Bargains at late-night shopping - Day 15

49c for a 500g punnet of strawberries! I bought four ... I did leave two for other shoppers. ;)

Amazingly, only ONE berry in the 2kg had to be thrown out. About a quarter were good enough to eat whole and are in the fridge for the kiddies, and the other 1.5kg are chopped up in the freezer, ready for smoothies, icypoles, muffins and anything else fun I think of.

Today I also had about 5 litres of milk to use up. People have been sick this week, and we get 10L delivered each week - delivery day is tomorrow. So tonight I've made 1.5L of vanilla ice-cream, a batch of vanilla custard, a batch of chocolate custard, and I've currently got yogurt going and am about to make mini-frittatas before heading to bed. Alastair and I also baked some yummy biscuits, but I'll save those for tomorrow's post.

Cooking up a storm!

From this:



to this (and more, but I am not photographing it all):


A friend and her husband took me to the Canning Vale Saturday clearance markets this weekend. I don't drive so it's impossible for me to get to otherwise, and they have no kids and not huge amounts of storage space, so by taking me with them they could split boxes with me. I also supplied the stroller for carrying the boxes!

Apart from it being bloody freezing down there at 7.30am, it was pretty good. I got:

- box of oranges
- box of Pink Lady apples
- box of plums
- half a huge bag of baby spinach, $5
- half a huge bag of basil (I used 250g of leaves to make pesto and still have heaps left)
- half a box of tomatoes (5 kg)
- 2 eggplant
- 2 zucchini
- 2 butternut pumpkins
- 2 leeks

for the grand total of $42 (and I'm only learning - I could've got the apples for cheaper if I'd shopped around at the various stalls better). So far I've cooked up basil & spinach pesto, tomato & basil pasta sauce, roasted tomato passata, plum teacake, plum muffins, beef & barley soup, and pumpkin soup. The kids have eaten a good amount of the apples and I'm going to freeze some according to this method, for making pies/crumbles. I'm going to juice the oranges and freeze in ice cube trays for baking and sorbets. I blanched and froze the rest of the spinach and will use for spinach and ricotta triangles this week. The eggplants are going into eggplant curry tonight and then eggplant pasta sauce for the freezer. I stewed a big batch of the plums and they're in the fridge for snacks/desserts/breakfast (with yogurt for breakfast, custard for dessert). I might make some jam but I need jars first.

Basically this will mean that I have quick healthy lunches and dinners ready when I'm tired. It will reduce our food bill over the next month or so.

I should probably add here that the Thermomix is my best friend ;)

I would definitely recommend these markets if you're in Perth and are able to preserve the produce in some way, and/or buy with friends and use it quickly. Just take a hat and gloves!

Bargain-hunting

I went op-shopping last week for the first time in ages, and of course didn't find what I really wanted - summer clothes for Alastair - but found some other things. A nice dark denim skirt for me, Barbie T-shirt for Emma, and these:

From Surprisingly Domestic

A handbag with tags still attached, in giftable condition - $5. Not my colour, but it'll make a nice Christmas gift!

From Surprisingly Domestic

That's $22 new, in as new condition for $1.75, and will fit Evelyn this summer.

Then on the weekend we went to Spotlight and I finally bought the drill for the next mei tai I want to make, and found this for $5 down from $25:

From Surprisingly Domestic

Alastair loves Dora! It's slightly scratched, that's all. We put it low on the wall so he can hang his own things :)

A productive day

Have I ever mentioned that I like crime fiction?

Our bookshelves are overflowing, so when I saw an offer on Freecycle for one in our suburb that would actually fit in our car, I snapped it up. (I love Freecycle, but given that we have a smallish car with no towbar, it's not actually feasible to collect many things from it!) Then I moved a lot of books around.

It fits about half my crime fiction collection:



The rest of our fiction collection is here (I'd say about 80% of it is mine!):



In contrast, here are the books poor Garry has to read (they're all computer books):



Evelyn's capris/shorties (I think they'll be capri length now and shorties in summer) are coming along nicely too: