1) We had gammon and lamb as our Christmas Dinner meats as we’re not huge turkey fans here and we had plenty of leftovers as I’m sure we all did. 😉 We all had gammon sandwiches for lunch on Boxing Day with most of the gammon leftovers but the last bits were made into a quiche which we had for tea with leftover potatoes cooked in our Air Fryer with a little olive oil drizzled on them to crisp them up.
My Dad bought us a huge leg of lamb so we had a LOT of leftovers from that to use up and I thought it would be a good start to my batch cooking mission to use it to make some meals to go in the freezer so I made a couple of lamb hotpots which will be amazing when it’s time to eat them. For now, they’re safely in the freezer ready to be taken out and defrosted the night before I need them.
2) Did I tell you I got a new (to us) freezer to go in the garage? It’s about the same height as a fridge freezer but all freezer so I’ve been looking forward to getting a bit of batch cooking done since I got it the week before Christmas. This week I’ve cooked a HUGE batch of my homemade tomato sauce and portioned it up into different sized packs so I can just pull out what I need. I have some single portion sizes and some that will do for whole family meals so I have all bases covered. That’s about all the batch cooking I’ve had time to do this week other than the lamb hotpot but I have plans for more over the weekend.
3) I tried to ask Mr Frugal for practical presents this year and one of the things he bought me was a breadmaker. I do love it but I think I tried to run before I could walk as the first thing I attempted was cheese and sun dried tomato bread – made with no recipe just a vague recollection of the normal bread recipe I use with some added extras.
It didn’t look amazing and the texture wasn’t the best but actually, it was absolutely delicious and was a great accompaniment to the soup I made from random vegetables this week. I think I’m going to try again with an actual recipe though to see if I can make a version that resembles a loaf!
4) I got an email from Zeek on Christmas Eve reminding me that my credit was about to expire if I didn’t use it in 48 hours! I had no idea that I had any credits but when I had a look, it looks as though lots of you have been using my affiliate link to buy some vouchers in time for Christmas (and why not seeing as you get £5 off your first one).
I bought a PS4 voucher as I knew that Mr Frugal had asked for some sort of expansion pack for one of his games and this paid for that quite nicely. I also bought a Starbucks voucher so that I could have a warm drink whilst standing in the queue for Lush with Miss Frugal on Boxing Day! The only problem with the Starbucks voucher is that I can’t for the life of me find how to add it to the app on my phone and the queue in there was too big on Boxing Day to go and ask bearing in mind that the Lush queue was a good forty minutes long!
You can find out about Zeek here if you want to save yourself some money – I’ve saved a fortune.
5) We realised that Miss Frugal’s Christmas stocking was a casualty of our missing Christmas decorations and although I was dreading a trip into town right before Christmas, I knew I’d have to go and try and get her a new one as we have a tradition of stocking presents on Christmas morning. As I was putting on my shoes, Master Frugal offered to make one instead which sounded like a much better option than braving the pre-Christmas crush in town.
I cut out two stocking shapes from a coffee sack I bought at the Festival of Thrift and he did the rest, using a glue gun to stick the two sides together and to add the decorations.
What thrifty or frugal things are you planning on doing in 2017?
We’ll be back next year with the linky. 😉
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