Naked Chef Turns Into Thrifty Chef

Hello my lovely blogging chums and a warm welcome to my new follower Marlene Jones. I do so love it when I find someone else has joined my little online family. It's encouraging to think my thoughts and tips are of interest to like minded folk. I've always felt that the blogs I follow 'understand' me and offer up little gems that make me happy and usually enlighten me in some way. I 'get' Instagram but I don't subscribe as I like a bit more depth to my online connections. Anyway my friends have you all been watching Jamie Oliver's new series £1 wonders? I'm very impressed with it. The Mr has been on to the website mentioned on the show and has printed off all the recipes.

I kinda feel Jamie is cooking from the heart with this series and I think it will help a lot of people eat well and I'm sure it will give some confidence to those who perhaps have not cooked very much before. All the meals are balanced, tasty and not overly complicated, here is a quick pancake dish. I wouldn't say every recipe is for me but my goodness I will be making a few and I'll let you folks know how I get on. Some of his cooking and thrifty tips are just as good as the concept cookery. His way of making an integral white sauce is very clever, time saving and energy saving and the best, less washing up. It's made me re-evaluate how I cook and how even though I think I know it all, I can still learn more. The Mr has a fresh lemon drink every morning and now he has to zest the washed peel for me and put it in the freezer, because it is great for adding to my roasted vegetable cous cous and will also be great for cake mixes and other things. More taste less waste and no extra cost. (Apologies for my text being a little squashed up but Blogger is playing me up at the moment).

House & Garden Creatures

When we bought our house a few years back we inherited a massively overgrown garden which has been very difficult and dare I say it expensive to control. Over the colder months we have had a really nice chap coming to us who has broken the back of the work. He is also an aquatic expert which means he has been able to tackle the large pond at the bottom of the front garden. Last Summer it was almost impossible to see any water. It took him weeks to drain it and remove years worth of sludge and I did worry that the wildlife would miss out this year because it had been totally emptied.

I need not have worried because the newly grown lush young pond plants are chock-a-block with frogspawn and the water is alive with hoards of frogs. Let's hope Miss Mittens doesn't cotton on.

My Angel Flew To Another

Alas the bidding started high. She sold for £600 plus 30% commision and VAT. Above my budget but she is probably worth the money.

Charity Shops A Force For Good

 

Caroline Jones

When this lovely lady lost her Mum to breast cancer back in 2014 she decided it would be a fitting tribute to only buy and wear charity shop clothes for a year, and simultaneously raise funds for Cancer Research UK, through 'Just Giving'. Her plan was to raise £1000, but news of her campaign grew and eventually she raised £68,000. Isn't that amazing and doesn't she look fab?

I love buying pre owned clothes and items, I've done it all my adult life, and the best bit is not knowing what you might stumble on. Of course it also means you can sell things on yourself  too when you want to ring the changes. I'm not a massive consumer but I do try and only buy things that I think I will use for years or things that I feel I might be able to sell on later and get my money back, or perhaps even make a small profit. At the moment I'm compiling a list of items I have loved but now longer have such an interest in. I'm also eyeing up an 18th century carved softwood Angel that is being auctioned tomorrow. Wish me luck with that. The difficulty with auctions is setting your upper limit and not going beyond that. I tend to set an upper amount in my mind, then maybe go one bid above that. I'll let you know how I get on.

One of the fantastic bloggers I follow, Ann also known as The Polyester Princess has turned the search for pre loved clothing and accessories into an art form, click here to visit her colourful blog, and see just how good you can look in second hand clothing. She is a total inspiration.

Currently there are more than 10,000 charity shops in the UK, raising more than £363 million for good causes. Customers come from all walks of life and naturally are looking for different things. Some folk are on a tight budget, some are looking for quirky or one off items, some are looking for craft materials and the latest incarnation is the sustainability shopper. This is all fantastic news for us all and most importantly for the planet.

Items that don't sell are passed on to a network of recyclers and partner organisations who turn CDs into plastic pellets, unwanted fabric into mattress filling, books into cardboard sheeting etc. Even unwanted bric a brac is shipped abroad.

Vintage clothing takes on a different connotation but can still be purchased at a reasonable price, and truthfully are really inter-changeable. Back in the day when I was a student I would often go to Portobello Market and Camden Lock to buy unusual vintage eye catching outfits, yes, I've always been a show off. I remember being inspired by Annie Hall.

I had a Kangol chocolate brown beret instead of the black hat.

Lots of A listers also wear Vintage now for their  red carpet walk. This pleases me greatly because it means that the younger generation will get on board with this no waste, pre-loved clothing ethos.

Rhinna wearing a dress by John Galliano for Dior's 2002 collection

The idea of a no waste world makes my heart sing.

My Brush With The Bard - Part Three - Marie Corelli

 I have a great fondness for eccentric folk, most especially women. Discovering the Mitford sisters many years ago was a great joy. One that led me eventually to a move to Derbyshire, where during the late 20th century the baby of the family, Deborah became the Duchess of Devonshire. What an absolutely fabulous life she led.

I was therefore, delighted when our Stratford Upon Avon tour guide Owen, not a stranger to flamboyance and eccentricty himself, told us all about a famous local lady who was kind and eccentric in equal measure.

Marie Corelli as she was known locally was in fact born Mary Mackay in 1855, she moved to SUA in 1899. She was a very successful writer of romantic novels and earned a huge fortune in the process. Marie by all accounts a diminutive figure lived with her companion of forty years Bertha Vyver who towered above her. When Marie died she left everything she owned to Bertha.

I think these two pics of Marie are quite charming revealing her artistic nature. She seemed to have a happy and fulfilled life and set her sights on spreading the love.

She was a conservationist long before it was a recognised thing and indeed a great philanthropist. She did so much for SUA to conserve and protect it using her own funds and she was instrumental in setting up organisations to sustain her good works. The local children also benefited from her generosity as she paid for 1000s of outings and trips to the circus, theatre and parks for them.

She lived a big life, she even had her own mini gondola made, complete with authentic gondolier, so she could cruise the local waterways in style. Owen showed us the secret tunnel she had in the local park, that saved her from prying eyes when she and said gondolier forayed forth.

What a kind and wonderfully eccentric lady.

If you want to read more about Marie click here.

Snow Snow Sun Cat Snow

 

View of our garden from the bedroom window after 24 hours of snow. The forecast is for more snow tomorrow, we've been invited to a posh do so not sure if we will make that. Just now the sun has emerged and it's sunny and bright. So you never know.

As the snow is melting huge chunks are falling from the roof, scaredy cat Miss Mittens is so fearful she ran at full pelt off our bed and into the washing basket.

My Brush With The Bard - Part Two

 Shakespeare looks down on us from his lofty perch surrounded by some rather magnificent bronzes, this is the Gower Memorial positioned alongside the very pretty canal boats and swan filled waterways in the centre of town, a five minute stroll from our guest house.

Taking in the tourist walk around Stratford Upon Avon, which was wonderful btw, we heard and saw all things Shakespeare, including bizarrely some donated lamp posts, one of which featured Bottom from  Midsummer Night's Dream. Click here to read all about this national and international friendship.

A number of these lamps were situated near or in the RSC gardens which are behind the Theatre. A walk through the small park led me to the early Holy Trinity Church, where The Bard is buried alongside his wife Anne and other family members, although not his young son Hamnet, who sadly is buried we know not where. 

The older I get the more I like to visit churches, the interiors are usually blessed with a very peaceful quality and quite often offer some beautiful stained glass and wonderful architectural features.

This church, where Shakespeare was baptised and worshipped dates from 1210, with later additions.

I was intrigued as always by the strange wooden carvings on the seats found on each side of the chancel, these particular ones were carved around 1460. Such wondrous beasties.

The Shakespeare family graves are very shallow at only three feet deep, and the bodies were wrapped in cloth rather than being placed in a coffin. They are situated very close to and facing the high alter.  Interestingly Shakespeare's grave has a curse carved atop the stone. Hopefully you can click on the image and read it.

We did hear a tale of the skull of William Shakespeare being stolen from his grave by 18th century grave robbers. The graves were scanned a few years back and findings were inconclusive, although it does appear the skull is not there? Tales of a skull in another church 15 miles away, long thought of to be his, has been identified as a woman in her seventies. The mystery deepens. Maybe Anne's skull, stolen in error?

I think I will be visiting Stratford again, plenty to still do and see and of course always a new season of plays. 

I'll be back with a story about a rather famous and eccentric female resident of Stratford who I had never heard of, who did much to preserve the historic town. Only a tad late for International Women's Day.

My Brush With The Bard - Part One

 

I'm not really one for taking masses of photos, I normally prefer just to enjoy the moment of experience. But on my recent visit to Stratford Upon Avon I saw a number of things I would like to share with you my blogging chums, simply because I think they might interest you. Firstly the cake at the top of this post is obviously just to get your attention and yes I feel it has worked very well.

The rest of the pics in this post are from the house where Shakespeare was born in 1564. It's such an amazing dwelling, because of its age of course, but because he truly popped into this world in an upstairs room, a room that I was able to stand in. His family lived in the house for many years and he spent his early years there, attending a school just around the corner, which you can also visit.

It goes without saying that the contents of the house are not the originals, the house has been many things over the years, a school, a public house etc But what you see is original to the 16th century. Remarkable. 

The house has always attracted folk who share the love of Willaim Shakespeare and during the 19th century it became a fashionable thing for visitors making the pilgrimage to etch their  name on the panes of his bedroom window. A kind of homage to the great man. The last image shows the panes that are still in the room, but not actually in the window frames anymore. The earliest recorded date on the window is 1806.

Famous names written on the glass include the Scottish writer Walter Scott, the philosopher Thomas Carlyle: and two great Shakepeare actors, Ellen Terry and Henry Irving.

It felt like a very special place, a house with gravitas, you could feel the importance of it in the air. I was so glad to have walked through its doors. 

World Book Day Winner

 

This was on my Twitter feed as the 'child who won the internet'. I'm afraid I don't know the identity of the person who took the photo. But I unreservedly applaud the parent who coming back home late from work the night before World Book Day was told, I need a costume for school tomorrow.

We've all been there.