Finding New Recipes

One of the reasons we've been getting takeaway as much as we have is that I, at least, have gotten bored of the food we've been eating at home.  It's not that it's been bad food at all or that there hasn't been variety in what we've been eating, it's just that it's beginning to feel like we're eating the same stuff for a long time now.  A caveat I should probably add to this is that I don't really like cooking, especially if it takes a very long time or uses a hundred dishes.  This does limit the range of things we cook a little.

I have been looking for recipes that are vegan or at least vegetarian to add to our recipe book. However, most of the recipes I've come across seem to either be about making products that are like meat, such as burgers, or contain ingredients that are kind of pricey and aren't the easiest to find.  This is especially true of most of the vegan cook books I've looked at recently.

So, I'm going to keep searching for recipes online which are relatively quick (around 30 minutes cooking time) and simple, but hopefully lets us try different styles of food from around the world.  Most of the recipes I have come across so far have been Asian and we've been enjoying working our way through those flavours.  However, I think I'll need to do a more specific search to find vegan versions of food from other regions.  It might also be good to go back to the Redwall Cookbook to see what I can bring back from that, I seem to remember us enjoying a few of those recipes.

As well as finding more recipes I also want to see if we can incorporate eating more seasonally into our cooking.  This might be a little tricky and I have to admit I don't even really know what vegetables actually grow when, so that'll require a bit more research (I ended up finding these lovely magnets by Asking for Trouble from Etsy) but hopefully it'll just mean swapping the vegetables in the recipes.  We're doing it to be more sustainable, but I also want to do it so that we can get a better idea about what grows when in case we ever get the chance to grow our own food.  I'm also hoping we can start foraging for some of our food as well and that should give us much more of a connection to what we're eating as well.

I'm also thinking about finding a range of side dishes I can make to add a bit of variety to our lunches and which would allows us to make ourselves a sort of Budha bowl style meal.  I have to admit this might have been slightly inspired by all the kdrama we've been watching recently where they always seem to have yummy looking side dishes with the meals they eat. 

Despite how I feel about cooking I do feel that right now I might have actually given myself more work rather than the less when it comes to cooking.  However, I do think it'll be worth it in the long run as we should enjoy our food a little more and it'll stop us spending so much money on takeaways and eating out which we can then put into our savings.  It'll also teach me more about the other flavours that are out there and that should make my cooking better in the long run, especially when I'm making dishes that are basically me just winging it, which are most of them - I never was very good at following recipes. 

January 2023 Budget

It's been a pretty good start to the year when it comes to our finances.  We've still had a couple of slip ups, but nothing big and we've been able to make up for them pretty quickly.  The most important part of this month has been starting to form the habits that we're hoping to carry on for the rest of the year to reach the financial goals we have for 2023.

Our general bills did go up a little last year and we've had to take that into account along with the addition of the car payment of £220 a month.  Due to this we've decided that we do need to start being a lot stricter with our spending elsewhere - especially when it comes to our personal spending.  With that in mind we have been good with our groceries spending, keeping that in budget for the month despite including household spending and the fact that we're no longer using cash.  I think having a few months where we could only use cash broke our habit of just constantly spending on food and now we're able to keep that going whilst using our cards.  If we ever find ourselves slipping again we can always go back to cash.

We didn't do quite so well on our takeaway and eating out budget, but we pulled back on the spending in the last couple of weeks and managed to finish the month in budget.  Also, despite the amount of driving we did this month trying to see as many English Heritage properties as we could we actually managed to stay under budget for January, so the hybrid is definitely helping us save on fuel in the way we hoped it would.  It doesn't quite make up for the monthly payment we have to make for the car, but it helps pay towards it.

Even though I'm now paying less money into my pension then I did last year, taking it down to 12.5% of my pay, it's still quite a good amount and more than I originally thought it would be.  Any money going into my pension is good, especially as I recently did a calculation of how much money I would have after I retired based on what I have so far and it really wasn't good.  

As with the takeaways we did have a couple of blips with our personal spending, which is meant to be £25 each a week, but some of that was on having to get my engagement ring fixed and we also pulled that back across the month by reducing our spending later on.  So we've managed to end the month on budget with this as well.  Having the budget has been a good check every time we think about spending some money and we really think about whether we really need or want to item before we get it.  We also discuss our spending with each other a lot more, which is good as it makes me feel more like we're working towards our financial goals together now.

Lastly is our sinking funds and savings.  We were able to put in our first £75 of the year into our Christmas sinking fund and the last payment we needed to get our car repair sinking fund back up to the £500 we wanted (something we hopefully won't need to spend any time soon but good to have just in case).  We still need to work on our other sinking funds, though the sailing lessons sinking fund is on the back burner for now, and our four months savings funds but it's a start.  I'm expecting us to get better once we get more into the swing of things.

All in all, it's been a pretty good start to the year.  We didn't get as much saved as we would have liked, but this is a five week month and I'd accidentally planned for it to be a four week month so we've actually done pretty well.  We'll see how things go with February, which is actually a four week month - I've double checked.  One of the good things we found out this month is that we're not actually that bothered about not spending money on things and we do really enjoy the free activities we did throughout January.  Hopefully this is something we can carry on for the rest of the year.