Post Christmas
Well after all that preparation, here we are on the other side of Christmas and New Year, and a few days into 2022. This last week has been so grey, and wet, wet, wet and it's now snowing nearby and feels cold enough here too. I hate snow and ice and lurk indoors until it's gone!
A couple of friends have, independently, gone to Spain to spend some time there. They were quite near each other, so met up, and sent our friendship group a few pictures of themselves sitting in the winter sun, with blue skies. I don't particularly want to travel at the moment, but those pictures gave me a serious case of Missing Out!
I'd like to think about a holiday, but with all the red list, green list stuff going on, I really don't want to gear myself up and then not be able to go. Anyway, it just takes a day of blue sky here, and I'm full of the joys of Spring!
Back on the diet
I seriously need to get back on the diet wagon! I'm bulging in all the wrong places. It suits me to have our main meal at lunchtime as I can have a lot less over the course of the day that way.
But it's difficult to do. Tomorrow for instance, I have a u3a committee meeting until 12 noon, and I won't want to come straight home and start cooking.
Plus if we eat at 1pm, I will have to spend a good part of the morning cooking, then cleaning up, and it will be the middle of the afternoon before I'm free as it were.
The whole thing would dominate every day. So I think I'll stay with our usual early evening dinner.
I've still got a couple of bags of 19p veg to use. Some potatoes, carrots, sprouts and parsnips, all stored in the greenhouse so they are cool, and the rats won't find them before we use them.
Tomorrow, I'm going to explore using a carrot cake recipe, but swapping the carrots for parsnips, adding lemon zest instead of orange, and using muscovado sugar. Not very diet friendly I know!
And dinner will be a cauliflower crumble from a charity shop cookbook.
Many people like to explore veganism in January. Perhaps more will do so this year with all the talk of a plant based diet helping climate change.
If you'd like to explore it, there is an official Veganuary website with ideas.
Or try this post for an entire month's worth of delicious vegan food ideas, at the super frugal price that we work at.
And on the website, there are more all the time. I'm not vegan, and don't aspire to be, but I do like to have lots of vegetarian food, and when I'm experimenting, they often turn out to be vegan too.
A Roulade
I made this yummy article recently. It's a roulade filled with mincemeat, Bramley apple and cream and is gorgeous!
I used ordinary flour to start with and although yummy, the sponge was very slightly chewy, so I swapped to cornflour which worked beautifully and meant that the whole thing is gluten free.
I also tried this delectable version using cranberry sauce. You can either roll along the long edge to make 12 portions, or roll along the short edge and make 6 bigger slices.
So many other possible versions to try!
Leek & Cranberry Crumble
This very tasty leek and cranberry crumble is the result of watching a tv show centered on cranberries. The recipe wasn't fully given, one of those say what's in it as we go along ones, so this is my version of it and my goodness, was it good!
An e-book
I published an ebook for meal plan 1 in August and am delighted that many people have thought it was worth getting.
I've managed to get my head around WooCommerce so I can feature it on the blog and you can find it here. It's also on Amazon, but I'm not allowed to include links to there in a newsletter. No idea why!
I'm busy recooking, photographing and updating the recipes for Meal Plan 2 and putting them into an ebook. It was written in 2013 and still prices up, which is fabulous. But the posts are embarrassingly bad and need a lot of updating! I'm getting on well with them again, having taken a break to do other things.
Do come and say hello on the Fantastically Frugal Food Facebook group, or the Sensational Slimming Sustenance group. I'd love to see you. Lots of useful tips, recipes and ideas. The nearly 17,000 membership are brilliant, brimming with talent.
And don't forget Thrifty Lesley, where there are 800+ recipes of fantastically frugal food and many weekly meal plans. And Cheap Family Recipes where you can find all kinds of delicious things that don't cost much, with two family monthly meal plans.
I've also got a few YouTube videos up, not many yet, but I'm planning to do more. I've done a couple more, need to edit them now. So much to do, so little time!
With all best wishes, until next time
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