Making Good Use

Happy New Year

It's nearly a whole, brand-new, shiny new year.  I love waking up on January 1st, the thought of a blank new year to make a mark on is very alluring (plus, the festering season is then over- yay!!)  2011 had some rather serious and unpleasant low points, several of which are not my story to tell but have had a knock-on affect on me nonetheless. 

My personal bete-noir of 2011 was ye olde gall bladder problem.  I did seriously think I was dying the night it all flared up and I was home alone which made it doubly frightening.  (I felt so ill I would have phoned for an ambulance but my hair needed washing and I couldn't face being taken to hospital with a greasy barnet - God, that sounds really vain but it's true!!)  However, as P pointed out recently, it may have been a truly scary and painful 12 hours or so but out of that came a much healthier way of eating, significant weight loss and I have felt generally much much better in myself since I drastically cut down on my saturated fat intake.

My 'micro business' (I love that phrase) selling on eBay has done really well this year, thanks mainly to an excellent and extended car boot season and my being prepared to take a few risks with speculating to accumulate.  I managed to keep up my thrifting spreadsheet during the whole of 2011 so I'll be interested to work out how much I've spent, how much profit I've made and how much I've saved with things I bought second-hand for myself this year.  I think I'll start a new spreadsheet for 2012 too.

I feel really positive about 2012 and have a good feeling that many of the nagging and persistent problems that have dogged P and I this past year will finally be sorted.  We're considering some exciting plans and ideas that may or may not come to fruition but whatever happens I just feel it in my bones that 2012 will be a lot better than 2011.

Thank you so much to everyone who stops by, reads or comments on the blog - it's so nice to feel part of such a lovely community. I wish all of you the most wonderful 2012 and hope all your dreams come true this year.

I'll leave you with a link to Abba singing Happy New Year (check out the gorgeous corner sofa and floor lamp in the video - who says the 1970s were the decade that fashion forgot!)

A Few Handmade and Thrifted Pressies

For me, this Christmas was all about giving as many handmade and thrifted pressies as possible.  Mum received, among other things,

Two quilted placemats - as requested.  They're looking a bit washed-out in this photo but the colours are much stronger in reality.

Two fabric coasters, one side was made from an off-cut of vintage linen with an unused iron-on embroidery pattern on it, and the other side with the very last bits of some gorgeous Sanderson fabric I bought last summer at the Vintage and Handmade Textile Fair in Chipping Sodbury.

Lily got another pure wool blankie.  Part of a charity shop wool blanket (which I rather liked and would have used as is as a throw but it had a large cigarette burn in the middle!)   With a cat-shaped cut out on one corner made from an embroidered linen tablecloth found at a jumble sale in Basildon.  The tablecloth must have been beautiful in its day but had an awful lot of holes and tears in it so cutting it up was the only sensible option.

And on a thrifted note I found this beautiful handknitted patchwork blanket for Mum at the local 'Coffee and Jumble' a few weeks ago.  Somebody put in an awful lot of work on this blanket and the only thing wrong with it is that a few of the seams needed re-sewing.  It's gracing Mum's bed beautifully at the moment. 

Handmade-wise I also gave Mum four handknitted dishcloths (also requested) and an infinity scarf the same as this one.  There were some 'boughten' (nice bit of Bristol-ese there) presents too - mainly a new, easy-to-use, large-button, volume-adjustable mobile phone.

Homemade and Fat Free Festive Treats

My first low-fat Christmas has been slightly bothering me for a while now - I think it's been all the adverts on telly for bloomin' Christmas cheeses that have been particularly tormenting me (what I wouldn't give to get my chops around some white stilton with ginger is nobody's business!!) 

I knew I'd be fine with the Christmas dinner itself - though sans 'Pigs in Blankets' obv!! - as there's really no fat to speak of in roast chicken with a large selection of veggies, and cranberry and bread sauces on the side.  Even Christmas Pud tends to be pretty low fat but the thought of no brandy butter or clotted cream on top was making me feel ever-s0-slightly sorry for myself.  As it turned out, I thoroughly enjoyed my pud with low-fat custard on it.  To be especially kind, everyone else did without the brandy butter as they didn't want to torment me with it - I may have been tempted to have a sniff but I wouldn't have eaten it whatever.

To make up for my somewhat limited Christmas menu, my sister, who is becoming a seriously good baker / confectioner these days, gave me a couple of tres tasty and extremely thoughtful homemade Christmas foodie treats.

Very low fat Carrot Cake with a frosting made from extra light Philapdelphia.  Yup, it was as darned tasty as it looks.

And a huge jar full of homemade Peppermints - seriously, seriously moreish.  I have eaten a disgustingly large amount of these already but, after all, it is Christmas.

West Country Thrifting

I'm down in Bristol at the moment, to spend Christmas and New Year with my family.  Yesterday, Mum and I had to go and do some final Christmas food shopping and thought we might as well check out the local charity shops while we were at it.  It was just as well that we decided to walk just that leetle bit further down the road and check out the Salvation Army shop too as that was where I got all my finds from.

A rather lovely Figgio of Norway plate.  It was £3.00 but I thought it was too nice to leave behind, even at that price.

Two large 1970s floral sheets - £2.50 the pair.  I'm not sure whether these'll end up on eBay or whether I'll keep hold of them and use the material for something - I'm thinking the print would make a rather nice summer skirt next year.

A tweed scarf - 50p.  Lovely bit of material and a really nice colours too.

Vintage M&S gents silky dressing gown - at the rather odd price point of £2.80.  It's in lovely nick and will be one for eBay in the spring.

Mum also found a top for my sister in the Sally Army and a gorgeous red M&S dressing gown for herself in the BHF shop.  We were well loaded down with all our finds, and that was before we hit Sainsbury's for the food!! 

Super Quick Sweet Potato and Sweetcorn Soup

I first came across this recipe for Sweet Potato Soup and Corn Soup on the BBC Food website.  It's a really quick and simple recipe - though I don't quite know why the ingredients are given to serve one.  Aside from having to at least triple the ingredients (which works well with the 150g tins of sweetcorn I tend to use) this soup is so quick, easy and tasty to make.  It was just the thing for lunch ona really cold, wet and miserable Monday.  I made it extra thick today by only adding 500g of chicken stock and 150g of white wine.  I also omit the double cream which the original recipe uses.   Making it with fresh thyme is definitely the best but at this time of year the thyme in our garden is totally dead, dried thyme works pretty well too.

My take on the recipe is as follows:

1 tbsp olive oil

2 large sweet potatoes - peeled and cubed

150g tin of sweetcorn

1 or 2 cloves of garlic - crushed

2 sprigs of fresh thyme - or a teaspoon of dried

150ml of white wine

600ml chicken or vegetable stock

Heat the olive oil in a pan, gently saute the sweet potato and sweetcorn for 5 - 6 minutes, add the garlic and fresh thyme.  Add the wine and stock and cook until everything is tender.  Blitz with a hand blender and enjoy!  Quick to make, easy ingredients, and always super tasty.

Now, That Really Cheered Me Up

I got a lovely little parcel in the post yesterday - all the way from Australia (and it only took 5 days to get here, which is amazing in itself considering all the Christmas post that's around at the moment.)   The parcel was sent by Briget who won the Cup Cake Teacosy Giveaway I had on the blog a while ago. 

It was beautifully wrapped with gold tissue paper and a tartan ribbon but, unfortunately, I'd ripped into the wrapping before I even thought of taking a photo.  Inside was a really nice bookmark  - which is already being used and is a great improvement on the flyleaf from an old book that I had been using, a set of swap cards, a handmade button card and a koala bear teabag saucer - which did sterling use this morning as somewhere to balance my sticky marmalade coated knife whilst I decided if I wanted another slice or two of toast. 

But, best of all, was this really sweet little Russian doll keyring.  Absolutely ideal for me, especially as the other little wooden Russian doll keyring I had broke a few months ago.  Thank you so much for the parcel, Briget, it was a brilliant surprise and it really cheered up a miserable pre-Christmas Saturday. 

Small Mercies

Whilst I loathe this dank, dark time of year with a total passion, and I feel like I am being slowly suffocated in the endless, endless hours of darkness, at least there are some small mercies to be grateful for.

Small mercy 1.  I live in the driest county in England - Essex - where, apparently, the rainfall is less even than Jerusalem and Beirut.  I gather from my poor family in Bristol that it has rained, sleeted, snowed etc etc fairly relentlessly there for days on end - with yesterday being so bad it was barely daylight all day.  Thankfully, here in Essex we had a cold but bright and sunny day.

Small mercy 2. The mahoosive Post Office queue on Tuesday - it was out the door and halfway down the precinct when I joined it - was much more manageable this morning.  I was very gratful for that small mercy I can tell you.  And on that note, I should add small mercy 2a - at least I'm still selling items on eBay and Amazon at a steady pace.

Small mercy 3. It's only six more days until we get to the shortest day.  Hoo-bloody-rah.  Even if we won't see any perceptible difference in the daylight for weeks yet, at least we know that technically the worst of the dark will be behind us.

Small mercy 4.  The winter flowering jasmine is beginning to blossom - those teeny tiny little yellow flowers are such a cheerful sight. 

I do realise that I'm lucky to not have anything really major to worry about - just this miserable time of year - so maybe that should be small (or even very large) mercy number 5. 

Luggage Label Gift Tags

I was absolutely certain that they'd have some nice gift tags for sale at yesterday's Cat's Protection League Christmas Fair, wrong - they had a lovely selection of Christmas cards at excellent prices - but not a single gift tag to be found.  So when I got home I had to put my 'inventiveness hat' on and see what I already had that I could make gift tags from.

Cue a pile of brown card luggage labels, some stick-on red wooden hearts (and ladybirds), all of which have been accumulated from boot sales over the past year or so, and a session with my lovely fountain pen, and I've got me some gift tags.

I don't normally bother with gift labels but this year some of the presents are handmade and some are thrifted so I wanted to warn each receipient which is what before they open their pressies!!

A couple of nicely festive green luggage labels were also found, gussied up with some Christmassy do-dahs that were knocking around, and pressed into service as Plum Vodka gift tags.

Thrifted Cookware

Maureen kindly commented on my last post, saying how much she liked my enamel dish.  Yeah, I thought, I found that at a jumble sale when I lived in Nottingham (15 / 16 years ago now.)  Then I got to thinking that, actually, pretty much all my cookware is from jumble sales or boot sales,

Four enamel baking dishes - three from the jumble in Nottingham and one other from goodness knows where, possibly my aunt when she moved into a care home (I've certainly got her metal colander which is used pretty much every day, plus another green and cream enamel one which, again came from a jumble in Nottingham.)

A large black, white and grey speckled enamel baking tray which came from a jumble sale approx. 20 years ago at the church hall in Warmley near Bristol.  I love this tray, there's something rather French about the speckled enamel and it is big enough to roast all sorts of things in the oven on it.  Next to it is a round enamel pie dish in cream with green edging which I paid 5p for at a car boot sale two or three years ago.  It has also proved to be incredibly versatile for baking smaller amounts on in the oven - though I've never actually used it to bake a pie as I'm not very keen on pastry.

Three smallish Pyrex dishes - all found since I've lived in Wickford.  These get used A LOT to cook things in and to serve things from at the table.  One or other of them is often used as a salad bowl or a vegetable dish when we're having our evening meal.

An enormous Pyrex dish which I paid 50p for a year or so ago.  I hesitated about buying it as a) I had to cart it home in a bag and it was tres heavy, and b) I thought it might be too large for us but, no, I use it quite regularly.

And the ubiquitous rose-print Pyrex which I was given many years ago by a friend who was clearing out her parent's house.  I've used this dish almost as many times as I've had hot dinners since!!

And that's just the cookware, I'm pretty sure all my crockery is thrifted too - with maybe the odd mug as an exception - as is most of my cutlery, except the odd piece of gorgeous Habitat cutlery that I bought nearly 30 years ago and which I still love just as much now as I did then.  Wish I'd been able to afford to buy a whole canteen of it all those years ago, it's fabulous. 

Very occasionally I have to buy something for the kitchen new in a shop (I'm particularly good at dropping Pyrex measuring jugs on our stone-tiled kitchen floor - they inevitably smash with a sound akin to a small nuclear explosion) and the price of cookware retail always give me an attack of the vapours - thank goodness I like thrifting.

Using Up the Leftovers

Tonight's evening meal was a tasty concoction made from using up the leftovers from the previous two evenings.

The blanched outer leaves of a cabbage (the inner we had with a lot of other veggies and some roast chicken yesterday evening - and the veggies left from that were souped up for lunch today) stuffed with what was left from Monday evening's quorn spaghetti bolognaise - with a bit of plain rice added to make it go a bit further.

Topped off with a plain white sauce - sadly, made from a packet mix these days as it's much lower in saturated fat than if I made it from scratch - baked for 30 minutes in the oven with the merest sprinkling of some grated parmesan on the top halfway through cooking to give it a teensy bit of a cheese taste.  It was jolly delicious and warming - just the ticket for a cold, windy evening.