Category Archives: Homemaking

A New Desk – Part 1

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I have just checked the date and realised that it is 10 days since my last blog post.  I have been busy – in that time my mother has come home from hospital after having undergone heart surgery, I have attended a gathering of my extended family which I organised to celebrate a milestone from my grandfather’s life and been away for a work conference for 2 days.  That has all been in addition to running a household and holding down a full-time job.

There will be some blog posts about some of what I have been doing,but that is enough of my excuses for the moment.

GMan and I both had a day off today and we decided to make a round trip of over 200km to IKEA to buy a new desk for our home office.  I had searched online for either a new or second-hand desk and the one we bought was definitely the best to suit our needs.

indexWe arrived home this afternoon with 3 large packages.

2015-07-17 01GMan and I have spent several hours assembling the desk.  We are very happy with how it has turned out so far.  It is currently sitting in the middle of the office.

2015-07-17 02Tomorrow we will move all of the stuff of the existing desk and position the new one in its place.  The next step will be to build the bookcase/hutch section which attached to the desk.

Watch out for tomorrow’s post in which I hope to show you the completed desk and revamped office/library area.

Tracking 2015 – The Halfway Mark

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 Well, another financial year is done and dusted.  More importantly, I have reached the halfway mark of tracking our variable spending.

BudgetingHere 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
June – $2,939.07

We are halfway through the year and our variable spending is $22,564.50 so far.

As I mentioned in the round-up for May, we began June with GMan buying a new pair of shoes.  Other than that we did not spend anything on clothes or shoes.  We bought Christmas gift for our other daughter so the majority of our Christmas spending is done.

The ‘House & Garden’ category continues to be a substantial portion of our expenses with $367 for repairs to the ride-on mower and $237 on a fancy new garden hose system which arrived yesterday.  There will be more detail about that in a future post.

It will be interesting to see how the second half of the year compares to the first.

The Emotional Stuff – Part 2

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About 10 days ago I wrote this post.

2015-06-22 01Tonight I would like to follow that up with this piece, also written by my friend, Patty.

 In the town of my youth, behind the double brick home that is my mother’s neighbour’s house, is a hoarder.
The daughter of a very cranky, intolerant almost-100 year old father, (who lives in a nursing home on the other side of the river) she lives by herself with her mother’s memories and furniture.
Downstairs, you are barely able to squeeze past the belongings of her mother’s old home.
The furniture, the tables, the sofas, dusty with age and just covered with plastic, the china cabinets, and boxes, and boxes, and boxes of glassware and who-knows-whatever-else. All stored.
Filling up her house, cluttering her own life.
She moans to my sister as they hose their lawns. “I wish I could travel! It’s too expensive.”
My sister and I would sympathise and suggest she sell some of her mother’s possessions.
“Oh no! I could never do that! It’s too precious!”
And so her life is unlived, her home a rambling, chaotic mess of someone else’s life.
There’s barely enough room for herself. Her mother lives on, in every room.
It’s physically demanding, cramped and unacceptable.
She lives within the shadows, unhappy, miserable, resentful, and unable to move on.

She knows the answer to the situation, she just hasn’t asked herself the question.
Why keep it all, and what happened to MY life!

I have said to my own sons: “When I go, keep what you want, no obligation, and chuck the rest!”

While this is probably an extreme example, it is a stark reminder that we cannot live our lives if we are weighed down by emotional attachments to the stuff of previous generations.

How do you feel about this?  Have you had to deal with this sort of situation?

An Antimacassar

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I recently made a new antimacassar (headrest cover) for an armchair which belongs to my mother.

001The original concept of these linens dates from the Victorian era and you can read more about them here.  They were draped over the headrest of a chair or sofa but I chose to use some elastic to hold my handiwork in place.

I cut up a brand new pillowcase which had some promotional printing on either end.  It was in Mum’s stash of new linen but was unlikely to ever be used as a pillowcase and it was perfect for making this.  In fact, this is only half of the story as there were 2 pillowcases and I made another for a second chair.

It is easy to forget how much wear and tear the headrest of an armchair takes.  The other chair is also leather and the ptch at the centre of the headrest had actually worn right through some time ago.  Mum had made an antimacassar for that chair using a small linen table runner but that had subsequently worn to the point where it was almost worn out.

Now the two chairs have new antimacassars, there are two less pillowcases stashed away and I did not have to buy anything new for this simple but effective sewing project.

Gluten-Free Pasta – An Update

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote this post about making my own gluten-free pasta which includes the recipe.

004The fettucine and lasagne sheets were packaged and frozen for later use.

003I made a large dish of lasagne last week and GMan declared that it was really good.  That is high praise indeed, especially since he can happily eat conventional pasta if he wishes.

Tonight was the big test when I boiled the fettucine to add to sliced sauages in a spicy sauce.  I made sure the water was at a rolling boil and I added the frozen bundles of pasta.  Once it had come back to the boil it was only about 2 minutes until the pasta was ready.  My worst fears of a gluggy mass at the bottom of the saucepan were not realised and I will definitely continue to make my own gluten-free pasta.

Home Office/Library

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Today I have been revamping the home office/library area in our home.  This is really a follow up post to one I wrote in January which you can read here.

I finally moved the Australian Geographic magazines to the bottom shelf of the shelving unit in the lounge room and finally the bookcase was empty.

003I advertised it on a couple of local Facebook Buy, Swap, Sell sites and it looks as though it will be going to a new home tomorrow.

2011-12-21 01This is what one side of the office looked like a couple of years ago.  The freezer has been moved downstairs and with one bookcase ready to go we now have this blank corner.

009I am planning to get a comfy chair to put in the corner and create a reading nook.

Meanwhile, on the opposite wall we have a folding trestle table which we use as a computer desk.

001This was always only a temporary measure but it has been like this for nearly 10 years!  After much searching I have found this piece at IKEA.  I have only seen it online but hopefully it will measure up to my expectations.

indexThe look of the room has been changed by re-arranging some of the artwork we have.

007These are above the computer desk at the moment but if I end up getting the IKEA desk I will relocate them to the other side so they will be above the reading chair.

Here are a couple of others which have also been changed around.

008The office/library is a rather strange room due to the fact that the house was extended many years ago before we bought it.  This room was originally the main bedroom at the end of the house, however, it is now a walk-through room to the additional bedrooms.  The cupboards in the above photo would have been the original wardrobe.  The right-hand side is my linen cupboard and the left-hand side holds the filing cabinet.

004As you can see from the link in the first paragraph, we downsized from a 4 drawer filing cabinet to a 2 drawer one.  This left plenty of space but it was not particularly functional.  Today, we have cut down an offcut of melamine coated shelving and created a new shelf.

006There is still more to do but I feel as though I a winning the battle to make the office/library into both a functional and pleasant space.

No Waste

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One of the challenges of growing your own food is dealing with the gluts of produce which invariably occur.

The issue today was passionfruit.  We planted a passionfruit vine about 18 months ago and in now covers a large section of the perimeter fence of the chicken run.  For several weeks now I having been collecting and eating passionfruit almost every day but today I decided to store some for when there are no fresh ones available.

001My efforts yielded 2 trays of passionfruit pulp to be frozen and stored for later use.

The vine appears to have 2 different types of fruit on it.  One of them is a common purple passionfruit but the other are much larger and are yellow when ripe  and the pulp is a very bright orange and has a somewhat different flavour.  You can see the different skins in the compost bucket in the following photo.

002These will go back in the compost and eventually be added to the garden beds to grow more food.

Made from Scratch

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I have previously written a post about making your own pasta from scratch.  Barely 6 months after I wrote this post I made the decision to eat a gluten-free diet for the sake of my health.  The pasta making attachment has languished at the back of the pantry and I keep promising myself that I will try making my own gluten-free pasta.  Well yesterday was finally the day.

After searching the internet and using some ideas gained through making other gluten dough such as pizza bases, I decided to give it a try.

Here is my recipe:

2 cups gluten-free flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
10g psyllium husk
3 eggs
25ml water
25 ml olive oil

2012-01-31 01Combine the dry ingredients, add the eggs and then gradually add the water and oil.  The mixture will not roll into a ball as it does if using wheat flour but it should be damp enough that you can squeeze it together in your hand.  Mix thoroughly for about 3 minutes.  Cover bowl with a damp teatowel to retain the moisture and work as quickly as possible.

Take a small ball of dough and knead well in your hands, press out into a thick disc and feed through the pasta roller on thickest setting.  The dough will crumble but persevere and do it several times until the dough starts to feed through in sheets.  Continue to fold and feed through until you have a good consistency and then feed it through progressively thinner settings.

003Once you have the thickness that you want you can cut it into lasagne sheets or attempt the next step of making fettucine.004It is certainly more difficult to make than conventional pasta but I am hoping it will be worth the effort.  Both the lasagne sheets and fettucine have been frozen so the final verdict will be when they are cooked.  I am very confident that the lasagne will be successful but I will have to wait and see with the fettucine.

Based on what I have done so far, I would say that this has been a worthwhile exercise and I will tweak the recipe further if required.

Watch this space………..

My Turn

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Today it was time to clean and tidy up my pantry.

It is really not too bad but was definitely time to check for anything lurking in the background.  I wiped out all of the shelves, decanted a few things into the new jars and generally re-arranged it to work a bit better.

BEFORE

002

001The space on the bottom shelf is where the dehydrator normally lives but I was using it when the photo was taken.  The pack in the bottom right-hand corner of the photo is some gluten-free bread mix which was 18 months past its best before date but I made it anyway and it turned out well.  There is a second pack in the box which I might make up next weekend.

I have moved a few things out of the pantry – a large coffee plunger which now lives on the shelf above the oven with the other coffee plunger and the teapot.  The coffee grinder which we never use is going to the op shop along with a plastic container which belongs in the freezer but I never have it in there as it just wastes space and limits how much I can pack in.  Finally, the pile of plastic plates and bowls (meant to be disposable but I keep washing and re-using them) have been moved from the pantry.  I have kept 2 of each in the cupboard for the grandchildren but the rest will be stored in the sideboard for use at BBQ’s or other events.  One day I may decide to offload them altogether but not just yet.

AFTER

005I did not take a photo of the bottom shelf and the floor but suffice to say they look a bit better, too.

Planning Ahead

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On Saturday or Sunday morning I generally make a menu plan of our meals for the coming week.  This based on what is in the fridge, freezer, pantry and garden and is used to create a shopping list for any additional requirements.  I try to incorporate a mix of fish, chicken, red meat and vegetarian meals.

The next couple of weeks are very unpredictable due to family issues and will mean that I am not at home some nights but potentially with very short notice.  So I used a different method today and simply made a list of 20 meals for which we have the ingredients.  We will need some additional fruit and vegetables during that time.

1  Pizza
2  Grilled salmon and vegetables
3  Tumeric chicken and rice
4  Pumpkin soup
5  Chilli con carne and rice
6  Nachos
7  Sausages and vegetables
8  Vegetable pie and salad
9  Hamburger patties and salad
10  Celery soup
11  Beef curry and rice
12  Tuna patties and vegetables
13  Shepherd’s pie and vegetables
14  Scrambled eggs with bacon and avocado
15  Chicken stir-fry and rice
16  Pizza
17  Chilli con carne and rice
18  Pumpkin soup
19  Lasagne and salad
20  Chilli chicken and corn chips

The entire plan is gluten-free.  I make my own gluten-free pizza bases and hamburger patties, buy gluten-free sausages from Aldi, buy gluten free corn chips and lasagne sheets and use gluten-free flour as required.008I intend to work roughly from the top of the list and we had home-made pizzas tonight.  This is how I make them.

Do you plan your meals?  How closely do you stick to a plan?