Eating from the Redwall Cookbook: Summer

This will be a very quick blog as I only cooked one recipe from the summer section of this cookbook.

Hotroot Sunsalad 

This was the only savoury recipe I could find in this season, the rest was either a pudding or a sweet of some form.  I did have to make one change to this recipe as I couldn't find any Jerusalem artichokes, so I swapped them for broccoli instead.  It's definitely not the most exciting recipe I've ever cooked and if I was to ever make it again I would definitely add much more hot sauce to give if more flavour.  However, it's pretty unlikely I'll make this one again as boiling vegetables isn't my preferred way of cooking them.  I always feel you loose all the flavour, no matter how short the cooking time.  It's a shame as this was one of the recipes I was really looking forward to making.  

The other recipes I left as I'm not really into sweets, at least not when it's as hot as this summer has been.  Though I have now noticed that there is one recipe that I thought was a sweet, but looking at it again is actually a savoury so I'll probably just add it to the autumn recipes.  I do think that I will have another look at the sweet /pudding recipes again as the weather gets cooler as that tends to be when I start craving that type of food.  So you may see them cropping up in a later post.  But that's it really.  Now I just have autumn left to go and then I'll have cooked most of the recipes I remember reading about in my favourite childhood books.

September 2021 Budget

As I've already written a goals update in the last post, which is basically all about trying to get ourselves financially fit, I'm going to be very quick with this post so that I'm not just repeating myself.  I wasn't really expecting September to go particularly well financially, but actually, we did manage to do a little better than I thought and I'll take that.

Our lack of credit card debt and personal emergency funds have remained the same and I'm actually quite proud of the fact that we've managed to keep them like this throughout this entire year.  We have also managed to start reducing our food, household, and takeaway bills, and I'm hoping to keep this downward trend for the rest of the year.  We did have one expensive week for eating out, but that was when we went on a trip out with my Mum and I wouldn't want to change that.

I did also manage to put some money aside for my pension again this month as it was something that I had decided I was going to prioritise for the rest of the year.

However, we still weren't able to put any money into our sinking funds and our four months emergency fund.  While this was disappointing I knew that it would probably be the case as there were some big, unplanned expenses that came out right at the start of the month.

And they all circulated around the car, which needed over £200 worth of repairs and two of the tyres changed, and we didn't use our sinking fund to cover this.  I suppose in a way I could say that we did actually put around £400 pounds into our sinking funds in September, it's just that we had to take it back out again right away.

We also both needed to replace our walking boots, getting replacement walking poles, and my partner needed a high vis top for when he's cycling home now as it's so dark.  Perhaps the outdoor gear isn't strictly 'needed' but walking is important to both of us and we couldn't really be happy without it so it wasn't something I wanted to comprise on.

So, whilst the big expenses on the car did have an impact on what I had originally planned for this month, it could have been far worse and I'm very grateful that we have the money coming in to cover those expenses without having to put ourselves into debt.  On that front, we have been very lucky.  And now we're starting a new month and I have plans on how to start catching up on where we fell behind, such as only eating out / having a takeaway once a week, so October should be a good one.