Weekly Meal Plan - August 3rd, 2020

How exciting! My first actual meal planning post.  Pull up a chair 😊

I've been meal planning on and off for years.  I have found certain things either drive you to meal plan or allow you to "ease off the accelerator" and wing it a little more.  When I've had my winging it times, I know from personal experience that we suffer the consequences.  Our costs go up, meals become less healthy and Steven and I become more grumpy!  

Therefore I hope that this blog, along with it's Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest pages will ensure our winging it days become less and less, helping you along the way too.  

Having said that (!!!) I am only human and on the days when the inevitable happens, I'll share the outcomes of that too.

There's so many fantastic YouTube channels out there, many of which I use for inspiration.  As I create content for this social media channel I will share my own videos too, though it will most likely be via our smallholding channel. 

Ok friends, I'll stop wittering on now.  August 3rd week's meal plan on my new frugal whiteboard that I LOVE looks like this:  

Monday - Meatloaf with Potatoes, roasted courgette and tomatoes

Tuesday – Left over chicken salad with dressing & crusty bread (ended up as chicken korma as it was a cold day and we needed something hot to warm us up)

Wednesday – Taco bar - slow cooker taco meat

Thursday – Steak fajita bowls

Friday - Chicken korma, boiled rice, naan and mint yoghurt - (After swapping with Tuesday, it will be the humble jacket potatoes with choice of filling instead).

Saturday - BBQ - Ste cooks on a Saturday and ironically never knows what he will do until the day!

Sunday –   Roast chicken dinner with Yorkshire puddings and home grown veg 

Every week we have a soup of the week (SOTW) and this week is traditional pea and ham using a smoked gammon joint in the Slow Cooker Crockpot.  The recipe is here.

As I can, I'll come back and update with recipe details and photos of how the meals turned out so keep checking back on these "older" posts.

Here we can see I am perfectly relaxed whilst Steven gets on with the BBQ.  Mum's need a day off too ;)

Slow Cooker / Crockpot BBQ Meatloaf

My recipe for BBQ Meatloaf is adapted from largefamilytable.com and I have to be honest with you, this was the first time I have ever eaten, let alone cooked meatloaf.  As a 39 year old woman, don't be shocked and give up on me just yet at this revelation.

Ingredients

• 1 lb minced (ground) beef
• 1 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
• 1 large egg
• 1 cup chopped veggies (I used onions, courgette, and bell peppers)
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp minced garlic
• 1 tsp onion powder
• 1 tsp parsley
• 1 tsp oregano
• BBQ sauce

Instructions

Mix all ingredients together by hand. Take your time with this and be sure everything is combined well.
Form into a loaf shape.
If preparing ahead for the freezer, place in a freezer bag and freeze until the night before you are ready to use them. Thaw in fridge overnight.
Place meatloaf in slow cooker and spread barbecue sauce over the top.
Cook on HIGH for 4 hours or LOW for up to 8 hours. Careful not to burn. It'll still taste nice if you do...I'm not telling you how I know that ;)
I served ours with buttered potatoes and roasted courgette and tomatoes.  Delish!

Enjoy!

Slow Cooker / Crockpot pea and ham soup

I urge you to try this slow cooker, crockpot recipe.  If you like your pea and ham soup, this recipe is for you.  It tastes even better when it is cold outside, that's a promise ;)  I made this in between getting the kids up and doing the animals early one morning.  I was so pleased it took next to no time to put together!.

Ingredients

• Small smoked gammon joint.
• 2 peeled potatoes, cubed.
• 2 large white onions, chopped.
• 3 cloves garlic, minced.
• 1kg frozen garden peas.
• Water

Instructions

Put the garlic, onions, peas, raw potato and gammon in to the Slow Cooker.  Put the potatoes and gammon in first, unlike me as you can see below!  Don't forget to remove the protective layer off the gammon, saves you doing it at the end and burning yourself.

Pour in enough water to cover the gammon 1/2 way - more if you like thinner, less if you prefer a thicker soup.

Cook on high setting for 4 hours or low for 8.

Remove the gammon and trim off any fat before shredding with two forks.

Blitz the soup into the consistency you prefer and put the shredded gammon back in, combine.

Season to taste serve in a soup bowl with a little of the shredded gammon to garnish.

To make a less healthier version, add cream at blending and a little cream to drizzle before adding the gammon garnish but the truth be told, I really don't think it needs it.

This recipe freezes well, I use plastic containers and label them with a marker.  They stack well in the freezer.

Hello and welcome! Can you meal plan your way to financial freedom?

Hi lovely people.  

I've got the kettle on.  Come and have a seat at my farmhouse kitchen table and get a warm next to the Aga whilst I introduce myself and my family.

I'm Tracy, wife to Steven and mother to Grace (13) and Jack (10). Both Steven and I work full time and run a smallholding which is our beautiful family home too.  We are born and raised in the North East of England and have lived here on the smallholding since January 2016 and love absolutely everything about it.  We are also lucky enough to have extended family who live close by and (covid/lockdown allowing) we see frequently.

As I'm sure is the same for you, we are always busy with something or other.  If we are not dashing around to school, work or days out with the kids, we are firmly planted on the smallholding (pun intended) raising our livestock and growing our own food.  Oh not to mention doing everything else that us humans do, cooking, cleaning, washing.....this is making me tired just typing!  

In my years of experience, one thing I have learnt for us to be successful is that life needs organising. By successful I don't mean anything other than have a smooth running of this place, food on the table and a comfortable home with happy and healthy inhabitants.  Being organised also doesn't mean take the fun out of things or running an inflexible military operation.  It does mean we have to be organised or things slip and don't get done, which can have negative outcomes depending on what it is.  Not having matching socks doesn't matter as much as having no food prepped/available for the evening meal, which may lead to eating out ruining our budget etc etc.  Forgetting to feed the animals is not acceptable where as forgetting to write 'bleach' on the shopping list is.  You see where I'm coming from?

As we move in to 2021 we will be making our usual plans and dreams for the coming year, one of which is already decided upon.  That leads me to this new blog.  Meal planning our way to financial freedom.  Crazy woman?  Bear with me.

Steve and I don't want to work for someone else for the rest of our working lives.  Many people don't.  Why do we have to work?  To bring in an income.  Why?  We have chosen a lifestyle choice and to have a mortgage.  To pay the mortgage we need to work and continue to earn at least one of our wages just to settle the bills every month.  So why doesn't one of us quit and the other just work?  Well then what would we do if hard times hit, we would have no plan b.  Right now, we have a plan b, one of us goes down, the other steps up and we adapt.

However ideally, we don't want to be tied to that for the remainder of our mortgage term.  

Without dwelling too much and boring you all senseless, we have given ourselves 10 years to pay our 27 year mortgage off.  There's that crazy word again.  

Well we don't HAVE to, we WANT to. Financial freedom in one respect.  Security in another?  There's many varying reasons as to why people would want to pay their mortgage off early.  Maybe you can relate this, maybe it's not a mortgage for you, maybe you want to save money for one reason or another, or simply you just need to figure out how to meet your current mortgage/rent demands.  One thing is for sure, times are really hard for many right now.

In the 4 years or so we have lived here, one thing we have managed to do, which is helping us save towards overpaying the mortgage, is reduce our grocery budget significantly.  From around £600 a month (I'm aware this is spending stupid money from not being organised, buying on a whim and eating out!) to what I think is a reasonable £300 a month.  The only way I have found to do this is planning.  Meal planning, freezer planning and planning your grocery shop.  Meal planning can be reverse planning, which I'll talk about in another post or standard planning (ie planning ahead).  Without sitting down and planning my family's meals out, I wouldn't be able to have a grocery budget of £300.  I refer to this sitting down time as one of my "Kitchen Tasks".  So this blog isn't just (or even mostly) about paying the mortgage off, it's about what we are doing with the grocery and grocery related bills to reduce them and to use those savings to over pay on the mortgage.

Other people will want to reduce their grocery budget for another reason or maybe you don't want to reduce your budget, maybe you struggle with meal ideas and would like to start planning.  Thinking of ideas to cook each day or for the freezer can be overwhelming.

Maybe my blog can help.  What you can expect in the coming posts is to join me at our Farmhouse Kitchen Table and I'll share how I manage all of these activities and my other Kitchen Tasks!  Including weekly menu plans, shopping lists, grocery hauls and related budgets.  Get insight in to our lives and follow our journey to financial freedom with regular updates on everything  I hope you find some useful or inspiring information here and even if not, I'd love for your support as we take on this next chapter in our lives.  Transparent, real life going on here!  Now, final comment for today, remember I said I live on a smallholding (homestead)?  My Aga is my favourite part of the kitchen and in the spirit of the transparency I mentioned, here's me working around a poorly duck at my Aga.

Isn't she beautiful :)

Please leave me a comment below if you're new here (everyone is, it's a new blog!) as I would love to get to know you.  

Bye for now, Tracy x

Moving house....not for us ;) but why have we had to move our ducks?

You will see on our recent YouTube video that our ducks are now in our paddock area.  They were being bullied over food by the laying hens would you believe?  Now if you watch the video, excuse the accent, I hate how I sound sometimes :)  Also I think I sound a little arrogant in places which is definitely not meant to be the case :) as I hope you guys would know.

Anyway, the ducks and hens.  They all got along famously when food wasn't involved but the poor ducks were too polite for their own good and despite being 3 or 4 times the weight of our brown hens, they didn't get goaded in to fighting over food and we were having to make allowances for how to feed them.

Round here we need things to run smoothly and efficiently, so this wasn't an option.  We can't have the ducks not getting enough food and we don't have spare time to stand round and hand feed them (every day at least ;) )     

 

Naturally, Rodney helped.

 

So Steven set about with his pallets, hammer and nails, found some roofing that you are sometimes lucky enough to have lying around on a smallholding and made them a lovely duck house that will most definitely stand the test of time! 

 

Whilst we worked on this, the ducks were still in the orchard (where they lived with the chickens) but we soon moved them in to the paddock once their house was ready.

In the paddock there is an area which naturally dips and collects water so we have added a pond liner to it and filled it up with rain water.  If you don't know already, ducks make everything filthy in no time!  The pond is no exception.  The good thing with this is (the theory anyway) that we can empty and refill it by tipping the liner out.  It's not very deep at all.  We will let you know!

Rodney and Buster thought it was great fun!

We would like the ducks to stay in the paddock area.  We don't want them getting any ideas about swimming off down the river! They have plenty of space, water and food here but I'm sure we'd still lose them given the chance.  So the next project, before we moved the ducks in actually, was to chicken wire the bottom of the post and rail fence that runs round the paddock.  We worked together and the weather was kind to us; it didn't take too long and another  good job done.

The ducks were soon investigating their new home and seemed to give it the bill of approval (sorry, couldn't resist!!)

Life moves on here, exciting times and a growing flock. I can't wait to see the egg results when these ducks are all laying, imagine all the things I can make with soooo many duck eggs.  They are my complete favourite animal.

Recipe - Slow Cooker - pea and ham soup

This is SUCH a delicious soup, please try it once if never again!  In the slow cooker too, double win.

Ingredients

• Small smoked gammon joint.
• 2 peeled potatoes.
• 2 large white onions.
• 3 cloves garlic.
• 1kg frozen garden peas.
• Water

Instructions

Put the garlic, onions, peas, raw potato and gammon in to the Slow Cooker.  Put the potatoes and gammon in first, unlike me!

Pour in enough water to cover the gammon 1/2 way - more if you like thinner, less if you prefer a thicker soup.

Cook on high setting for 4 hours or low for 8.

Remove the gammon and trim off any fat before shredding with two forks.

Blitz the soup into the consistency you prefer and put the shredded gammon back in, combine.

Season to taste serve in a soup bowl with a little of the shredded gammon to garnish.

To make a less healthier version, add cream at blending and a little cream to drizzle before adding the gammon garnish but the truth be told, I really don't think it needs it.

Riverbank arrangements / shortest For Sale ever

No, we haven't moved to the riverbank 😂

We have though, taken the house off the market.  We are no longer for sale.  In a nutshell, it just wasn't the right thing to do for us, at this time of our lives and with what we are fortunate enough to already have.  The reasons we moved to this small smallholding and the offerings it gives us, haven't changed.  Our requirements haven't changed one bit.  They are still all around moving to a more (not total) self sufficient, self reliant and enjoyable lifestyle.  

Our knowledge and experience has grown vastly and we got a little carried away with ideas that yes would work, but just were not worth losing our family home for, to move to a place and leave our hearts behind in this home.  Whilst the option is ours, we shall be staying here.  Instead of looking to move to more land whilst working full time for local and corporate companies, we are now (and always were to be fair) continuing to develop what we have here, making our family's mark on the house, making the most of the land, raising livestock and loving life.  So onwards we go!  That takes us to the riverbank.  

Can you believe we have been sat on 0.6 acres (yes, ALLLL THAT) of land on the riverbank and have done nothing with it since we lived here except plant a couple of trees.  That said, we did have to fence it off to stop the horses going for a swim and to prevent the cattle from the neighbouring field crossing the river to eat our grass during the dry months.  You can see the fence on the left and the river (our of shot) on the right.

So we (the royal we) set to and strimmed 80% of it.  20% we won't talk about as it involves a broken strimmer and naughty words.

Below is the before and after.  Not to detract from the cracking job Steven did, but isn't the sky amazing on the after shot?

For completeness, here's a shot from the other way :) to which the horses wanted part of the action.

Next up, fencing was needed to stop the sheep rolling in to the river.  If anyone's would, it'd be ours.  Funnily enough, this stage too included a lot more choice words and I knew it was a day to not voice my opinion but to smile, nod and pass the (insert tool name).  Fencing round here has always been wooden circular posts and either stock fencing which we use tensioners on or post and rail.  Depends what it's to keep in or out.  The ground is very stony and putting posts in can be an ordeal.  However the river bank, not surprisingly, was fairly soft.  Knowing this would be too good to be true, we waited for the inevitable problem to show its face.  And I'm a positive person, so that shows you what fencing can be like!

Said problem arose when we tried to use Clipex fence posts, which we felt very much like we were proper farmers for using.  Sod being like proper farmers, who have proper machines.  Now I know Ste can work like a machine but even he threw down the towel after the first afternoon of trying to use the sodding fence posts, finally retiring to the kitchen and a Jack Daniels mumbling some more of those words I cannot type.

We don't have machines here, almost everything is manual, almost.

Next day, Ste set about after a night of "thinking about it" and he took Jack, our youngest with him as I remembered I had some really important tasks to do.....

I dared venture down to check on them/fish Ste out of the river later that day and low and behold, what was complete?

A whole brand new fence, the full length of the river bank, made to last the test of time!  OK so a few wooden posts were used which we risk needing to be replaced if they rot, should the river rise, but we (again, royal) are happy to do that as and when needed!  Doesn't it look amazing?

OK so why is it even needed? 0.6 acres of land?  To rotate and graze our sheep on and yey, we have them on it now!!  Of course they chose to stand in the 20% but that fits in around here.  They have safely been on a couple of weeks now.  It's a whole other story about how we got them on there and secured them in, which funnily enough included yet more of those funny words ;)

Life is an adventure here and we wouldn't change it for the world :)

(PS Grace is helping me with editing and posting now, she does this to learn what it's like to work a few hours (she's paid) and to help me out, so these posts may appear during the working day for me which is when she might be helping)