Day 112: And the heating goes on

There is snow on the mountains not so very far north of here.  I can't see it, but I can feel it.  The weather has taken on a distinct chill, and it has made its way inside.

Last night it was just too miserable sitting in my cold living room.  It was not too bad while I was moving around, but there comes a time when one likes to lounge on the sofa and watch a DVD.  My fleecy blanket helped a little, but not enough.  So I gave in, and wandered through to the kitchen, and flicked the switch to the little radiator symbol.

Even so, I am not succumbing fully yet.  I wandered through the flat turning off all the radiators except for the living room.  And although I have the heating on again tonight, I am switching it on and off manually, so it only goes on when I really feel the need.  The bedroom is still fine when I am under the duvet, especially with my hot water bottle.  And mornings are still okay, though stripping off for the shower is getting more and more unpleasant.  I may soon have to put the bathroom radiator on a timer.

I am also remembering keep-warm advice often dished out to the elderly.  One of them is, in the winter, to pretty much live in and heat one room.  If it comes to it, I have my little fold-out bed in the cupboard, which will do the job nicely. I shall try to adopt a positive attitude to this, and convince myself that it is like a fun camping trip.  Oh well.

But before such desperate measures, I should first do everything else I can.  I have a kind of day off tomorrow, so time to trundle down to Lakeland and purchase some good quality clingfilm to cover these windows.  While I am there, I will take the Marks and Spencer vouchers I've got saved from my birthday and invest in a couple of thermal vests.  Friends, I am grimly determined.  The cold will not beat me.

Day 105: Winter is i-cummin in

I am mightily impressed that is is mid October and I still have not turned on the central heating.  Nor have I been shivering miserably in a cold dank flat.  Outside there has been a distinct autumnal nip to the air, but inside I have been, if not exactly snug as a bug, at least comfortably free of shivers.

I put it down to this being a tenement flat, with neighbours below, above, and to either side.  Very kindly, what they spend on heating also helps to keep me warm.  Moreover, the flat is kind of long and thin, with windows front and back, so there is very little actual outside wall.  For an old flat without double glazing and with plenty of gaps between the floorboards, it is also surprisingly draft free.  I guess these Victorians knew what they were doing when they built this place.

But winter is indeed i-cummin in, and if it is anything like the last two up here, I am going to have to look at some heat-saving ventures.  Given that it is a rented flat and I will not be forking out on insulation any time soon, I need to do what I can with what I have.  I can close the thick curtains in the living room, but the bedroom curtains are pretty thin, and there are only flimsy blinds in the kitchen and bathroom.  I also read a tip about pinning a clear shower curtain over the window as a kind of secondary double glazing.  It doesn't sound very attractive, but it might be worth a go if I can find such a thing cheaply enough. 

And the other easy tip is draft excluders at the bottom of doors.  I seem to have a surplus of towels, so maybe I could roll some up and tie them in place.  I could even have a go at covering them.  I have a strange zebra-striped blanket thing with sleeves that is falling apart, which might do the trick.  Time to dig out the needle and thread, I think.

I did find this web page which has some very useful tips about staying warm in general.  Some are bleedingly obvious, but others are more original.  I especially liked tip number 16!

Day 51: Making Good Use of the Oven

This has been a day of triumphant cooking!

Recipes are posted below and above, all very suitably frugal.  But the important thing about this evening's cookery is that I managed to plan things so as to make very good use of the oven. 

The menu was intended to be as follows:

Boston Baked Beans

Oven Chips (fries)
Falafel

Quiche

Focaccia 

Ginger biscuits

Roasted tomatoes

slightly blurred Boston Baked Beans
with foccacia and a sprinkling
of grated cheese.

The Baked Beans were made in the slow cooker, having been soaked all night and cooked for 8 hours on Low from morning through to evening.  This in itself is a massive oven saving: just imagine running the thing for the same length of time!  Oh, and they were amazingly delicious, btw - though with that much bacon, one could hardly go wrong.

The Oven Chips saga began two days ago.  Rather than boiling just enough potatoes for one serving, I stuck five large ones in the pan (unpeeled), and cooked the lot.  One I ate that night, but the other four I stored in the fridge.  So tonight I cut one into wedges, put them on an oiled baking tray, sprayed them with vegetable oil and a dash of Cajun seasoning, and baked for about 20 minutes until they were crisp and brown and lovely.  

The oven chips cooked on a baking tray alongside the falafel, which had been made a couple of days before from the same batch of chickpeas which made the hummus.  These too had been frozen for a few days till I was ready to use them.

The remaining three potatoes I also cut into wedges, spread them out on a baking tray, and froze them for half an hour until solid.  Then I removed them from the tray and put them in a plastic bag, and now I have frozen oven chips in my freezer, all ready to go.

Remember the left-over pastry from the large quiche?  I had lined three ramekins with it, and frozen them.  Now I mixed up two eggs and some milk, popped a piece of frozen cooked broccoli and some feta cheese in each one, poured over the egg mixture, and baked in the bottom of the oven.  Thus was the oven full of chips, falafel, and the little quiches, all of which took about 20-25 minutes to bake at 200C.  (Admittedly, the chips were a bit overdone!)  One of the quiches has gone into the fridge for tomorrow's lunch; the other two are back in the freezer.

Previously in the afternoon, I made the foccacia dough and left it to rise.  I am a bit nervous of making yeast bread, usually preferring to stick to soda bread, but my little sister makes an amazing foccacia, so I thought it was worth a go.  The result is pretty good for a first attempt, although a little harder than I would have liked it.  It was intended to bake this along with a batch of ginger biscuits, 25 in total - but my sister phoned, and they never got made.  So half the oven was, alas, unused.

Then finally, I followed the suggestion of Friend Sharon on Day 41, where she says this:

If you have some supermarket basic tomatoes and want to make them into something gorgeous - cut them in half, place in an oven tray cut side up, sprinkle with salt, a touch of sugar and some dried (or fresh) thyme. A little drizzle of olive oil helps things along. Preheat the oven as hot as it will go...if being really frugal make these after something where you've had the oven on anyway...then put them in and turn off the oven. Leave for about 8 hours or overnight. (This is taken from Nigella's Express book...called moonblush tomatoes...but she uses expensive vine toms to start with). Great in salads, on toast, baked potatoes, chopped and through pasta...just sooooo nice.

So as you can see, all this was something of a complex operation, easily upset by an unplanned (though very pleasant) phonecall.  But in the event, it all worked out well, even if I was a bit hot and tired afterwards.  The oven is a terrible user of fuel, so I have come to a resolution that I will never just use it for one thing.  That meant a little forward planning, but despite appearances, I didn't actually run it like a military operation: I just cooked a bit extra wherever I could and froze it; then on the day looked to see what I had.  So I am all stocked up on main meals the next few days.  Maybe weeks!

Tomorrow, I will be blogging about indigestion.

Day 39: The Shower

Maybe it is because I have yet to receive my first electricity bill, that I haven't given much attention so far to saving on power.  And of course, it is summer: I have no need of heating yet, though this being Scotland, it won't be long before that becomes a fairly major issue.  As it happens, this flat has no gas supply, which is a shame, because it is usually cheaper for heating.  But at least it will be easier to keep track of the whole.  And after my epic two-year battle with the gas suppliers in a previous Edinburgh flat, which ended in an explosion of rage down the phone quite unlike anything I have ever produced before or since, I am quite glad to avoid the hassle this time.

So with the heating turned off, the main power guzzler apart from the cooker is the hot water.  Handily, it is supplied by a combination heater - it warms the water as you use it, rather than having to heat up a whole tank every time.  Even so, I have turned it far down, and only really use it for washing dishes and filling the bathroom sink.  And so far, in 39 days, I have had only one hot bath!  The shower, however, is on a separate system, one which also heats the water as it emerges.  It too is currently set at luke-warm.

I confess it: I absolutely love a boiling hot shower in the morning!  But weirdly, not in the evening.  In the same way, I can wallow for hours in a hot bath in the morning.  I can even sleep.  But in the evening, even in a bath filled with lovely lavendar-scented bubbles, I can never lounge for more than a few minutes.  And that anomaly got me to thinking ... 

For why is it that the hot shower is so desirable in the morning?  Simples: because when we wake up, we are cold.  We have not eaten since the previous evening, and our body is making no heat of its own.  That's why we need duvets, after all.  The hot shower makes up for that cold, warming the blood at the start of the day, and taking away the shivers.

Actually coffee here :-)

So the solution I have discovered is truly simple: eat breakfast first.  Fill up at the very least with a slice of toast, or best of all, with a helping of porridge.  Then your body can get burning calories right away, and you warm up from the inside.  After that, a shower can be taken lukewarm, with no shivers.  True story! 

Besides, it is so much easier to get out of bed knowing that your first act is going to be drinking a nice cup of tea. 

Total Daily Expenditure: £8.11 
(weekly food shop)

Day 26: Electrical Troubles

That scream you heard echoing across the void last night?  It was I.

Two days ago, when microwaving my jam sponge pudding, I was in the hallway when I heard a funny noise.  It was a kind of subdued bang, like something had fallen over in a cupboard. I went through to the kitchen to find the pudding cooked and ready to eat, and that was that.

Then yesterday afternoon, I turned on the cooker to heat some milk.  Nothing.  The cooker was clearly dead.  But I was not daunted.  I turned to the microwave.  Again, nothing.  Turns out the bang I heard must have been the microwave gently exploding, and in doing so, it has shorted the cooker socket as well. 

Did you know that you can cook pasta in a slow cooker?  Well, you can.  When cooked, you can even mix it with bolognaise sauce, sprinkle some cheese on top, and sort of 'bake' it (although the cheese doesn't go nice and brown).  The landlord should get round to sorting the them soon, but it goes to show that the temporary loss of cooker and microwave could even prove quite useful in making me more imaginative in my use of the slow cooker.  Encouraged by the pasta success, I looked up a cookbook, and even found a recipe for chocolate peanut sponge pudding, which sounds fab and would use up the peanut butter the Americans bequeathed me.

So on reflection, this is not the disaster it seemed at first to be.  After all, the oven is one of the biggest users of electricity in the house, and I should ration my use of it more carefully.  For one thing, I need to find a way of adding an extra shelf, so that I can cook more than one item at a time.  And at the very least, I will save a couple of days of electricity useage.

I started this whole blog, as my tagline says, in an attempt to "make a virtue out of a necessity".  I am quite surprised by how phlegmatic I am being about the temporary loss of cooker and microwave.  It may be that my tagline philosophy is rubbing off on me even more that I expected.  Inconvenience?  You betcha.  Let's see what lessons I can learn from it.