I guess it makes sense to start a series on frugal food, cheap and easy meals with a look at cheap quick meals for breakfast. If you are a serial cereal eater at breakfast time, consider these cheap quick meals as brunch recipes instead! With our purse strings tightening we have been consuming far less bread than usual. The bread in our local village bakery is baked in wood fired ovens and tastes divine. In fact, we believe it may well be the best bread in the world! But, it costs to get good bread, so rather than eat it […]
Cheap Easy Meals
Cheap Easy Meals I shall be taking over a Self Sufficient life for the next few weeks. We shall be having a Cheap Easy Meals theme. Lately the Dirty Boots household has been going through an even more frugal period than usual. Much the same as the rest of the planet I imagine. The lack of funds, combining with the end of winter and a time with less variety available on the vegetable plot has inspired me to come up with more cheap easy meals than usual. And, luckily (or not?) for you, I shall be sharing! Cheap, Quick Healthy […]
Urban Compost Bin Tumblers
As any regular readers know we have a very basic, but effective form of composting. We use three compost bins that are rotated every few months. Made frorm pallets, they are cheap and effective. I previously wrote about how to build a compost bin and what I thought was the best composter system. Lately I have been hearing about the rotating composter and how you can supposedly make compost in 14-21 days. Well, I just had to investigate. It seems unbelievable to me that these compost bin tumbler machines can be that effective. I have always said I didn’t believe […]
Do You Use a Moon Cup? The Menstrual Cup Review
This is a post for the girls. Since I’ve been writing a lot about cleaning lately and generally being a bit ‘girlie’ I may as well air my dirty laundry completely, and talk about the mysterious menstrual cup. Thankfully since first writing this post these have become a lot more common and are finally losing a little of their mystery. But if you don’t have a BFF who uses them to explain the details read on… There are a few different brands out there but personally I am a fan of Mooncups. And, though I don’t have ‘self sufficient‘ periods, […]
Environmentally Friendly Washing Up?
Self Sufficient Washing Up? Regular readers will know we are trying to make all aspects of life here as self sufficient as possible. Even the really mundane bits like household cleaning are trying to be carried out as greenly and cheaply as possible. But no we haven’t found a way to wash up self sufficiently. We still rely on commercial cleaning tools such as bought scourers and cloths. But I think we are improving as I have at last found an effective alternative to the humble washing up sponge. One of the last green (ish) cleaning switch-overs here as been […]
Eco Wash Balls-An Eco Balls Review
In what now seems like the far distant past already, right at the start of this site I wrote about being left here up the Mountain for a while while Mrs. Dirty Boots went back to the UK for a bit. Having never taking much notice previously I was in charger of doing the Laundry. This involved the use of Eco Balls. There is now a wide range of different Eco Laundry Balls to choose from – click to see all brands. I wrote about how amazed and surprised I was by how efficient Eco Wash Balls were. For such […]
Spare Cabbage? Make Sauerkraut
I have long had a love affair with Sauerkraut but always thought you needed to live in Eastern Europe and have a tonne of cabbage to make it yourself. I was wrong. It is simple to make sauerkraut at home with very basic implements. Best of all homemade sauerkraut is full of goodness most bought products have lost. And, if the spare cabbage you have is not the white hearting cabbage usually recommended for krauting worry ye not! What is Sauerkraut? First of all, sauerkraut is not pickled cabbage. Sauerkraut is a fermented food. The vegetables are tightly packed into […]