Applegeddon - Windfall Traumas

I came home to find a suspicious package on my doorstep. It wasn't the classic dog turd wrapped in flaming paper. It’s not that kind of neighbourhood. No, it’s a lovely, friendly, respectable neighbourhood where people have social standing and gardens with mature trees. That meant it could be any one of those pesky, generous neighbours. I eyed it suspiciously and my worst fears were confirmed: more bloody cooking apples.

A few hours later, my neighbour Roy, a middle-aged gentleman with social standing and mature trees, rang my bell to jovially check, “You got the apples then? Enjoy!” The picture of blithe innocence, his face was, the rotten bugger.

See, the thing is, he knows and I know he knows, and he knows that I know, etc. that I’ve already got half a tonne of the blighters all over my own back garden, from my own bloody mature tree. Age and experience made him the fastest on the draw when it came to 'gifting' his on though. I'll get him next year.

So I have several kilos of cooking apples and I ain’t afraid to use ‘em. Actually I am. I’m having hourly cold sweats at the thought of getting through them but I'm One Mean Housewife: I can't waste them, can I? So I will cook them and cook them and I will bloody well cook them until they are done. Here are some things I have done so far.

Braised pork and apples 

This is a good one and it’s going on our menu weekly until they’re done. I adapted a recipe in the BBC GoodFood “101 One-Pot Dishes” book. Dust two large pork chops in plenty of seasoned flour and then brown them on a high heat. Remove it from the pan and then brown two cooking apples (peeled and cut in wedges) with a chopped onion and stick of celery. Add 300ml chicken stock, a spoonful of grain mustard and a bay leaf, and stir. Put the meat back in and let it simmer for 30 minutes. Nice with rice, and hoovered up by both husband and toddler.

River Cottage Lumberjack Cake 

I’m finding it hard to talk about this one because it was TOO HARD (I’m rubbish at baking), I burnt it a bit, and the ingredients cost a chuffing fortune. However, it has enough calories to feed London for a week so if I hadn’t eaten almost all of it immediately, it would go a long way. It is moist and delicious. Recipe here.

Indian Apple Chutney 

Until today, I was a chutney virgin (always wanted to say that) and this was a triumph. It's like nippy pickled apple jam and it's very yummy with cold chicken and with cheese. Recipe here.

Warm Apple With Sultanas And Crème Fraiche

An easy idea from a friend. Core an apple and fill it with crème fraiche and dried fruit. Nuke it for a couple of minutes. I think I did it the wrong way: cutting the apple down the middle and scooping out the core may work better. It tasted good though. The toddler wanted more.

Apple and Parsnip Soup

Autumn is soup season and this is a bit different. I used this BBC Good Food recipe. It is delicious and thick. It was crying out for a bit of nutmeg so I put in about a half teaspoonful. We'll be having this one again too. I'm almost beginning to not resent these apples.






So there you are. If you have an unwelcome windfall, worry not what to do with it. That's right: waste no time, gather them up and sneakily deposit them on an unsuspecting neighbour's doorstep. Do it in the dead of night so you can't be caught.

One Mean Housewife, with a mad look in the eye, turns a peeler over and over in her calloused hand...

Measure For Pleasure

This mean old housewife is a 1980 vintage: pleasantly mature, but young enough to have been bottled up in metric measures.  750ml, not 25 Fl. Oz. That said, we remember the information we use most and I never approach the bar and ask for 568ml of 80-/ ale.  No wonder I still have to thrash through a frantic mental conversion every time I see metric.

My tatty and trusty jug.

But measuring is important. If you're going to scrimp, you need to make sure you feed the family and not the bin and that means preparing the right amount of food.  One of my aims is to cook (or defrost) a square meal from fresh ingredients every night.  Get the amounts right and you can have exactly one for the table and one for the freezer, clean plates, full bellies and disgruntled, underfed garden birds.

Modern Wastrel, go tomorrow and purchase a jug and scales and position them at the front of your cupboard. You already have a jug like that?  Well stop using it to microwave beans and restore its dignity (you'll never get rid of the orange glow, mind).

Here are some of my magic numbers, memorised to help me cope with the metric problem:

• 400ml = a whole adult meal dished up.  200ml for One Weaned Infant.
• 100ml by volume = rolled porridge oats for one (same for the child!). 200ml of milk.
• 100g = uncooked pasta for one (less with cheese sauce).
• 75ml by volume = uncooked rice for one, twice as much water to steam.
• 100ml = the exact volume of both of my ladles.  They are different shapes.  Also, for breeders, the volume of one of those little Tommee Tippee food pots, up to the opaque line.
• 100g = enough meat for one adult.
• 200ml / half a tin = enough cooked chick peas, lentils, etc. for one adult.
• 1 Brussels sprout = more than enough for anyone.

One Mean Housewife, with pipette and burette, measures out tomorrow's watery gruel and pease pudding.

Packaging Matchmaking

Now you can read "Charlotte's Web" while listening to Nick Drake and watching "Bambi", but there is nothing, nothing in the world sadder than this:

Ah, the missing puzzle piece: gone forever or just snuggled up in the drawer of the DVD player? You'll never know with a toddler in the house.  If you are One Mean Housewife, you might also find yourself quite upset by this:

It's an empty packet of baby pyjamas.  Look at all that plastic.  Look at all that reusable plastic, with its resealable zip lock, just crying out to be used again for something or other.  What a waste to chuck that straight in the landfill.

Now I can't stand waste, but I don't want to be the subject of one of those Channel 4 extreme hoarding documentaries.  Once every three months after Toddler Boy was born, as I unpacked the next size packets of vests and pyjamas, I was faced with a selection of those plastic wallets and every time it was an uncomfortable experience.  To bin or not to bin: that is the scrimper's question.  Couldn't do it.  Somewhere in the whirling eddies of my intuition, I knew there was a use for them.  So I indulged myself with a spot of light squirrelling.    

I wasn't wrong, reader.

Now, you can pop bubble wrap while scratching your itchy foot and writing in biro on a banana, but there is nothing more satisfying than a perfect storage solution.  

It's a match made in packaging heaven.  The packets even come in varying sizes to suit the wee one's different puzzles and, because they are transparent, His Little Highness can look and choose.  How developmentally appropriate, ha.  

Hand-me-down, complete jigsaws in salvaged plastic storage sacks. Oh yes.

One Mean Housewife, for longer than is appropriate, agonises over a shoebox...

Scrimping Through The Eye Of A Needle

I do love my little sewing machine but sometimes I wonder if she's a bit wasteful.  Imagine!  The very gadget I bought to turbo charge my scrimping.  But sometimes I look at Janome (it's "Ja-GNOME-ay" says The Sewing Machine Man), with her two tails of dangling thread and I just see pennies waiting to go down the drain.

Her methods are mysterious but I can tell you that, to get started without losing your thread back through the eye of the needle, she needs to have these two tails dangling at a length of at least 120mm.  When you finish your piece of stitching those tails will be hanging out of the start of it and all you can do is trim them off and pull out a similar length for next time.  That means, if you have a lot of pieces to stitch, you end up with a pile of waste threads big enough to make One Mean Housewife choke on her gruel.

Tonight's project is to repurpose some redundant facecloths into reusable baby wipes by cutting into quarters and hemming off the raw edges.  I'm going to sew two dozen pieces so that's 24 x 240mm, which is a whopping 5.76m of wasted thread, and it really is good for nothing, unless you have a lot of vacuum cleaners that need destroying.

Here's my prudent plan:

Rather than trim off each piece after sewing and pull out a new pair of tails to start the next, you can put the next piece straight under and sew, like this:

That saves pulling out a length of thread just to waste it and you end up with, instead of a dozen pieces each with a tail, with a little string of bunting with just a tiny length of thread between the pieces for trimming off, like this:

23 tail-ends saved (can't save the first one) with an average join of 20mm x 2.  So that's (240-40) x 23 = 4600, 4.6 metres of thread still safely on the reel and away from helpless Hoovers and Housewives.


One Mean Housewife, desperately seeking to quantify her thriftiness, Googles the price of thread.

Down With This Sort Of Cling

Behold the world's least desirable roll of cling film!

A floppy box which flattened on first contact, ends which exploded moments later, a cardboard blade which couldn't cut chocolate mousse, never mind the world's stretchiest, most indestructible substance inside: it's quite a package.  I don't understand how the stuff can be so thin it's near unusable and yet strong enough to resist cutting with any of the myriad blades in my kitchen.

Every encounter with the thing has given me a grey hair or a wrinkle and yet this tormentor has lasted 4 years in my workspace.

Why?  I don't like to waste.  I couldn't bring myself to throw it out.  I felt I could/should thole it until it ran it out.  But it never ran out.  How could it?  Would you use it?!

Well, today is a great day.  By way of a special offer at Lakeland, I have acquired for free a roll of superior cling wrap and a dispenser that actually works.  Praise be!  It's so pleasing to use.  I'm wrapping things that never needed wrapped.  I'm not sure if my husband can still breath in there.

I'm going to wince when I do it as there are many, many metres left, but today is the day I finally get that grease-stained, malformed little box of misery out of my life and into the bin.

One Mean Housewife, an oblong box in hand, skips out of the back door in her slippers.