Leftover Loose Change

As I mentioned in my last post, my food-for-£1-a-day challenge in 2017 radically changed a whole raft of my housekeeping habits and I thought it might be interesting to chart that five years on. Broadly speaking, the changes fall into five categories.

1 Shopping - I still use Ocado for a once a week On-Line shop but I use it more judiciously and primarily for heavy items because the big change to my shopping habits relates not just to what I buy as to how I buy it. Despite not having set foot on a bicycle since I was an undergraduate, I have taken up cycling again so shopping to supplement my Ocado order is now done on a set of old-fashioned two wheels, with a wicker basket attached to the handlebars, not on four, petrol-driven ones with a large boot at the back. 

I am not sure exactly what triggered my shift to riding a bicycle again after thirty non-cycling years but the 2017 challenge was certainly part of it - it made me much more conscious not just of the cost of food on the supermarket shelf but also of the underlying costs of shopping and cooking, including transport - my own and that of suppliers. 

It was not the only trigger - the pandemic too, I think has encouraged everyone to refocus on making the most of what is immediately accessible and the fact that I have shifted to part-time (unpaid) working means I am finding I want to be more physically active anyway. Using a bicycle rather than the car, I am much more free-ranging in where I pick stuff up. It's easy to make multiple trips during the week and to be more selective about what I get where and that is certainly something I am much more aware of post 2017. I am fortunate in that there is a Sainsburys and an Aldi 3 and 4 miles away respectively. I do have to be careful about how much I buy on any one occasion - the return leg of the route includes a very steep hill and while I huff and puff less than I used to do cycling up this, it's not sensible to load my bicycle basket up too heavily. I've learned quickly that even relatively few items can easily add several very unwelcome kilos of weight to what is already quite a heavy bicycle! Nothing to concern the average fit 20 or 30 year old but more of a deal for a rather unfit Mrs Tittlemouse in her mid fifties!

In terms of what I buy, there hasn't been quite such a drastic shift. I've always cooked from scratch and that hasn't changed. I eat a lot of soup and I bake a lot of bread and that was always the case. We still eat meat and fish but rather less frequently and in more modest quantities when we do and I think that's the case for many people these days. Several recipes I experimented with on the food challenge have become firm favourites, albeit cooked less frugally than how I cooked them then - the chilli sin carne in particular which I make frequently. I now make a more concerted effort to try to buy locally produced food where possible and I often shop around for cheaper ingredients for the things I make in a way that I simply didn't think of doing before. On the minus side, I think my cooking repertoire has shrunk a bit in order to ensure that recipes 'dovetail' to avoid waste and although that's satisfyingly symbiotic, sometimes I feel it's become too repetitive. 

2 Cooking - I still love cooking and baking and do a great deal of it. See above!

There is more than a grain of truth in the notion that baking for me is an existential act - I bake and I am alive; the world may spin apparently out of control and the news is either panic-inducing, depressing, fear-mongering, or too often all three, but the constancy of kneading a loaf of bread, making buns, shortbread, flatbread, biscuits, or doughnuts, shifting baking pans around with my customary, noisy lack of finesse* and eating the simple but good results has kept my faith in bigger perspectives intact. 

*I'm not known at home in the kitchen as Mrs Smash'em Bash'em for nothing, I fear!

My 2017 challenge reinforced the therapeutic characteristics of cooking from scratch, even on a budget that compromised many of my usual recipes. 

3 Preserving - the challenge also pushed me specifically to extend my food preservation techniques. I'd always had an interest in food preservation - freezing foraged blackberries or blackcurrants from the garden and making jam from hedgerow fruit - but the challenge gave me new impetus. The first foray I undertook was to invest in some old-fashioned bottling equipment in order to preserve home-grown or foraged fruit in sealed jars which, once processed, would not require electricity or anything more than a shelf to store them on. I've done rhubarb and blackberries but mostly I've bottled unsweetened apple purée because I've had a lot of apples from the garden and I make it from whole chopped apples, without peeling or coring them, so it's virtually waste-free. 

Apart from last year when the apple harvest was very poor because the cold, wet Spring of 2021 prevented a lot of the blossom setting, my fruit-bottling has meant that we've been able to eat our own fruit off the larder shelf right the way through the winter. Old-fashioned bottling is a straightforward process but obviously involves capital outlay in terms of equipment so I thought about it with some care first. The investment has however turned out to be very worthwhile and I use my Vigo bottler a great deal, mostly in late summer and early autumn but at other times too - you can use it to pasteurise homemade cordials and other preserves such as jam and mincemeat, as well as fruit, either puréed or whole in water or syrup. 

You do need proper bottling jars with appropriate seals and I chose to get Weck ones like these which use separate rubber rings and clamps and I've found them excellent. Weck also make snap-on plastic lids for using when you've opened the jar and want to store it in the fridge which is incredibly useful. They recommend purchasing new rubber rings each season but I've not found that to be necessary - they last pretty well although it's important to inspect them before each redeployment just to make sure they haven't started to perish. 

As well as bottling, I've expanded my dehydrating. I'd done a bit of food dehydrating before, but I now do a lot more.

Especially faller apples from our two apple trees. It's labour-intensive but effective.  And once dehydrated, the dried apple can be shovelled into big glass storage jars (like the one in the pic) or repurposed tins with tight fitting lids and stacked in a cool, dark, dry cupboard for months, or years. I've taken to drying home-grown tomatoes, herbs and citrus peel in the same way. 

Bottling, drying, freezing - all game-changing in terms of making use of food for free. The 2017 challenge concentrated my mind on how valuable that is and I've never looked back. There is also nothing that beats the ability to preserve and squirrel away a natural harvest to combat a constant undertow of uncertainty and anxiety on other fronts and we've all had plenty of that over the last few years. 

4 Planting - I admit it - I am an erratic and not very competent gardener but D has taken it to a whole new level and got much more serious about it since we moved house in 2018. Our herb patch has expanded quite considerably. 

Among other things, we've experimented with growing tomatoes - quite successfully owing to D's ruthless pruning and watering regime - the ones in the pic above are some of last year's; pumpkins and courgettes - not so successfully - we didn't enrich the soil where we planted them sufficiently nor water them enough; onions and leeks - partially successfully but sabotaged by constant guerrilla warfare from the slug population - and runner beans - successfully but not terribly satisfactorily as I'm never very good at using them when they're ready to use. 

My indoor gardening which began as a child - with mustard and cress grown on pink blotting paper and alfalfa seeds and mung beans in an upturned jam jar - has extended to experimenting with other so called 'micro-greens' and sprouting seeds such as radishes, pea shoots and sunflower greens.  

It's been a voyage of discovery - sometimes lucky, sometimes unlucky; sometimes responsive to meticulous care and attention and sometimes downright resistant to it - that continues to tease and tantalise with possibilities and the 2017 challenge brought home to us just how valuable even a few, limited grow-your-own efforts can be and has made it a compelling and beguiling road to travel. 

5 Fermenting and culturing - again, this is something I'd done a bit of before. I've been making my own yoghurt ever since H was tiny, for example. But the 2017 challenge encouraged me to take it further. I now make a full-fat, Greek-style yoghurt for eating neat that is a fraction of the price of commercial Greek-style yoghurt and tastes every bit as good. It uses a commercial yoghurt starter which does have to be renewed every now and again (but not nearly as often as received wisdom tells you). I strain it through muslin and use the leftover whey in bread-baking. The pic below is of a recent batch after straining overnight - it's thick and unctuous and needs nothing added. I eat it as it is for breakfast or pudding, or as a snack lunch.

I also bought an heirloom matsoni culture in 2019 (a Caucasian yoghurt culture that is cultivated at room temperature rather than in a heated yoghurt-maker) and it's still going strong, providing me with a constant supply of buttermilk-type yoghurt that I use in cooking and baking. 

I've also taken to fermenting discarded apple cores and peels to make apple cider vinegar - gallons of the stuff in a good apple year. You can see what's left of last season's vinegar complete with its (slightly disconcerting) floating 'mother' in the pic. 

Plenty of scope for more but the 2017 challenge was the impetus to experiment and move on with this kind of frugal self-sufficiency in a way I would never have done without it. 

So all in all, the project had a legacy of leftover loose change that I never really expected to be either so long-lasting or so valuable. I hope this year's version proves to be as fruitful! We'll see!

E x