Sloe poke

Bottling sloe gin is normally done in the winter - preferably in time to enjoy the fruits of your not-labour at Christmas. But better late than never - I've been periodically looking at, gently agitating and thinking of these beautiful jewel-coloured jars since October when I picked the fruit and had my first go at liqueurs.

Tonight I had a first go at bottling two of the three and I learned the following:

• Logically, to the initial alcohol you have added sugar and fruitness, both of which increase the volume - I have been astonished at how much gin came out of the jar, given how much went in. Note to self - get more bottles than you think you need.
• Bottling fruit liqueurs is best not started at 10PM on a weeknight. It takes time for the drip-drip-drip slow separation of alcohol from fruit (as though they are only parting reluctantly, having had such a great roadtrip together these crazy months from clear, transparent liquid through faintly pink to deep amethyst.)
• Straining the fruit is easier if you can support the fruit and go away and leave it - standing holding the muslin full of fruit with your nose full of the smell is both tantalising and boring.
• In view of both of the above points, it is better to bottle one liqueur at a time and not attempt two or three at the same time.

However, don't let this put you off. Standing at 11.30PM watching a slightly mesmeric process still beats the leather pants off watching Strictly Come Dancing, so I'm still pretty pleased with my evening's work. And ultimately, this will be a rich harvest for a pleasant autumn walk and a couple of brief kitchen sessions. You could genuinely spend more time designing a label for your gin than actually making it. Though I will invest in some more bottles and consider how to construct a means to hang the bag overnight in the future. (As well as design some proper labels).

I can't wait for the tasting. In the meantime, I think I need to find a better place than under the kitchen sink so I can frequently look on and admire this store cupboard staple!

Frugal brewing

Making things yourself saves you money - some of the time. To be honest, if you buy a pattern and good quality fabric to make a dress, it ends up being more expensive than something from a cheap shop. Better quality, and better value for money, but more expensive upfront.

When we started brewing our own beer, I thought it would be the same. A fun activity that gets us off the sofa, a new skill, and one that would over time save us money but would be more expensive for the first years.

Not so. We have just bottled our second batch of beer, and my boyfriend has kept rigorous records of everything we have bought - ingredients, equipment, bottles... Our beer currently works out at €2,25 per 33cl bottle. Which is already cheaper than craft beer in the stops. I am very pleasantly surprise to find that our homemade beer so, well, frugal.

We are finding more ways to make homebrewing more frugal. Re-using the bottles from beer we drink, rather than buying bottles. Did you know you can 'wash' yeast after a brew and re-use it for a total of up to ten batches? And now I find myself with a bowl full of hops - with the most delicious smell. I can't bear to just chuck them in the bin, they smell amazing. Reuses for hops, anyone? I'm thinking to try them out and make a sleep-inducing herb pillow or pot pourri for the bedroom.

First adventures in brewing

So after drinking a lot of craft beer, attending a demonstration and generally thinking to ourselves 'this could be fun', we finally took the plunge and braved our first brew over the weekend.

There are many things that attract both of us to homebrewing. We both really enjoy good quality beer, and we like the people that we meet when seeking out craft beer bars and shops, visiting breweries and generally sharing this small pleasure. It's a very friendly, welcoming community - people want to share their love of brewing and drinking good beer, and encourage you to have a go. It very much fits in with our general philosophy of prioritising quantity over quality, and it supports our frugal living efforts because it's a fair bit cheaper to brew beer than buy it. Plus it of course appeals to me as another traditional craft to learn, a part of the traditional farmhouse's ordinary routine, and a very local activity and product.

I found a local supplier of homebrew kits and we went along to explore. To our delight we found the shopowner is a keen brewer, and spent a fair bit of time talking us through different options and advising us on where to start (which was essentially start with the simplest option and then add new steps gradually.) He also does demonstration days. It makes such a difference when starting out on a new challenge to know that we can call him up if we have any questions or if things go wrong.

We came home weighted down with some basic equipment and our first kit beer. There are three kinds of brewing - brewing from kits, brewing with malt extracts and brewing with whole grains. The most authentic and the most difficult is the last, in which you boil or 'mash' malted grains to extract the sugars and flavourings, then boil this with hops and other flavourings, then allow to ferment. Malt extract allows you to skip the mashing process - you get a powder or syrup which you dissolve in water, then you boil with hops and flavourings and ferment. We are starting with the simplest brewing method - kit brewing - in which you get a syrup containing all the sugars and flavourings which you dissolve in water and then ferment with yeast.

Sounds simple, but there's a lot of sterilising and temperature measuring involved already, so it is definitely worth starting simple to familiarise yourself with the equipment, and with things like reading the 'original gravity' (a measure of the sugar content before brewing which can be compared with a measure of sugar content after brewing to calculate alcohol content).

This has the potential to be a very frugal hobby. We have invested in some basic equipment, but we have calculated that (provided the beer comes out ok and drinkable) it would be substantially cheaper to brew our own beer than to buy it - about €0.70 per 33cl bottle for beer made with a kit, potentially much lower with grain brewing. Ideally - fingers crossed - we will soon be able to produce as much beer as we want to drink, with enough to offer guests and give as gifts. This will either get us invited to all the local parties - or none!

Free slippers

It's been a grim August. It's grey and rainy, and because they can't figure out how to turn off the air conditioning at work, we're all sitting in front of our computers wrapped up in jumpers, jackets and even blankets against the cold. So just the weather for making a pair of slippers!

You may remember I found a HUGE number of old worn pairs of jeans in one of my boxes in the basement? I've been googling ideas for things to make with all that denim, and one of the projects I came across was a tutorial for making a pair of slippers out of old jeans and cardboard. Unfortunately I now can't find the link for the one I used but there are plenty more around t'internet!

It involved drawing around flip flops on cardboard, cutting them out and covering them with denim, then stitching them into the back pockets.

They are super comfy, super soft and super warm, which shouldn't really surprise me as they are made from lovely worn denim cotton, but it did surprise me nonetheless. I'm not sure how well they will wear, but I'm only intending to wear them around the house, they were totally free and they are 100% compostable. And I've got plenty of denim left to try making a second, stronger pair when these wear out!

I really enjoyed making these. In each effort to simplify life, I encounter complication after complication. (The latest is trying to make or find plain white cotton bedsheets. It would cost three times more to make them than to just buy fitted sheets, but that's really not what I'm looking for, but I can't justify paying three times the price...) 

This project is so simple. Easily completed in an evening after work from things that would otherwise go in the bin, this is satisfyingly frugal, green and creative all at the same time. A little thing making me disproportionately happy.

Jam jam jam

It's that time of year again - fresh fruit perfectly ripe on market stalls at silly prices. Jam time!

If you don't make jam, please please please give it a try. We've met people who think it's a huge, time-consuming, complex undertaking. Making jam is very straightforward and as long as you sterilise things, pretty safe. And there are three big advantages of homemade jam over shop-bought.

You can make it the way you like it. As with bread, pizza or any other food product, making it yourself means you can make it your way. You can try wacky flavour combinations, add nuts or spices, mix different fruits and go for exactly the sweetness level you want. We got so sick of shop jams with no pieces of actual fruit in, and now really enjoy making jam with big whole strawberries and chunks of peach floating around.

You know exactly what's in it. Homemade jam is fruit and sugar, and you control how much sugar you use. (We also add some lemon juice to help the set.)  There's no colourings, flavourings or preservatives, and if you want to, you could make it organic.

It's cheaper. This kind of surprised me, I figured that commercially-made jam would benefit from economies of scale and would work out cheaper than homemade, but no. It varies from fruit to fruit, of course, but our jams come in around €3-10 per kilo. That's with fruit from the market or the supermarket, I imagine it could be even cheaper with homegrown fruit.

Jam-making is a perfect Sunday afternoon activity, and we'll enjoy the sweet fruity taste of summer in the colder months.

The sewing machine has been a-whirring...

I've been taking full advantage of the shorter working hours this week as client work slows down for the holiday season. It helps that my boss is on holiday (at least in theory - she still works, but less than in a normal week) so the rate of task accumulation is much less, allowing me to clear my decks and tackle the 'rainy day' (or rather slow day) jobs like filing old emails.

I've been listening to a lot of background music this week, and my new discovery is Bella Harper. Thank you Deezer for your 'Hear This' section, I'm discovering some artists I really like through these recommendations. Check out her song 'Good Man's Wife' which you can listen to free and legally online here. (At least in Belgium - not sure how this works overseas...)

In addition to discovering new artists, I've been on a major sewing spree the last week or so. I've made a pair of pajama bottoms, from fabric I originally bought for a dress and then decided wasn't very... dress-like. I've got as much fabric again, and I'm toying between making a skirt for work which I can wear with blue and pink and purple jumpers this autumn (it's quite autumn-y isn't it?) and making another pair of pj bottoms for my sister, because the fabric reminds me so much of her somehow.

I finally got the pleats and darts right on the skirt I'm making from a pair of my boyfriend's wornout trousers. I'm now taking apart an old shirt of my boyfriend's which I salvaged from his last donation to the charity shop, and I'm going to make a skirt lining from the fabric. For those interested, the tutorial I am loosely following is on youtube here.

Remaining tasks after I make an inner skirt from the lining fabric are to attach the waistband, finally decide on the length, and decide what I'm going to do on the bottom hem. Ruffle? Plain? Lace? We shall see. I do feel ultra frugal with this skirt though - a custom-made skirt for work made from cast-offs? Even the thread I'm using to sew with is left over from the grey bedroom curtains. So far, the only cost is my time and the electricity to run the sewing machine.

What's working its way through your machine yet? Any projects you are planning? For me, I've got a very small and a very big project in mind... Any guesses?

Pots pots pots, or Container Gardening: Episode 1

As you may know, I have just bought a sample of seeds to start off my balcony garden. They arrived and I couldn't resist any longer - I planted some seeds after dinner this evening. SO EXCITING! I really really hope some of them will germinate. The next few weeks will be a little nerve-wracking.

As I don't compost my kitchen waste, I had to buy in the potting compost but I really didn't like the idea of buying plastic seed trays. A bit of googling threw up this fabulous tutorial on how to make seed pots from the inside of a toilet roll. I dug out all the toilet roll inners from the paper recycling and planted a selection of seeds.

Contrary to my expectations, the pots were super super quick and easy to put together. They're not perfect and some are uneven or a bit wobbly but they all seem to be standing up quite happily. The cardboard also seems to be great for wicking moisture up towards the top of the planting medium. The biggest hassle was trying to avoid spilling the teeny tiny seeds.

I will most definitely keep you posted on any visible progress here in the coming weeks. One thing is for sure, though - I am going to need more toilet roll.

And next up... Yoghurt!

Thank you all for your advice on my dilemma last week. I have decided on my next challenge. As I am struggling so much with limiting and organising my stuff, in the end I decided to go with the option which did not involve buying any new kit or any ingredients which would need to be stored. For yoghurt, I have everything I need already in the house except the milk, which is easy enough to pick up.

After much reading, I decided to try incubating the yoghurt in the oven overnight. I had a slight mishap when I added the yoghurt starter while the milk was still over 80 degrees... Funnily enough the starter separated and didn't look yoghurty anymore. I realised my error, and prepared another starter which I added after the yoghurt had cooled. The jar spent the night in a slightly warm oven wrapped in a towel, and I popped it in the fridge in the morning. And lo! it had set!

Please excuse me while I do a happy dance... This has rather made my day, it's been a long, stressful, busy, hectic couple of days and very far from either simple or slow. I've also been rather cross and crabby, and a bit snappy at everyone, so I'm pleased to discover that checking on my jar of yoghurt has raised my spirits and put me in a more positive frame of mind for tomorrow.

The real test is of course the taste - I have't opened the jar yet but will let you know the verdict when I do. I've also realised that I have unintentionally made more than twice as much yoghurt as I normally eat in a week, so I might just have to make some cheese to use up the rest. (Sigh. It's a hard life.)

How much is too much?

I'm struggling with a dilemma. I am chafing at the bit to start another 'bit' of simple living. I'm torn - yoghurt? a sourdough starter? ginger beer? soap? - and I'm also keen to avoid biting off more than I can chew. 

I know that at the moment I feel on top of the 'simple strands' I'm already doing but I know how easily, how quickly it can become overwhelming. You only need to skip a few days for things to feel heavy again. I really, really want the changes I made last month to last - not just another month, but for good. 

I'm holding back on several fronts to try to make sure I am progressing slowly and sustainably, but I also don't want to limit myself overmuch when I'm feeling so enthused by my simple living journey, when it seems to be 'taking off' and I'm beginning to really feel the positive feedback loops.

I'm considering several factors. Yoghurt probably involves the smallest outlay - I have everything except the milk - and the most immediate reward, but I know that once I start making my own yoghurt, I'll want to carry on. Another set of tasks to be encorporated into my routine. I don't want to end up eating croissant from the supermarket for breakfast simply because I've run out of homemade yoghurt (yes it has happened before when I ran out of homemade cereal) - that would undo so much progress.

Soap is another possibility. It's a much bigger challenge and I would need to buy most of the ingredients, but I could probably make 6-12 months' worth of soap in one batch. That's quite tempting. That's quite a result from an afternoon's work.

I've been meaning to get around to trying to make ginger beer for some time, and I have pretty much everything I need - apart from a cloth to cover the jar with. I keep meaning to crochet a doily from leftover cotton yarn but it's another one of those things that I never get round to.

Finally, I want to take on the next decluttering challenge. I've known what the next project is for a while. Last month I tackled my wardrobe head on - this month I want to tackle all the paperwork and stationery cluttering up cupboards and shelves. You wouldn't believe how much there is and how badly organised, and I'm determined to clear some space.

Ah. Indecision. What next? Or is it still too soon after my last changes, should I focus on consolidating them? Please tell me you also face the same tricky decision.

Vintage chocolate chip cookies

As some of you may know, I have been hitherto entirely failed to resist the chocolate chip cookies at work. They are terrible, industrial, mass-made biscuits that can last about a year in the packet. They don't even taste nice, they're just moreish.

Last month for the first time, I resisted the call of the biscuit jar all month. No cookies at work. (This doesn't apply to other biscuits, crisps, croissants... but I'm picking my battles - one at a time!) I'm keen to wean myself off this frankly addictive crap - eating real cookies is a far better option than the cardboard stuff from the supermarket. I wouldn't touch a plastic-wrapped cake or plastic-wrapped waffle - so why do I persist in eating plastic-wrapped biscuits?

So to reward my success and make the shop biscuit less appetising, it only seemed logical to bake chocolate chip cookies at home. I haven't made these for ages - if in fact I ever have, not sure - so I'm sure I'll have to bake a few batches before I perfect them. I used this recipe from BBC Good Food - it is called 'Vintage chocolate chip cookies', and I couldn't resist the vintage. I made them over the weekend and they disappeared very quickly, so this is definitely a recipe to be repeated!

Genius!

I was browsing through some old posts on Homestead Lady, which I have discovered through the weekly Homestead Barn Hop, and one Homestead Lady post links to this post over at Green Eggs and Goats on how to make your own knitting needles.

I kid you not.

 Image shamelessly stolen from Green Eggs and Goats

This has utterly blown my mind. Making my own clothes, spinning my own yarn, preparing my own fibres, even making my own drop spindle - all things I had thought of and researched, but never in my wildest dreams did I think it would be possible to make my own knitting needles.

These also look really easy and super cheap! I can't wait until the next time I need a pair of needles so I have an excuse to try this. And you get nice wooden ones too - I always get metal because they're cheaper but they are so heavily they often fall out of my work and that is deeply frustrating.

Yay for the internet. I wonder what I will discover next?

Experimenting

There's a lot of pressure that comes with trying to simplify. Not externally, but from ourselves. We look around at far more developed 'simple living' practices and feel that we're not doing enough. We look at the perfectly organised, minimalist cupboards and think guiltily of the topsy turvy pile of stuff at the back of the wardrobe. And every step can be fraught with not-good-enough not-fast-enough not-frugal-enough challenges. I'm really beginning to accept that this journey takes time, takes patience, and will also probably involve quite a few more tantrums.

This is why I really like Amanda Soule Blake's recent post about getting past her spinning block. We need to let go of the idea that everything must be perfect, and accept that learning and experimenting will mean some yarn that can't be used, some bread that can't be eaten, some clothes that can't be worn.

With this approach, I have this week vemtured my first ever attempt at making cheese. I found a recipe online that seemed the very simplest imaginable, in techniques, labour, ingredients and equipment. I am reluctant to invest money and space in a new kit before I know if this is a craft I will really use, but this recipe (Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, published in The Guardian) seemed very doable.

Basically, mix yoghurt with spices and leave to drain. That's kind of it. The main challenge was finding a set-up allowing this to drain in the fridge for several days. I used a mixing bowl and wooden spoon but think next time I'll use a jug (smaller surface area needed) and cover it with a bit of tin foil to prevent the whole fridge from smelling a bit yoghurt-y. (I actually quite like the smell - tangy - but my boyfriend was less enamoured).

This morning I took the cheese out and put it in a clean jar with some olive oil. I think maybe it should have drained a little longer, as it was still quite wet, and I think maybe I need to try different ways of packing it to reduce the amount of olive oil used.

I'm using the whey to bake bread. (I was thinking of trying to make ricotta with the whey but decided to tackle one challenge at a time. Maybe when I get the hang of this cheese I can start experimenting with the next one!

I've had a little taste, although I'm saving most of it to have with the bread rolls, and it's cheese more by texture than flavour. It's very gentle in taste and mostly a platform for the flavours used - salt, pepper, lemon zest. A little too much lemon and not enough pepper or salt in this first batch... I think plenty of experimentation is in order for this recipe - there are endless possible variations with different herbs and spices. Maybe with some cinnamon and honey, and then rolled in poppy seeds. Or chives and black pepper. Mmmm...

Any favourite combinations or other suggestions? Have I tempted you to have a go at this?

How homemade is it?

I’ve been pondering this question for a little while, after reading this post over at Taylor Made Ranch. How homemade is it?

We met up with some friends over the weekend. These friends are also living a simple life, although I don’t think they have defined it as such. They aspire towards having a farm or smallholding, they make the most amazing walnut wine, use cloth nappies with their small son, and knit lovely homemade gifts. (They gave me a fabulous hat for Christmas.) We were talking about how do-it-yourself and many of the old skills so often discussed, rehearsed and learned in the online simple living community - cooking from scratch, making your own cheese and so on.

We were discussing whether something is really homemade if you get a kit. If you don’t source and measure the ingredients yourself, but everything comes pre-measured, pre-washed, pre-prepared, and you just have to mix it and stick it into the oven. A posher version of instant cake mix.

I would see this approach as a stepping stone or halfway house. For instance, my little cousins make their own Christmas cake. They are able to do this at the age of 8 and 10 because they get a kit, with all the candied citrus and dried fruits included. When you’re learning - at whatever age - it’s a great way to get started, minimising your risk, your initial outlay, stacking the odds in favour of success.

But I think you should ideally want to move past this. If you are baking your own cakes but ALWAYS buy pre-measured kits, for years, then this feels a little like cheating. It also undermines the cost saving side of doing it yourself, which I feel is important.

However, how far should you take this? Where is the line? Is a half-baked loaf which you bought in the supermarket and finish off in the oven for ten minutes homemade? (By the way, whenever you see somewhere offering sandwiches or bread ‘baked in store/here’, this is what they mean.) I bake bread using flour, yeast, water and salt - but I don’t grind the flour myself, or grow the grain. The yeast is shop-bought, not a homegrown sourdough starter.

I frequently find myself wanting to take things ‘back’ a notch - to go from mending a jumper to knitting a jumper to dyeing the wool to spinning the yarn to carding the fleece to shearing the sheep… At what point is it homemade? It’s a sliding scale, rather than an either/or.

I sometimes feel that it’s not enough, I’m not doing enough of these things, but I keep reminding myself that as with a cake kit, it’s a stepping stone. My first cheese will probably be made from shop-bought yoghurt, but my second might be from homemade yoghurt using shop-bought milk, and maybe one day I will have a goat for milk in the back garden.

Stripy pajamas

After mending my pajamas for about the millionth time, I decided it was time for a new pair. But of course I couldn't quite muster the effort to go buy a sewing machine, so I made this pair of pjs by hand.

 

Hubble bubble...

How's this for kitchen witchery?

I'll never buy cereal again

I start most mornings, like so many people, with a bowl of cereal. I tend to pimp this up a bit by adding oats or seeds and raisins, but I've never made my own cereal before. While browsing blogs a while ago, I stumbled across this recipe for toasted muesli by Easy Peasy Organic.

It's taken me a while to get around to trying this out, but I'm a convert already. It took me about half an hour to make this batch, which is about half the volumes of the recipe. I reckon this would last me just over a week, and there are endless variations of nuts, seeds and dried fruit! This batch includes oats, ground almonds, linseeds and sunflower seeds, with prunes and raisins. I couldn't resist it and just had to try it, and I've found it tastes like a flapjack in a bowl - far from boring! 

Lavender Bath Bags

My crafty mojo has been sadly lacking recently. What I really needed was a simple, easy project whose benefits could be immediately enjoyed. I turned to Cheryl's how-to for Lavender Soap Scrubs over at Time to Craft. As I used mine for a luxurious long soak in the bathtub rather than a shower, I found myself thinking of them as bath bags.

If you haven't visited Time to Craft, you absolutely must - there are loads of easy crafty and baking tutorials, and most are designed to be done for or with children. So head on over there right now!

How to: make an all-purpose cleaner

I use this cleaner in the kitchen, the bathroom, and for cleaning windows, tables, doors, walls... Basically, everything. It works fantastically well, cuts through grease and limescale and soap scum, and leaves surfaces shiny. As it has tea tree oil in it, it also acts as a mild antiseptic, antibacterial and antifungal, but is completely fine to use around asthmatics.

It's really, really complicated. Seriously. It will take you ages. Are you ready?

How to: make your own moisteuriser

Well, how I make my own moisteuriser, anyway. I have been experimenting with homemade options and natural things like aloe vera gel, sweet almond oil, but everything has left my skin feeling tight and dry after a few days to a week. I have been using only this to nourish my face for almost a month and I love love LOVE it!

Only 7 months late

Finally! This morning I finished the last of these teeny tiny stockings. It's taken me quite a lot longer than I expected - hence a project intended for a birthday present last November has only been completed now.