This weeks insourcing #11....my value in the home...

 

I've been deliberately off-line for a few days, in order to have more 'doing' and less 'talking about doing'. This might sound odd, but sometimes in the enforced urgency of blogging, it seems that it's more important to post what you've done, than it is to actually do.

 

So I am proud that I had a really productive week last week. I shopped frugally and found lots of lovely inexpensive but good quality produce at the fruit market. I spent enough there to avail myself of their loyal customer offer, getting some lovely mandarins gifted with a smile.

 

From that produce I was able to make the equivalent of 10 bought containers of Eggplant and Roasted Pumpkin Baba Ghanoush (recipe on here tomorrow), 6 jars of lemon butter, 10 prepared and portioned ziplock bags of vegetables (celery, broccoli, zucchini, capsicum, beans), several trays of roasted tomato and roasted capsicum, roasted two trays of snake beans with chilli and salt..these are a delicious crunchy, salty, spicy snack, made ten snack bags with veges and chicken slivers, and crumbed some veal steaks with GF crumbs made from the crust ends of the loaves. This makes a small portion of meat really big and satisfying. I add grated parmesan to the crumbs for a nice robust flavour. This is where those little 'luxury' items like parmesan cheese, really make the meal. I'm mentally trying to calculate the retail version of all that, and I'm coming up with insane figures based upon the price of all that in the supermarket and deli. I'm going to say $5 each on the Baba Ghanoush (they're actually $7.50 in the posh deli and a smaller container!), the same on the lemon butter and ditto on the real price, portioned and prepped veges are $5 each all day every day, snacks and snack bags...well you can't buy them, but lets say $5 saving on things like sushi, chips and so on, parmesan crumbed veal sells for $32.99 a kg at my local butcher, so $20 there. So around $150 saved on similar bought items, and that's with the price of the ingredients subtracted.

 

I made and froze lentil and vegetable soup with all the endy bits of veg that were on the way out, and made peanut butter cookies with Teff flour I found in the pantry (a random GF purchase), sandwiching them with cinnamon icing. They were a success, but we all agreed we weren't that fond of the flavour of the Teff flour, so I'll have to find another way to use the rest of it up. It was expensive so I don't really want to just toss it. I recall buying it to make a pastry I found in a book, so perhaps I need to unearth that book!  Lentil soup is $8 for a 500ml sachet in the supermarket, and I made about 6 litres. So there's $96 worth there and GF treats are ridiculously expensive at around $4 per cookie, so $60 worth there. So again, subtract the price of the ingredients and I've created meals and treats valued at around $150, if I were to purchase them ready made.

 

I planted herb seedlings out, including basil, coriander, garlic chives and some shallot ends...the green things that is...they will of course grow from the end white bit with the roots dangling off it. The value there is around $15 a week. We love fresh herbs and add them to everything, so it's a substantial spend to buy them.

 

I started crocheting fringe for my version of a Moroccan Wedding Blanket, and starting stitching sequins to the bed cover I'm using for that project, which I've had for about thirty years! You can see Annabels crocheted version here. One the size I am embellishing costs anything up to $1500, so that's a biggie.

 

I also made lentil burgers one night, baking the GF bread rolls myself...scrummy....and baked four loaves of GF bread, which is so much nicer than the awful spongy stuff you buy. A saving on bought GF rolls of $9 and a huge saving of $28 on the bread. Subtract the price of the bread mix at $9, and I've still saved $28.

 

All up, I value my efforts at $1843 this week!

 

So a really good week for me, and the reason not much happened with my blog all week....lol!

 

Still...doing is better than writing about doing!

 

Please share your insourcing achievements. I love hearing about what everyone is up to!

 

...Mimi...