Tracking 2015 – May

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Posted on June 1, 2015

Another month over and I have totalled up the spending for May. It is not a pretty sight. Almost $6,000 gone this month in variable spending. Yikes!!

Here are the totals so far:

January – $5,144.53
February – $1,783.49
March – $4,350.56
April – $2,385.31
May – $5,961.54

I have amended the figures slightly to include everything that we have spent in the past 5 months – that is variable spending so does not include mortgage, rates, insurances, phone/internet etc.

May was particularly high as we booked and paid for airfares and accommodation in Melbourne at Christmas as well as paying for birthday presents for both daughters and a Christmas gift for one of them. Since they are both adults earning their own money we generally pay for something special such as an airfare and then buy a small gift to give on the day. The other category that impacted significantly was ‘House & Garden’ of just over $1,200 which included $860 for the plumber and electrician and installation of a new sump pump for the greywater system.

I thought that we would pull our horns in for June but we started the first day of the month with GMan buying a new pair of shoes for work at $209 since the others could not be repaired. The other not so good news is that the drive chain broke on the ride-on mower yesterday and we have yet to find out what that will cost to replace.

There are only 29 more days until the end of the financial year and I will be halfway through this tracking exercise which is nothing if not eye-opening.

Eating In – Baked Potatoes

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Posted on May 21, 2015

Baked potatoes are one of my favourite meals. They are probably best wrapped in alfoil and cooked in the coals of an open fire but that is generally not practical so we compromise with what we have. It is uneconomical to turn on a conventional oven to bake 2 potatoes and for many years I cooked them in the microwave. While they are not strictly baked it made it reasonably quick and easy meal for a family.

In the last couple of years I read about cooking baked potatoes in the slow cooker. According to the article, you simply wash and dry and potatoes, rub them with a little bit of oil and put them in the slowcooker on High for 4 hours. It just seemed too easy but I decided to give it a go as I had nothing to lose – except maybe 2 potatoes. When I took them out they were cooked to perfection and were even crispy-skinned on the bottom – just like the ones you can buy from the baked potato carts in the street!

Since then I have tweaked the recipe slightly and add a spicy coating. Black pepper, herb salt, cumin and chilli (just a pinch of each) into a bowl and a teaspoon of flaxseed meal. I use this because it is gluten-free and it has some nutritional value. You could just use plain flour (either wheat or gluten-free) if you prefer.

Rub the potatoes lightly with oil then roll in the spice mixture and place in the slow cooker. No other oil or liquid is needed. I find that 4 hours is perfect for medium-sized potatoes but if you have larger ones you may want to extend the cooking time by another 30 minutes.

I serve these filled with refried beans and topped with a dollop of plain yoghurt and grated cheese. Coleslaw is a favourite addition and usually some fried mushrooms. Alternatively, you could fill with a bolognaise mixture or even tuna for variety. Some salad on the side makes a complete meal.

Eating In – Pizzas

Cooking Up a Storm

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Posted on May 17, 2015

I didn’t sew today (or this week) but today I cooked. More specifically I cooked this afternoon and evening as I went shopping this morning.

Last night I cooked pumpkin with vegetable stock in the slowcooker. This afternoon I cooked potatoes, fried some onion and added the pumpkin mixture. This made 7 large serves of soup. I had one for dinner and here are the others ready to go in the freezer.

With the remainder of the pumpkin I sliced it up, brushed with a mixture of oil and balsamic vinegar and roasted it. I will use the roasted pumpkin slices on pizzas for dinner on Tuesday night. Two trays ready to go in the oven.

Once the pumpkin mixture was finished in the slow cooker I cooked the chickpeas which had been soaking over night to make hummus.

The next thing into the slow cooker was honey soy chicken. 8 chicken thigh fillets, 3 tablespoons honey and 2 tablespoons tamari or soy sauce. Once the chicken was cooked I removed the pieces with a slotted spoon and poured the juice into a small saucepan and thickened it with arrowroot. 4 serves ready to freeze.

After the chicken was done I washed the slow cooker then added kidney beans to make refried beans which you can find in this blog post.

I make my own gluten-free pizza bases and normally make enough for 6 bases and freeze them. There were none in the freezer so it was time to make another batch. Here is the dough divided into pieces. The first 2 bases were already in the oven by the time I took the photo.

Here are 6 pre-cooked bases ready to be bagged and frozen. I use opened out cereal packets to separate things that I am freezing. The dividers can be washed and re-used many times.

I picked lemons and made lemon cordial. You can read more about it here.

I also made more butter mixture and 8 serves of chilli con carne (no photo) as well as dividing up the meat which I bought and packing it into the freezer.

Cooking and preparing meals is a never-ending task but it is good to have a few meals and ingredients prepared to make the job a bit easier each evening.

A Packed Lunch

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Posted on May 11, 2015

I pack our lunches (and breakfasts) each day for work but I am usually in a rush so the camera is the last thing on my mind. This morning I had a little more time and I remembered to grab the camera.

This is what GMan took today. Banana, apple, 2 Vitabrits and psyllium husk, 2 slices bread, almonds and raisins, baked beans, grapefruit.

He always has 2 pieces of fruit, dried fruit and nuts for snacks. Lunch can be baked beans, flavoured tuna, salad, soup or leftovers. He generally has Vitabrits for breakfast but I had prepared a grapefruit yesterday so the Vitabrits were kept for tomorrow.

Sometimes I feel like I am packing the same old thing every day but we are happy to take our packed lunches and save around $10/day each on bought lunches. That is $200/fortnight that we can use for other expenses. The other benefit is that it is all packed in reuseable containers and ziplock bags so we are minimising any waste.

We are lucky that we both have access to refrigerators and microwave ovens at work.

Do you take a packed lunch?

Sew My Stash Sunday – 15

Finding the Freezer

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Posted on May 7, 2015

Well, it wasn’t the actual freezer – more like the contents!.

Today I was working from home and late this afternoon I went looking for a chicken casserole in the freezer to have for dinner. I do not keep an absolute inventory of the contents of the freezer but generally have a pretty fair idea of what is in there. I could not even remember what type of container the casserole was in but I eventually found it.

While I was looking for the casserole I found a few odds and ends that needed to be used up and the drawers needed cleaning as well.

Here are the contents of the top drawer.

The drawer was washed and ready to repack.

Organised and ready to replace.

The bottom drawer finished as well.

This was the freezer section of my main refrigerator in the kitchen. We also have a small bar-sized freezer downstairs. There are are few food items but it is mostly frozen water which we stored during the storm season. This could be thawed and used and the remaining food transferred to the freezer in the kitchen. I will do that on the weekend and then defrost the small freezer.

This is what I have in the freezers at the moment.

Salmon – 6 serves
Chicken – 4 serves
Diced beef – 4 serves
Mince – 2 serves
Sausages – 8 serves
Bacon – 6 rashers
Frozen peas – 1.5 packets
Home-made bread – 6 slices
Tomato pulp – 500ml
Honey/soy sauce – 100ml
Broccoli stalk – 1
Zucchini slice – 2 serves
Cherry tomatoes – 2kg
Chopped basil and tomatoes – 2 ice-cube trays
Ground coffee – 500g
Mango puree – 1.2 litres
Guava puree – 1.5 litres
Berry juice – 800ml
Pumpkin soup – 5 serves
Celery soup – 2 serves
Crushed bunya nuts – 2 kg
Ice – 10 litre

When I re-read the list it is evident that my freezer contents are mostly meat and storage of some of the things we grow – cherry tomatoes, basil, mangoes, guavas, bunya nuts and pumpkins. Sometimes I have more prepared meals.

How do you keep track of what is in the freezer? What sorts of things do you store.

Tracking 2015 – April

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Posted on May 4, 2015

Over the weekend I finalised the figures for our April spending.

Here are the totals so far:

January – $2,628.73
February – $1,783.49
March – $4,320.56
April – $2,384.46

Now that I have 4 months of spending recorded I decided to extrapolate that to a 12 month period and came up with $33,351.72 which is rather high considering that is only our variable expenses and does not include the mortgage, rates, insurances etc. I then took out the holiday costs and redid my calculations which presented a more realistic figure of $24,832.32 for the year. Finally, I excluded our public transport costs and our variable spending dropped to $18,340.32 when averaged over the year. The reason I tried excluding the public transport costs is that these are entirely associated with going to work and would not be relevant in a post-retirement budget.

This is certainly proving to be an interesting exercise to see where the money actually goes.

Doing the Doona

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Posted on April 30, 2015

Do you feel like you’ve just stepped out of the boxing ring by the time you have finished putting the doona/duvet back in its cover? I don’t know that I would be that dramatic but it is certainly not one of my favourite tasks.

I was recently looking at something on YouTube when I saw a video on how to insert a doona into a cover and then promptly forgot about it. Since then I have changed the cover to the darker one which I use during the cooler months. However, I kept the lightweight, polyester insert as the nights were still relatively warm. I used my usual method which I can do by myself but is easier with the assistance of GMan.

The overnight temperatures have now signalled that it really is autumn so today I decided to change over to the feather doona. I remembered to take some time to search YouTube for the trick to easily putting the doona in a cover. There are several to choose from but I thought that the instructions in the following video were as clear as any.

After watching it twice, I decided to test the idea. The first problem was when I discovered that the doona was nearly 30cm wider than the cover. I have had this doona for many years and never noticed that before so I just persevered.

Perhaps it is just because I am not overly tall and we have a foot end on the bed, but I found that I walked from one side of the bed to the other numerous times as I was rolling it up. I had excess doona sticking out from both ends due to the doona being wider than the cover. I followed the directions and it worked well. The excess just seemed to disappear into the midst of the doona.

The end result looks much the same as any other method and I am not sure that there was a great deal of difference in the time it took.

The only real advantage that I can see is that my method does entail lifting your hand well above your head in order to shake the doona into place. If you have shoulder problems the YouTube method would eliminate that. I do not think it is worth the effort of turning the cover inside-out and laying it out absolutely flat with the corners of the doona matching.

Will I do it again? Probably not.

How do you get your doona into the cover? Would you consider trying the method shown in the video?