Frugal Living. - Batch Cooking/Menu planning. /recycling stuff…

At the moment I’m trying to get into more batch cooking, I don’t tend to cook for the freezer, but if that’s your thing; it’s a great idea. It certainly saves lots of money, fuel and time. We don’t eat a lot of the kind of meals that are good for batch freezing. But what I am doing at the moment is sort of the same thing… almost.

The weather here at the moment is glorious, its turned HOT… the last few days have been around 24-28 degrees… and its lovely, our pool is cleaned and up and running, (we have lovely Dutch guests from this blog actually and they are enjoying a daily swim.)

Add to this the fact that I’m busy in the veggie garden now and we are a tad low on wood… so I am planning our meals with great care, two or three days at a time, and then lighting the range, cooking tons, and then we don’t have to light it or cook for a few days…

For example, tomorrow early morning while its cool, we’ll light the range, and I’ll bake 3-4 loaves of Soda Bread, put two in the freezer, I’m going to make a huge bowl of potato salad, one of rice salad, and some pasta salad. A large quiche, which I’ll cut in half and freeze in separate bags, and also boil a few eggs.

Combine that lot with various things like the odd tin of tuna and it will feed us for days…

We have lettuce ready in the garden, and I even splashed out 88cents on a few tomatoes today, so we can have salad too…

I don’t reckon I’ll have to cook again before Tuesday…Wednesday, if I’m lucky.

In this warm weather we tend to eat whatever is cool and easy… Its really turned warm early this year, generally I don’t think it’s this warm for quite a few weeks yet… it was very welcome though…



I’m also busy cutting up my tetra paks that our milk comes in… those damn cartons are such a pain… I know you can send them to the recycling bins, but I do try to reuse them in anyway I can really. At the moment, I’m opening them out and cutting them up into a sort of fringe shape, then hanging them from the olive trees… hehehe they are shiny inside and act as a great bird deterrent for the veggie patch…



We try to recycle as much as possible, we generally end up with one rubbish bag a month, which I feel isn’t too bad. All our compostable waste is either on the heap like coffee grounds, tea bags, weeds etc. Eggshells are saved for a few days to dry out and then I crumble them around my veggie patch to deter slugs and snails. All food waste goes into the dogs, table scraps which isn’t often, all my veggie peelings are cooked up for them too… so nothing wasted there, cabbage stump is Beesa’s fave snack…



All glass bottles are washed and kept as I’m planning, lots of fruit liqueurs, plus Elderflower champagne, and some syrups this year, glass jars are saved for preserves.

We have a plastic recycling bin which gets empted whenever we go to town, as does the tetrapak one if I’ve not used them for other stuff, I washed a few and froze juice in them, they pack nicely like bricks in the freezer.

All paper and cardboard is burnt on the range, and all our ash goes back onto the land…

The main thing I have a problem finding things to do with, is, the thin wispy plastic cling film type stuff and the same wispy bags you get given stuff in from supermarkets… we don’t get much of it, but it’s a problem. At the mo, I’ve been washing it and using it to stuff draft excluders … I’ve also been told you can wash it and knit washable door mats etc with it… hmmmm not sure about that. Rick already thinks I’m crazy as I have a use, wash, and rotate system with the freezer bags…

As we get all kinds of scrap stuff from the butcher for the dogs, it has to be frozen… and sometimes although its fresh, its unpleasant looking stuff… and I didn’t want to use my freezer bags which would be washed and reused for our food for this …

So I’ve worked out a system… he thinks I’m barmy…

Any yoghurt pots or plastic ice-cream cartons, loo roll cardboard kind of stuff is used for seedlings in the little housie. That sort of covers it really.