Thai green chicken curry and consequences of overspending

I have Thai green chicken curry in the slow cooker at the moment, and it is smelling wonderful! This morning I placed two frozen chicken thighs, a couple handfuls of frozen green beans, a few handfuls of frozen broccoli, some frozen sweet peppers and onion and a good amount of fresh mushrooms into the slow cooker. I mixed up some of the dehydrated coconut flakes with water to make coconut milk and added Thai green curry paste. Once that was stirred up well I poured it over the rest and turned the slow cooker on low. About two hours later I turned it on high. Now, 4 1/2 hours after I started, dinner is finished. All I need to do for tonight now is cook a batch of rice.

We also received a text message from the bank this morning saying our balance was below a certain amount. We haven't really paid that much attention to what we've been spending on groceries during the moving process, and due to that we have overspent this month. I need to try and not buy anything for the rest of this month and most of next month to make up for this overspending. I do want to stock up on dried beans and get a bit more flour, as well as getting at least one boneless pork shoulder from Morrisons (£1.50/kg this week!).

I am hoping to start making use of our freezer (that's actually a decent size here!) to prepare meals for the slow cooker so that all I will need to do is dump the bag into the cooker and turn it on. Very useful for if and when I get sick or when I am exhausted and cannot cook.

Back in action!

Hello everyone! We now have internet at our new place, so I'll be trying to update the blog occasionally amidst all of the remaining unpacking and decorating that needs doing.

For tonight, we are having crockpot lemon garlic chicken (4 frozen chicken thighs, juice of 2 lemons, teaspoon - or one clove - minced garlic, cooked on low for 4 hours), rice, a salad (homegrown!) and green beans.

I've promised Jethro that we can have Thai green chicken curry tomorrow night, and I am bound and determined to make it in the crockpot. I have some dried coconut flakes (add water, turns it into coconut milk) that I'll be using instead of the expensive canned stuff. We found sweet bell peppers on sale last week at Aldi for 69p per 3 peppers, so we bought three packs. I wish we would have bought double that now that we have a decent sized freezer. I'll do my best to remember to write down what and how much of everything goes into the curry tomorrow so that I can share the recipe with everyone.

Have a wonderful day!

Emily

Important update! 20th August until ?

I am currently in the process of moving, so I unfortunately will not have internet for a short while. Sorry for the interruption this will cause in my blog posts.

Emily

Day 18 and 19

Sorry about not posting yesterday, I was out of the house from 8:30 am until well after 9 pm! Due to that, we ended up having frozen pizza. I also donated blood, so this (and my immediate exhaustion afterwards) is the main reason we had pizza last night instead of tonight. It's quick and easy. Unfortunately, it can also be budget crashing. Even on sale, the pizzas costed £1.25 each, so £2.50 for both of us to eat. It doesn't sound like much, but considering that is only one meal, if every meal in one week (3 per day, 7 days) costed that much, you'd spend £52.50 in ONE week!

Anyway, tonight I'm making homemade tuna 'helper' with canned tuna and broken spaghetti pasta. Add in a bit of milk, cheese and spices as well as broccoli or peas and you've got a one pot meal that takes about 30 minutes to make. I'll post a recipe as soon as I can update again!

Day 17

Last night I made lasagne. I ran out of leeks, so I needed to use some of the lasagne sheets that I had, but I didn't know how many I would need, so I cooked what I had. Around half of a box. Turns out I only needed 3 sheets to finish the lasagne. So, what to do with the leftover sheets? I blotted them dry on a clean tea towel, placed a small spoonful of some chicken that I had cooked in nacho cheese dip and salsa in the slow cooker the other day on one end and rolled them up! I then lightly greased a baking dish and laid the rolls in them. Then I made a mock cheese/spice sauce to pour over them with a bit of milk, cornstarch, home made fajita seasoning, crushed red chillies, Italian seasoning, paprika and black pepper. I cooked the sauce on the stovetop until it was just starting to thicken, then I poured it over the rolls and finely shredded some cheese over the top of the dish. As I pulled out the lasagne, I put the dish of lasagne sheet roll ups into the oven and let them cook for about 20 minutes. We haven't tried them yet, but this means that most of dinner tonight is already finished!

I also soaked the rest of the black beans that I had in water last night and cooked them in the slow cooker today. I have drained them and have them out cooling at the moment so that I can put them into the blender with a bit of garlic and some shallot and make "refried" beans to go with dinner tonight.

I'm baking bread at the moment as well (and the entire flat smells like a bakery!). I used a really simple recipe (that can be found here) and ended up using around 400 g of flour because it was a bit dry here today. The amount of flour that you use in bread making recipes will vary due to the weather in your area and especially the humidity.

I like to keep the windows open in the flat, otherwise the air gets stale and sometimes stifling. Since bread needs a warm moist environment to rise (yeast breads anyway, quick breads are for another day), I've figured out that I can place the bowl or pan into my oven, place a baking dish on the bottom (or on a lower rack if you have a heating element on the floor of your oven) and add boiling water to the baking dish. Then close up the oven (do NOT turn the oven on!!!) and let it rise for the allotted time in the recipe. Most recipes call for a first rise of 45 minutes to an hour, then after shaping and placing in the pan, a second rise of another 30 - 45 minutes.

*Update on the bread: I'm still not accustomed to baking bread here! Back in the States I had a stand mixer with a dough hook. Here in the UK I do not. Therefore I'm having to learn how to feel how much flour needs to go in for making dough. I don't think I used enough flour today. The bread still tastes wonderful though, so no harm done. :)

Since I didn't really follow any recipes this time I don't have any recipes to type up. I do however have photos!

Chicken and lasagne sheet roll ups

Black beans soaking in water

Bread dough

Bread dough, first rise

Separating the dough

Starting the second rise

Finished bread. The results of not using enough flour!

Day 16

I discovered this morning that we have already went over budget by £13... This is after only two weeks! I'm going to do my best to not buy anything but the absolute essentials for the rest of the month. With a lot of creativity, I think that we can get through the next two weeks fine for food. I believe that things will be better once we move, since we will have an actual freezer there and space for a chest freezer that someone has offered us (yay!). Since I do not own a pressure canner/cooker (and I don't really want one either), I cannot safely can and preserve meats and low acid meals. This is why the freezer space is vital to us only using £50 per month. Once we have decent freezer space, I'll be doing more "once per month" cooking. This way, if I'm sick or too tired to cook, we can still have a homecooked meal.

Having Jethro stop by the store on his way home is a bad idea for us, but I have been keeping up with what we use the most vs what we use the least so that I can better plan for the following months.

We are down to 1 egg, so we ended up having oatmeal this morning. Jethro picked up some bacon (darn our cravings!) yesterday, so we each had a piece of bacon as well for some protein. I sent a piece of the healthier cottage pie and a creole chicken leg to work with him for lunch, and I had a piece of the healthier cottage pie with a yoghurt and 2 slices of wholemeal toast for lunch.

For a mid-afternoon snack, I had homemade strawberry jam and a bit of "no nut" chocolate spread on 2 slices of wholemeal toast. If you like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, try a chocolate spread and jelly sandwich! Even though I am allergic to some nuts, luckily hazelnuts are not on my allergy list, so I can have things like Nutella. We bought the "no nut" stuff because it was on clearance a while back for 75 pence for a bigger jar than the Nutella comes in for £2.15. I had honestly forgotten that we had the stuff! It ended up getting pushed to the back of the refrigerator where I couldn't see it.

What I've found by researching our food intake is #1, we eat far too much for one meal, #2, we go through cheese and milk like crazy! I may splurge and buy the strongest (we like cheddar) that I can find next month so that we won't need to add so much to our meals and salads to still get the flavour. Once we have a freezer, I'll probably end up freezing milk to keep from getting sucked into the store because we are out. As you are probably far too aware, it is very difficult to get only one item at the store! Impulse buys stack up, and the fewer trips to the store you can make, the better.

I'm doing more research, gathering up cheaper (and still healthy!) recipes, and I'm really looking forward to having freezer space again next month. I'll also be growing some of our own food from scraps after we move, since we will have a small back garden. I have already started a leek root, 3 carrot tops, and an eye/sprout from one of the potatoes we had yesterday. The new house also has a walk in pantry under the stairs, which I am super super excited about!

Days 14 and 15

I'm sorry that I've been fairly absent for a few days here. We decided to take it easy this weekend and just enjoy it, so blogging was unfortunately pushed to the back burner for a day or two. Anyway, I did manage to cut Jethro's hair and cook a healthy version of cottage pie this weekend! I have nearly caught up with the cleaning from over the weekend and I also have apples with a bit of sugar and water in the slow cooker becoming apple sauce now. My new cookbook and my study guide for my Life in the UK test came through the post this weekend and this morning, so I have a bit of reading to do soon. I am really looking forward to perusing the cookbook though. It's the one from the Hairy Bikers, their "The Hairy Dieters" cookbook. The apple sauce that I made costed a grand total of £1.61 for 12 servings (a serving is approximately 4 ounces/115 grams). This means that each of the six jars that I preserved of the apple sauce costed me £0.27, whereas the same size jar in the store would cost twice that, minimum! Plus making my own means that I know that there aren't any artificial ingredients, colourings, flavourings, or preservatives in my apple sauce.

Anyway, here are some recipes:
Healthy cottage pie
Homemade slow cooker applesauce (external link) - Dump all of the ingredients into a slow cooker and cook for 4 hours to make this in the slow cooker!