Making Good Use

It's Not What You Know ....

In the past six months since I've stopped going to the hairdressers and have been having my hair cut by the local mobile hairdresser (recommended to me by the ever-lovely next-door neighbours), I calculate I've saved somewhere in the region of £100.  As it only costs £5.00 for a cut now as opposed to £25.00 per visit to the hairdressers I've not only saved a wad of cash, I've also been tempted to get my hair cut much more frequently.  P also gets his hair shorn at the same time and he pays £4.00 instead of the £10.00 per shearing he was paying at the hairdressers, so he must have saved approx. £40.00 too.  Plus we don't have to bother going down to the high street, plus I don't end up with a frightening hair-do which I then have to walk around with for a day or two.  Do you know what I mean?  Having a wash, cut and blow-dry always ensures you walk out of the hairdressers looking very 'done' in the hair dept.  Which is just not me at all.

Anyhoo, you may remember that some joker came a couple of weeks ago and quoted £500 to get the garden into shape!!!!  Since then I've been chopping, slashing and ripping-out like a dervish and although things look much better, there is a limit to what I can achieve with just a pair of Asda value secateurs and a two-step step ladder.  Now it just so happens that the very nice mobile hairdresser's son-in-law does a bit of gardening on the side.  He's just been round to give a quote and he's reckoning on 4 hours or so @ £10.00 per hour to rid the poor old shed of most of the engulfing ivy, and to do some other bits of heavy pruning and weeding too.  Now that's more the price I was expecting to pay.  He's coming back tomorrow afternoon to do the work.

Which, hopefully, means the shed may at long last reappear from beneath the ivy coat it has been wearing for the last few years.

Having slated Oxfam charity shops for their exceedingly high prices more than once on this blog, I think I'm going to have to revise my opinion of them.  Last week I found the wonderful eiderdown for £2.99 in the Oxfam in Billericay.  Today in my local Oxfam shop I found two tubs of brand-new unopened 'Moon Sand' for DN - 99p each (£4.00 each on Amazon) and two brand-new pairs of Next boxer shorts - Wallace and Gromit ones - also 99p each (these types of character boxers seem to sell for approx. £11.00 for a pack of two), also for DN.  Whilst I was in there I gave their rack of cards a good perusal and ended up with two very suitable Easter cards - one was 99p and one 49p.  With cards being SOOOOOO expensive I was really pleased to not only find nice cards at a good price but also ones where the profit goes to a good cause.

Home Thoughts from the Top of the Garden

Since the garden bench was moved a couple of weeks ago, I've started sitting up at the top of the garden with my mid-morning cup of coffee.  I've gained a whole new perspective of looking at the house.  From this position it reminds me of a child's drawing of a house - lots of chimneys and a steeply-sloping roof.  And looking at it from this angle the whole place looks minute.  Now although it's by no means a large house it is definitely a lot bigger than it looks from 12 yds or so away.  Also noticeable from the garden bench is just how shot-away the roof tiles are (I imagine that'll be mega-bucks to replace those), and how 'tired and emotional' the paintwork is!!  Luckily for us we only rent the place, and although we do really like living here I'm not sure we'd ever want to buy it as it is just a tad too small and would need an awful lot of money spending on it in the fairly near future (the central heating system is out of the Ark, and the downstairs windows at the back are totally rotten and need urgent replacing.)

However, whilst we wait for the housing market to hit rock bottom before we buy, this is a very nice place indeed to call home.

The tuna / pepper/ sweetcorn / rice salad concoction I made for the evening meal yesterday worked out very well and was almost as tasty as Waitrose' Wild Rice Salad - which costs £1.99 for a tiny tub.  I reckon I managed to make at least twice the quantity for somewhere in the region of 75p.

Using Up a Bit More

Thanks for your suggestions yesterday about what to do with half a bowl of cold rice.  Heather's idea of making a rice salad sounded good, especially as it meant I could also use up the half bowl of sweetcorn left over from last night's Sweet Potato and Sweetcorn Soup, the pepper that has been lurking in the back of the fridge for over a week, and a small tin of tuna in sundried tomato and basil that has been sitting on the shelf for well over a year.  All mixed together with the rice that should make a nice tasty salad to go with green salad, some salad potatoes and, possibly, some warm breaded camembert.

So that's a few bits and bobs saved from landfill.  Sadly, the cucumber which I could have sworn was still good at the weekend had deteriorated to green mush by today so that had to be chucked out, as did one egg which was past it's use-by date.  I'm a bit dubious about using eggs much over date although I did use up two of them yesterday when they were only one day out of date.

The Sweet Potato and Sweetcorn Soup which we had for our evening meal yesterday was very easy to make and tasty too.  It also used up three small sweet potatoes which had been lurking about for a while.  It's a James Martin recipe and I found it on the BBC Food website. I find BBC Food a very useful place to have a look at in order to use up odd bits and bobs of food as you can type in an ingredient - for example, sweet potatoes - and it gives a whole list of recipes that use that ingredient.   It's a very handy tool in order to avoid food waste as much as possible.