What disappointing weather for Good Friday, it started off fine and I planned to go into the garden, but my plans had to change with the weather and I caught up with some ironing instead whilst watching YouTube.
DH made the tomato soup and stewed the plums, I had emails to answer, things that couldn’t wait and a couple of discounted items I wanted to buy online using the Easter offers that had dropped into my inbox.
I was also disappointed that I didn’t find the time to make any Easter cards this year. I had in mind to do another lino cut like at Christmas, but I couldn’t really carve out enough time.
After our family get together last weekend it has been unusually quiet here, a funny kind of Easter and in fact, I haven’t done many of the things I would normally have done this year at all – so much time has been taken up with the car and my mum, both are getting old and cranky now and each day I brace myself wondering what the issue will be today.
Mum seems to be sliding down hill at the moment, not so much in her health but in refusing to co-operate fully with the carers. Last night she decided she wouldn’t change into her pyjama top and went to bed in her jumper.  I think she may have just been too tired. She is also reluctant to change her clothes too often or have the bed linen changed (partly because her cataracts don’t allow her to see all the stains that we can see and partly that she doesn’t want to generate more washing for my sister). Some days she is eating very little other than the chip sandwich on a Wednesday and Friday from the deli cafe across the road, even worse she is not drinking very much so that she doesn’t have to walk down the hallway to the bathroom. I am not sure what can be done. If we say anything she becomes even more stubborn…it is frustrating. I think she just gets too tired to be bothered much now. When she isn’t on the phone calling me, she is sleeping a lot in the day but not through the night. I expect anyone would get drowsy from the boredom of sitting in the same room day after day with nothing to do. My heart goes out to all the elderly people who are at a similar stage in their lives as my mum. We all try to do what we can to help but we cannot make her well and young again.
By the time you read this, we will be on our way to visit mum and I am hoping the weather is fine enough this afternoon to take her to the park; she lives to go out now. I have no plans for the rest of Easter, I find it too busy now to contemplate going anywhere and I would welcome a nice relaxing day in the garden, but that will be weather dependant.
At last the car is working again…just in time for the petrol shortage. Sainsbury’s had closed their petrol station completely on Tuesday – I was shocked to see the cones across the entry and the shutters down on the little shop where you pay. It seemed at odds with the government’s message that there are no shortages! Luckily, we will have enough to do the 180 mile round trip to see my mum.
We haven’t unpacked the garden furniture yet, we need to keep it dry so that we can sand and paint the wooden bench with a fresh coat, and spray the metal furniture, after giving it a good brush down to remove any rust patches. I managed to order a can of spray paint online from Dunelm, taking advantage of their special offer and using the free click and collect service. We can pick it up next time we pass through town. It is yet another job that is waiting for a run of good weather.
Thursday was a lovely dry and sunny day and we went for a longer walk than usual – I needed the fresh air and time to reset myself and being in nature does that so well. We took in a few steep hills for a good cardio workout!!
The pretty celandines along the roadside….
….and everywhere the trees have little buds about to burst open.
The hidden resevoir down the track was like a mirror…..
….with the ducks gliding across to see if we had food.
In the garden the primroses are still covered in flowers creeping over my broken pot. The white camelia is about to flower and everything is starting to grow in the borders. We just need some sunshine and warmth.
Have a lovely day today, whatever you are doing.
Back soon x
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On Wednesday, I found myself unexpectedly on a bus to Burnley 45 miles away from home.
DH has had many issues with his car recently, he is trying to keep it going longer, one repair after another. He will grieve for this car when it finally has to go, but as long as it keeps moving it will have a reprieve.
Recently, it had a major breakdown when the clutch went. (with a bang). Considering it is 12 years old and has done 175,000 miles he is, we are told by those that know, very light on the clutch and it should have normally required replacing around the 100,000 mark.
The clutch was replaced and this week it went back to the same garage for a service and MOT (passed, thankfully) and all should have been well.
Well, not really….’well’ is not how I would describe the car after having been ‘worked on’ now since the February half term school holidays, when it broke down. The issue now was with the suspension (as it usually is). It is a Citroen that has the special suspension quite similar to a Rolls Royce without the price tag. Not all Citroen cars have this – I don’t think they make new ones in the same way, but it is an older model and rather than shock absorbers it has spheres.
These spheres are quite a mystery to anyone other than a Citroen specialist and one that knows these older cars. The suspension had not been adjusted by the garage who fitted the clutch, and it had left the car completely unbalanced and going clunk over the slightest bump and with the front end up in the air. Citroens rest when you turn the engine off and look like they are deflating, a bit like a rise and fall lamp.
So you may have guessed already that our trusty Citroen sphere specialist is away over the hill in Hapton, near Burnley, but he is an absolute magician and sorts it all out for us and once again we are able to glide over speed bumps, manholes and potholes.
Whilst the mechanic attended to our car, we went off to explore. Hapton is no more than a village with only a corner shop and a chinese takeaway, so we decided to go into Burnley about 2 miles away as the crow flies. We tried the local train station first, but the ticket machine and timetable on the platform were in some strange language that we could not master and being an unmanned station, we gave up on that idea.
‘Let’s try the bus’ I suggested.
We popped into the only local shop and asked about a bus. They directed us to the bus stop and luckily there were a few people waiting who couldn’t have been more helpful about the journey and the ticket price. It was the journey from hell though for me, I get very travel sick on buses and often have to get off, wait awhile, then get on the next one. Thankfully, I managed to complete the 30 minute journey in one go. For most of it, the bus route was trundling around local outlying estates en route to Burnley, which felt like we were in a bit of a maze.
I sent my daughter’s a picture of us on the bus and a message saying ‘we are on a bus to Burnley’….they thought it was an hilarious April Fool’s day joke!
Burnley is a lovely clean town and although the population is only 94,000 against Huddersfield’s 162,000 it has far more shops in the town centre. They still have a Marks and Sparks – so we dived in there for a much needed drink and a slice of toast. I wandered around the clothes for a while. DH bought himself one of those flexible woven belts and a lovely eau-de-nil tee-shirt. I need trousers, but I am not overkeen on these new look wide leg ones – all that fabric flapping about my legs. I am not convinced they are a style that suits everyone, I have long legs but even I would find some of them over the top, and I don’t think they would make good gardening trousers afterwards. The fashion world like to change things about to generate more sales and by changing a shape from slim to wide, long to short, frilly to plain and tailored is the best way to do it.
We had a mooch around the centre and then before we knew it the car was done and we had to catch the bus back to collect it.
We had packed up a flask of soup and looked on Google maps for somewhere nearby to eat our picnic lunch and found that Gawthorpe Hall was only in Padiham, in fact we had passed it on the bus. It is run by both the National Trust and the local council and is well worth a visit. I have one or two photos of interest below. The history for anyone wanting more information can be found on Wikepedia. Being developed from a former tower around 1600 in the Elizabethan era, it is very old but well cared for with beautifully ornate ceilings and wooden panelling. The guides in the rooms are well worth talking to for their knowledge of both the house and its contents.
The attic floor was a surprise as it is given over to a permanent exhibition of textiles, all collected by one of the previous owners, Rachel Beatrice Kay-Shuttleworth 1886-1967. She is a fascinating person and what a wonderful collection. If you get the chance to go, it is well worth a visit.
Everything is catalogued with these simple little tickets.
We were very tired by the time we came away at teatime and managed to get caught up in the M62 crush on the way home so it was a quick meal of baked potatoes, cheese and beans for our evening meal, and an early night after our adventurous day.
We celebrated our family Easter get together early, because on Easter Sunday we will be going further north to see my mum, so this last weekend was our opportunity to see our daughters and the grandchildren. On Saturday they all descended on me, I had only a few hours notice and needed to find activities for them quickly, as well as some lunch.
DH did most of the washing and chopping of the salad items for the cold buffet lunch and we had boiled eggs, cheese and cold sliced chicken. Sweetie had persuaded her mum to buy some bunny paper plates, cups and serviettes in Aldi for the table. It is a squeeze now seating everyone as we have grown over time to ten of us. My younger daughter had to sit on the small folding steps as we are a stool short at the moment having lent it to goodness knows who.
After lunch I didn’t have time to make any biscuit dough but I did have a slab of plain cake in the freezer that I had made a while ago to use up some eggs. I found the Easter cutters (bunnies, chickens etc), made up some white icing and got the tray of sprinkles and pastel coloured tubes of icing that I had bought in readiness back in January for such an occasion.
I cut the cake into four pieces (one each) and the children had great fun cutting out shapes and icing and decorating them – even the off cuts were decorated…or eaten…mainly eaten, but nothing was wasted.
I displayed their ‘efforts’ in the cardboard trays I keep from the tomato packs, they do come in handy.
Whilst I was clearing the table the children had free reign to officially draw on my windows (which always excites them) with those white chalk paints. I had printed off some bunny pictures from the internet and DH went outside and stuck them to the window for them to use as a template.
Master Freddie decided his bunny was going to be hidden in long grass!!
The table was covered with the paper cloth and out came the felt tips so that they could decorate the Easter bunny cards I had found (from the Range or maybe the Works).
Sweetie decided she was going to turn hers into bunting.
Baby Chocolate drew a spaghetti bunny!
Master Freddie made some 5/8th bunnies as he is all into fractions at the moment.
We also covered kitchen rolls with pastel paper and decorated them to look like bunnies.
All bunnied out the children went home for their teas and DH and I had a lie down!
On Sunday it was throwing it down here, wet, wet, wet.
Of course it is the school holidays, it is bound to rain. Many an Easter Egg trail was hit hard by the weather this weekend. We met the grandchildren and their mums and took cover indoors in a local museum. The lady on reception gave the children a clipboard and a sheet of Easter egg shapes to hunt for and copy the pictures of eggs hidden throughout the museum to claim a prize.
The other exhibition event, advertised for last Saturday and Sunday and through the week in the Kirklees Museums brochure, and on their website and on social media was
‘Moving Pictures – From Magic Lanterns to Cinema’, a chance for the children to learn about how moving images became films with optical toys and making their own moving pictures‘ –
Sounded good…. but it turned out to be a non-starter because no-one at the museum knew anything about it!! There was no exhibition or optical toys or crafts available to make their own moving pictures. How can that be? How can they publicise something that they then forget to do. I have never known that happen before.
The museum is very much about the Huddersfield district and how it grew with the coming of the textile mills and they had displays with old weaving looms and factory looms.
I hadn’t realised that the women of Huddersfield had played such a large part in the women’s suffrage movement.
The journal of Florence Lockwood on display is especially noteable at the moment – she heads the page Signs of the Times and part way down is the entry on August 4th 1914 ‘England declares war on Germany’.
In our troubled times I might well be writing something similar soon in my journal.
This made me smile – how true back then.
The other noteable item on display was this rather beautiful patchwork quilt made up of varying pieces of scrap fabrics, probably cut from old garments and painstakingly embroidered. I will definitely be going back without the children for a good look around.
So now the playroom is deathly silent, the toys and crafts have been tidied away and all will be waiting for when the grandchildren descend on us again. Very soon I hope.
Have a lovely week, back soon with that recipe. I am making the mushroom soup today for lunch. x
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Like HM treasury, I have to maintain control over our spending. Keeping within a budget with the weekly food shop has become increasingly difficult. Avoiding waste is a must. I think most people have their preferred places to shop and mine is Sainsbury’s – they have the best range of organic foods in our area for both fresh fruit and veg and they have their own range of organic groceries too like lentils, beans, milk, cheese and pasta, and also stock other brands. We don’t have any farmer’s markets nearby for the fruit and veg, so that is not an option for us.
I use the self scan shop on my mobile app to take advantage of all the personal offers that are tailored to what we normally buy. I also collect the personal extra Nectar points that, like the scan shop offers, change each week. Then there are the general store wide Nectar card reductions on items and you can also collect 1 Nectar point for every £1 spent. Unlike Tesco and some of the other supermarkets, there are never many yellow sticker items at Sainsbury’s, but often they are not things I would want to buy.
All these offers and points might seem small but over time do accumulate and save us a lot of money, not always on the total amount of the weekly shop because I buy multiples of the items when they are on offer, enough to make sure I won’t run out until they have the item on offer again. However, it does reduce the amount we spend on food over the year.
Just buying items only on offer (where possible) means we each have to make a list of our personal offers on the app and then check on other offers as we go down the aisles. At the moment we are waiting for the Alara muesli to come back on offer, DH has only one box left so it will be touch and go whether he can spin it out until the next offer appears on the shelf! We generally have a list of things we are running out of and of course there are some dairy items that we will always need to buy weekly like fresh milk and yoghurt and fruit and veg.
I always have an alternative in mind should we need something that is not on offer. So for instance, I buy the Plenish brand of organic almond milk in a carton. This is frequently on offer in the chiller fridges near the ordinary cow’s milk and it has a long enough date to buy 3 at once (I probably use just over one carton a week). If it is not on offer I know to go to the aisle where they have the longerlife milk cartons and same Plenish almond milk in the longlife version will usually be on offer when the fresh chiller one isn’t. This has an even longer date so I keep 3 of these to hand in the pantry and rather than buy a fresh one not on offer I will wait and use a long life one.
If one brand of organic butter (my preference is Yeo Valley) is not on offer when I need it I can usually find the Sainsbury’s organic version is. It may seem a strange way of shopping but it works for us and saves money whilst still be able to buy the food we like and the organic versions.
It is just a different way of shopping that I have learnt over time and I have a mental list of all the products we normally buy and as I trundle up and down the aisle with my trolley I am always on the look out for the red stickers on the shelf edge that indicates a product on offer. I am well tuned into spotting them a mile off!!
So down to the nitty gritty….
Yesterday’s food bill came to a total of £77.81 and I saved £20.15 from all the offers, plus I gained another 717 Nectar points (77 basic and then 640 in bonus points) which is about £3.58. My £77.81 bill was made up of mainly offers, but I did buy a birthday card, a packet of beetroot and some of the fruit that were not on offer.
Meanwhile, DH spent £55.32 on all his offers and the only items not on offer were the bread, 2 avocados, 3 Bramley apples, a pack of raspberries and a pear. His savings were £3.69. He also had a voucher for extra Nectar points on a £20 spend and in total 675 points worth £3.37.
Our total Nectar points at the moment are worth £80.97, once it reaches £100 I will use it to buy my groceries in Sainsbury’s and then transfer the £100 I would have used from my bank account into my savings account. If you get my drift.
My pantry is well stocked now and I know next week I might not be able to take advantage of certain items if they are on offer purely because we won’t need them for a while. The cheese was on a personal offer and will be grated and put in the freezer.
So now it is a matter of getting it all prepared and cooked. DH made a batch of tomato and red pepper soup with those leftover from last week’s shop, one will go in the freezer for later.
DH has, over the last few years, taken over a vast amount of the cooking. He is a whizz at making nutloaf, lentil curry, or ratatouille, but he tends to make the things he knows and not try new recipes. That is down to me and something I need to get to grips with. I have 2 or 3 folders full of tear out recipes from magazines, and it is my intention to try them out – the ones that we don’t like I can then throw away.
Generally, we have very little ultra-processed food, but avoiding processed food is a different challenge. By processed this would include bread, pastry based meals, cereal or cheese as they are all in an altered ‘processed state’.
Luckily, there is always room for improvements in any diet and these are best done a little at a time, mainly by either doing a food swap or learning to go without.
After doing quite a bit of research and listening to some of the doctors and researches on You Tube (this can be good or bad – I think there are so many opposing ideas of a healthy diet and claims that are not founded on gold standard research) both DH and I have come to the conclusion that we need to lower our carbohydrate intake of bread, potatoes, pasta and brown rice and increase our protein intake and dark green veg.
I have found that listening to the practicing GP Doctor David Unwin quite enlightening. He has helped many of his own patients reverse their type 2 diabetes as well as his own. His own story is very interesting and the reason he is very keen on a low carb diet.
This is the interview with Dr Chatergee another prominent doctor fighting to promote healthier living.
For a while now I have been close to the limit, but not quite crossed the line for type 2 diabetes with my HA1C level which should be in the range of 18.0 to 41.0. Mine is currently 39.0 a tiny shift from the previous 40 and what my doctor terms pre-pre diabetic. I was quite shocked at this result as I am not overweight and I prefer savoury foods to sweet, hardly ever eat cakes or add sugar to anything. So rather than wait until it gets any worse I am taking action now and trying out this low carb diet to see if my HA1C level improves.
We have already implemented some of the suggestions. We only have a small amount of brown rice now (about 1-2 tablespoons each) with our curry and instead have it with a good helping of green beans.
Most days we have a large pot of homemade soup on the go and depending on which soup it is we will throw in chickpeas, red lentils, edame or cannellini beans for added protein and fibre. We have cut down to one slice of bread with our soup and will probably cut it out altogether soon. Instead we have a small salad of watercress, little gem lettuce, tomatoes, beetroot and sometimes coleslaw with it. We might also add a small chunk of cheese.
Not eating fish or meat makes the protein side of things more difficult for vegetarians. You have to eat far more plant protein to equal meat. We already have a fair amount of pulses and beans and I would not want to increase the amount of cheese we eat so I will probably be looking to make more nut and egg dishes.
We made an effort to reduce any snacks and have cut out packets of crisps altogether – I no longer go down that aisle at all. I have bought some cashew nuts instead, but they are a bit moreish. Neither of us liked the seaweed thins my SIL recommended as an alternative snack – she will be getting the rest of the unopened packs when I see her.
We have reduced the biscuits to one pack a week, but we might only eat half now. I am fortunate in not having a sweet tooth but I do like the occasional biscuit with a cup of tea, especially when we are outside gardening – that old saying a drink is too wet without one. I tend to buy the dark chocolate Petit Beurre or the Bahlsen Leibniz, whichever is on offer. Sometimes we will have a couple of crackers (Carrs melts) instead with nut butter as a snack.
We have been following this new regime now for 2 or 3 weeks – so early days. DH is really up for the challenge and is beginning to try new recipes that I find and think of alternatives; we have not felt the least bit hungry or missing the snacks of crisps. I expect the extra protein is keeping us fuller longer.
I have even unboxed the spiraliser I bought last summer and have not used yet and found a nice handy place for it in the kitchen cupboard. I can make a vegetable spaghetti amongst other things.
There are a number of recipes I want to try. I saw on Pinterest one for red lentil and herb flatbreads (no flour, so no gluten) and another making a quiche within a crisp potato base rather than pastry.
So small changes and I am hoping better health.
As requested I will post the mushroom soup recipe (it is rather flexible though, we often don’t make it to the exact recipe).
I will also post the Lentil and Mushroom bake. It is one of those dishes like curry that can gain in flavour overnight.
To answer Sue’s comment about the mushrooms – it will be the mushrooms that give the dish flavour, so something like red peppers, courgette, feta cheese, tomatoes or walnuts. If it is just the actual mushrooms you don’t like you could add a tiny bit of mushroom stock for flavour.
I am just going to flick through some recipes now to make a menu plan. I will only try one new recipe each week as time is quite valuable at the moment and once this cold spell is over we will no doubt want to focus on the garden again.
I know many bloggers are looking to alter or modify their diets, especially when it comes to ultra-processed foods and gluten free. What a shame the NHS is always many years behind the research. Practising preventative medicine, by altering your lifestyle and diet, is so much better than fire fighting conditions with medication like statins and diabetic tablets.
Have a good weekend, back soon. x
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where the journey takes me 2 