she does scream for at least 40 mins at a time, every night) took their toll and on Wednesday I had a migraine. Which was disappointing, actually it was more than disappointing it was also painful but I’m going with disappointing because I was hopeful that I would get through the month without one as I’ve been watching for all the little triggers, however, this was one outside of my control, which sucks…

The rest of the work week passed pretty much without incident, on Friday I spent some time in the pit of hopelessness also known as the Apple Store, I say some time, I mean 2 hours but there was the three hours that I went home for while they put a new battery in.  The good news is that they did and it was free and my phone lived to serve another day!

On Friday evening, I went to Jenny’s ‘no more treatment’ party. It’s been a slog for Jenny and for the rest of her family. I’ve always said that Jenny is the kind of person I want to be when I grow up, which is why I’m so happy that she’s done with chemo and radiotherapy  and that the world gets to keep her for a while yet!

On Saturday, I started marmalade, it’s the season and did other boring housework stuff. 

  Ma came for dinner on Saturday 

 I spent Sunday doing very little, apart from food prep for the week ahead…It was gloriously unproductive but just the thing!

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Friday Links

Posted on January 22, 2016 by nicdempsey

Happy Friday!  This week was apparently the worst week of the year or at least the most depressing, given that it started off with Blue Monday. Hopefully, your week wasn’t too awful and here are this week’s links…

How to beat the Blue Monday blues. Or any kind of depressive episode!

The Housing and Planning Bill reveals the contempt the Conservative Party holds the public in.

Giles Fraser on the Anglican Church and its latest nonsense on gay marriage.

Robin Lustig on liberalism. Don’t disagree with any of it.

The problem with capitalism.

The end of standing on the right? Years of London Tube tradition is not efficient, I’m shocked and disturbed..

Book depicting ‘happy’ slave of George Washington. Ignores that actual slave ran away and Washington conspired to keep him in slavery basically breaking the law. I found the contradictions of Mount Vernon, the emphasis on how great a man Washington was with the slave quarters obscene. And on Monday they withdrew the book. Well done them.

Pope Francis draws criticism over Protestant concessions. Finally, the RC church is catching up with me. I’ve always taken communion at any church I’ve been too because people should not be able to stand between me and God, it also didn’t bother me if a non-Catholic took communion in a Catholic mass either. So I’m pleased that Francis is doing this even though it’s going to take a lot more than that to get me back into a Catholic church..

We had a tiny bit of snow this weekend, London snow, you wake up and see that there has been snow because it’s still on top of cars and roofs but not on roads or pavements! The Guardian had a disappointing snowmen photo round up. It’s very British..

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Cottage Pie

Posted on January 21, 2016 by nicdempsey

I made this over the Christmas break, using the leftover roast beef. I’ve never made a cottage or shepherds pie using the left over roast before and as roast dinners were never much on Ma’s repertoire of meals she cooked, even seen one made. So I turned to Delia, who for tradition English cooking is fail safe. The recipe is in her Complete Cookery Course but is pretty close to this one.

I don’t often think of my cooking as traditionally English, I have talked about the importance of routine in cooking and eating, I think that it’s a good way of marking the week and gaining confidence with cooking. You have to make something a couple of times to get a feel for it and routine is comforting. I like getting to the end of the week knowing that there will be pizza on Friday. Cottage (or shepherds) pie was a Monday night dinner, it used up the remains of Sunday’s roast dinner and stretched food a bit further. I don’t often have roast dinners and if I’m eating a cottage pie, it’s probably got lentils in it or is made with raw mince. This was good and if I ever have leftover roast meat, I’ll make it again.

As ever, I deviated slightly from Delia, I don’t have a mincer so I blitzed the meat in the food processor and then did the same to the onions, swede and carrot. Not having any gravy, I just added 10fl oz of water and 3 crumbed OXO cubes into the pan. I didn’t add cinnamon or fresh herbs but added a good shake of mixed herbs. I’m not sure that the tomato purée would have worked so well with lamb but it was perfect for the beef, and I ended up with a rich beef mixture.

I don’t think I’ve ever made mash to a recipe, it could be that my Irish heritage means that I was born knowing how to do it or I could have grown up watching Ma do it all the time and picked it up, although I should point out that I’ve never bought the lumps (sorry it’s a very bad family joke – my dad used to complain about lumps in the mashed potatoes and Ma used to pretend that she’d bought them specially!)  I boiled some potatoes with the rest of the swede and mashed them with some milk, butter and lots of black pepper.

I made one big pie which we ate on New Year’s Day, and two little ones (I used these) for the freezer.

So another option for leftover roast beef should you have any!

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A Day in my Life

Posted on January 20, 2016 by nicdempsey

As I’m back to ‘normal’ working hours this week, I thought it would be interesting to document what a working day looks like for me. It may actually only be interesting to me but as this is my space, I’m gonna go ahead and do it anyway!

5:45am  The alarm goes off, the wake up light as been gradually lightening up my bedroom so I’m either awake or semi-awake but at 5:45am, the radio comes to life and Farming Today starts, and among other things I learn about the use of drones on farms. I generally grab my phone and check mail and fitbit to have a look at how I slept. The blue light of the screen needs to be avoided at night but embraced in the morning. However, this morning I’ve woken up with a headache, this is not unusual for this time of the month (I’m bang in the middle of migraine time) but I know the drill, water, tablets, vicks and close my eyes for a bit.

6:10am  I drag myself out of bed after the news. The headache is a bit better and in order to avoid getting back into bed, I make it and lay out my clothes for the day. Then do my set of exercises.

6:20am  Into the kitchen for a rodent check! I make a cup of mint tea, fill up up water again and sort out my lunch.

6:30am

To the bathroom to  perform morning ablutions (it’s a fabulous word that!)

6:40am  Into work clothes, make up and hair to make myself presentable. This is as good as it’s going to get today. Then wash up and put away tea cup and water glass. I’ve become a little bit fanatical about getting things away recently (my mother is so proud!).

7:00am The 7 o’clock news is my cue, I have a final check to make sure that I have charger, travel card, book, phone etc, then leave the house and walk to the station, I’m usually out by 7:05am and at the station for the 7:26 to Paddington. Leaving the house when it’s dark in the morning sucks every bit as much as you think it does but it’s worth it, to get a start on the day and a seat on the train. And it’s still dark and I’m still not happy about it… 7:40am – 7:50amArrive at Paddington and walk to the bus stop, it’s still not light yet. Usually, I’d walk from Paddington to the office but my foot still isn’t up to it so am taking the bus. I moan about public transport constantly but London is well served by buses. Although in the 3 minutes I have to wait for the bus, I say a small prayer for the teachers of the two teenage schoolgirls chatting away at the bus stop. It’s the combination of total ignorance and complete confidence that blows me away, I’m comforted by the knowledge that teenagers are working with nearly adult bodies but underdeveloped brains, essentially they’re disabled, most of them will turn out fine!

8:05amArrive at the office. Log in, make tea (tea is important even though mine is herbal or green rather than ‘proper’ builders tea!) and get water, check email and to-do list while eating breakfast. Get to work on the list. Remember at about 8:50am that I haven’t called my mother, do that and get back to work.

10:20amColleague suggests coffee and I’m still headachey, caffeine is one of the few things that help with fending off the migraines so we go get a coffee and I eat my pear in the hope that they will help. They don’t.

11:30amFruit has arrived so I grab some grapes and an apple and a plum. I also make another mint tea and refill my water bottle. I snack on the grapes, the other fruit is saved for tomorrow.

12:10pmStill headachey, I eat my lunch (surprisingly delicious, the spinach idea is keeper for work lunches) and take a painkiller. I take some time to check my email, exciting email from library informing me that two books on reserve have just come in! Walk to the break room and read for 15-20 minutes, give up because headache so decide to get back to work.

The afternoon is spent mostly at my desk writing up minutes and dealing with anything else that comes up, at some point, I wash up my lunch things and refill my water and tea. At 4:45pm, I review the work that needs doing in the rest of the week and double check my diary to make sure that I’m not missing anything. That done, I work out a task list for tomorrow and shut down my laptop. While I’m waiting for that to happen, I have a quick tidy of my desk etc.

5:04pmDesk clear and it’s time to leave the office. The journey home is uneventful, I get a seat and am home by 6:00pm.

I get home to discover that the landlord and handyman have been round. The boiler has been serviced, the mouse entrances covered, the light socket in the cupboard and bedroom radiator valve fixed and the bathroom cold tap now works again! Hurrah!

Ma calls and we catch up on the day, then after I change into home clothes, I potter about for a bit tidying up and rearranging cupboards back to how they were this morning, and then make dinner. Dinner is soup (this is not a photo of the actual soup I made but it’s close enough!)DSCF5139After dinner, I wash up.Tomorrow is rubbish day so I sort out the recycling and mop the floor. By 8:30pm, I’m all done.

8:30pm

I sit down to read for a bit, this doesn’t go as expected and I wake up at 9:30pm feeling confused! So I go and have a shower and get myself to bed. 12 hours after I woke up to R4, I go to sleep to R4, lights out at 9:50pm

So all in all a pretty average Monday and work day generally. How was yours?

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Food and Budget: 09/01 to 15/01/2016

Posted on January 19, 2016 by nicdempsey

I was so fed up this week, I’d thrown a ton of food and other stuff away, I’d felt like I’d been in kitchen all week, cleaning it and I knew there was more to go. I did have a rough  meal plan and I was determined that I wasn’t going to let the week send me off into wild spending, the whole point of this budget limit is to prove that it’s doable even when I’m stressing out about critters invading the kitchen.

One of the other joys of this week was my phone decided to randomly crash, so I had a paper list, here it is

.

I needed to make some granola (to replace the stuff I’d thrown away) and planned on slow cooker chicken and peppers for Saturday night, a soba noodle salad for lunches and needed to get ingredients for that. However, I had a genius moment and forgot to take the chicken out of the freezer, I also hadn’t planned on buying fruit and wanted some.   So I had a quick change of plan. I abandoned the idea of making granola and bought a packet of Dorset Cereals granola instead, 4 chicken legs were half price so I got those and I bought a pineapple and a pomegranate again. They didn’t have any parsley but they did have coriander and it was on special offer so that did just fine! The total was £14.96. Close but still within budget…DSCF5119DSCF5118For a number of reasons, mainly to do with forgetting to switch the slow cooker on, we didn’t eat the chicken and peppers on Saturday night, we ate pasta and butter and cheese!

I find weekdays are easier if I have the same thing for breakfast and lunches. I prepped those meals on Sunday afternoon. Breakfasts were pomegranate arils, yogurt and granola. I chopped up the pineapple and potted it up as a snack. For lunches I had the soba noodle salad and roast vegetables (a squash that’s been hanging around since October, tomatoes, peppers and onions)DSCF5134The chicken and peppers I ate with rice on Sunday and Tuesday night. The rest went in the freezer.DSCF5131I really want to make a dent in some of food in the freezer and so had soup from the freezer on Monday and Wednesday night, with extra vegetables and seeds. (the colour of it is not great but it tastes good!)DSCF5139Tuna burgers also from the freezer with chopped up carrots was Thursday’s dinner.

And on Friday I made a new to me pizza base because it didn’t require sugar, which I didn’t have. This one is a keeper, it’s quick, simple and tastes really good. If you don’t make your own or are having problems with yours, try this one, just use plain flour instead of strong bread flour.

So what did I learn this week? In my professional life, I’m a huge advocate for having and understanding a process for regular jobs, that way it’s easier to deviate from plan and work around if you have too. The key is understanding the steps before you have to jettison them. This was the key takeaway from last week, having a plan in plan made it easier to tap into what I needed (fruit) and easier to adapt when I realised that I’d forgotten to defrost the chicken because I had a good idea of what I was going to eat and how much it cost. If I had just turned up to the supermarket without a list or a plan in the completely grumpy and stressed out mood I was rocking on Saturday morning…well there’s no way I’ve have stuck to the £15 budget and that would have put me at a disadvantage for the rest of the month.

The other lesson from last week is that a little bit of food prep goes a long way. That couple of hours on Sunday, got me ahead of the game, knowing that food was sorted made my week easier because it was one less decision to think about each day.

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Life Happened: Organisation

Posted on January 18, 2016 by nicdempsey

After last’s week’s mouse apocalypse, I wanted this week to be easy. It was my busy week at work and the last one on reduced hours.

Last week I wanted to:

  • Have my lunch made the day before
  • Get to bed and lights out at 10pm
  • Get out of bed by 7pm each morning
  • Ensure that the kitchen was spotless to deter the mice
  • Increase my water intake – I haven’t been drinking enough and it’s showing on how sluggish I feel and on my which looks dehydrated and tired.

With the exception of the kitchen, this was all geared towards ensuring that regular hours wouldn’t be such a huge shock this week.I did pretty well, Sunday food prep and a robust meal plan helped me with the lunch goal, it was easy to keep the kitchen very clean, partly because paranoia reigns and it was so tidy to start with. I’ve gone back to having a shower before bedtime which means that mornings are easier and I made sure I drunk a pint of water as soon as I woke up which seemed to help kickstart the water drinking.

I made a dent in my January books to read pile. I know, I’m basically helpless in the library, it’s like they’re calling my name…DSCF5159I found myself doing things that I would ordinarily put off like the ironing straight away and so I felt more in control of life, which is good because by the end of the week, I was tired and headachey.

That pretty much continued through the weekend, I’m sorted for the coming week but that’s about all I did at the weekend. Hopefully I’ll perk up for the coming week….

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Kitchen Clean and Deep Clean Task Lists

Posted on January 16, 2016 by nicdempsey

Having given the kitchen a thorough post mouse clean and de-clutter and resolved to do a deep clean of it every two months, I thought it would be useful for me to have the list somewhere.

I will be the first to admit that the whole ‘mice loose in the kitchen’ episode has made me more that a little paranoid and it’s going to be a good long while before I lose that, so these lists may seem over the top to everyone else but this is what I need to do to feel better. Also you should note that these lists are the ideal, what I will start doing when I’m sure the mice aren’t getting in any more. Currently, I’m not, so I’m clearing and bleaching counters every night and cleaning them before I use them and sweeping and mopping the floor every night.

Daily

  • Washing up done and dried and put away
  • Floor swept
  • Counters and cooker cleaned

Every other day

Weekly

  • Floor mopped
  • Everything on counters moved, counters cleaned and bleached
  • Recycling boxes emptied and wiped out
  • Rubbish bin changed and wiped clean
  • Fridge cleaned
  • Tea towels and wipe up clothes hot washed

Once a month

  • Oven Cleaned
  • Rubbish bin changed and washed
  • Recycling boxes emptied and washed
  • Baseboards removed and cleaned

Every other month deep clean

  • Everything on counters moved and cleaned
  • Counters cleaned and bleached
  • Cupboards emptied and cleaned
  • Drawers emptied and cleaned
  • Everything on shelves and shelves washed
  • Everything on top of fridge moved and top of fridge cleaned
  • Freezer defrosted and cleaned
  • Kettle de-scaled
  • Toaster cleaned

Every 3 to 4 months

  • Assuming that the mouse bait and traps haven’t gone off (in which case, I’ll be doing most of the weekly stuff daily and the other stuff weekly), reset and replace

I don’t think I’ll ever take being vermin free for granted again and I may even need to assign a bleach and mouse poison line to my budget! As I go on with this, I’ll probably find that some of this has to be done more or less often and/or there are tasks that I’ll need to add as I go.

If anyone wants to let me know what they do, what works for them or anything that they think I’ve missed, do chime in below!

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Friday Links

Posted on January 15, 2016 by nicdempsey

Happy Friday! This weeks links seem to be all about me being an angry old lady. Which when I think about the state of the nation, isn’t that far away from the truth…

Secret Doctor on why they are going on strike. We can spend money on consultants and big business but not paying doctors a decent wage

While I’m at it, let’s have a quick look at The Sun’s reporting on the doctors strike and the Twitter response. 

The collapse of parenting I’ve been saying this for an age…

David Bowie died on Monday. Praise has been fulsome. I will say this, even people who ‘don’t like David Bowie’, have a David Bowie song that they like and yes he was young and yes it is sad as the priest said about my father when he died, maybe you come to earth to sing your song and once it’s done, you can leave. To have left such songs and to die surrounded by the people you love who love you. That’s not a bad life or death to have had…

And if that wasn’t bad enough for you, Alan Rickman died yesterday.

Fostering agencies should not be for profit organisations. Another thing I’ve been saying for ages, without knowing the figures. I still think that foster carers should be paid a salary and then an allowance for the children they care for. Fostering well is a complex job and the people that do it should be treated as other professionals in the caring professions but then, looking at how we treat doctors, nurses, social workers and carers, I’m not holding my breath.

The secret life of the Wetherspoons carpets. Every day is a learning day!

Lindy West on diets and why we diet. I like this so much, this year I’ve not set any goals around my weight but I am aware that eating well and exercising will have a positive impact on my body as well as my mind and make me feel less uncomfortable because my clothes aren’t tight!

Gymtimidation this was interesting in relation to how I felt about the gym before I had my foot surgery. It’s difficult to be the largest person in class, even if you’re most accomplished at the exercise than others.

Gentrification and the growing backlash. Another thing I’ve been moaning in about forever..

Caroline Lucas on why we need a living rent commission. This month I’ve been really happy because I had a conversation with my landlord about my rent, which is due to go up in June, it will only go up by 5.1%. That’s actually really good news, the current rate for a flat like mine where I live is about 17% higher than what I’ll be paying in June. My rent rise is low because I’m a good tenant, I’ve been there a while and my landlord is a decent person. Here’s the problem, last year I got a pay rise of 1.9%, now that’s also really lucky because loads of people I know didn’t get any pay rise and it was way above the current rate of inflation (0.1%). Here’s the problem, in actual cash money, my pay rise doesn’t cover the increase in rent. Assuming (and it’s a big assumption) I get the same pay rise in July when they usually happen, it added to last July’s raise, still won’t cover the rise in the rent. On top of that, the cost of my annual pass to get me to work (renewal in March), has gone up 1%, my council tax will probably go up at least 2%, maybe 4% and the cost of everything else from food to utilities doesn’t seem to be getting any cheaper! To add insult to injury some credit cards (who to my knowledge have never, ever lowered interest rates have begun to track the base rate and if it goes up (as everyone is predicting it will) so will the interest they charge! O.k, you could argue that the credit cards are my own damn fault and I’d agree with you, but banks are still getting cheap credit, I’m not seeing that trickle down to me. As I keep saying, I’m one of the lucky ones in this scenario, I just have myself to look after, I’m in a secure job and have a decent landlord. However, I feel that I’ll never get ahead of myself, I certainly don’t feel that I’ll every have a truly secure living situation, short of a lottery win. I feel like that and I have lots going for me, so how are people who are more squeezed and less secure coping? Nothing, and I do mean nothing this government is doing, is designed to make life for people in my position better. I did everything ‘they’ said I should do to get ahead and I can’t, one thing that would really help me would be for government to effectively take the heat out of both the housing and the rental market, especially in London. It would be difficult but this is something that the market has been failing on for decades and it’s time for a little old fashioned government control. However, as my uncle said, this government is not for the working people, it’s for the ones who already have the cash.

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Soba Noodle Salad

Posted on January 14, 2016 by nicdempsey

This salad has been part of my lunch this week. The original version is from Cassie at Back to Her Roots and I’ve made it a couple of times and it’s great, I find it’s an amazing hangover food, it’s mild but there’s actual favour. It also tolerates being left in the fridge for a while but benefits from being room temperature when you eat it, which makes it great for packed lunches.

I had planned to make the original recipe but the mouse purge left me missing key ingredients that I didn’t have the budget to replace. So I improvised a bit. I didn’t include the sesame seeds, replaced the tahini with peanut butter (which is a pretty effective supplement for tahini and less than half the price, as a bonus I used it to bait the mouse traps!) and as I didn’t have any rice wine vinegar, I used the red wine vinegar I had on hand.

I portioned it up into five containers and added roasted vegetables because in the post Christmas slump, you can never have too many! That done it became the holy grail of packed lunches, easy to make, tasty, cheap (working out at less than .75p a portion) and interesting. I know that it doesn’t look like much but that it entirely down to my photography skills, at the office on my phone, which make it look like it could be a candidate for sad desk lunch but I promise you it’s not and it’s well worth looking at if you’re in a leftovers for lunch rut. You don’t have to use soba noodles either, you could try wholemeal or spelt spaghetti (which have the added bonus of being cheaper) just weigh out 9.5oz before you cook it.

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