Hello Dear Reader,
How's your New Year going, has it lost its shine yet? Here we are already half way through January and I'm still holding on to the New Year feeling. I have been in my sewing room using up some left over fabric to make a scrappy quilt which is making me happy, the garden, while not much is planted at the moment, is humming along nicely thanks to intermittent showers of rain. The pumpkin vine has already covered one bed and has made a good start on the next one along. And the tomatoes are fruiting beautifully, but I need to beat Miss mouse or Mr rat by picking them quite green and ripening the inside. We have set traps but nothing has been caught yet.

LH has made a start on one of our goals this year, to sand back and oil/stain our old, but still solid, outdoor setting. He started on Monday by pressure hosing off the table and chairs, getting into all the nooks and crannies, then he used an orbital sander, borrowed from our future SIL, to start sanding back the table, it's looking good so far. The only problem was that he didn't think to close the sliding glass doors that lead onto the patio nor the windows that face out that way. So now I have fine dust covering our bedroom furniture and every last shutter in that area along with the security screens. I want to cry as it has not been very long since I cleaned them all. So guess what I'm doing on tomorrow?
Here's how we saved money this week-
1. Grated and froze a half block of cheese that had been sitting in the fridge for a while, I froze it one cup portions.
2. Made some golden chicken stock from the roast chicken frame, I now have four jars of lovely stock in my freezer to use. I just popped the roast chicken frame in the slow cooker along with carrots, 1/2 an onion and a teaspoon of turmeric, let it cook on slow overnight and this is the result.
3. I forgot to put milk on the shopping list for the Wednesday grocery shop so I popped up to Coles on Sunday (wearing a mask as per Covid protocol) to pick up some milk and bread. I spied this great markdown and snaffled it. I used it to make vanilla yoghurt.
$3.57 for 1.5 litres of yoghurt...thank you very much.
4. An oldie but a goodie, used the toothbrush to squeeze the toothpaste to the top of the tube, using every last bit. I even cut the tube open to get to the residue, yes I'm that woman and I'm not sorry.
5. Semi dried an abundance of our Lemon Drop tomatoes in the oven using the "Food Warming" function. Love to preserve home grown abundance to prevent waste.
How did you save money this week?
Have a lovely day,
💛Fi