Courgettes, Roasted and Preserved

Last week was busy.
Last week was an unbelievable week. We are back to normal now, the new Au Pair has arrived and seems to be really nice. Her name is Chiara and this cohabiting is going to be extremely interesting.
Chiara can't, at present, eat most foods. When I asked her if there was anything she did not eat, she said: It'll be faster to tell you what I can eat".
She is, for the moment, intolerant to many, many, maaaany things.
The first night we had dinner together, I kept asking her what I could or could not put in the risotto I was making.

So, get ready for some new, extremely healthy and cheap recipes here...

In the meantime, while we were busy looking for the new Au Pair and fixing the cars for the NCTs, some courgettes just languished on my kitchen counter for a few days... Finally, on Sunday, I was so tired of seeing them I had the idea of using them all, otherwise they would just rot. And throwing food away is NOT an option.

But, what to do with 6 courgettes all at once???

I decided I would roast them and keep them in sunflower oil, so here we go:

Remove the top and bottom of each courgette, wash well in lukewarm water and cut them in half.

Now, place each piece on the chopping board and slice gently:

The slices should be not too thick, so that they cook quite fast.

Now, place a few on a grill pan:

Turn them every now and then and, once nicely roasted, add to a jar:

On the side, have some chopped garlic ready and, if you like, some mint leaves.

I also added some rock salt every now and then, adding the oil bit by bit, you will see no air remains in the jar.

Make sure the oil covers all the courgettes before placing your precious jar in the fridge.

Mint gives preserved vegetables a very fresh taste.

Enjoy! 

Mother Yeast

The holidays are now over, we got back home Thursday night at 4 am.
I brought with me many memories, pictures and a general feel of well being and happiness. Spending time with my family really fuels my soul.

I also brought with me Mother Yeast, or Pasta Madre, or Lievito Madre.

My mother got some from a friend who got it from her brother-in-law, who got it from a family somewhere else.

This is a dough which is usually passed down for generations in the households of rural Italy.

Some families had Mother Yeast passed down for the past 400 years. The older the dough, the better it works. It's something amazing to think about: you might be baking using a natural yeast  your mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother used to bake.

You may be kneading the same flour they kneaded. 

However, it is hard to come by because it's not sold in any shop, you must find someone who has extra and is willing to share it.

My mother has some now, and she insisted I take some.

It needs to be renewed every week, some people renew it every single day. In fact, the more you renew it, the better it works.

Some chefs say it is at its best after 3 or 4 years of "life".

Now, to the renewal process.

First, you get the Mother Yeast out of the fridge, where is kept in a glass jar with the lid on.

Then, prepare the tools: scale, spoon and a clean bowl.

 Cover the scale plate with some tin foil, and lightly dust it with flour, so the Mother Yeast will not stick to it.

 Place the Mother Yeast on the scale and weigh it. 

Add the same amount in fresh flour.

 Place both in the bowl.

 Measure half the amount in water, for example you have 100 grams of Mother Yeast, so you'll add 50 millilitres of water.

 Knead it well as if you were making a bread loaf.

 Now, place it in the bowl, make a cross on it with a knife and cover the bowl with a clean cloth.

 When it looks like this, it is ready to go back in the glass jar and in the refrigerator.

I have renewed my own Mother Yeast today, on a Sunday, so that each week I will make sure I do it, as Sunday is usually the day we bake. It takes literally 5 minutes for the renewal process and it is great to be able to bake without any store-bought yeast.

I will be giving it a try soon, and report back ;)

On Saving as a Fine Art

This is a difficult topic for me. First of all, I don't like money. I don't like the system it created, I don't like the fact that people would do anything to get it: stepping over any principle, killing, starving others. I don't like it. I deeply despise it.
In fact, I believe one day we (or, more likely, our children and grandchildren) will live in a world where money is regarded for what it is: a waste of paper.
I believe a society based on resources instead of money would work way better, and that's why I support The Venus Project.

In the meantime, we have to do with what we have. And make sure we are not wasting, not wanting what we don't need; reducing, reusing and recycling as much as we can.

Moreover, I want to make sure I am not wasting my time in the office just to buy things I don't need or just to pay the bills.
That's not our purpose in life. Our lives should be lived to their fullest potential, we must make room for love, laughter, hobbies and passions.

However, and this is one big "however", I find myself in the position of not yet being able to leave my full time job to be a home maker. I would just love to stay home, raise my children, sew, cook, volunteer and have time to write and read.

This is why saving is important. Saving means we'll be able to pay off our mortgage sooner that the (scary!!!) 35 years we signed up for and retire to live somewhere sunnier and brighter when the children will not be children anymore. At least, this is the big plan.

I know life is long and mysterious, and no plans can really be made, but I feel I have to do my best to try and make it easier for us all in the years to come. Even if one of us (myself or my husband) dies tomorrow, my children will still have a roof on their heads and food on the table. And that's another thing that makes me sleep well at night.

Now, back to saving, which is where I had started my post.

Before I buy something, I ask myself a few simple questions: Can I find it cheaper? Can I find it second hand? Can I do without? Do I really like it?

Can I Find It Cheaper?

In the last few days I have been pondering and caressing the idea of making a quilt out of a bunch of old jeans pairs I have stored from many closet spring cleanings. A friend of mine also gave me a bag of old jeans because she knows I am always looking for fabric.
Searching online for quilting tutorials, I found a very good website with a great tutorial for beginners, which seemed written just for me.
Awesome! But hey, I don't have the cutter... nor the mat... I thought: I'll go get the cutter and the mat in the craft shop close to my office straight after work!
Wow, the prices put me off. What's the point in paying above 20 Euro for the Cutter and above 15 Euro for the mat? I want to make the quilt from old jeans, originally purchased in second hand shops and given to me by a friend... It is my first try at quilting, the quilt itself will probably look like crap, if I have to spend over 35 Euro just to begin???
No! In the evening I went on eBay, found the cutter and the mat and I spent all together under 10 Euro. They are probably not the best quality tools, but, seriously, how many quilts am I going to make in the next few years? 
So, with some patience, on the 4th of March my cutter and mat will be here, and I can then start my quilt. I will have to wait, I know, but I'm busy in the garden now after work, so I'm not pressed for time. And those extra 25 Euro are still in my pocket :)

Can I Find It Second Hand?

A funny story here. A couple of years back, some friends were complaining Christmas is expensive. No surprise there, they complain all the time they have no money. 
They complain children are expensive, food is expensive, clothes are expensive... That's an awful lot of complaining. 
We are talking about a couple where both work full time, with 2 young kids.
We all know how expensive childcare is, but that is something we should not be complaining about. Before you have children you know you are going to spend money in childcare, and a fair amount that is.
I raised my first son exclusively with second hand clothes. I had to buy them in the charity shop back then, because I had no friends that could give me their kids clothes. We were new in Ireland, no family close by, no close friends, it was different.
My son was always well clothed and warm. Saving on clothes meant I could afford the best shoes for him when he started taking his first step, and those are way more important than clothes.
My daughter too, she always wears second hand clothes, however now I'm lucky to have this friend who has two older girls and passes on to me everything they outgrow. That's even cheaper. Again, I can get her good shoes and boots because I don't spend anything on clothes.
Sometimes I feel bad, I feel like I never buy anything for her, so I'll get her a hat or something she will like, like a tiny handbag.
So, for me, second hand is always the first choice. For myself and my husband too. I bought all his winter jackets second hand, otherwise they are really expensive. All my clothes are second hand and all my shoes are second hand, except my runners, purchased on sale because I wanted a particular kind and could not find them in good enough condition in the charity shops.

Can I do Without?
The answer, most of the times, is YES. Look around yourself, you more than likely already have everything you need. Someone once said, a woman never has enough shoes. I don't agree. Of course we like shoes, we like handbags and nice clothes. But really... Do I really NEED that extra pair of blue jeans? Probably not. Do I really, really NEED another set of plates for the kitchen. No, I don't.
If I put aside the want, I can save money to get something I really need, or something that would make my life easier. Like a steam mop. Which I recently purchased on sale. I have done without so far, I could keep it that way. However, I have not purchased useless clutter so I have room for the steam mop and money to invest in a model that better responds to what I want.
Why did I get the steam mop? Because it's great, it also has a part that detaches so it can be used as a handheld steam cleaner. It means less and less chemicals in the house as it eliminates the need for the floor cleaner. It also means I don't need to boil the water to mop the floor anymore. I plug it in and the steam is ready in a few minutes. The plan is to eliminate all carpets from the house, so that is going to be very handy upstairs as well in the coming years.

Do I really like it?

When I want to indulge in something I might fancy to have, then the hardest of questions comes in... Do I really like it? I might. In fact, if it catches my eye, I kind of like it. Is it worth throwing out something else to make room for it? Probably not.
Will I like it once I get home? If the answer is not a definite YES, then I don't buy it.

The habit of questioning myself before I put my hand in the pocket to reach for my hard earned money has saved me a lot so far. 
I have to provide for two young children and they are learning themselves that a present doesn't always come in a box. Sometimes Santa Claus will get things second hand just to make sure they are tried and tested ;)
The fact that we don't watch tv plays a huge part in the saving, not just because we have one bill less to pay each month, but because we don't get to see advertisement. The ads are written to make you want things, and rightly so, but I'm happy to avoid that.

All in all, we are doing fairly well, there is no stress in our house since we both work and do without a lot of silly things we don't really need. We are not pressed by fashion, trends and the likes. We live simply, we enjoy just being together without the need to go out and spend money on entertainment.
We live altogether, a very fulfilling life. We are always busy and try to involve the children in everything we do inside the house.

We tend to try and fix something ourselves before we hire someone to do it.

What we save by fixing things ourselves we can spend on weekends away and holidays.

Oil Bread, or the soft dough bread

Bread, the staple food that we used to buy at the "end of the day" reductions. Problem is, is full of anti fungal, alcohol, weird kind of fats and other stuff you would not really want to eat, I think.
Now, I bake my own bread in the electric oven, and we always have it in the house to accompany our meals.
The recipe I use now will give you an elastic dough that is easily stretched to make focaccia, which is a kind of pizza, filled with mozzarella and ham, usually, and covered with another layer of dough. It is lovely to eat, it keeps for a few days and is good eaten hot or cold. My husband takes it to work for his lunch almost every day.
Now for the recipe and procedure.

Ingredients:

500 grams of plain flour
300 ml of water
60 ml of olive oil
1 sachet of dried yeast
salt to taste

Mix everything together, adding nuts, olives, turmeric, anything you fancy really in your bread. Or just stick to the basic and enjoy :)

I let the bread-maker do this part of the work for me, I've already said my bread machine is worth her weight in gold and I'm not exaggerating.

Anyway, once you have a nice soft ball, place it in a bowl and cover it with a clean tea towel. I place it then in the cold oven, so it is away from temperature change that may occur in the kitchen.

After about 2 hours you will see the ball has almost doubled in size and so is ready to be baked. Take olive oil and brush your loaf with it. Now, if you are lucky enough to own a cast iron pot, place it in the pot with the lid on and in the oven. 

Switch the oven on to 200 degrees Celsius and let cook for about 30 minutes, or until you see the crust is starting to form.
At this stage, take the loaf out of the pot and place it on the oven rack and let cook until you are satisfied with the crust outside.
And here it is:

Baking your own bread will save you about 30% on the shop bought one, and most important, will spare your body the added crap ;)

New Life

I have not touched this blog for a very long time. I've missed it, I must say. We have a new baby, a girl. I am happy and all my energy and time I dedicate to my children. But I miss writing, I miss having the time to do something just for myself :)

Well, in the last 3 months I've gone through a lot, emotionally speaking. We were told we were going to have another boy, and I was really really happy about that. But I must confess, when I saw my little girl emerge from behind the curtain in the surgery room, I was overwhelmed, I felt over the moon. We now have a wonderful 5 year old boy and a little girl of 3 months. They are everything to me and I am focusing on their well being from the moment I wake up until I go to bed in the evening. As any other parent in the world does :)

I have not stopped cooking for a minute, I have been trying many new things and I want to share these new recipes on the blog as soon as possible.

My son liked the sausage rolls some dear friends brought here one day, so I made him something similar the very next day. That means I've learned to make a sort of puff pastry, it's a version that only takes 5 minutes to prepare and needs to sit in the fridge for 2 hours. It was my first try at puff pastry, while everyone tried to scare me away from it! The results were amazing and today I will make a lighter version of it, substituting the butter with a vegetable spread.

I have finally managed to get my hands on a cast iron pot, it was on good offer at a supermarket and I just could not miss the opportunity to have it for less than half the normal price. I bought it mainly for one reason: baking bread!!! It is a magical pot, because it turns my electric oven into a real oven where the bread cooks slowly and does not dry too much. I've baked bread loafs since I got the pot and I've added to it seeds and nuts of all kinds, olives, turmeric powder... My creativity is exploring all the possibilities and I really want to share the recipe for this wonderful bread as soon as I can.

My mother, 2000 kilometers away, saw the picture and immediately inquired about the pot :) This week I'll buy another one for her and take it with me when we will go visit them in less than 20 days. I am amazed that I will be teaching her how to make that bread loaf.

I've also been making marmalade, or better, jam. Every time I had some fruit too ripe to eat raw I turned it into a jar of sweet goodness. It's easier than I thought and I froze the extra jars to make sure they do not go bad. There is no artificial preservatives in my jam, such as pectin: only sugar, fruit and a secret ingredient that gives it a completely unexpected twist.

Let's say my main efforts have gone towards the baking, lately, as I bought a bread machine that is worth her weight in gold: she will make the dough and I turn it into pizza, bread, focaccia, panini rolls and the like.

This post is just an update to myself, mainly, to look back a few months and see all the important things accomplished so far and the new challenges ahead. I just want to remind myself to take 5 minutes for me every now and then and write. It's my medicine for the soul and it makes me feel good.

The little one is already 3 months old, I cannot believe it. My son will be 6 years old in no time and I look back these years and I say to myself: wow! you've come a long way!

The changes that happened in my life thought me a lot and I am grateful I have been able to adapt to all the good and bad things life threw in my direction. I can't wait to start cooking for this new baby too! And that is something I would never have imagined myself doing only 7 or 8 years ago.

She is so much part of this family already, she will happily sit in her baby chair and just look at us moving about all day. When we eat, she will be in her chair, "talking" to us. We are now a complete family, we will not have any more children for many reasons and I am loving each and every second of this slow, strange life I am living at present, where my whole world starts and ends in my house, with plenty of things to do, nappies to change, bottles to boil, meals to imagine and prepare, homework to do.

I am grateful for all I have, I believe we all build our lives with our actions and decisions, even with the wrong ones.

This is a promise to myself to get back to writing, one way or the other. This is a pin pointed on my imaginary board reminding me to make room in the daily routines for me, me and me.

Vegetable Stock Cubes!!!

I need to confess: I'm a huge fan of vegetable stock. This means that, twice a week during the whole Winter when my husband is out playing soccer, Yuri (my son) and myself, will have a simple warm pasta soup, cooked with just vegetable stock and topped with grated parmesan cheese. That's it! I love it, it reminds me of the long evenings my mother and I spent at home while my father worked the late shift in the car factory.
Yesterday I read an article about MSG, monosodium glutamate. It sounds like a poison. And chances are, it's not healthy. IKEA removed it from its foods sometime last year, and they are always ahead in these things, so well, I am going to remove it too. I am pregnant at present, and I don't want to feed myself and, now, my two children anything unhealthy.


MSG is present in many vegetable stock cubes so I decided to make my own cubes with salt and vegetables. And no weird stuff in it. The procedure is super simple and, as usual, the thing cooks itself giving me the time to make my son a pencil case and a holdall for school at the sewing machine.


Ingredients for 56 cubes:
1 Courgette
1 White Onion
3 Carrots
10 Cherry Tomatoes
A small bunch of Parsley
2 small sticks of Rosemary
2 stalks of Celery
500 grams of Rock Salt

Some of the ingredients, peeled and washed

Peel, wash and chop up the whole lot and throw it in a non stick pot.

Cover them with all the salt and place the lid on.

Let cook on low-medium heat for 90 minutes.

The salt will extract all the water from the vegetables, so there is no need to add any water. Once you like the look of the whole thing (it doesn't really look nice now, does it?) blend it all.

Once cooled, place all of the paste in the ice cube trays and freeze them.

I got exactly 56 cubes plus 1 which I left in the fridge to try tonight :)
Once the cubes are frozen, I'll place them all in freezer bags so they don't take up too much space.
And here's what I was doing in the meantime:

We're almost ready for the long winter that will soon be here. School gear an'all!

A Handmade Baby

We'll have our second (and last) baby soon. When we had our first, being him a non expected surprise, we were a bit overwhelmed... My husband was still a student, I was abroad working and things were just a tiny bit messy. Well, in the end, everything turned out to be ok, my husband found a job and moved here where I already had one, we rented a small place for us and were just not prepared for anything that was coming. We were just over the moon with happiness and full of questions. This time around, we have our own house, we are settled. I can just have fun creating a welcoming environment for the baby that will hopefully be with us at the beginning of December.


More importantly, I now own a sewing machine! So I could not miss the chance to create something nice for this new baby...


Because I am not an expert in the art of sewing, I just took a pattern from a beautiful blog and then measured up a friend's Mei Tai carrier and made my own last night. Yep, after having dinner and watching Italy playing at a friend's house, we returned home and I put together a baby carrier:

In the past couple of weeks I also made two hats, one for the baby and one for my son, with his initial on. I knitted them without any patters, just out of fantasy. The one for my son is quite plain, in two colors of cotton&bamboo thread. The one for baby looks like a smurfs' hat, because I knitted it like a triangle.

I love all of my "creations" so far. More are to come. I bought Aran Islands wool to knit a baby blanket and am working on it at the moment. We'll see the results soon.

A Single Fruit Goes a Long Way - Pineapple Vinegar

Two days a go I found a good offer on pineapple and I bought one. I love pineapples, especially now that I know NOTHING goes to waste with these amazing fruits.
I washed the pineapple, under running water, making sure to rub well its rough and aromatic skin. I chopped off the top and put it aside, not in the bin. I peeled the fruit with a knife and placed all of the skin in a large jar with a 1/4 cup of sugar and 1 litre of water (I let the water air all day in a jug, to make sure the chlorine evaporates). I covered the jar with a tea towel and it will stay on my kitchen counter for at least 4 weeks. I'll stir it everyday to make sure oxygen gets in and the yeasts in the air can have their beneficial action. Once I filter the vinegar, I'll post new pictures. Forn now, it looks like this:

I also kept the top. I placed it in a small coffee cup with water hoping it will soon grow roots. We'll see. If it does, we'll have a nice indoor plant soon and an actual pineapple in 2 years :)

Updated: Here is the vinegar filtered and bottled. I'm very proud. I used it to make a yummy Tomato Relish as well...

Pre-Packed Thoughts

Lately we've been eating the salad leaves from our suburban garden. What a feeling to go out back in the morning, cut some salad leaves and bring them to work!


Almost everyday I'll go in my polytunnel and look at the little plants and the miracle of life happening slowly but steadily in there... 
In particular, we have a Borlotti Bean plant, who had two accidents so far: when still in the small pot inside the house, my son by accident "sat" on it. The plant was folded in two... I managed to help it up again with some Sellotape and a wooden stick. A few days later, when it was recovering from the first hit, a friend's child broke the upper part... Again, Sellotape came to the rescue... I looked at my plant a bit sad and made sure the child didn't feel bad about it. Well, I have to say it is the first bean plant to grow flowers!!! I have been rewarded already, even if those flowers for one reason or the other will not turn into beans :)


I've been thinking a lot about pre-packed things lately. Mostly because we'll celebrate my son's 5th Birthday on Sunday. Awesome! He's 5 already. I can hardly believe it. 


The Birthdays we've been so far, except for two of them, were held in these covered play grounds where there are slides and ball pools. You pay a fee per child, the children get two hours of play (among crowds of other children) then everyone from the party is gathered into a room, the food for the kids is served, the cake is cut, the goodie bags are handed out and you go home. Yes, the kids have great fun. Yes, my son the last time did not stop running and playing for two hours. But...


I hate it. I hate those places. I just have to say it. The Invitation cards are all the same, you just fill in date and time. The cakes are usually bought in the stores by the parents. There is no food for the parents. So you're stuck there with a disgusting coffee for two hours watching your kid going up and down an artificial playground which is usually kept quite cold. I thought the other day: When even a child's Birthday comes pre-packed in a sterile, assembly line-like place, you realize humanity IS doomed.


Maybe it's me. I'm too radical. Maybe. I'm an extremist. Maybe. But...


But the joy I saw in my son's eyes the other day while cutting the red paper to make his invitations... The spark in his eyes when he suggested how to make them look better... It was great. It was worth all the effort. 


His Birthday will be on an Angry Birds theme. He was very interested in the whole preparation of the goodie bags and such... I'll be cooking my butt off, and we'll spend a wonderful afternoon together, everyone will be eating and drinking juice or beer or wine and the house will fill with the kids running up and down and their laughter and I'll be the happiest person in the whole world. 


It's disgraceful that people won't even take the time anymore to prepare a cake for their own children's birthdays... I am making everything myself every year and I love it... Every year the menu is different, every year I'll find a different cake to make. I don't like baking cakes, it's something that never turns out quite the way I expect it. But the joy it brings to place those candles on it :)


I always cook from scratch. I make my own washing powder. I refuse to use bleach in the house. After work I dig in the garden in the effort to make it produce food. We eliminated TV when our son was born. We don't buy ready made food EVER. We shop as little as possible. We don't buy things we don't need. We drive the smallest possible cars as little as possible.


And I often think all we do is for nothing... All our efforts, all our hard work to make this Earth a better place is wasted because one single person will never make the difference...
But... But then I look in my son's eyes and see them lit up when he talks about his plants in the garden, and his crazy love for slugs, worms and centipedes and I see hope and that not all we do is for nothing, all we do is actually for him :)

Peas Blooming

The New Word

It's been a few days since I've posted on the blog. Well, in my defense I can say it's been a busy weekend and it was a busy week at work.


I love this space, because it's mine and mine alone.
As every mother knows, we are always sharing ourselves with our husbands and children. Whenever Mamma says: "I'll just put my feet up for two minutes", maybe while the sauce is already on the stove and you don't need to be watching it anymore, here comes the little one: "Mammy will you help me color Scooby Doo?".
The husband is nowhere to be found, or busy with his own things, so the feet-up-plan goes out the window, and you have to search for the Scooby Doo page first, which is somewhere in the pile of coloring pages printed at school and brought home (on purpose, to fulfill the moments when you wanna just put your feet up for a few minutes), and then get the pencils and then help with the coloring :) 
It doesn't matter, I am really glad to do whatever it takes to make my son happy, even if it means no time for myself anywhere in sight for the next 10 years.
I like being busy, I like working in the home, I like setting an example for my son; nothing falls from the sky, but everything comes from your hard working hands. This is what I was shown as a child and this is what I want to show my son.


Well, to come back to this post's title... I have today, learned a new word! And I love it!!! After living in an English-speaking Country for six years, I did not expect this to strike me the way it did. 
The word is Resilience. I love it! It signifies being able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions.


We live difficult times, and I believe more difficulties are just around the corner. For all of us, regular working class people. There is a financial crisis that has spread everywhere, our wages do not depend anymore on our abilities but instead depend on a system many of us do not understand. So many persons lost their jobs in the last 4 years(23 million people in Europe are unemployed at present), and things do not seem to be getting any better. At least, the economy is not recovering. 
I believe we have finite resources on the Planet, and this means the economy cannot grow forever. Here is why the word Resilience struck me this morning: we should create, at least in our homes, which is the only space we can control ourselves, a Resilient System. Or at least, as resilient as possible.

This is what our garden looks like at the moment. This is another step I am taking towards resilience. The first step was the stockpile, which is relatively easy. This is a step forward.
Next week we will get a new polytunnel, the one we had "abandoned us" on the 4th of April, torn by a very strong wind. Now we know better, and will install the new tunnel in a different way.


The wooden boxes in the picture contain the vegetables that will not suffer any damage in the event of a frost. Far right are the carrots, then there are oilseed rapes at the back and mixed salad leaves on the front. Next to them, in the back, 4 strawberries plants and on the front, the spinach. On the left, under the plastic box, more salad leaves, parsley and, invisible in the back, 2 artichoke plants. They are my favorites. I can never find artichokes here in Ireland, I'll be soooo happy when I can just eat my own :)


The polytunnel is necessary for beans, pepper and aubergine plants. They are delicate plants and must be in a protected space. And our sitting room does look a bit like a garden centre at the moment, so the tunnel is definitely needed.


In another corner of the garden I have peas plants, those would resist anything! On Sunday I also planted 3 raspberry bushes. Well, they are more raspberries sticks at the moment, but I trust them to become bushes soon.


Saturday was my gardening day, my son was very happy to help me build the wooden boxes and then plant the seeds. He checks every morning on the germination of the seeds we have inside and reminds me to water them. He's a great little boy.


Well, all of this to say that if the worse should happen, and both of us lose our job and we only had the unemployment payments to live on, we would still make it and not go hungry for a long time. We would still be able to pay the mortgage and eat proper food for a long time. Resilience is truly a great word, and it is something that helps me feel safer. There are so many things I cannot control, so many fundamental things, like the stability of our jobs. So what I can control I want to control.


In the meantime, I cook from scratch every single day, I avoid bringing in the house processed foods and things with just too many ingredients on the label to be even considered food. I know is comfortable to shop and I do so with pleasure, but I'm always careful what's inside the nice package.


I think we need to prepare for rainy days all the time. We need to learn from our parents' and grandparents', who fed entire families with very little and just worked very hard all their lives.

The Mighty Pile :)

Recently I have started stockpiling. Recently means last year, when we were in Italy for our holidays. 

I was in a supermarket with my mother, shopping for something special to eat that day and I saw a very good kind of pasta on special offer. So I told my mum if we could organize for the guy who brings to us Italians in Ireland all our tomato sauce, to bring a big box of pasta as well. She said it could be done and so I bought about 30 kilos of pasta, which equals to 60 packets. The thing is, here I can only find 3 varieties of pasta, and the quality is quite low. Actually very low. Unless you are prepared to spend 2.50 € a packet, which I am not.

So the stockpiling habit began. Once the pasta boxes arrived, I placed them all in a space under the stairs, close enough to the kitchen, on a small bookshelf. When I looked at all that food I felt a kind of security. It definitely makes me feel safe to have enough food to feed my family for at least 2 months! The pasta sits alongside my parents' homemade tomato sauce. More recently I have added to this, and increased the pile with olive and vegetable oil, vinegar, sugar, some pesto jars, vegetable stock cubes, salt, wine bottles, flour, pickles and sottoli, yeast, bicarbonate of soda, soda for washing, soap bars, toothpaste, evaporated milk, dried legumes such as beans, lentils and chickpeas, corn starch, potatoes and other things that now I cannot think of.

I find this habit to be a very good one. At least, it works for us as a family. Our trips to the supermarket have been drastically reduced. We go shopping once a week now, and we only buy bread, fruit and vegetables and yogurts for my son. On average, this shopping cost about 20 €. Once in the supermarket, I usually buy products to go in the stockpile. It is important for me to have always the same amount of items in the pile. They are rotated and obviously, the ones just bought go at the back of the shelf.

In the kitchen drawer I only keep the products I am currently using.

Last weekend I cleaned this particular drawer. It is my kitchen drawer, where I keep all the things I need in order to cook. I found 3 bicarbonate of soda packets open, so I decided to put all of the bicarbonate in one single jar, to protect it from humidity and have it all in one place. I also changed the paper that lies underneath the bottles and jars. I got rid of empty packages and I can now see what I have, what I need, what I need to buy and what needs to be refilled from the stockpile.

I also have the habit of washing and keeping glass jars when empty. I love them. Particularly because they come in handy all the time, believe me. I also buy bigger glass jars to keep things tidy.

I come from a culture of reusing, recycling and preserving. Every year in August, for example, I helped my parents make the tomato sauce. The bottles used for this operation usually come from the local bar, empty "Peroni" beer bottles that would be otherwise thrown away. The bottles are washed, filled with the precious sauce, sealed with new caps and placed on their shelf. Once a bottle is empty, my mother would thoroughly wash it, and place it on another shelf to be used next year. This means that we have glass bottles older than 30 years. Older than me. It is a virtuous cycle that gives a simple bottle a huge importance and a very long life. I have also always seen my mother use the freezer as a "treasure chest". Out of the freezer come all kind of things, such as legumes, vegetables, fruit and meat. This means there is always something to cook during the winter months, even if she doesn't go shopping for weeks in a row.

I am trying hard to apply all the teachings of my parents into the life I have now, working full time, living in a terraced house with an eclosed garden at the back. It is hard, but it seems to be working quite well. I try to take one step at a time, like a child discovers walking. When I thought I had no space for a stockpile, I managed to de-clutter the small space under the stairs, and that worked. When I thought I could never grow anything to put on the table, I found that growing in pots can be an option. When I thought I had very little time to cook, I learned to cook extra portions and freeze the extras. When I thought my son would need nappies for a while, before he was born I bought reusable nappies for a fraction of the price I would have spent on disposable nappies and without creating the huge amount of garbage the disposable would have. When I thought of all the chemical crap that comes in our washing powder and that inevitably ends up on our skin, I searched for a simple way to make washing powder.

I believe all of us can find ways in the everyday life to create virtuous habits. I believe that by showing and not telling our children what to do in order to save some money, avoid to create garbage or cook a simple meal, we can really make a difference in our life and theirs.

I needed to take control of our lives and our expenses, especially since we decided to buy our house, and I found that taking control of what we eat is the first step. The journey is still long, I have skills to learn and skills to rediscover. I have a lot of things to work on, and I will definitely do so, one at a time.