Savings vs. Ethics vs. Health--part one

1) Part of the reason Jack can find things so cheap is she is not a vegan. I would *love* to find a 100g dark chocolate bar for 35p to be used for grating into savoury dishes like chilli and making desserts. But every single stinking one of them has milk powder in it as a cheap filler. The cheapest I can find is a baking chocolate that costs £1.50 for 200g. Making 100g cost 75p. I could be paying much more than that for some of the specialty chocolate I love like Montezuma chocolate chilli bar which costs more that £2 for 100g.

 

2) But sometimes she hits it just right. I have been using red wine in my cooking lately. There is a superb mushroom and potato stew from the cookbook Isa Does It that uses a cup of red wine that makes the flavour fantastically rich. Jack Monroe also knows how cheap wine can really enhance the flavour of the dish. I was buying a 250ml bottle of cooking wine for £1.10 but on Jack’s suggestion went to the proper wine aisle where I found a 750cl bottle of cooking wine for £2.50. Her cookbook also talks about freezing leftover wine if you can’t get through that much in a week or so. The alcohol doesn’t freeze so it always has the consistency of a Sno-Cone. You just scoop out what you need and put it back in the freezer. I already do this with so many other things where you only use a bit at a time like smoky chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. Thanks Jack!

 

3) She buys white rice and white pasta because it is by far the cheapest. I struggle with this. Nutrition is where I’m at. I buy the cheapest brown basmati rice I can find which is £1.70 or there abouts for 1 kg.I think she pays less than 50p for a kg of white rice.  One thing she does do is use rice 100% of the time. I usually like to mix it up with other grains like quinoa which is great for you but ridiculously expensive. It had been the cheapest at Waitrose, but our last shop revealed that it was now over £3 for 500g. It got me thinking that we could have rice 90% of the time and the occasional quinoa to make it really last. No one says it *has* to be quinoa several times a week. Brown rice is rather nice! She also uses regular rice for risotto instead of expensive Arborio rice so I’m keen to try that as well.

 

4) She also bakes with cheap, plain white flour. I have a wheat intolerance and so 30p for a bag of Basics Flour is out of the question. Making GF flour can be really pricy. But I’ve been experimenting with making my flour mix out of healthy, but less expensive grains like buckwheat, brown rice and chickpea instead of really more expensive bags of teff and quinoa and millet (all around £5 a bag) So far the flour has been fine.

 

I’m sure I’ll be looking at more of her money saving tips and seeing how can we can adapt them making sure that cheap and healthy and vegan all coincide. I’m sure it is possible.

How does your garden grow?

I got really excited and impulsively made the investment in 3 herb pots from Sainsbury.

I bought parsley, mint and coriander as those were the ones I thought I’d use the most. I set them up on the kitchen window on a matching saucer and felt all smug with myself.

 

Fresh herbs.

Anytime I want some.

Just pluck a few here and there and sprinkle artfully on our food.

Won’t it feel posh?

 

Yes, I felt smug for about an hour and then Spiderman came home and gave me the look.

 

You know the look. It says:

 

What have the poor plants done to deserve this?

Are you a serial plant murderer?

Why do you never learn?

 

Because he knows. He KNOWS. I can’t grow anything. In the United States, it’s called having a green thumb, in the United Kingdom it is called having green fingers.

 

I have no green appendage at all. None. Which is a shame as my Mum is so green she’s practically a Martian. She just walks by and plants voluntarily perk up. I walk by and the commit suicide. FACT. She’s always had this gift. When I was about seven, I wrote a book entitled The New Story of My Family (although in my handwriting it looked a bit like thehewstoryuvmyfamilet)  Her page included the line,

 

This is my mother. She likes to plant everything in the world.

 

But I am determined to make this work. Every time I go into the kitchen I get all excited and shout,

 

I did it!

They’re still alive!

I don’t believe it!

 

It has been five days since I brought them home. That must be a new record for me.

I have used them a few times--particularly the coriander. I’m beginning to wonder if I’m going to pluck the poor thing bald before it has a chance to grow any more leaves.

 

Spiderman is still dubious, but wait until we have A Girl called Jack’s carrot and onion falafel with parsley and coriander on Wednesday night. Then he’ll see.

 

You’ll all see. (laughs maniacally)

 

Let’s just hope they’ll  be alive come Wednesday Morning.

A Girl Called Jack

I don’t know if Jack Monroe has reached the other side of the pond, but she is a hot commodity over here.

She is the face of poverty for the UK and her blog http://agirlcalledjack.com/ really made everyone think about what it is really like to live below the poverty line. In 2012, she was desperately trying to find a job--any job-- while being a single mum to Small Boy, trying to keep the roof over their heads and food on the table. She had cut their heating off in the dead of winter to save money and was trying to feed herself and her son for £10 a week.

 

Her angry young woman blog which describes in heart breaking detail feeding Small Boy the last bit of food in the fridge while she went to bed hungry. In the morning while Small Boy ate one weetabix with water instead of milk, his two year old concern asking, “Where’s Mummy’s breakfast?” and her replying she wasn’t hungry, but her rumbling tummy calling her a liar.

 

She ends with:

Poverty isn’t just having no heating, or not quite enough food, or unplugging your fridge and turning your hot water off. Poverty is the sinking feeling when your small boy finishes his one Weetabix and says, “More Mummy? Bread and jam please, Mummy,” as you’re wondering whether to take the TV or the guitar to the pawn shop first and how to tell him that is there is no bread and jam.

 

All the while she was posting recipes that used the Sainsbury’s Basic brand products on her blog. She discovered early on that she could make cheap nutritious meals for far less than processed food. A tin of spaghetti hoops might cost 50p, but a packet of the cheapest pasta costs 34p and would feed them for many meals. Add a carton of chopped tomatoes  for 35p and you could have a home cooked meal. She grew herbs on her windowsill so she’d always have fresh herbs for cooking (a £1.25 investment if you bought the pot at Sainbury) and could go for months of meals if she could keep the plant alive.

 

This prompted a journalist from the Daily Telegraph  to come over for lunch--a delicious Moroccan Tangine that cost 49p a portion using a cheap tin of chickpeas, a cheap tin of tomatoes, a tin of carrots, a tin of potatoes and some dried fruit. Mix in an onion, some garlic and some fresh herbs and a chilli pepper she grew on her windowsill and you have a meal . Read the article here: http://agirlcalledjack.com/2013/03/03/my-49p-lunch-with-a-girl-called-jack-the-telegraph-2nd-march/

 

This eventually led to a cookbook deal and a regular column for budget food in the Guardian newspaper. Now that she has more money she is not vulnerably housed, she is able to care for Small Boy better, but she still eats for around £10-15 a week.

 

I am fascinated by her life and ability to eat so well on so little. I doubt we will be able to get our  budget that low--but I wouldn’t mind shaving off a bit here and there and still eating well.

 

I bought her cook book on Friday and am really looking forward to seeing what I can do. Stay Tuned for A Girl called Spider!

Tiny Dancer

On Monday morning, when I was in the bath, Spiderman came to give me the sad news. Little Pirouette, our tiny dancer, had shuffled off this mortal coil and gone to join her sibling Tibia in the great big web in the sky.

 

We brought her home for my birthday in 2008 and she has been a joy to watch her climb about. She was one of two arboreal spiders (Polychrome being the other) that we own when means that she was a tree dweller not a ground dweller.

 When we first brought her home she was in a small, round fish bowl- like container that contained, among other things, a plastic red apple that she loved sitting on.

 

Soon she began to outgrow that container and we upcycled an old plastic sweet jar by using a wood burning tool to melt breathing holes into it. In true arboreal fashion, she climbed to the top and hid herself in a mass of webbing for several years.

 

She was difficult to see, but you could often hear her thumping about as she leapt from top to bottom then climbed back up to leap again. Silly girl. She earned the name Lid Hugger when after a moult Spiderman carefully opened the lid and saw the old skin resting in the hammock web--but where was Pirouette?  Why nestled in the underside of the lid that he had carelessly lifted! If she hadn’t just moulted and been feeling exhausted it would have been a perfect chance to run and escape! Lucky for us, she was a good girl who stayed put until we got the lid back together with the jar.

 

Pirouette was a Peruvian Pink Toe (Avicularia Avicularia) which is how she earned her ballerina name. Those tiny pink balls on the ends of her feet looked just like ballet slippers to us; the pink hairs on her tiny abdomen like a tutu! A Peruvian Pink Toe and a painting by Degas are virtually indistinguishable. FACT.

A spider

A Degas dancer

 

So how did she die? We’re really not sure. She was a juvenile when we brought her home based on her moulting patterns of every 6 months for her first three moults with us. After that it moved to one moult a year which is right for an adult spider. We had wondered if she was male--it is very hard to sex a spider, but particularly this type--the three key signs were not clear. She always did keep a little abdomen--often a sign of being male. There were no visible tibial hooks used for holding a female at bay while you deposit your sperm. Her palps had a bulbous quality--but then all her feet did. Those bulbs could have just been the shape of her feet, not sperm pouches.  We always hope for a female spider as they live longer, but judging from what we know about her--she was probably between nine and ten years old. Which is a good life for a spider. If our estimation of age is true, then she was most definitely female as males would not have lived that long.

 

It was a bit of a mystery finding her today. I kept holding out hope she was just moulting as spiders do not die on their backs. A spider on it’s back is in the process of growing by shedding it’s skin. But as Spiderman gently pointed out--she was found on the floor of her tank and she has never, ever moulted down there. She always lived in a hammock between two branches. She lived, slept, ate and moulted in that web hammock. He thinks she died, fell out of her web hammock and landed on the floor.

 

Poor baby. I once had a bird who did that. It was too poorly to be on its perch and was found dead at the bottom of the cage with its little bird feet curled around the ladder. We had to bury it with the ladder as we could get the feet unattached.

 

So the cause of death is a mystery. We’ll need to call Incy Wincy Quincy the spider coroner to come and give us a verdict.

 

Unless he’s stuck in a bathtub somewhere.

 

So goodbye to our little pink toed ballerina. We will miss you, my little dancer.

There’s no place like home!

Well, Thursday is World Book Day and I thought I’d give you a sneak peak at my Dorothy costume. It’s 9:PM on Wednesday and I’ve just come in from talking to a group of cubs and scouts about being a Quaker (not dressed like Dorothy, obviously!) to help them towards their World Faith Badge, but was keen to come home and try on the outfit before tomorrow.

 

They are encouraging everyone--including adults--to dress as your favourite book character. These kinds of days are my favourite days. If I’m honest (and as I’ve just said to about 30 children--as a Quaker I believe in honesty and integrity) then I wish every day was dress up day. OK, maybe not *every* day, but at least once a week I’d be happy to pretend to be someone else.

 

There are several staff members who are dreading tomorrow. They are only coming in costume under protest. Part of my “secrets of adulthood” (as Gretchen Rubin calls them) are that what is fun for me, is not always fun for everyone else, but I’ve got to be myself and enjoy what I enjoy even if *nobody* else shares that  same opinion. I can’t be put off from my unadulterated glee of getting to create a costume and wear it just because other people find it childish or embarrassing.

 

Some people at school who are dressing up are bringing their costume and changing once they get to school. Most of them looked mortified at the thought of having to go into town dressed as a book character. Not me. I will proudly walk to school in the guise of Dorothy. Two years ago a trucker honked his horn and shouted “Pippi Longstocking Wooo!” at me as I was waiting to cross the road. That made my day.

 

I genuinely find it hard to understand how you could NOT love dressing up as a book character--it’s BRILLIANT! But I am married to someone who does not see the fun in it. But luckily for me Spiderman has always enjoyed watching me have fun even if it is not his cup of tea. This is why the man takes me to the Pantomime every year for Christmas--because I adore singing along and shouting all the audience participation bits at the actors and just generally being silly in all the mayhem.

 

Here I am in all my glory.

You can just see the silver shoes peeking out from under my dress. Eagle eyed readers will notice the pinafore style apron I am wearing was recently worn in my monologue about the Victorian house maid.

Even older readers may recognise the wig from my evacuee monologue

 

In my hand you can see my basket that contains a copy of the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and a small dog named Toto!

Here’s a close up of me holding my little dog. Isn’t he adorable? I made him completely out of scrap fabric I had lying about. Sadly, this is the only sort of dog my allergies will allow.

 

So I’m all set for tomorrow. I’ve been asked to speak about my favourite book and so I’ll be giving the same speech I gave two years ago for World Book Day which you can read here: http://spidergrrlvstheworld.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/wonderful-wonderful-what-can-i-say-but.html

 

I really hate to take the outfit off --I’m wearing it as I type this-- but know I need to go to bed. Thursday will come quicker if I’m asleep (a bit like Father Christmas) and then I’ll be able to spend the day as Dorothy Gale from Kansas.

 

I can hardly wait.

The Saga of the Spoiled Silver Slippers

Right. Thursday is World Book Day. I’m going to be dressed as a character from my favourite book. Any guesses? I’ll give you a hint--it starts with O and ends with Z and if you get it right you win a trip over the rainbow.

 

I’ve been beavering away on a Dorothy costume--one based on the book not the film. I did copious amounts of research on how to make the shoes. The problem was every website I found was talking about leather shoes and red paint. Clearly they were all thinking about the film.

 

So let’s get this straight.

 

Silver slippers = book, ruby slippers = film because red showed up better in Technicolor.

  I wanted silver shoes. I followed the guidelines and bought best quality silver spray paint. I bought a *perfect* pair of non-leather shoes that looked so very much like the illustrations in  many books. They had a slight heel to them and I thought I might  have a bit of trouble walking without a wobble so I had planned to only wear them at school--to wear other shoes for the dusty 15 minute walk to work. Once safely at school I would change into my perfect footwear and just be careful.

Spiderman sprayed my shoes for me as spray paint messes with my asthma. I normally don’t like using spray paint as it has a scary warning on the back, but I planned to cut back in other ways on my carbon footprint to make up for any damage I had done to the ozone layer. The shoes when they were wet were Perfect and Beautiful, but when they dried they were something else.

 

Spoiled.

 

If this were an anthropomorphic children’s book it would go something like this:

 

The Saga of the Spoiled Silver Slippers

 

Once there was a pair of silver slippers who were very spoiled. They didn’t have to do anything all day but sit there and look pretty, but they would have none of it.  As soon as a coat of shiny, silver paint was applied, they wrinkled up their shiny silver noses until cracks appeared in their skin. How they loved making mischief!

They did this every time and it made a little girl who desperately need silver shoes by Thursday very sad indeed. But the shoes just laughed. Didn’t I tell you they were spoiled? They just refused to cooperate no matter how much the girl pleaded and promised them a starring role in her costume for World Book Day.

 

But no. The spoiled shoes just spoiled themselves over and over until finally they were discarded for another pair of silver, sparkly shoes.

“I was just playing a joke! I didn’t mean it!” they cried, “I want to be part of your costume for World Book Day!”

 Objects in the photo are sparklier than they appear

 

But the little girl just smiled at her new shoes. They were not as perfect as the other shoes, but they would do just fine. These shoes didn’t mind being painted silver. They liked when the glitter glue was rubbed all over them--they thought it tickled. They were excited to have a crossover link to Doctor Who when some of the silver fabric used to make a model of K-9 was used to make some decorative bows. They were proud to be part of the costume.

“We’re from the book, you know” they said as they nodded sagely,” not the film.”

 

And they all lived happily every after except the spoiled pair of shoes who were unceremoniously dumped in a plastic bag to stop the flakes of silver getting *everywhere* and then forgotten about.

 

The end

 

Why did the paint refuse to stick and  just crackle and flake off?  Who knows. Why did other people’s paint stick? Was it because their paint was red and not metallic? Who knows. Was it because my shoes were not leather but synthetic? Who knows. Maybe if we remove the paint from the uncooperative shoes and sand the surface to roughen it up the paint will adhere. Maybe not. I am concerned about breathing in all those fumes and paint flakes--I don’t want to be like Buddy Ebsen (yes from the Beverly Hillbillies) who was supposed to have been the Tin Man in the 1939 film and he breathed in all the aluminium powder from his silver make up and nearly died and was replaced with Jack Haley (who incidentally was *not* told why Buddy Ebsen left the picture!)   

 

 

But the thing that really surprised me was that I handled it so well. What’s the big deal, I hear you ask? It’s just World Book Day, for pete’s sake. Well…..there was a time when this would have thrown me for a loop. I had my head and my heart set on the uncooperative shoes and no alternative would have been good enough. You could not change my mind--I’d be like a brick wall (if a brick wall could cry and swear a lot) and I’d be a misery guts to be with. Try as I might I would *not* have been able to let go and it is likely I would have said something ridiculous like, “Well I just won’t go at all then!” 

 

I know. I know. But do you want to know the most amazing thing? Despite having been like this a lot in the past--Spiderman married me anyway. He says I am much easier to be around now that I don’t act like such a mad woman. Although, he has said on occasion that there isn’t attic big enough to hold me. Why are mad women always locked in attics in Victorian melodramas? 

 

But there you are. The saga of the spoiled silver slippers and the solution of the sparkly silver shoes. Try saying that 3 times fast.

Stay tuned for a photo of me in my whole Dorothy outfit--complete with silver shoes and Toto the dog!

Powerless

Suddenly, without warning on Saturday night about 9:45, our electricity went out. I was in bed and Spiderman was washing up the last of the dishes before packing his gear for his early start to his volunteer job at the zoo when it happened.

 

On my end it looked as if Spiderman turned off the hall light to come to bed and then remembered something left undone and flicked it back on again only to decide, “Sod it! I‘ll do it in the morning!” and flicked it off again. On his end he says the kitchen light strained itself to brightness before fading out and dying as if that last burst of energy was all it could muster.

 

It was dark. Very dark. We called out to each other and once assured we were both alright began the task of finding light.

 

We have a torch, but no batteries. My father, ever ready with a working flashlight, would have been rolling over in his grave at our carelessness. Some discussion in the inky darkness led to remembering there was a fat candle and some matches left over from Christmas in a drawer. But which one? Eventually the candle was found and lit and a ghostly spectre glided down the hallway. Spiderman found the stool and stood upon it, lifted the Bayberry candle as it wafted out its faint perfume, and checked the fuse box.

 

No switch was flipped. He took a clue from the IT Crowd and tried turning it off and on again, but to no avail.   We did not know what to do and even one candle could not light the darkness enough to make a decision. The best decision was to sleep on it and hope it would right itself in the night.

 

This is not an unheard of plan, recently we discovered  that we must have had a power outage as the timer on the boiler was off. Our heat is set to come on in cycles throughout the day and night. Only when we noticed that the heat was coming on at strange times did we check the boiler and notice the evidence of a power outage. That righted itself, surely this would as well?

 

I slept fitfully in the night, waking up at intervals cold and in complete darkness--the warm, friendly glowing face of our bedroom clock was invisible. In the morning, it was clear that the power had not righted itself and we were still in the dark.

 

And the cold. Our heat and hot water and all appliances all run on electrics. So no heat mats for the spiders, no hot bath for me. No kettle boiled for Spiderman’s tea. Nothing.

 

In the early morning light--which was shockingly dim, we re-lit the Christmas candle and tried to figure out who to phone. Back in Louisiana we used to just phone CLECO. But we never had to report it here. Our energy provider is not local, they are a great energy company that provides 100% renewable green energy and no nuclear, but they ain’t from around these here parts. (As they say in one of the many Spaghetti Westerns I watched with my dad when I was growing up).

 

Eventually Spiderman got through and we were assured someone would be here within the next twenty hours. TWENTY HOURS! It sounded like an eternity.

 

I decided to try to wash my hair using only cold water which had me gasping and swearing at its briskness, but my hair turned out rather lovely and shiny--but this is not an experience I wish to repeat any time soon. However, Spiderman’s impression of me saying AHHYEEEEE! (it’s freezing!) followed by OOOooooOOOO (don’t I look purdy?)  had me in stitches.

 

Powerless.

 

In more ways than one. We were without power and I felt powerless to do anything. What else could we do but wait it out?  Patience is not my middle name, for a very good reason.

 

I had to go to Meeting for Worship as I have responsibilities there. Someone had to stay home and wait for the help to arrive. I was in a foul mood, full of anxiety and a million worries. I felt cold inside and out. I had planned to go late and just do my bit at the end and then come home. We were having a special lunch discussion today and I had longed to go to it, but the sense of powerlessness had frozen my heart and I could find no joy in it.

 

Go, Spiderman said. Go and stay if you want. Go and have fun. Go and feel better. Go and come home to me when you are ready.

 

So I did.

 

For the first 45 minutes of Meeting for Worship I felt as thought there was an icy hand squeezing my heart. This is what a panic attack feels like for me. I could not shake the feeling.

 

http://neversixfeetunder.synthasite.com/forgotten.php#/

What if the spiders die because it is too cold?

What if all the food in the fridge and freezer go bad?

What if the repairman doesn’t come? (that has happened before after hours of waiting)

What if he does come at 4am? (they warned us he might)

  What if he needs to get in to read the meter in the middle of the night? (our meter is in a locked cupboard downstairs to which we do not have the key)

 

Every thought kept whizzing around in my head. I managed to analyse each one and think of how I would cope with it. Slowly, my heart stop hurting and the fear was leaving me. I did not feel powerful, but I no longer felt powerless. 

 

The feeling finally left in its entirety when I was able to stop obsessing about myself and started thinking of all those people in the UK who have suffered flood damage. They’ve got no power just like we don‘t and theirs has been out a lot longer than ours. . But the real difference is, at the end of it, they don’t have a home to go to anymore. And we do.

 

This is just an annoying issue to deal with, not a life or death situation. Not even for the spiders. It’s just not that cold and we can wrap their tanks with blankets if we are concerned. Suddenly I felt very powerful. I knew I could not be in control of the situation, but I could control how I dealt with it.  

 

I ended up staying for the lunch discussion and came away feeling warm and spiritually rejuvenated. I had many offers of help from the practical (take home this thermos full of hot water) to the unbelievably kind (you can board your tarantulas in our spare room if you are worried) but in the end, it wasn’t needed.

 

When I got home at 1:30, the house was warm and full of light. The repairman had come, fixed things and left. A second repairman had even come and left. The spiders were fine. Everything in the freezer was still frozen solid so that gives me hope. I only felt a few things needed to be gotten rid of the fridge (I just couldn’t be sure about the yoghurt) but the rest was fine.

 

While my heart was un-knotting itself, help was here and the problem was being solved. I was no longer powerless in every sense of the word.

 

We had light and heat and power.

I gained a better understanding of how to deal with difficult situations.

 

Powerful.