Thrifty Housekeeping - Stocking up the larder

The key for our household when grocery shopping and stocking up the larder is keeping hubby away from the task!

He has a super sweet tooth and doesn't do shopping lists or budgets.

We spent on average €60 a week when doing our grocery shopping. This would usually be dividend equally between food and household products such as toilet paper, nappies and detergent.

I have narrowed my larder essentials down to three items; strong flour, sugar and oatmeal. 

From the flour, it is the bases for bread, pancakes, pasta, pastry, pizza, buns and bases for soups and sauces.

From the sugar, it is the bases for jams, chutneys and home brew. 

From the oatmeal, it is our breakfast staple of porridge. 

We do purchases of course a large variety of other products but never dairy or meat in a supermarket. 

As we produce so much fresh food, it is very important that we can store it for again. The deep freeze is very important to us for this, as well as bottling jams and chutneys.

I do think the biggest change needed is a change of attitude towards food. We did at one time, decide what we fancied to eat and then buy it, cook it or both.

Now we ( mainly me! ) go for a walk in the garden, count the eggs brought in that day, check out the meat in the freezer and have a look at the larder. Then we know we have the ingredient for x number of different meal choices and we decide on one then.

At the moment, it's any meal that uses plenty of courgettes, tomatoes and new potatoes.

We could get the grocery costs down much lower, but again we are not frugal!

We like to treat ourselves, eat out occasionally, have cheat nights every now and again and most importantly eat healthy proteins and fats instead of cheap carbohydrates.

Another factor to be considered is that we send about €10 a week on rolled oats for the animals. Which is a food cost, as it helps produce the eggs, milk and bacon.

In summary, we feed two adults and three children for about €40 a week plus another €30 on household products, due to a considerable investment of our time.

I find everything boils down to choosing between time or money.

You can sell your time for a wage but then have no time to be more self reliant and therefore you would need to spend your wage.

If only we could have time and money!

Thrifty Housekeeping - Heating

It is amazing how quickly attitudes changed. It was only three years ago when we started renovation work on the cottage. The workmen were horrified that    we wanted solid fuel and not oil or gas as our only heat source.

They assured us that we would regret it. It was inconvenient and old fashioned but we know that oil prices were going to keep rising, which in time would make solid fuel more attractive and popular again. We were correct.

The thing I love about solid fuel is the choice. We have the choice to burn so many different fuels, from turf, coal or timber. We can buy in small quantities or large. Produce our own or buy in.

When you burn oil, your only choice is oil.

In our cottage we have a stanley range in the kitchen. This heats the water and eight radiators. It will easily cook the dinner or boil the kettle or even bake the bread.

It uses a bag of turf a day during the milder months. It would be lit from afternoon onwards. 

During the couple of colder months, it uses two bags a day. It is lit first thing in the morning and the firebox filled up before bed. It would still be hot in the morning. With the embers still glowing, it is just a matter of adding a few more sods of turf and emptying the ash box.

It produces a very warm kitchen and we usually leave the doors open so the heat travels throughout the cottage. Sometimes I wonder if we needed the radiators at all! 

We have an open fire in our sitting room. We will put in a non-boiler stove during the winter to improve efficiency. We only use this when it is very cold to boost the heating. 

We are plumbed for hot water solar panels. But we have yet to have the panels installed. At the moment our hot water is heated by emersion during the summer but hopefully this will change soon. The panels will boost the cylinder temperatures during the winter meaning that the stanley range will not need to work so hard.

A plot of turf bog came with the cottage. It is located about six miles away. It gets cut by machine in May usually, depending on weather.

We then turn, foot and bag the turf to bring home. It is then dry and burns well. 

We also fell twenty mature trees a few years ago that we still have not cut and stacked yet. As I said before, hubby has a very long to do list.

We usually buy kindling to start the fire and a few bags of coal as it burns hotter during Dec/Jan when it is very cold.

Our heating costs for the year are a few hundred euro. To pay the machine cutter, some coal and kindling. 

And a few hot evenings spent in the bog turning turf to dry it before bringing it home. 

Thrifty Housekeeping - Intro

I hope to start a series about thrifty housekeeping. 

And just to be clear, I don't blog about being frugal nor do we live a frugal life. Our motives are not financial. Other than having greater financial freedoms, our motives are more family, lifestyle and health based.

So anything I will write about will take into consideration cost, but not before considering the balance of nutrition and family life.

 I read many frugal food blogs, while many of these are wonderful and thoughtful, I find that many choose food cost over any nutritional consideration. 

How can food be considered separate from the nutrition it provides?

I feel that this is false economy. What you save now, you will pay later with you or your families health. 

I will start a series covering how we here run our cottage and smallholding. Covering points from:

Heating our cottage

How I stock the larder

Laundry

Menu planning

Up cycling furniture 

Feeding our animals

Managing on one income

While our little home runs on very little, it is not perfect. My list of DIY jobs for hubby to do is endless! But he is working his way through it. 

We have at times the dreaded 'laundry mountain' that can hung around for weeks growing until I finally tackle it.

Every surface inside of the cottage is full of sticky little handprint that reappear quicker than I can clean them. And the boys haven't yet learnt how to aim for inside the toilet bowl.

I guess homes are never perfect, as they are in constant motion. All we can do is make good memories!