Tag: budget

Luxury on a Budget: Afternoon Tea

November 16, 2014 / enroutetoawesome / 0 Comments

I’ve said it before and I still mean it: When you’re trying to save money, luxuries have to come first. It’s not just possible to enjoy a little luxury while sticking to your budget; it’s absolutely essential. If life has no space for a bit of pleasure now and then, what on earth are you budgeting for?

There’s good news for your bank account, though. When it comes to enjoying a luxury, the thing itself is only part of the package. The main point is the quality of the experience. And the good thing about that is that it means you can have a whole lot of indulgence without spending very much. One happy little low-cost luxury enjoyed in Australian homes, schools and workplaces is morning and afternoon tea.

Japan understood the importance of teatime very well, changing the brew from hot matcha or oolong in winter to cold green or barley tea in summer, enjoyed with a variety of sweet or salted snacks. China and Hong Kong enjoy formal and informal teatimes, including yum cha, the ultimate tea break. South Americans sip volcanic mate, while India and the U.K. both enjoy their morning and afternoon tiffin with savouries and sweets (hence the Australian and New Zealander taste for the experience). Whenever you enjoy it and whatever you call it, when it comes to luxury on a budget, teatime is right up there with foot massages for pleasure and value for money.

Being Australian, Kin and I have always enjoyed our morning and afternoon teas, but we only started making an event of it during our first Japanese winter. Maybe being indoors so much caused us to try and make it a richer experience or maybe the frozen landscape so far from home caused us to invoke the spirits of our ancestors with their tin teapots, fruitcake, scones and blessed, blessed heat. Whatever our reason for starting, we kept it going all through that winter and now, two years later, we still haven’t stopped. No matter how busy or wretched the day, we always come together in the afternoon to enjoy a little oasis of peace and pleasant sensations.

Remember that word, please! PEACE is the point to your afternoon tea. This is an everyday event, so it’s not supposed to cause you any stress or problems. With peace in mind, here are a couple of my simplest, most reliable recipes for teatime treats:

(All measures are Australian and metric. I’ll include a conversion chart on the site soon, but for now, look them up here.)

Banana Bread

The simplest thing to make in the entire universe. I’m not even kidding; I have left entire ingredients out of this recipe before, and it still keeps coming up edible.

3 tbsp olive oil (or other vegetable oil) – 2 cups self raising flour
2/3 cup sugar – 3 eggs
¼ tsp bicarbonate of soda (baking soda) – ½ tsp salt
4 large or 5-6 small mashed bananas

Preheat oven to 180 C. Grease loaf tin and set aside.

In a mixing bowl, beat sugar, oil and eggs together until light and fluffy. Beat in bananas (if you’re using an electric mixer, you don’t even have to mash them, just dump them in one at a time and let the mixer squoosh them). Sift dry ingredients into the bowl and mix well. It should still be pretty liquid at this stage.

Pour mixture into tin and place in oven. Bake for about an hour; shorter if you like things heavy and moist, longer if you like them fluffy and light. Simple! Slice and eat hot, cold, toasted with honey or however you prefer.

Butter cake with passionfruit icing

Up until Japan, I baked my cakes in regular, round cake tin. Nagahama, however, had never heard of such a thing, so I wound up instead having to buy two tiny loaf tins and bake two tiny cakes …. which has turned out to be the best thing ever. I now get one cake to eat and another to freeze for the next time I fancy cake and don’t feel like baking (and sometimes when a woman needs cake, she needs it right away!) Other advantages are that small cakes get eaten quickly, even if you don’t have any visitors for a few days and they also make portion control much easier. Kin could happily eat an entire meal of cake, so he likes the small ones; for some reason, it’s much easier to cut yourself a small slice of a small cake than it is to cut a small slice from a large cake.

Butter cake (Margaret Fulton):

125g butter (half a block) – 2 cups self raising flour
¾ cup caster sugar – 2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla – ¾ cup milk
Pinch salt

Preheat oven to 180 C. Grease your cake tin/s and set aside.

Cream butter with vanilla and sugar until it looks white and fluffy. Beat in eggs, one at a time until thoroughly combined. Sift flour and salt together three times and fold into mixture alternately with milk, using a spatula or wooden spoon.

(I regularly skip this careful sifting and the cake still turns out pretty good, so if you’re in a hurry, just stir it up and go)

Dollop mixture into tin/s and place in oven. Bake for 30 minutes (twenty-five, if using two pans).

Icing:

1 cup icing sugar – 1 tbsp melted butter
2-3 tbsp passionfruit pulp

Makes enough for one of the little loaf-cakes, so if you’ve made a big cake, double up.

Using a spatula or a bread and butter knife, mix the lot together in a bowl, then spread it on top of the cooled cake. Too simple! I also often replace the passionfruit with whatever citrus is handy; use a few tbsp of the juice and grate up a few teaspoonsful of zest to mix through as well.

Sultana scones

Slightly more tricky here: If you want these guys at their best, you actually have to cook them at teatime. Scones are a teatime staple for a reason, though; they’re cheap, quick, pretty easy and bloody awesome. I like plain scones with jam and cream, but Nagahama sometimes had trouble providing these, so sultana ones with butter were a good mainstay.

60g chilled, chopped butter – 2 cups self-raising flour
½ cup sultanas – ½ cup milk
1/3 cup sugar

Preheat oven to 200 C. Grease a baking tray or dust it with plain flour and set aside.

Sift flour into a bowl and then rub in the butter with your fingers until it looks like fine breadcrumbs. Give the bowl a thump on your benchtop every now and then, to bring the big lumps to the surface. Stir in the sultanas. Make a well in the centre of your mixture and very slowly pour in the milk, stirring quickly with a butter knife until you have a dough. You may not need all of it, so watch out; if your mixture gets too sticky, you’ll have to dust it with a bit more flour.

This next step is where all recipe book authors turn out to be filthy liars. They will now tell you to turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead it until smooth. Do NOT do this, unless you enjoy eating grey, tasteless lumps. Instead, gather the dough gently into a ball, turn it out onto the lightly floured surface and then carefully fold and press it a couple of times until it looks like it’s fairly well combined. You may only need to do this two or three times and remember to be gentle!

Roll the dough out until it’s about two cm thick. Use a biscuit cutter or the top of a small water glass to cut scones from the dough (probably 16-17 of them). Place on the tray about 1cm apart and brush them with a little milk. Bake them for about ten minutes or until they sound hollow when you tap them on the bottom. Serve hot, with butter!

Even at 1/3 cup, these scones aren’t super sweet; I’ll add more or less sugar depending on how we feel. If they turn out to not be sweet enough for you, these scones are lovely with some honey or stewed blueberries.

Morning and afternoon tea are small, light meals, with the main focus being your chosen drink, rather than food. On working days, our afternoon tea is as simple as coffee for Kin and a pot of tea for me, with some little treat like a slice of cake or some good fruit or mochi. On non-working days we become a little more elaborate and along with our sweets, we also enjoy things like olives, devilled eggs, little sandwiches and other small, savoury items. The point isn’t the food, it’s the event; a period of stillness, pleasant sensations and happiness in solitude or in good company. Stuffing yourself with half a cake is no luxury at all; but slice of it with afternoon tea is an experience to savour.

Tea’s up!

Gem

Fuss and Budgets

June 22, 2014 / enroutetoawesome / 3 Comments

By Gem

Enroute is having money worries! Saving for a house has seen us put away a respectable stash, but now we’re soon to leave our jobs, leave the country and start taking some very big chances…… and that means we’re nervously facing the fact that our savings are likely to take a kicking over the rest of 2014. There are tough times ahead, we’re a little anxious, but we know it’s time to make some hard decisions.

So we spent lots of money and bought a camera!

You WHAT?

When we were young, Kin and I both had our own special ways of being terrible with money. In our defence, please note that we’ve always paid our rent and bills and never had our phones cut off. But once these essentials were out of the way, our spending habits were atrocious.

Bad Spending – Gem-Style

My dreadful money method was to meticulously plan where absolutely every dollar should go and to deny myself pretty much anything I wanted, pretty much all of the time. This allowed me to accumulate some savings… which were then decimated at intervals when the rigid discipline became too much and I went temporarily buy-crazy.

Result? Despite the constant threat of nest-egg annihilation, I never seemed to obtain anything I wanted. (Buy-crazy shopping is not well-considered shopping.)

Bad Spending – Kin-Style

Kin, on the other hand, would frantically spend anything he earned or received as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, he never thought very hard about what to spend it on, so his money would just evaporate, leaving him with nothing between pays.

Result? No savings mean a person has very little money at a time; and that means that Kin never got much that he wanted either! To make things worse, he also ran up some emergency debt (although not very much, thankfully; one of the good things about being in a low income bracket in your twenties is no-one wants to lend you money!)

So. Neither of us had much money (although I had slightly more than Kin) and neither of us were able to have nice things (although Kin had slightly more than me). Day to day, life was okay, but we were both just treading water; neither of us were ever in a position to improve things for ourselves.

Then, one day, we met, we moved in together and we combined our finances. And we combined our opposing ideas on how to manage those finances. And together, we developed our most important household rule:

Budget Luxuries FIRST

This isn’t the disaster it sounds like! The key words here are different for each of us, but the rule helps us both.

For me, the keywords are “Luxuries FIRST”. I like a good fait accompli and am happy to simply sit on money I don’t yet have a purpose for, so I will stick to a spending plan, even if it means having to scrape every last coin out of the couch, make scratch meals out of pantry scraps and home-grown vegetables and wash the dishes with soap. Because of that, it’s actually quite easy for me to sacrifice after the fact, especially since I already have my lovely indulgences to make me happy!

For Kin, who could happily get through the lot, the keywords are “Budget FIRST”. This means that before he spends any money in a pay period he has to think about what he actually wants, not just this month, but in the short and long term future. Actually setting aside physical containers to hold money for different purposes can be helpful for this sort of person. For example, you might have one envelope with money for restaurant meals, another with money for a new mattress, and so on. Doing things this way means that there is no large pool of cash for you to draw from to dilute the sacrifice; every time you spend, you will have to decide which area is going to take the hit. Watching your holiday, bicycle or pretty dress dribble away a few dollars at a time is a wonderful way to focus your attention on unnecessary spending.

If you don’t like keeping cash in the house, having separate bank accounts for your different kinds of spending can work (this guy has a lot to say on that topic, if you can avoid the advertising) but you really need to stay on top of fees and taxation.

But please remember: We budget luxuries first out of our household SPENDING money. We do NOT prioritise them over our rent, bills or savings. If you or your partner just flat-out can’t be trusted right now, this would be a terrible idea for you (you need to think about more basic goals, like these or these). There are also a lot of low-cost ways to obtain your pleasures, and I’m looking forward to talking about them later on!

Where do you fit luxury into your life? Where are you prepared to sacrifice and where do you indulge?

Happy (frugal) hedonism!

Gem

On the Boil: The Awesomeness of Soup

April 20, 2014 / enroutetoawesome / 6 Comments

By Gem

Now Australia is beginning to settle into autumn, and the spring days here in Japan maintain their chill… Now, it is time to sing the song of soup.

O Soup, the nourishing
Soup, the tasty
O, Soup, ye friend of the poor and saviour of the lazy…

… not to mention, Soup, the best way I know of getting rid of whatever’s going leggy in the garden, or leaky in the fridge. Or, Soup, how you can get five serves of vegetables into one meal, let alone one day. Or even Soup, a really good way of impressing lunch guests without really doing anything.

But none of those really rhyme so well, do they?

Soup and Scheduling

I’ve spoken before about the importance of planning when you’re trying to keep your diet properly balanced. If you’re generally lazy (I am!), busy (I am!), or just someone who can’t always be trusted to make decisions like a grownup (I am!), but you still want to keep everyone properly fed during the week, then you need to organise your kitchen ahead of time.

Soup is central to my day-to-day organisation. If you always keep a jug of soup and a bottle of salad dressing in the fridge, you will always have a lovely, vege-ful meal half organised before you even get home from work.

This is great for those days when you just plain don’t feel like cooking or discover you have unexpected guests on a night you were planning to make scrambled eggs on toast. With about three minutes extra work, your scrambled eggs become an omelette, and you have soup, salad and toast ready to go with it! Salads and soups travel quite happily to work with you and will turn your lunchtime sandwich into a real meal. It also helps you feel better about those days when you haven’t prepared, but you’re already exhausted and just buy a barbequed chicken and some bread rolls on your way home from work. You’re still giving everyone a decent, balanced meal, you’re just not killing yourself to do it at a time when you just don’t have the energy.

Soup is also another arrow in my quiver against the Healthy-Food-Costs-More brigade.

Getting Organised

Soup and salad dressing are both very simple to make. I shake up my salad dressing in an old squeezy-top mustard bottle that Kin washes out each time we empty it (about every month or so) and store it in the fridge. Just find an old jar, dump in a couple of tablespoons of a nice vinegar (we like a very acidic red wine vinegar), about double that of oil, salt, pepper and any additives that take your fancy (I often add about a tablespoon of Dijon mustard, crushed garlic or some parmesan shavings), shake it up and boom; vinaigrette dressing ready whenever you want it. Just give it another shake when it’s time to squoodge some out.

(Here are some rather more precise recipes if you’re nervous about that sort of thing. Or you can simply buy a nice, low kilojoule salad dressing to keep on hand).

On the whole, though, it’s even easier to construct a soup than it is to make a salad dressing, and it’s a lot more impressive to visitors.

Basic Soup No 1: Green Velvet

This soup is Kin’s favourite; it’s also the easiest soup I know! A basic soup like this just needs vegetables and stock. I usually use a liquid chicken stock for my soups, but there are no real rules when it comes to soup. If you are vegetarian, use vegetable stock. If you can’t make liquid stock (I’m not very good at it, either) or afford to buy it, use cubes from the supermarket. Don’t fret too much about getting things right; it’s soup. Soup will forgive you for just about anything.

Ingredients:

1 head of broccoli, divided into small florets, stem chopped
1 bunch of spinach, washed
1 large onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed or finely chopped
2 largeish potatoes, peeled and chopped into cubes
1.2 litres of stock (or whatever. If you like a thicker soup, use less. If thinner, use more)
Splash of olive oil
Herbs or seasonings (see variation). Today’s herbs for us are oregano, thyme and rosemary.

Method:

Heat the oil in a saucepan and brown the onion and garlic over a low-medium heat until softened (probably more than five minutes, probably less than ten. Again, it’s soup; don’t worry so much). Add the potato and stir fry for 2-3 minutes (if adding dried herbs, this is a good time. This is also when I add hard herbs like rosemary), then pour in the stock. Bring to the boil, and then simmer for about fifteen minutes, or until the potato is tender. Add the broccoli (and any other fresh herbs), simmer for about four minutes or until broccoli is tender, then add spinach. Stir through and turn off heat.

Liquify soup using a stick blender, food processor, or whatever you have on hand. If you don’t have any of those things, go to an op shop or a pawn shop and buy one. I don’t care how broke you are. Being able to make soup is going to save you more money than a second-hand stick blender could possibly cost you.

Pour soup into bowls and serve, or into containers to store in the fridge. I sometimes pop a swirl of cream in each bowl, but it isn’t necessary. This soup reheats quite happily in the microwave and keeps for over a week in the fridge.

Variation: Leave out the herbs and instead add half a teaspoon of cumin at the end of cooking. Serve each bowl with a blob of natural yoghurt

This soup can also be made with any sort of vegies you have lying around, like carrot, beans, zucchini and any sort of leafy greens. Just simmer hard veg for longer and add leafy veg toward the end of cooking time. If you like a thick soup, add more potato. If you like a thin soup, add more stock. However you make it, it will always be delicious. It will also be cheap and give you a hefty serve of vitamins and fibre with every verdant bowlful.

What other sort of soup recipes would you like to see? Or does anyone have a good recipe of their own? I’ll be back in my garden soon and I’ll be on the lookout for nice ones.

Happy souping!

Gem

Sumo Food: Chanko Nabe

January 15, 2014 / enroutetoawesome / 2 Comments

I know! I’m late! I promised Beans this recipe ages ago, though, so I really wanted to wait for nabe night!

Vegetarian readers are also safe to stay this time! I’ll offer a few options for de-meating the dish as we go.

Those of you who are familiar with Kyuushockers will already know that our school lunches tend to be a bit light on the vegie side of things. Nabe is one of my favourite ways of making up for this; it’s an easy way to get HEAPS of vegies into yourself, without having to work very hard. Kin also approves of nabe because it doesn’t make a lot of dishes; all of the ingredients are popped into the communal stockpot, and you haul out whatever you fancy to eat, replacing ingredients as the pot empties.

Nabe ingredients differ with the season (which is a nice way of saying “with what’s on special at the supermarket/going leggy in the garden”). If you don’t have all of the ingredients in this recipe, leave them out or replace them with something else. Greens are greens, roots are roots; I would only recommend that if you’re having trouble sourcing/affording asian mushrooms, buy them dried or leave them out.

Dashi (Stock)

This is my weeknight dashi; I get a little more elaborate on the weekend. Take a piece of kombu, (dried kelp) around 20 cm by 10 cm and wipe off any white residue with a damp cloth. Soak the kombu in a litre of water for at least half an hour. Hell, leave it in there and go to work; it’ll be fine when you get home. Gently heat the water (skimming occasionally if you can be bothered; I can’t) until it is almost boiling, then whip out your kombu and discard it.

Next comes katsuo. Since it’s a weeknight, I’m using dashi granules, which are available at any asian grocery and, these days, probably at supermarkets as well. They tend to come in a blue packet and will have instructions on the side (even if the instructions are in Japanese, just look at the numbers; you’ll work it out). Mine comes in sachets to be used with 600ml of water; I’m using two and a half and adding 500ml to my kombu stock, so now I have 1500ml all up. Since I’m using dashi granules, the stock will be a little scummy on top; if that bothers you, give it a skim before you go any further.

If you are vegetarian, dried shiitakes make a gorgeous alternative to fish-based dashi; just pour boiling water over about eight of them in a saucepan and leave them to soak. You get mushrooms AND dashi! Kin and I aren’t vegetarian, but shiitake dashi is one of our favourites.

Now that your stock is prepped, you just need to pop it into your nabe pot (a big saucepan will do) and stick it on the hotplate. I then add a shake (probably about 50ml) of soy sauce and about the same of mirin. Tonight, we’re also having a dash of ponzu in there as well, just because we like it. Once it’s boiling, you’re ready to start adding ingredients!

Ingredients

Vary as desired; the dashi is the important bit.

Chicken and/or fish (or extra mushrooms and cottony tofu for the vegos!)
Tofu
Udon noodles (fresh or dried). We’re also having konnyaku noodles!
Flavourings (chopped green onion, grated ginger and garlic chives)
Sliced root vegetables (One medium carrot and about 15cm of lotus root)
Leafy greens (Pak choy, bok choy, chrysanthemum greens and about a quarter of a wombok)
Mushrooms (shiitake and enokitake)

The quantities are up to you. The first time you make it, try a bunch of each thing and see if you need more or less. The best order to pop things into your stock is:

Meat…

Then flavourings…

Then root vegies…

Then go mad and throw in whatever you’d like!

On nabe nights, cooking and eating happen simultaneously, so you’ll only need a very small bowl each, with a soup spoon and chopsticks. You’ll also need at least one slotted spoon and a ladle for scooping out your dinner! When the ingredients you fancy are ready, ladle them into your bowl, devour them, then ladle out some more. Keep topping up the pot until everyone is full. (Needless to say, meat is the ONE ingredient that absolutely cannot be added later, unless you’re going to let the soup boil by itself for a little while). If you don’t have a portable hotplate, you can also prepare your nabe on the stove.

Traditionally, rice or noodles were added at the very end of the meal and then enjoyed in the soup, but Kin and I enjoy our noodles with the rest of the ingredients, so we stick them in a few at a time and haul them back out as we fancy them.

Chanko nabe is warming, hearty winter comfort food that still manages to be extremely high in fibre and nutrients. I love it after workouts and Kin loves it any time at all, especially since he gets the leftovers for breakfast. Nabe is also cheap (because you toss in whatever you can get) and super-fun to serve to guests!

What are your go-to dishes in winter?

Gem

Cheep Cheep: Budget Roast Chicken

January 6, 2014 / enroutetoawesome / 0 Comments

This week’s recipe: Roast chicken and stuffing, roast vegetables (with super-crunchy potatoes) and steamed greens with basil and parsley.

Hopefully any vegetarian readers have already fled; if not, please be warned: Today’s post is not for you! If that first shot wasn’t enough to put you off, the ones below definitely will! Why don’t you try this blog or this one today instead?

Kin is very eager to practice his food photography and a couple of other people have suggested we include a regular recipe section. I’m not sure how well I’ll manage it; I’m not a trained chef or dietician and I don’t really intend to become a food blogger. That being said, I can boast of one skill that I’m not convinced all food bloggers possess: I am capable of producing decent mails on a daily basis. You probably won’t see perfectly swirled berry tarts or bowls of glossy pasta with one salmon egg and a single piece of cress balanced on top, but you will know that the dishes you see here can be cheaply reproduced and are usually manageable on a weeknight timetable. Also, unlike most food photographers, Kin actually has to EAT the dish once he’s finished photographing it, so he has a vested interest in maintaining flavour, rather than appearance.

Roast chicken is one of my favourite weapons in my personal war against the “real food is expensive” brigade. One small chook with stuffing will give two people a massive dinner, a couple of decently hefty lunches (think sandwiches or chicken salads), wings for snacking and a carcass to make into soup. I defy you to get that out of KFC. Roasting a chicken is also super easy! The only slightly tricky bit is the stuffing, but if you make it the day before, there’s no hassle involved.

Today’s stuffing is a fairly basic one; the main flavours come from onion, bacon and this little champion here:

That’s sage, one of the nicest herbs I know for flavouring meat. With care, it will grow into an attractive silvery-leafed shrub. With abuse, it will grow into stunted, silvery-leafed sticks, but will still survive to flavour your food, no matter how badly you treat it. I like that in a plant. Dried sage is also easy to find in shops and the flavour is decent.

Breadcrumbs provide the bulk of your stuffing; you’ll need about four slices with the crusts cut off (we use wholemeal, but it isn’t important). If you have a food processor, toss your bread in and blitz it to crumbs. If not, cut it bread into the smallest cubes you can. Place it in a bowl, and season with pepper and salt. Add any herbs you fancy finely chopped or processed; tonight our pots have provided parsley, thyme and a little rosemary, but if you don’t have fresh herbs, don’t go out and buy them. A shake from a jar of dried herbs will do nicely.

Heat a tablespoon of oil in a frying pan (med-high) and drop in about three leaves of sage. Let them frizzle and crisp for a moment, then reduce the heat to medium and toss in one finely chopped brown onion and two – three rashers of bacon, also trimmed and finely chopped. Cook, stirring for three minutes, or until onion is soft and translucent. Dump this into your breadcrumbs and mix it around with a wooden spoon. See if, when you squeeze the mixture in your fist, it keeps its shape. If not, try adding an egg, a little milk or some melted butter to bind it together. Once the mess is moist enough to hold a shape without being sticky, it’s ready to go.

Get your oven preheating to about 190°celsius (a little up or down won’t matter). Give your (thawed) chook a good wash with cold water, including inside the cavity. Dry it off with paper towels or tea towels if you plan to wash them right away. Then, trim off any fat you don’t fancy, shove in your stuffing and secure the cavity with toothpicks. Lightly oil and salt the outside (if you want to) and put it in the oven, breast side down for thirty minutes.

I also include a head of garlic during this first part of the cooking time (garlic needs very little time to roast) for use in soups and sauces through the week. Just stick it in the fridge and it will keep almost forever.

For a weeknight dinner, I don’t do anything very elaborate with the veg; I usually toss them in a small amount of olive oil and season them with garlic powder and chopped rosemary. Ditto the greens; today’s are a combination of broccoli and beans, steamed for two minutes. After two minutes, I add spinach, flat leafed parsley, basil and a tiny wodge of butter and steam the lot for one more minute.

Potatoes, however are a serious matter. For super crunchy spuds without a lot of oil, peel, chop and then par boil them (starting from cold) for ten minutes until the outside is soft. Drain your potatoes, then toss them in their sieve to break up their outsides. Then tumble them in your oil and seasonings.

Put your potatoes and other baking veg on a tray together (tonight we’re having pumpkin, onion, carrot and finger eggplant). Once your chicken has been in the oven for thirty minutes, turn it breast side up and put it on the lower oven shelf, with your tray of vegies on the top shelf. Also take this time to pour off and store and juices collected on the tray; you’ll want them for gravy or soups.

After half an hour, add your soft vegies (this is when I actually add the eggplant), like tomatoes, zucchini or capsicum. Wait another half hour and your dinner is done!

Once you’ve done your prep, this meal will cook quite happily without your supervision. You can have a bath, do some cleaning, entertain guests, whatever you’d like. If you’re the forgetful type, though, make sure you set a timer. You can also be really lazy if you want and just throw in all of your vegies at the one hour mark soft ones included; just don’t blame me if you end up with salsa!

Gem

P.S. I tried to keep the word count down, so I might have left something out. If you have any questions, just send me a message and I’ll clear it up.

The Horror: Repairing A Devastated Garden

September 2, 2013 / enroutetoawesome / 3 Comments

By Gem

Those who’ve been Enroute for a while know that I have a decent collection of herbs and vegies potted up on the balcony to help supply our little kitchen. You’ll also know that we recently went away for five days during the peak of summer. This is what greeted me when I returned:

Yikes! Time for a repair job!

Making a Speedy Recovery

Speed is important right now for two reasons. Firstly, I want to get us eating our own produce again ASAP. Secondly, Shiga might be warm right now, but within a few months the cold will return. To fix your garden or start a new garden at a time like this, you need to think fast and make the right decisions about what to plant.

Here are my selections:

I’ve picked some fast-growing options for the short term and medium-length options to keep us eating until the snow flies (stupid Northern Hemisphere and its stupid “actual winters”). It’s too late to replant any of the fruiting summer crops like tomatoes, cucumbers, or aubergines. Winter vegetables do exist, but I’m not used to snow OR to balcony gardening, so winter crops are probably beyond me as long as I’m in Japan.

My speedy selections are:

1- Supermarket Herb Pots

I bought basil, more flat-leaf parsley and two pots of salad herbs (lots of mizuna, not much lettuce from the looks. Bummer).

When money is no object, remember that the best seedlings always come from nurseries. The varieties are better-selected for home gardeners and the plants themselves are properly hardened, so they won’t curl up their little toes and die on you the second the sun touches them.

When you’re going cheap and nasty, though, supermarket herbs are a good option. These plants are intended for consumption rather than planting, so they are not even slightly hardened and will need a lot of cossetting from you. Generally, though, they cost half as much as proper plants and you usually get a lot per pot.

I gave my planters a very, very good soaking (seriously, the soil had gone badly hydrophobic, so I had to dig through every centimetre of soil and mix water through it. An easier way to do this is to simply purchase a soaking agent to help your soil absorb and retain water.) Then I planted the seedlings on an extremely overcast day and soaked them again. If the day had been sunny, I would have used pieces of cardboard to shield the plants.

2 – Asian Greens

Super cheap (because they grow from seed) and super-speedy, Asian greens are the shiznit. The seedlings will be established in just a few days and you can go from planting to cropping in just weeks. This speed and low cost also makes them a good option if you’re into microgreens.

These little guys are also TOUGH and will take some fairly serious abuse from you as seedlings (although you’ll want to start treating them nice when they get older, so that they’ll crop well for you). I chose Kokurakuten (or spinach mustard) as well as Pak Choi and direct-planted them. My favourites are usually Choy Sum and Tatsoi, but I didn’t find those here.

3 – Tomato Cuttings

“But Gem!” I hear you cry, “I thought you said it was too late to plant fruiting crops! Why are you recommending tomatoes at a time like this?”

It is too late to PLANT tomatoes, yes. But for a flush, late season crop, just when your tomato plants are getting a bit tired, tomato cuttings are brilliant (thank you, Jackie French!). The above picture is a cutting I took just a few weeks ago; it’s already flowering and even has a spray of fruit.

The best way to take a tomato cutting is to select one of your best performers of that season and then mulch it REALLY heavily, or bury the lower branches in soil. Then, once some roots have started to form, yank that branch off and replant it. Bingo, brand new tomato plant, eight times the size of any seedling you could buy and one hundred percent ready for some serious, tomato-growing action. If I hadn’t already taken cuttings of my cherry tomato, I would do my best to find a surviving bit and do it now. They really do grow that fast!

4 – Violas

Tough, colorful and fast growing violas are always a good flower when you’ve got a bare spot or two and you’re in a hurry. In Australia, my usual go-to options are huge pansy-faces and heartsease, but these look similar enough to get me by. You can plant violas almost any time at all, and as long as you take the most basic care of them, they will just keep on blooming for you. That includes the winter months of this stupid frozen hemisphere, although you’ll want to get them indoors before Christmas. The only better option I know is alyssum, but that is harder to put in a vase (also, I can’t find any).

5 – Mid-term vegies

These are still reasonably fast-growing options, just not up to the insane speed-levels of asian greens.

The speedier ones are lettuce and spinach (both for salads and for cooked dishes). I’ve planted these guys in seed-raising pots and will transplant them once they’re a reasonable size.

Slower-growing, are beans and chrysanthemum greens. In warm weather (which this still is), the beans will shoot within a few days of planting and should crop for at least a little while before the weather gets too cold. The chrysanthemum greens take a moderate amount of time to grow, but are very cold-resistant and should survive the first part of winter, even if they don’t get much bigger once the weather turns cold.

Luckily, despite heavy fatalities, there were some survivors, which means that my selections were probably a little different than if I had had no remaining assets in my garden. My tomato cutting, some herbs (thyme, oregano, rosemary, chives, flat leafed parsley, lemon balm and sage), some flowers (pink cosmos, morning glory and New Guinea impatien) and, surprisingly the zucchini, although the early crop has been sacrificed. All of these plants look like hell, but they’re already on the way to making a recovery.

I still weep for the fallen (especially the lettuce and my beautiful little miniature sunflowers!), but at least the damage has been repaired as far as I’m able and we won’t have to wait until spring to have fresh food!

What are your speedy go-to crops?

Gem

Coffee Body Scrub

August 3, 2013 / enroutetoawesome / 1 Comment

WE-ARE-SO-TIRED!

Kin can’t sleep at night because of the heat so, of course, I can’t sleep either. In the morning, when it is a little cooler, I can’t sleep because of the bright sun so, of course, nor can Kin! We’re a very sad and weary pair right now and have been for about a month.

On the other hand, our next-door neighbours have a new baby that, no matter which one of us is awake, at whatever time, we always seem to hear crying. That’s put our problems into some perspective; at least we’re getting some sleep! That couple must be so exhausted, I’m sure they’re close to crying as much as the baby.

So, after a bad night’s sleep and a hard day’s work, what better way is there to rejuvenate myself than with a lovely, home-made coffee (thank you, Kin!) and a lovely homemade coffee body scrub?

Recycling Coffee Grounds

Usually, Kin’s used coffee grounds end up in the same place as my used tea leaves; fertilising our leafy greens! Recently, though, I’ve started swiping them for a different purpose. I don’t know if it’s a Japan thing or just my local area, but I have searched far and wide for a body scrub with no success at all. I DID find one tiny little tube of salt scrub which, not to mention how expensive it was, would be an absolute nightmare for my dry, cranky skin. So I’ve started making my own!

To start with I just scoured myself with the plain grounds, but after a bit of thinking, a bit of Googling and a bit of experimentation, I’ve come up with a recipe that makes me fairly happy.

Coffee Body Scrub

I’ll do this in ratios, because not everyone uses Australian measures:

– 1 part coffee grounds

– 1 part brown sugar (what they call “brown” here is more like the stuff we call “raw” in Oz)

– 1/3 part olive oil

– Cocoa powder and vanilla essence.

I just mix all of these things together in a bowl, pop it into a little bathroom pot with a lid and voila! A gorgeous, extremely cheap scrub that works really, really well.

This scrub is honestly a bit too rough for the face (although I have no choice, so I’m using it anyway, just very gingerly). But for the bod, it’s perfect and it smells absolutely divine. I chuck the cocoa and vanilla in there just to add to the scent (it stays on the skin so nicely). I know that cocoa flavenoids are supposed to be beneficial for skin health, but I’m pretty sure you need to ingest the stuff, not just slap it on yourself and hope. Ditto topical caffeine from the coffee; I’m pretty sure it needs to stay on the skin, not just get rubbed on and rinsed off.

This scrub would probably be really luxurious if you had sweet almond oil, or glycerine or all sorts of other things that I wouldn’t be able to get here. But even with plain old olive oil, I’m happy.

For those manly folk who are scoffing at my recipe, I have one word for you: Solvol. But home-made, recycled-ingredient Solvol. Interested now? Every bearded eco-warrior needs something to get the bicycle grease or planting dirt off their hands. It’s also good for beard dandruff or product buildup in your hair (although warning to blondes; we also discovered it will stain pale things, including hair!).

I love finding new ways of using things and this scrub has been a real winner. And even if I’m taking some of the lettuce’s coffee grounds away from them, as long as this weather keeps up, Kin will keep producing plenty more! Are there any other uses for coffee grounds or tea leaves that I’m missing?

Gem

The Wonderful Weekend – and – Gem Gets Bossy

June 9, 2013 / enroutetoawesome / 0 Comments

EDIT: Up until this point, En Route had been a forum for Gem to complain bitterly about the school lunches provided in Nagahama. This entry marks the point at which the two of us started journal-keeping; the complaints are still available at Kyuushockers.

By Gem

Kin and I wound up doing some fabulously exciting things in May. Clubbing in Osaka, parties on boats, capsule hotels and trips to Gifu, not to mention lots and lots of travel to all sorts of wonderful festivals.

Trouble is, we’re just not fabulously exciting people. We had a fantastic time at all of these events (which is why we keep getting invited, heaven help us) but we tend to need a bit of time between parties to recharge. This weekend, we did hardly anything… okay, we did go to the firefly festival in Moriyama and we also did a four-hour bike ride yesterday, but that was just the two of us and was strictly local. This weekend has been recovery time. Time to do our housework, time to exercise (hence the bike ride), time to spend together. And we’re both feeling so much better for it. I’m about to plan our menu for the week, Kin is making me a pot of tea and the breadmaker is grunting contentedly to itself in the corner (it’s name is Oinky; when it starts kneading, it sounds like a relaxed truffle pig). When the time comes to go back to school tomorrow, I’ll be ready.

This Week’s “Awwwwww”

This girl’s writing practice sheet might be the cutest thing I’ve seen this year. My favourite is the one in the pool.

This Week’s Nightmare Creation

From the same fourth grade classroom. I’m not 100% sure who’s responsible for this one, but I have a few guesses.

Time at home this weekend has given me a chance to do something else; something I’m about to become demanding about.

Starting Out in Summer – Or – Do Some Gardening, You Lazy Tossers

Southern hemisphere friends can ignore this (although if it’s anyone from my Newcastle, I KNOW you can still get some broccoli and herbs in, not to mention English spinach). I’ve been bossy about this before, as I recall and I’m about to get bossy again. Whether you’re a lazy person or a busy person, there is something all of you need to do with your time:

Grow some bloody herbs

…

Do it!

There.

For a Lazy Person, having a few herbs and greens about the place takes so much stress out of the “Oh crap, people have come over and I have a loaf of bread and two tomatoes. What the fuck am I going to give them?” supply situations our people are so prone to. Toast that bread, chuck some chopped tomato on top with a bit of torn basil and some black pepper and BOOM! Bruschetta! (of sorts…)

For the Busy Person, it makes even more sense; the investment-return ratio for gardening is better than anything I can think of except regular exercise and the biggest cost will be your time (which you always have too much of anyway).

But I Don’t Have A Garden!

Location isn’t that important for either group; I’m one of the laziest people I know, and I’m still sprouting seeds indoors and bunging stuff in scavenged pots on a balcony where my watering can freezes in winter and the surfaces scorch in summer. If you have anything outdoors at all, a courtyard, a wide windowsill, a veranda, you have NO excuse not to grow a few things to make life easier, no matter how lazy you are.

(Unless you don’t ever cook, in which case you’ll get me started on a whole new naggy lecture).

In the Summer Time…

Most of the northern hemisphere has warmed up bee-yoo-tifully by now, which means that it’s the perfect time for a lazy entrance into the world of gardening. Anything you plant now will grow like the blazes, giving you that nice, speedy bit of positive reinforcement so necessary for we lazy folk beginning an endeavour.

My pots are filled with an assortment of winter survivors (like chives, that lurk underground and don’t seem to mind freezing) and spring additions, although I have a lot of work to put in for the summer veg in the near future. The spinach, broccolini and lettuce are producing, we should have our first zucchini and beans this week and I have a new batch of seeds ready to pop in any time. My summer garden is well underway. Let’s start on yours!

Step One – PLAN

What do you want to grow? Of course, everything; but when you consider the time and space you have available, you might want to start limiting your options a bit.

Things to consider are:

– Ease of growing (which is one reason why I recommend starting with herbs; they don’t make unreasonable demands about sunlight, water and weed-free soil AND they grow much faster than many vegetables)

– Ease of access (is this something you can buy cheaply and easily anyway? I’m not growing aubergines, because they are one of the cheapest vegetables available here)

– Availability of space (not just in your garden, but in your food-storage. To me, it is very much worth growing lettuce, just because my fridge is too small to always keep it on hand. Ditto green onions, because they wilt in the crisper. A potato crop, on the other hand, would give me a HUGE storage problem)

Storage is easier in the garden than the fridge; and it’s always there when you need it!

So plan, review and, for the love of Inari, START SMALL. If you get over-enthused and fill up every bed or container you have in the place, it’s likely to all become a bit much the first time you have a bad week and can’t water. A couple of basil plants and some thyme in a pot is a perfectly reasonable beginning and you can keep building from there. I started Spring with chives, lettuce, basil, thyme, oregano, rosemary, flat leaf parsley, broccolini, cucumbers and beans. This has expanded to include zucchini, cherry tomatoes, lemon balm, dill, sage and pak choy and is likely to expand still further.

The other reason to start small is for continued cropping. If you check my balcony photos, you’ll notice quite a few empty pots, or gaps in the current ones. These are for future crops of lettuce and beans, which will be planted a few weeks from now, to ensure a continued supply. If you’ve already filled up all the available space, you’ll have one big harvest, then nothing for a couple of months.

Step Two: PURCHASE (or scavenge or whatever)

The major things you’ll need are containers and soil. (People who have some actual ground to garden in can ignore this bit, but you’d better go out and start preparing a bed. More on this in future posts, if anyone’s interested.)

Containers are fairly easy; if you’re cashed up you can buy some really lovely ones, but even if you’re broke, acquiring containers is as simple as going to your local fruit and vegie shop and requesting their used Styrofoam boxes. Broccoli boxes are best, but don’t forget to cut drainage holes in the bottom! Soil is a little more tricky; if you’re lucky enough to have gardening friends, they may be kind enough to share their compost with you (although don’t bet on it; compost is precious) but to be honest, you’re probably just going to have to buy some. Yes, it’s expensive, but if you work one container at a time, it shouldn’t murder your budget too badly and you will soon start saving grocery money. I purchased the two classy-looking green containers, but scavenged the rest from a neighbour’s large trash pickup.

Fertiliser could also be useful, but isn’t essential. A nice organic liquid one is good for pots, but there are some good granule-types available too, which have the added advantage of being slow release. If you can’t afford fertilisers to begin with, don’t worry about it. Herbs are also lovely and undemanding about nutrition, whatever the label on their seed-packet tries to tell you.

If you’re really broke, apparently human urine can be a good fertiliser for balcony plants, but it needs to be VERY dilute; one part urine to ten parts water. You also need to be sure that there aren’t any nasties in your urine; not simply diseases like hepatitis, but any bits and

There’s WHAT on the rocket?

pieces left over from what you ingest. For example, I use hormonal contraceptives, so there’s no way I can try this out. To be honest, it’s probably safer not to pee near plants you plan to eat, just to avoid the gross-out factor if you realise halfway through your salad that you forgot to wash the lettuce. This method should be fine for flowers and other ornamentals, though.

Step Three: PLANT

The fun bit! But what should you plant, seedlings or seed?

Growing plants from seed is far, far cheaper and can often give healthier, better-growing plants, especially for ones prone to transplant shock. It’s a good way for the experienced or time-rich gardener to go.

HOWEVER: if you’re a first-time grower, I recommend starting with seedlings and potted herbs. You’ll see much faster results and gain much faster satisfaction. We’re lazy people, remember; we need quick rewards to keep ourselves going, especially in the early days. A couple of herbs and a punnet of lettuce and you’ll be eating your own salad in under a month, which is a wonderful bit of positive reinforcement.

I’ve gone with half and half; the beans, cucumber and a lot of the lettuce have been grown from seed, while most of the herbs, the broccoli and four lettuce plants were purchased.

There you go. You’re ready. Omelette aux fines herbes is within your grasp within the next month; IF you get started now.

Get growing!

Gem

Tag: budget

Luxury on a Budget: Afternoon Tea

Banana Bread

Butter cake with passionfruit icing

Sultana scones

Fuss and Budgets

You WHAT?

Budget Luxuries FIRST

On the Boil: The Awesomeness of Soup

Soup and Scheduling

Getting Organised

Basic Soup No 1: Green Velvet

Ingredients:

Method:

Sumo Food: Chanko Nabe

Dashi (Stock)

Ingredients

Cheep Cheep: Budget Roast Chicken

The Horror: Repairing A Devastated Garden

Making a Speedy Recovery

1- Supermarket Herb Pots

2 – Asian Greens

3 – Tomato Cuttings

4 – Violas

5 – Mid-term vegies

Coffee Body Scrub

WE-ARE-SO-TIRED!

Recycling Coffee Grounds

Coffee Body Scrub

The Wonderful Weekend – and – Gem Gets Bossy

Recent Posts

Archives

Categories