hopelessly behind

Just a quick drop by, I just havent got time to keep this up like I used to, so the odd post here and there will have to suffice.
Meals are the same as usual, very cheap, and costing around £20-30 a week for 5 people.
Waste - well that has been so minimal, that the flip top bin in the kitchen was emptied this week!! It has been 3 weeks since we last emptied it! (At least 3 or maybe 4 since the bin went out for collection!)
It wasn't smelly and full of flies! The only waste in there was plastic, it wasn't actually completely full, but after 3 weeks sitting there, it did need to go out.
Recycling the polythene with the carrier bags has been the best thing since sliced bread, as the saying goes, but I don't think sliced bread is particularly good, Hmmm!!!
As for the food, it's been very cheap. We have been eating a lot of homemade granola (575g - £1.17, it lasts 4-5 days). Lunches are usually bread and cheese, or chutney or jam! Evning meals have become even cheaper as we now have lots of our homegrown goodies - onions, garlic, potatoes, beans, peas, chard, courgettes, and eggs of course. Although the children are beginning to get fed up with courgette rich bolog. sauce, roasted courgette, courgette cooked in garlic, raw courgette, and courgette omelette!
We also have a demi john of rhubarb and a demi john of courgette wine bubbling away.
I was given some local cherries the other day, so quickly knocked up 3 jars of cherry jame, the kids love it, I must try to get to try it before it's all gone.

We have gained a new allotment, we started digging last sunday morning, and by evening we had planted 15 amaranth plants.

Where does the time go?

I have now been working full time for just over a week, I have managed to keep up the baking and making meals from scratch, but have not found time to post here!
We had a Suma delivery last week, and things will now be even cheaper as I have bulk bought bigger quantities.
I am experimenting with oaty bisuits at the moment, with the oats costing less than £7 for 12.5Kg, they are a good staple.
I have tried oaty biscuits (oats, flour, sugar, butter, baking powder, bicarb, golden syrup) using a recipe from a book, then varied the recipe to try demarara sugar instead of caster, and the latest ones had dem. sugar and 2 tsp ginger - voila! ginger nut biscuits. And the cost for 40 bisuits is only a few pence per biscuit!
I have also been making granola, I havent worked out the cost of this yet, but I know it is quiet reasonable (Oats, cashews, sultanas, d. coconut, flaked almonds, honey, & oil).

Now I am recycling the polythene, the plastic waste has gone right down. I still find the odd plastic item that I cannot recycle, but on the whole very little goes into the bin.
At the moment theres beer bottle tops (I am wondering about putting these inside tins, but they have a plastic coating on the inside!). Plastic tops and foil/plastic seals off the top of tetra packs, (although the last lot I bought were the cheap ones that you just snip). Still the occasional cat food sachet, and a lid off a peanut butter jar.

Cat litter.

What can I do with cat litter, I can see that I have completely overlooked the cat litter in my weekly rubbish.
It occured to me the otehr day when Mrs G asked what the rubbish looked like! Well, it wasn't very much, but it wasn't very pleasant! Dh empties tha cat litter into the top of the bag!!
But what else could I do with it? We use wood litter, but I will not put it in the compost as it can contain nasties. In a biodegradable plastic bin liner is it really bad to send it to land fill?
The garden isn't big enough to dig a hole, do you have cats? What do you do?

Thurs meal

Tonight was spag. bol.

As I only used half a bag of quorn this worked out quiet cheap!

50p pp

So todays cost was £1 pp

Waste What's that??

only fluff!

Everything that has been put in the bin ths week has come back out! And will be used!
So all that is left is some fluff from sweeping the floor!

a note to me

Monday - chilli £2. £1pp for day
Tues - salad and pastries £2 £1pp for day
Weds - soup £1.50 98p pp for day

waste - none this week as far as I know. But I will need to check if anyone else has put anything in the bin.Dh admitted putting a chip bag in there (Hmm, I know, when did he have chips???), so I told him he had to take it out and put it with the polythene!!

Make money and recycle

Do you remember taking the pop bottles back to the shop when you were younger?
How much was it? 10p the last time I remember doing it!
Well now you can make money, well points, on your recycling!!!!
Tesco Brockworth have a new fangled machine that eats plastic bottles, cans and glass, and in return you are awarded 1 tesco green point!!
Ok, that works out at 1p, but that's better than nothing, and IF you use the points in the deals, it works out at 4p! That's much better isn't it?
And the points accumulate until someone puts them on the card!! So if the people before you forget to take their card, or haven't worked out how to do it, then you can collect their points as well!! hey hey!!
We haven't tried it yet, because yes, you guessed it, we forgot our card!! When Ds finished putting our recycling in the machine, the total on the screen to be collected was 80p, hmmm, that could have been £3.20!!
So, we are now stopping our kerbside recycling of cans and bottles in favour of recycling at Tesco! We go there anyway to do the polythene, tetra packs and cardboard, so it will not take an extra trip!
We have never been abroad on holiday before, but I am saving my recycling/tesco points to go to Brittany next year!