narrating kayoz

October is No-Spend Month (First Status report)

We are having a no-spend month this month. We are sort of mixing up Buy Nothing New month with the Simply Savings $21 challenge (spend $21 on food for a week - only we are doing it for 4 weeks), and coincidentally doing it at the same time as Erica's no-spend month October.

We actually started just before the end of September, aligning it with our last pay day, which was also the day I paid last month's credit card bills - and there, combined with two car regos due this month - is our inspiration! We paid off the credit cards (we usually put everything on credit card and pay it off at the end of the month), but there wasn't much money left in the bank!

"Time for a no-spend month," I said.

So how are we going so far?

Well, not too bad, but not fabulously. We had about $100 in cash between us, so we decided to see if we could make that last all month for our food bills.The $21 challenge is theorically for a family of 4, so that works out about right.

We'd still have to pay for petrol, bills, the mortgage etc, but we're doing 'buy nothing new' anyway (and nothing second-hand either), and then just trying to eat out of what's already in the house as much as we could.

We had to buy toilet paper and cat food the first week, which in retrospect shouldn't really have come out of the cash, but then again, we really don't have a lot of other money to spare this month!

So what are we eating?

From the garden: We have lots of greens growing (3 different kinds of silverbeet, a few pick-and-come again lettuces, and beetroot leaves), though some of them are starting to go to seed, plus Spring onions and lots of herbs, and of course plenty of eggs.

I picked and ate my first (ever) baby beet yesterday, and there are lots more to come, but they mostly have a ways to go. Ditto the leaks and garlic. We have a few snap peas, but the kids eat the pods as soon as they are half way ready. Elli, mostly.

Grains: We've been eating a lot of rice, but unfortunately I can see it running out within the next 1-2 weeks at best. However, we do still have a fair bit of spaghetti and a bag of quinoa. We also have a fair bit of spelt flour and bakers flour left, so I see plenty of muffins and other snacks being baked in the next few weeks. We have still been buying bread, however I may make some too. I think I have only about three 5g sachets of yeast, but buying more of that will be cheaper than the bread.

Ready-meals & meat: we've already eaten just about all the meals we had frozen, though we may still have a container of chilli and one of soup I think. Ditto frozen meat, but we do still have about 4 chicken carcasses and some slightly manky carrots and celery I will be turning into chicken noodle soup this week.

Other protein: we still have quite a lot of dried beans and lentils. I made a lot of hommus and froze some of it a few days ago, plus some 'savory chickpeas' (pressure cooked for 40 minutes with a bay leaf, garlic, half a lemon and some salt - came out really yum!), but of course only Eliane & I really liked them, though Mikaela did eat some. And of course there are eggs.

Tomorrow night we'll be having dahl and rice for dinner, but since NONE of my kids will eat the dahl, there'll need to be a lot of rice and yoghurt.

Yoghurt: I make this so we have still been eating plenty, but whereas usually I used cartons of milk plus some milk powder, I have switched back to using all milk powder, since I had an un-opened packet in the cupboard. I've been using the powder to stretch our drinking milk budget too.

What we are spending (grocery) money on:

Is mostly milk, bread, fruit and some vegetables. Oh, and we did buy a 1kg block of cheese. Usually we spend at least $50/week on milk & bread (we go through a lot of milk, and we won't buy the cheap dairy-bankrupting brands), and easily spend $100/week on fruit and veg. Maybe more.

We've also bought tortillas, sugar (the kefir can't live without sugar...), a pack of 'for quick sale' organic mince, and a few other items I've forgetten no doubt.

So the fact that we still have some of our $100 left a week & a half in is an achievement I reckon. We have, however, been using up the powdered milk at a great rate. It won't last another week.

It's not really the greatest time to be doing the 21 dollar challenge for us, with Spring just underway, so not all that much in the garden or left in the larder, plus school holidays began two days after we started. Chris took the kids to Floriade last week and got a lot of whinging about the 'torture' of not being able to buy an ice cream!

But with two car regos to pay this month (that is, nearly $2000 worth) plus a $1000 gas bill that arrived the 2nd day of the challenge, we really don't have any choice.

We did also get around a $500 credit on the electricity bill from our solar panels, but we vowed any money we made there would go straight to paying off the money we took off the mortgage to pay for them in the first place.

What we should be doing and are not:

Is a proper audit of what we do have in our pantry, fridge and freezer, and menu planning. So far we've just been doing what we normally do, figuring out each meal's menu as close as possible to the time it needs to be served. Not so good for being organised and using up food we have.

So that's my goal for this week: a proper food audit, and at least a casual menu plan.

My challenge for the week is having 3 other kids at my house on Friday, for potentially the whole day, PLUS they're all sleeping over.

Snacks I can do okay (muffins, oat slice, and oh yes, I bought some more popping corn too, and fruit), lunch is pretty easy if I buy or make bread, but can I do a dinner meal they will all eat some of, without spending?

We'll see.

Maybe that will be the chicken noodle soup night.

And I think I have enough rhubarb in the garden to make a pie for our Friday night dessert night, though that pretty much requires ice cream, or at the very least cream... Maybe sweetened yoghurt?

(Totally off-topic, but I posted an article I've been working on for a few weeks over at Sustainable Suburbia today, on building sustainable & resilient local communities.)

Rioting for the Future

About a year ago I first read about Sharon Astyk's Riot for Austerity and posted about it on Sustainable Suburbia. I was inspired and wanted to join in, but we were prepping for our overseas trip, and as usual I already felt I had taken too much on, so I let it slide.

But just now I read an article in Grass Root's magazine from Asphyxia, about her version of the Riot (using Australian figures, yay), and calling for readers to join in.

Can we do it? The idea is to cut down to 10% of the average use of resources in 7 areas. In the June/July issue of Grass Roots this year Asphyxia has covered how she went about doing that in the area of food (not cutting down on eating, as such, but on the resources involved in getting the food).

Future issues are going to have articles on the next 6 areas, plus there's support through the Grass Roots FB page.

Since food has been my particular focus this year - eating more local, cooking more from scratch etc (and on that subject, can I just say I've just discovered the wonders of pressure cooking and I am SOLD), it seems fated.

I always feel like I'm trying to do too much, maybe something to do with having three kids, a part-time job, running several websites and trying to write a book (I haven't blogged about it here, but that is my Big project at the moment. Around the subject of urban homesteading, but that's all I'm going to say at the moment), and maybe sell a few articles along the way... but we are all about trying to live more sustainably anyway, and somehow the idea of putting some figures around it - even if we make it a 'quiet riot' and try to cut down to say, 50% in some areas - makes things feel more doable - or at least, easier to know what we are doing and what we need to still work on.

So, I'm going to talk to my family about it. We've just switched from cheap milk to bloody expensive but far more ethical (and local) milk. We've been getting seasonal organic fruit & vegies delivered most weeks (I love this because it doesn't give me the chance to not buy vegies I don't usually cook with - I just get them and have to figure out how to use them).

Of course, all this is costing more. The dairy alone is costing us around $30 extra per week (my kids go through a LOT of milk). I read Frugavore earlier this year and have been trying to put some of her advice into practice, like buying organic chicken carcasses and beef bones to make stock with, and cooking more with legumes, like lentils and beans, using dried (the pressure cooker is going to come in handy there) rather than canned beans and chick peas.

But. Cost is still an issue. And, we want to go o/s again (this time to live for maybe half a year) in 2014, before Liam starts highschool, so... I'm hoping I can parlé that into motivation to help us cut down on other resource use. Because mostly, cutting down should cots less, not more.

Right now though, I'm off to check out the Grass Roots FB page and see who's there.

It's all over (or, Gingerbread house - the Before and the After)

Getting back on track: writing, blogging and the Fab Fatties Challenge #2

I have been back at work for nearly a year now (I started back at the beginning of July).

In that time I have written almost nothing, submitted absolutely nothing (despite having several pieces either ready and waiting or just about ready to submit), have blogged very little, have gained about five kilos, have had one miscarriage and have not (since then) gotten pregnant.

One of the reasons I haven't been blogging much is that people at work might read it (being in a web team is quite different that way, as it turns out, to being in a communications team). Not that I mind if they do, exactly, it's just that there are things one usually doesn't talk about at work - trying to get pregnant, for instance - that one might blog about ad infinitum.

So here's my little disclaimer* for work folk:
Feel free to read. Feel free to comment. Don't talk to me (or preferably anyone else) about it at work. At least, not if it's something you think I wouldn't talk about at work. Like trying to get pregnant - not always something that's good for one's career, though it's not politically correct to say so. But I learned that the hard way last time.

Also - some notes for anyone new to the blog, eg, someone from work:

• it took me 17 cycles and one miscarriage to conceive Mikaela.
• I only have one ovary.
• my mum started going through menopause before she hit 40.
• my sister took four years to produce her beautiful son
• I am 37, Chris is nearly 41...

So just because I'm trying to get pregnant, doesn't mean I'm going on maternity leave any time in the next year. Or ever. Just so we're clear.

Now, back to the point of this post, which is not that it's seven months since my miscarriage and I'm not pregnant, despite being convinced that May was the month it would happen. Nor about the lack of blogging lately.

No, it is about the fact that I've put on about five kilos since I started back at work.

There are a few reasons for this - too much junk food at work and not enough exercise being high on the list - but the main one is that I lost my focus.

I got back down to my goal weight of 63kg early last year.** I had a health check within a month of starting work that determined that my healthiest weight range is something like 62-66kg. All good. And then I started trying to get pregnant again. And then I got pregnant again. And then I had a miscarriage. And somewhere in there I told myself I could eat whatever I liked (ie lots and lots of chocolate) because obviously I deserved it.

Yes, I have issues around food and deserving and comfort and anger and self image and shame and probably all sorts of other things. As I'm sure have blogged before,*** I took a long time to acknowledge any of this, let alone to acknowledge that I was overweight, still less that I cared. I was a feminist. And we feminists don't care what we look like, do we? Right...

Actually it was two things that snapped me out of it. It was realising (shortly after Liam was born), that I was unhealthily overweight (and I was, trust me on this, I'm not talking putting on five kilos here), and also that that was not okay now that I was a mother, and realising that however much I pretended not to notice or care, other people just had to look at me to know I was unhealthily overweight. I was fooling no-one.

Despite all this, now that I am back to an ordinary sort of weight I have largely gone back to pretending that none of that happened. That I don't have any food/weight issues. That I am, in short, too cool to care.

Well, I'm not. And that is why I am now taking back my focus and my control. It may take me another year to get pregnant (although we've given ourselves a deadline of this December, so lets hope not), or it may never happen. So to say even half consciously to myself (as I have, if I'm honest, been doing) that I can wait till after the next baby's been born to get back on track is ridiculous. It is self-delusion.

Food tracking, I've discovered, is my best defence against over-eating. So food tracking is what I will do. And to jump start myself, I am signing up for the Fab Fatties Challenge #2 - there are about five hours left to sign up, but if you do, make sure you tell them I sent you so I get me some 25 points in the challenge!****

The challenge goes for two weeks from today (May 29) and involves the following - all of which I am going to try to do every day (except the one about not drinking 'soda pop' since I don't do that anyway).

• Eat 5 servings of fruits and vegetables daily- 5 points
• Drink 8 glasses of water a day- 8 points
• Exercise- 1 point per minute
• Do a random good deed- 5 points
• Stop drinking soda pop for a day- 1 point
• Actually read someone else’s blog post and leave a comment- 1 point
• Answer [their] Fab Fatties random bonus questions about [them]- 5 points
              -Bonus questions will be posted daily on [their] blog.
• Recommend 2 fabulous friends from twitter and tell us why we should follow them- 2 points
• Eat a healthy breakfast-1 point
• Lose weight- 1 point per pound
• Keep a food journal for the day- 5 points per day
• Take a walk during you lunch break- 5 points
• Have a friend join this challenge- 25 points per friend
              -make sure your friend tells us you recruited them!

_________
*I've probably said this before, I'm just a little paranoid and still haven't come to terms with this weird collision of offline-personal, work, and online lives that facebook has created.

**Back down not from all the weight I gained during pregnancy - though there was some of that - but from all the weight I gained while trying and failing to become pregnant beforehand.

***But it was a loong time ago, before categories, let alone tagging, when I still did each entry by hand in dreamweaver, and I can't find it.

****And thanks to Food Food Body Body which is where I discovered the challenge.

Decadence, thy name is Kahlua

Back when I was 18 and living in a group house with a couple of (male) friends, the absolute height of decadence was a Saturday night at home, without the housemates but with my best friend Susan, swooning over Booker, eating chocolate (preferably dark and peppermint), and drinking very small glasses of Kahlua.

To this day the taste of straight Kahlua - the delightful sensation of it just slightly burning my mouth, my throat - spells decadence to me.

I don't drink it much because, well, I don't drink much alcohol in general, and besides it's expensive and I am a penny pincher. So one bottle will last me a year or more. But when I do partake a little, it takes me straight back to that feeling of slightly forbidden luxury. Delicious.

Liam's experiment

Liam's been asking me if he could do an experiment. This is his 'recipe':

4 cornflakes
1 tsp breadcrumbs
2 tbsp rolled oats
water

Instructions: put it all in the blender and blend.

I put him off for a couple of weeks, cause he always asked at bad times (like when we were about to have dinner). But finally on Sunday I let him do it.

He ended up with about 2 tbsp of cornflakes because that was the end of the packet, but the rest he did as written. After he'd given it a good blend, added some more water and blended again, I could see him wondering what to do next - it was pretty disappointing really, as experiments go. Over very quickly, and nothing happened except that it got all mushed.

So I asked him "What do you want to do with it? Are you going to eat it, or feed it to the chickens or Lochie, or do you want to cook it maybe?" He said he wanted to cook it, and, after some consideration, decided to do so in a saucepan.

As he was stirring it and it was becoming more solid, we talked about how it was a bit like porridge really, so he decided to eat it with some milk and (at my suggestion) some of the apricot and apple sauce I'd just made. He only took half - thought he'd save the rest of Kaely (it went to the chooks, in fact) - but he ate it all and said it was yum. It wasn't bad actually, with the apricot sauce.

Making apricot jam plus bonus apricot & apple sauce recipe

Yesterday we went to a friend's house and brought back three large bags of apricots. I've never made jam of any sort before, and it turned out to be pretty easy. Liam was keen to get started quickly, so we made a batch yesterday afternoon.

Another friend told me that the secret to apricot jam is to use equal parts apricots and sugar (by weight). She also told me to google it, which I did and which told me to add about 1/2 cup of water, some lemon juice (in fact I added a whole half lemon and the juice of the other half) and a few apricot kernals. Liam had fun bashing the stone with a hammer to get those out.

I think it's actually a bit sweet, so I think I'll try it with a a little less sugar for the next batch - I might even follow one of the many many recipes that came up when I googled 'simple apricot jam'. But it was still pretty cool to be putting away 6 jars of jam last night, plus a 7th half jar into the fridge. Liam thinks it's delicious!

Today, for variation, I made apricot sauce. Another friend mentioned using mint and lemon and a little sugar, so I made up my own recipe using those, plus apple. It was:

About 700g halved apricots
About 400g chopped apples (picked from another friend's tree)
About 200g sugar (could use less)
1 small lemon, peeled (from our garden)
About 1/3 cup water (ie about 80-100ml - I didn't actually measure it)
Some mint (from my mum's garden) - about 1 tbs chopped maybe? I didn't measure the mint either, and I didn't chop the leaves up, but it would have been better chopped.
2 apricot kernals

Basically combine, bring to the boil, and boil or simmer until soft.
Then blend it up (I used a stick blender directly in the saucepan, but you could transfer to a blender. Obviously if you want to bottle it you'd then need to reboil it for sterility.

I didn't make that much, cause I wanted to try out the recipe and see how it went, so I couldn't be bothered bottling it. I've put half in the fridge which I expect we'll use in a couple of days (on ice cream, for instance), and the other half in the freezer. I don't know that much about preserving stuff - like whether that would be enough sugar to preserve it, or whether you don't in fact need much sugar as long as you do the whole boiling the jars, filling and sealing while hot thing.

My Dad told me that his gran used to melt wax and use it to fill about 1/2 cm in the top of the jar to seal it properly. I think I'm going to try that with the next batch. I wonder if it needs to be bees wax? If regular parafin wax would be poisoning?

Anyway, it worked out to be really yummy. The mint flavour is definitely a nice touch.

 

One blissful day, or, Meeting Trish, Eating Oysters and Getting a Fabulous Massage. Mmm...

Yesterday was a day worth repeating.

First there was the morning. Then there was the afternoon. And then there was the late afternoon. Mmm.

But perhaps I should begin at the beginning. For Mother's Day this year I got a gift voucher. It was for a massage, a special kind of massage, from my husband. He is a qualified massage therapist, but this is not the sort of massage he would give anyone else. I leave the details to your imagination.

But the trick was finding the time and space - kid free time and space - to make the most of such a gift voucher.

Actually, that's not the beginning. The beginning was more than two years ago when Trish first said, "Let's get coffee together." At the time she was working and I was working. On my non-work days I had Liam. On my work days I didn't have a car. Also I was heavily pregnant. And then she got sick. Long story short - we never managed to get together before Mikaela was born.

Roll forward two years to Trish emailing last week to point out that with neither one of us working now (not for money anyway) we had no excuse. So yesterday morning we had coffee. We got a lovely sunny table at Cafe Fontaine on the top level of the Canberra Centre, and for two hours we talked and drank coffee and ate yummy blueberry pancakes. And I'm here to tell you that in person Trish was just as lovely and interesting as she is on her blog.

We talked about the way people can seem different in person to the way they do on paper - pen-friends, or job interviewees, for instance. And yet somehow I never made the connection to the two of us, meeting for the first time in person, after a few years now of reading and commenting on each other's blogs. Afterwards I thought about it - was she different in person? I decided that one meeting was perhaps not enough to go on, but if I had to make a call I'd have to say not particularly. Luckily we decided to get together again in August, so I will pay more attention then!

While I was having this lovely morning with Trish, Liam was in school and Kaely was at my mother's house. Liam finishes school at 12:30 on Fridays, but my child-free day didn't end then. No, my mother picked Liam up and took him home with her, while I picked up Chris for a romantic lunch date. This was planned as a sort of last hurrah before I go back to work next week, as well as a nice lead-in to using my gift voucher later in the day. But it also worked out to be a celebration of me finally posting off my bound masters project the day before.

We went to Delissio in Curtin. Mmm, yum.

We started with a dozen piping hot Oysters Kilpatrick, served around a hill of rock salt. That cost $24 which is about what I had initially planned to spend on this whole meal, but they were well worth it. Then we each had pasta dishes. Mine was a chicken, sundried tomato, pesto sort of thing. It was very good, though not out of the ordinary. Chris had something with seafood (predictably). I didn't pay attention to what exactly it was, but he looked like he enjoyed it. To finish we shared a Lindt chocolate fondant. A hot chocolate pudding with a lightly crunchy crust and a gooey chocolate sauce centre, served with a mint coulis and just enough cream. It was as good as the oysters and that is saying something. To keep ourselves hydrated we also had a glass of wine each with the meal and coffee with dessert. We were the last people in the restaurant (everyone else looked like they had to go back to work, poor dears) - we didn't get out of there until three.

Of course, a single glass of wine - even when strung out over a couple of hours and a solid meal - is enough to put me to sleep. So it was just as well Chris took some time to set up the massage room when we got home (with candles and an oil burner and so on), while I got to relax with the last of the Diana Wynn Jones series that has been my reward for finishing my project. Then, finally, I got to use my gift voucher. And let me just say that despite working professionally as a Rolfer and remedial massage therapist, Chris does a darn good relaxation massage when he sets his mind to it. And what there was beyond that, is not for this blogger to tell.

June is National $21 challenge month

We have taken up the $21 challenge this week. That is, the challenge to feed our family for $21 for a week. That's not counting food we already have in the house of course. The idea is to use what you have in your house, cook from scratch, and see just how you can do without so much packaged food.

Our grocery spending week starts on Wednesday. And I'm afraid I miscalculated in the shops last night and I already went over - I think I spent $23 on food. Oops. But that will be it until next Wednesday night.

The $23 covered milk (5 litres, which will last our family about four days), powdered milk (that was over $5 on it's own!) so that we can use that in cooking, making the fresh milk last longer, cheese (1kg block of tasty cheese lasts our family about a week), and fruit (8 apples, 4 bananas and 5 mandarins) - in addition to the few apples we had left from last week, that's enough for an apple each day in our morning porridge, for Liam to take two pieces of fruit to school each day, and a few pieces left over to eat, which the kids will no doubt gobble down in  a matter of two days or so.

We couldn't do it every week - well, not if we want to drink that much fresh milk and eat that much cheese - because I didn't buy any vegies and we would normally have another fruit shop mid-way through the week. And of course we would some weeks need to buy other things like flour and honey (honey we could have used this week) and whatnot. But it was/is still an interesting exercise. Mikaela and I baked some plain vanilla biscuits this morning, and we will have to make our own bread on the weekend. We have enough potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots and onions to cook a roast on the weekend (and a free range chook in the freezer that I got on special a week or two ago), and some frozen vegies to go with them. And we have a couple of pumpkins left from our pathetic autumn harvest - though I'm going to be using up one of those in a pot of pumpkin soup for Liam's class at school next Thursday. But aside from that we tend to buy our vegetables fresh each week, so luckily we have lots of frozen meals at the moment (several each of vegetarian chilli, chicken and veg soup, basic tomato sauce (add beans or tuna or whatever), and bolognese sauce. So we just need to add pasta or rice to any one of those and we've got a meal.

In the Simple Savings newsletter about the $21 challenge (linked above) they ask "What canned food have you got?"

Tuna, corn, salmon and asparagus all make good fritters, risotto, quiche or potato cakes. Baked beans are a good addition to casseroles, sausage bakes, soups and toasted sandwiches. Tomatoes are great for casseroles, pasta sauce and soup. Turn tinned fruit into puddings, muffins, crumbles and pies.

Well, we have very little of any of those things at the moment, except tuna which we have in abundance due to a recent good special. But we will be changing that over coming weeks, as we make a habit of stockpiling. We do have some food stockpiled from when its been on special (we could probably survive the week just on the salsa, rice crackers and tuna we have in the cupboard if we needed to), but not basics like tinned tomatoes or dried beans. That's going to change, because I want to do two things to save more money

1. Buy more food in bulk (eg flour and dried beans)
2. Go to supermarkets less

I'm assuming that by stockpiling more, I'll be able to cut down on supermarket shopping significantly, and just go tot he markets to buy fruit and veg. (Though there is also the milk and cheese issue.) And I'm hoping that by doing this we'll be able to afford to buy more organic food. That's the plan. And now that I am practically done with my masters project (if not, quite, actually), I am hoping to have some more thinking space to devote to this sort of thing. I'm also hoping that we will be able to finish the permanent chook run fence this weekend, so we can start collecting our eggs again. Though we may then need to spend more money on food for the dog!!