Easy Root Veggie Soup

Ingredients

500g root veg (carrots, parsnips, swede etc)

half bulb garlic

500ml veg stock

salt + pepper for seasoning

tbsp olive oil

Method

Wash veg thoroughly and top and tail (alternatively wash and peel veg if you prefer.) Chop into large but similar sized chunks. Toss lightly in a baking tin with the olive oil and seasoning. Cut the top off the garlic so you can just see the cloves on the top and wrap in tin foil. Place this in the middle of the veg. Roast for approx 35 mins on 180 degrees – this time will depend on whether you have electric/fan/gas oven and how large your vegetable chunks are. If you can’t easily stick a fork in the veg, keep going until you can.

Once the veg is done, remove from the oven and unwrap the garlic from the foil. Carefully squeeze the garlic out of the bulb – this will come out in a lovely mush. If it’s not at all mushy you might need to pop it back in the oven for an extra 10 mins.

Now whizz whizz whizz with a hand blender or food processor, whilst combining the 500ml of veg stock gradually. If you prefer a thicker soup add less stock and if you like it thinner add more!

There you have it, easy peasy root veg soup. I like to add some nice mature cheese and eat with a nice big wedge of bread and butter.

Top tip for weaning – if you want to make up small quantities to lessen wastage, freeze the veg once roasted and cooled. When you want a quick meal for your baby take out a small portion of frozen veg, add boiling water and a small bit of low salt veg stock or just pepper and whizz it up. You don’t have to wait ages for soup to defrost or play the microwave game this way, handy for busy mummies who still want to serve cheap nutritious food.

Happy souping!

Jessica x

Week Three – Make do

Making Do

After last week’s shenanigans I’ve been making up for lost time and have undertaken lots of new projects this week. My favourite is this towel hoodie I’ve made for Penny for the summer season.

I got the pattern (baja hoodie) off www.gotopatterns.com and bought a beach towel in a charity shop for the grand sum of £1. I’ve been trying to get a towel hoodie on ebay for ages but any that look half decent seem to cost £15 upwards. When my own huge bath towel cost less than half of that, I felt it was time to get the sewing machine out!

I haven’t followed a proper pattern in a really long time. I’m not a great one for making things from scratch. I really enjoy altering and up cycling so this was kind of new for me. The pattern was thankfully easy to follow, (although I did make a couple of mistakes) but overall I’m really pleased with how it turned out. If you decide to do something similar my only piece of advice would be to make sure you double stitch any seams as terry towelling is a bit of a demon to keep together once you cut it!

My whole week has revolved around various make do projects, which is lovely! I made some pretty nifty bathroom baskets out of a pair of old jeans and fabric ends which were otherwise going to the scrap. I followed this tutorial and they turned out great. The possibilities for extending this idea are endless I think! I’m going to search for a pair of wide legged jeans so I can make bigger ones next time.

I was really stuck on wednesday for extra drying space after doing a massive amount of laundry. I find it hard to juggle all of Penny’s stuff with our own washing. I find all the little things like muslin clothes and the washable bamboo wipes take up the bulk of drying space. So I came up with some new dryers for these things and best of all it was really really cheap to do.

Take one coat hanger. (It needs to be one with the little hooks for clothes ribbons.) Tie string/ribbon/t shirt yarn from one side to the other, taking care to double knot it to prevent laundry all over the floor. Add some pegs and Voila! Personally I used t shirt yarn as that’s what I had lying about and it works beautifully!

 

 

 

 

 

 

As well as these projects I’ve also been working on a millennium falcon star wars cake for Russell’s birthday, a tunic dress for Penny and a scandi print cushion cover – all of which I’ll have to post another time as they are still in progress.

I wish you all a lovely weekend and hope you may have found some inspiration for your own make do and mend projects

Happy Friday

Jessica x

 

Week Two

 

Kitchen Garden

This week I’m talking about growing your own herbs. I’m a total novice so knowing where to start with a kitchen garden was quite daunting.   

 

 

What a week! Russell and myself have been suffering with various food poisonings/tummy bugs so it’s been a bit chaotic here. I hope all your weeks were much calmer! Penny has so far managed to escape unscathed and lets hope that continues. Anyway, to business and this post is about my experiment with growing herbs.

We are a household that likes to cook. Russell likes to experiment with curry flavours and I’m especially fond of Italian, which means that we get through a wide variety of herbs. Fresh supermarket herbs are expensive, shockingly so in my opinion. I’ve been biding my time for a while though, as I thought starting a kitchen garden with a newborn was probably a little optimistic. But now we are achieving “sleeping through” so I took the plunge in March and got some little starter kits from Wilko’s.

They were only 75p each and came with the pot, soil and the seeds and some basic instructions. I started with basil, coriander and rocket. Whilst the little basil pot has flourished beautifully, the rocket and coriander didn’t fare so well. Both failed to thrive after a good start and to be honest I’m not really sure what went wrong. I think I may have planted too many seeds in one go.

I could have got disheartened and given up but in fact it spurred me on. I loved seeing the little shoots coming up and knowing that it was due to my (totally haphazard) care. So over the last two months I’ve gradually added to my kitchen garden. I now have:

basil, lavender, oregano, rosemary, sage, curry leaf and mint

You don’t need much in the way of tools either, I just have a little watering pot for herbs that cost 80p and the herbs themselves aren’t that expensive. I think the most I’ve paid was £2.99 for the curry leaf plant. I’m also looking into ways to kitchen compost so I won’t have to buy that either, although I may have to wait till we move to embark on that journey.

I’m really enjoying using the herbs in my everyday cooking, it’s very satisfying to pick them fresh and put them straight into the pan. Oregano and basil have been brilliant in making big batches of tomato pasta sauce, which I freeze in small portions and take out as necessary. The curry leaf was really great in a lentil dhal I made for a dinner party last week. The only one I haven’t really used is the lavender, but I’m working on finding a drying technique so I can make my own pot pourri.

I use the word garden a little liberally I think. What I actually mean is kitchen windowsill. The word garden always brings big country rose bushes and hydrangeas to mind. But still, it’s my garden even if it’s small. I’m very proud of how much it’s growing and now I’ve got a bit of confidence I’ve started growing some flowers.

I currently have a trough of sunflowers growing on the lounge windowsill and a newly installed hanging basket outside my front door. All of the info on each plant promised they were easy to look after, which I’m definitely hoping is true! I’ll post a picture of the basket once the flowers are in bloom.

I’d always put off growing my own, because I live in a first floor flat, having always thought I would be better off waiting till we moved into a house. I’m so glad I’ve finally got started though, as it”s been so successful that I wish I hadn’t waited so long. I’ve realised you don’t need much space and actually starting with just one or two plants worked best for me as I could focus on getting those right before adding more.

If you’ve been thinking about starting your own kitchen garden I hope this has inspired you to get growing. Start with your favourite herb and see where it takes you!

There’s a lot more I want to grow but I’m running out of windowsill so I’ll have to find some more space.

I hope you found this post useful, as always comments are welcome and please feel free to share any hints and tips you might have!

Happy Friday

Jessica x

Week One

 

Family Food Habits

This week I’m talking about food, which is a huge topic and I could write forever about it, so this week Im just going to focus on the changes I’ve made over the last few months to reduce wastage, save money and eat better.

I’ve shopped in Tesco all of my adult life. I’ve never really stopped to question it, or consider other options. My mother always shopped in Tesco when I was a child because it was the supermarket nearest to us. When I was a student I bought the value noodles, when I finished and brought in a salary I bought the big brands because it’s what was familiar to me.

Now I’m a mamma and questioning what’s in all this identically sized and coloured food. Even more so since Miss P started on solid food. I decided it was time to make some changes to move my family towards healthier and more eco friendly food habits.

The first thing I did was to order a weekly veg box. I felt strongly that we should have good wholesome organic vegetables that are grown locally or sourced in a sustainable way. When I added up the cost, I realised that I spend a similar amount in the supermarket but usually end up with a lot of wastage because it’s hard to get small quantities and multiple offers tend to mean I buy more than I need. Getting a weekly box means I get exactly the right amount, it tastes much better (who knew carrots could be so sweet) and I know I’m not feeding Penny any unnecessary gm or chemicals.

I also get a dozen eggs delivered as I know that they are coming from properly looked after chickens. (I buy from Riverford organic because they are based nearby and I like their policies and prices.) I’m happy to pay a fair price for good, fresh food that’s delivered to my door.

The second thing I did was plan. This is much harder to stick to than I first realised when I started doing this. Foodwise our whole week now revolves around the vegbox delivery, which comes on a friday. To help me with this, I did buy a few proper cookbooks to inspire me, as all my other books were based on sweet baking rather than wholesome cooking! I now plan exactly what we are going to eat sunday to thursday. Friday’s and saturdays are jackpot nights because we use up whatever’s left from the previous week. I’m not usually one to plug things but Hugh’s Three Good Things cookbook has been absolutely invaluable. I think 70% of our weekday recipes come directly from or are inspired by this book.

I do find it hard to be really disciplined about planning though. I try and sit down on friday when the box arrives and plan straight away, but sometimes other demands mean I don’t get around to it until saturday or sunday. But making sure the planning gets done also means that the rest of the shopping list gets done without overspending. Now when I go to the supermarket for all the other bits and pieces, I have the list and I stick to it. This has saved us a huge amount of money over the last couple of months and also means I know exactly what I have in the kitchen cupboards. No more out of date flour or beans in sight!

The third thing is possibly a bit controversial. We introduced veggie days. On a normal week we now have vegetarian meals on monday, wednesday and friday. Although not intentionally, we both seem to have made the whole day meat free too. I found this has meant we rarely have wasted veg at the end of the week, we’ve both got creative in the kitchen and to be honest, I find lots of our veggie meals as equally tasty if not more so than a standard meat and two veg dinner.

I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not always possible to stick to these three things (except the vegbox) completely. I find that disturbed nights with Penny will often end up with lazy shopping and cooking. When this happens though I try to get back on track as quickly as possible. I think overall it’s made a big difference to our spending and our nutrition. Plus because we waste a lot less food and we don’t buy more than we need, we’re also being a more eco friendly family.

I think there’s more that we could do, but it’s a start!

I hope you found this post useful, do comment if you have any other ideas that could help or if you implement any of the above for your lifestyle!

Happy Friday

Jessica x

Restart for Reloved 52

It’s time to kickstart this blog! After having my lovely daughter it’s taken a while to settle into a ‘normal’ life again (whatever that means!) but the time has come to pick up where I left off with Reloved 52. Instead of continuing with the previous project, I am going to start anew, read on for more details!

Reloved 52 has always been based on the ethics of recycling and eco crafting. Now I’m starting a new project to expand the original ethos a little further. 52 weeks to make the lifestyle of my little family a lot more eco friendly.

Starting on Friday 17th May, I will be posting weekly on a range of topics including food, health & beauty, housekeeping, transport and waste. This project is a way for me to document the changes I make and the learning process of how to make a small, modern family become an excellent friend rather than enemy, to our environment. I also hope that if I can achieve this, then anybody can!

When I first started the Reloved 52 project, I set myself a strict set of rules, which until I fell pregnant I did adhere to pretty well. This time there won’t be any hard rules (this would be impossible with a toddler for me) but the spirit of the project, is based on the philosophy of being earth kind as a whole lifestyle; rather than focussing on one particular area of my life as I did before.

With a 10 month old in tow I expect this will be challenging, but hopefully fun too. If you choose to follow my journey I hope you’ll find some useful information too and as always comments and community are most welcome on my blog.

Best

Mrs Geach x