£5 voucher from IKEA

Another freebie from IKEA dropped through the post today. It is for IKEA Family members and says that if you sign up to get emails from them at IKEA.co.uk/signmeup then they will send you a £5 voucher. I find IKEA very handy for getting little things to put in the shoebox Christmas gifts so shall certainly be taking advantage of it once it arrives ! I've also got a £5 off a £40 spend for LIDL this week, just in time for September stocking up, but only what is on the list and not too much !!

Getting rid of smells

This lovely sofa originally belonged to my parents. then to us, then to USAShoestring when he had a London flat. It has been sitting in our garage for 2 years and when we were over to see him USAShoestring said that it would be alright if we brought it into the house to use.

So yesterday there was a lot of scrubbing and vacuuming and wiping going on to get it cleaned up. But once we had managed to lift it into the sitting room there was a bit of a musty smell. Bad enough that we left the doors and windows open as it was a warm evening.

I have a list of ways to make nasty smells go away and fresh air is the first one I try. However, in this case I was pretty sure that stronger means would be needed. The next thing on the list is bicarbonate of soda, sprinkling a bit of this in smelly trainers or keeping a pot in the fridge works wonders. With the sofa I would have scattered it all over and left it for a bit before vacuuming it up again. The final weapon against smells is a can of Oust ! which really works well but has its own smell which I'm not that keen on. Anyway, I was pretty sure that the sofa would need Oust !

Lo and behold, this morning the sofa does not smell, all that Summer fresh air worked , so the bicarb and the Oust ! can be kept for another day !

What do you do to get rid of bad smells ?

Food waste when you stockpile !

I think that I have written about the dangers of over-stockpiling before, but yesterday I threw away food which was 4 and 5 years old as I had over-estimated the amount that we would use when I ordered it. I am writing this post mainly as a reminder to myself that it is a good idea to calculate roughly how much you use in a year and no matter how good a bargain the item is do not purchase more than that ! Also be careful to find out just how much you are getting as several of the items which went in the compost yesterday were whole caseloads of stuff that I thought that I was buying a single bag of !

I threw away 4 packets of brown rice from 2011, 5 packets of chickpea flour from 2012, 3 packets of barley from 2012 and 12 packets of bulgur wheat from 2013. All of these had lost their flavour, although I think they would probably have been safe to eat. I also threw away 6 tubs of nutritional yeast which arrived after I thought that I had ordered 1 tub. It turned out that the rest of the family did not like it and I thought that ordering 1, would be 1 tub but it was 1 case !

I still have 23 packets of dried dates from 2012 but these I have kept in the hope that a weekly bake of date scones will eventually see them used up !

Use what you have in the garden

We are just in the middle of digging out the flower beds and starting again with them. We seem to do this every few years as the ground elder takes over. The Romans introduced this salad vegetable into Britain to feed their armies but now it is just a nuisance !

We are determined to put a stop to all this work so some very generous gift cards  are going to be spent tomorrow on weed surprising membrane and mulch to go on top to try and stop the weeds growing so fast. We also thought that we were going to have to buy some new plants but it turned out that we had enough to fill 2 beds already, including this lovely blue geranium which had self-seeded in the middle of the driveway !  We only need 3 plants or so to fill the final bed, so more money to spend on weed suppressant !

We also put all the weeds at the back of the garden near the bonfire to rot down, they don't go into the compost bin so we don't spread them around the garden ! I'm looking forward to being able to have a rest from weeding and do some fun planting instead !

Cheap Wedding Anniversary

It was our 31st wedding anniversary the other day and along with homemade presents and cards we celebrated with a lovely homemade meal in the Dining Room with no garden clutter and candles on the table.

Marks and Spencer advertise their dine in for 2 for 10 pounds but this was dine in for 2 for 5 pounds.

We had steak, chips, tomatoes and onions followed by banana splits with cream and chocolate accompanied by sparkling apple juice. We bought the steak, the bananas, the cream, the apple juice and the sparkling water and it came to 4.97 pounds. Everything else came from the garden ! 

The meal was very quick to prepare and then the dishwasher did the washing up !

Mr Shoestring and I said that we could not have had a better experience in a fancy restaurant where you pay extra for a private dining room. We're quite happy with our own private dining room and were even better pleased with the bill !

Replacing a Door Lock

We moved into this house after my parents moved out. Although they left a whole cupboard full of keys none of them would fit the side door into the garden. For 8 years now we have been going in and out of the french windows in the dining room, including leaving footballs and gardening equipment and dirty shoes in there, on the premise that the key was bound to turn up one day so there was no point calling an expensive locksmith !

Finally, yesterday Mr Shoestring decided that SOMETHING must be done ! In the end he decided that the best thing to do would be to lever the pins out of the hinges on the door and then get me to help him lever the locked part of the door out of its socket.

After a bit of banging and levering with a chisel the door hinge pins were released and so was the door. Mr Shoestring was able to unscrew the old lock and go and buy an exact fit new lock for 23 pounds. I thought that this was rather expensive until he explained to me that calling out a locksmith would have cost 135 pounds and that would be before the cost of a replacement lock or any work to re-fit the door.

We are enchanted by the new door, with a lock ! We keep going in and out of it and exclaiming how marvellous it is. I have cleared out of the dining room all the gardening stuff ! We are delighted to have been able to do this big job for so little and I know think that Mr Shoestring is a genius !!

Homemade Curry Powder

After watching 'Eat well for Less' on Monday which featured a family with someone who needed to eat a special diet I realised that perhaps we are in a bit of a rut with regards to our menu. It needs to be very cheap after our lovely holiday earlier in the month and that means lots of legumes rather than lots of meat. Master Shoestring is growing a lot and would much rather eat meat ! He and Mr Shoestring did not enjoy the homemade veggie burgers last week so I remembered that the same ingredients could be used to make a curry which previously had gone down very well.

When I went to make it I discovered that I was nearly out of homemade curry powder, homemade so as to avoid salt ! But it was easy to make some more.

4 and a half teaspoons of coriander, 2 tsps turmeric, 1 and a half teaspoons of cumin seeds, 1/2 tsp black peppercorns, 1/2 tsp chilli flakes, 1/2 tsp cardamom , 1cm cinnamon stick, 1/4 tsp cloves, 1/4 tsp ginger

A quick grind in the mortar and pestle and it was all done. The curry went into the slow cooker and Master Shoestring cleared his plate 8 hours later ! It's great being able to make things for yourself and not have to go to the shops !