I'm often on the lookout for ways to do my day-to-day chores without using any, or very few, cleaning products.  There are two clear ways of doing this - for clothes and for dishes.  I remember way back in the day when my mum used to soak clothes before washing them. Sometimes she used to put them into a big copper boiler and boil them while moving them around with a wooden stick. The washing took hours to do and often she did it on a Friday night after she finished her outside job. I soak cotton, linen and poly-blend clothes too although I don't do it the way my mum did. If I have something that is badly stained, I fill a large container up with very hot water from the tap, add Disan, an oxy-bleach, dissolve the Disan with my laundry stick and drop the clothes in. BTW, my laundry stick is a spurtle - a scottish stick for stirring porridge. Don't ask why. Almost any fairly new stain can be removed using this method. You can also whiten your greying whites this way as well.

Another way to remove a stain is to wet the fabric and then rub laundry bar soap or laundry liquid on the stain, roll it up and leave it for an hour or so. You roll it up so it doesn't dry out. Then pop it in with the normal wash and the stain will probably go. If you have a top loading washing machine, fill it for your normal wash, apply soap or laundry liquid to any stains you notice, put the stained clothing in the filled washing machine and let it soak, overnight if possible. The following morning, do your normal wash. Generally all stains will be removed by the soaking.

I also soak dishes. We gave away our dishwasher years ago. Quite often I don't wash up our breakfast dishes until after we have lunch. If we've had eggs or baked beans for breakfast, it's the devil's job to remove the egg or tomato sauce from those dishes. Now I'm in the habit of half filling the sink with hot water, with a squirt of dish liquid and letting the dishes soak while I make the lunch. When I empty a pot or frying pan, I pour water in it straight away and let it soak that way. Eventually, when I get to the dishes after lunch, all they need is a quick wipe over and they're clean. A sharp contrast to standing their scrubbing with a brush if I don't pre-soak.

Soaking is one of those gentle, old-fashioned methods you very rarely hear about now because it doesn't use a product that someone is trying to push. This type of clothes care is particularly good for perspiration stains under arms, collar grime, whitening whites and general stains. Soaking works really well and often, if you have a very fresh stain, you can soak without adding any soap or oxy-bleach and it works! 

Hanno did the grocery shopping yesterday; he does it almost every week because I don't like going to the shops. I was preparing lunch when he came home and he said it was difficult finding what I had written on the list. I do put things on there such as: "with real juice", "only Australian" or "free range only". Today he had to ask the shop assistant to help him find Granita biscuits. I need a packet for the Christmas cheesecake. They searched and finally found them on the top shelf. That tells me that soon we won't be able to buy Granitas from Woolworths any more. They will be gone from the shelves like so many other old Australian brands. I wonder if you have found a similar scenario in your local supermarket.

 It occurred to me that although I go shopping on the odd occasion, I haven't been shopping on a regular basis for years, maybe five or six years. I've decided I should go again to reacquaint myself with the shelf placement and the brands. My guess is that I'll find a wasteland littered with made in China/India/Thailand generics and non-food, it will make me angry and I wont want to go back. Nevertheless, I need to do it so I know the true state of the supermarkets and not my old version of them. We don't always do what we want to do.

Not shopping is my preference and if I could live without shopping at all, I'd be happy. Here at home I revel in the almost-solitude, I enjoy having the sun on my arms, I love getting my hands dirty, I love the rhythm of my day and the work I do. Being so immersed in the work here, which is an equal mix of physical and intellectual work, has made me a different person. There was time when I searched for meaning and happiness in shopping malls and crowds, now I know where I can reliably find it. It's always right here under my nose, at home.

I'm watching a TV program called "The Abbey" at the moment and although I am by no means a religious person, I feel that life in that Abbey somehow reflects my life here. The Benedictine nuns in the abbey are living a cloistered life of gardening, craft, preparing meals and regular prayer. Here in our home we live according to our values while maintaining simplicity in our lives. I live by sunrise and sundown rather than an alarm clock or watch. We eat at the same time every day, taking a main meal at midday, we tend our chores, and each day runs to a gentle routine that makes the work satisfying and enriching. I do not pray but I am mindful and have periods of quiet reflection. The work I do here defines my character as much as it defines my days. Some would believe that being at home most of the time would be a burden but I find much of the world outside my own community superficial and loud. It's easier to stay at home but from next week on, and possibly for the next few weeks, I'll do the shopping at the supermarket and try to make sense of it.

I wonder what changes you've noticed in your local supermarket in the past few years. Have you seen a big move towards foreign products and generics? Are the old brands disappearing?

I've written about this subject in the past but I'm doing it again because I've had a few requests for it. Let me start by saying, there is not just one true way to live a simple life. It will all depend on how old you are, what your ambitions are, whether you have children, if you go out to work for a living, and possibly a hundred other things. This way of life is possible for every one and it's not limited by location or income. 

You do not buy a simple life, it is created and added to minute by minute, one day at a time. You can't tell if a person is living simply by the look of them. I know people who live on farms and grow their own food who do not living simply. I know people who live in the city and work in large corporations who do. Simple life is not so much about where you live but more about your mindset, your commitment and your values.

If you're at a crossroad in your life and you're not sure of your direction, I encourage you to take some time and think about what you value in your life. Write it down and create a long or short list that you can think about. If you're married or living in a partnership, you should share your list with your partner. They may or may not agree with your list, they may have a list of their own. Share your ideas about your future and try to come up with a combined plan for the next few years. Be prepared to go it alone too. Your partner may not agree with any of your plans. If that is the case, depending on what your plan is, you can probably do it anyway. That's what happened here. Hanno wasn't interested at first, I continued on and didn't say anything about what I was doing. A few months down the track, we spoke again and he was coming around to my way of thinking. Eventually he agreed fully and we're been on this journey together since then.

We are retired folk and have time to produce a lot of what we use at home. Home production gives us healthier products and food, saves us money and gives structure and meaning to our days. I decided very early on that I'd like to simplify my shopping, cleaning and cooking and starting with baking bread most days. I found that one simple task lead me to 20 others. The simple act of doing one thing opened up the possibility of so many things. The same happened with growing food in the back yard. Although I'd been a gardener for many years and didn't have to learn about that, I did have to learn about when to harvest, preserving, freezing, blanching and stockpiling. I think you'll find the same, that taking that first step will drive you forward to what waits beyond.

Although there is no set menu for this, the one thing many people do is to live on less than they earn, and pay off debt. The liberation from debt is life-changing and living simply can help you get there a long time before mainstream life will. In fact, mainstream life will take you in the opposite direction because there will always be the temptation and encouragement to buy, whether you can afford it or not.

Maybe it will be helpful to list a few things that are common in simple life, maybe that will give you a framework, and you can go on from there. I have written about all these things in the past so follow the links to find out more.
Paying off debt and tracking your spending
Living on less than you earn
Cooking from scratch
Keeping a stockpile
Green cleaning and Making your own laundry liquid
Making soap
Bread in the bread maching and Five minute bread
Decluttering
Lists and Routines
Finding happiness

You'll start your simple life immediately just by starting any of these things, and hopefully they'll lead you to the next step and the next. But please don't limit yourself to this list because as you mature and your circumstances change, so will your values and your aspirations. Simple life is a changeable feast, it might start as one thing and be totally another in a few years time. That's good. Life is dynamic and should be full of energetic and gentle change.

I hope that by thinking carefully about your own life, deciding what you want to do with your ordinary days and being prepared to change, you'll find the same sort of peace and happiness I have in my ordinary days. It's not easy, change never is, but the rewards are there if you move closer to a more engaged and self-reliant life.

If there is a question you want to ask, or something you want me to write about, please ask and I'll try to do it this week.

I hope all those ovens are being cleaned along with all the other pre-Christmas tasks. Try to stay calm and focused. In less than three weeks, Christmas will be over and we'll be in the seasonal doldrums waiting for the cricket to start. Thank goodness for the cricket.  I hope you have a wonderful weekend. See you next week, friends.

Congratulations Katie and Reuben at House of Humble, they won the 2013 Kidspot blogger comp! Pay them a visit to read about the excitement.

Recycle your old mobile phone in Australia - Mobile Muster

16 year old builds a small home - Youtube

The winter dishes we loved as children

Cooking lessons for life

Australians are eating less meat

Parmesan and Herb Straws

Homemade naan

PomPom Quarterly UK knitting mag

Crochet a Christmas tree

Free pattern for pinwheel purse on Ravelry

Another free Ravelry pattern - a super cute baby vest

DIY calendar work station

How to organise the back of a door

From the comments here during the week

Amongst gum trees

Little house quilting

Barb's Creations

To do the job safely, leave the high toxic chemicals on the supermarket shelf and arm yourself with an oxy-bleach powder similar to Napisan, I use the Aldi generic Di-san and it works perfectly. You'll also need bicarb/baking soda, cleaning vinegar, four or five old rags - not your knitted cleaning cloths, and an old towel. If you have cleaning brushes, that's great, if not, use an old nail brush. If you have no brushes, use a pot scrubber or steel wool, but be careful with it.

 Finished job.

 The paste is bicarb/baking soda mixed with vinegar, and some dish liquid if the oven is really dirty.

 Apply the paste the night before and leave overnight.

The next morning, you may have some brown spots left on your racks. These can usually be wiped off with a rag. If it's not coming off, get out your brush or steel wool and scrub.

 All done!  We celebrated with a cottage pie cooked in the clean oven.

NOTE: Oxy-bleach is a powdered form of hydrogen peroxide, it's not related to chorine bleach, it won't damage the environment and it cleans by releasing oxygen. Used on fabric, it will remove stains without  stripping the colour and used on metal, such as oven racks and slides, it loosens grease so it can be wiped off.

OVEN RACKS & TRAYS
The evening before, take all the oven racks and trays out of the oven and place them in a sink where they'll be completely submerged. I used our laundry sink. Turn on the hot water tap and start filling the sink to just cover the racks, then add a cap full of the oxy-bleach. Get a large spoon to stir it around to help dissolve all the powder. Make sure all the racks and trays are under water. If you're cleaning your stove top too, put those racks in too, plus anything else that needs a good clean. Leave it overnight to soak. 

OVEN
The evening before, get yourself a bowl and mix up about 1½ cups bicarb/baking soda with enough white vinegar to make a paste. The mixture will fizz and bubble when you pour in the vinegar, that's normal. Wipe this paste over the inside of the oven, particularly over the dirty spots. Do the door as well, you can use the paste on the glass. If your oven is greasy or very dirty, add a squirt of dish liquid. Not too much because you don't want it to bubble.  Leave overnight.

OVEN

The next morning, using your rags, wipe all the paste out of the oven. It's a really messy job but it should only take 5 - 10 minutes to do it thoroughly. Use a small bucket of water so you can wipe off the gunk frequently with a clean rag. When it looks clean, wipe over with a clean wet rag and wipe dry with your old towel.  Then have a good look inside to make sure you got all the dirty areas. If there are some dirty spots, apply the paste again to those areas only, wait 30 minutes and wipe off. If you think it needs brushing or rubbing with the steel wool, do it. Always finish off by wiping out with a clean wet rag and dry with an old towel.  Clean the outside of the oven as well by wiping over with vinegar on a cloth. Make sure you get in under the door - or remove the door completely and clean around it. Remove the knobs and clean around them too, replace the knobs. Wipe over with a clean towel.

STOVE TOP

The next morning, using your rags, wipe the stove top over with the paste and leave for 15 minutes. Then wipe off using the same technique used on the oven. Remove all the white paste, finish off with a clean wet rag and dry with an old towel. Replace all the top pieces and knobs.

We celebrated our clean oven with a cottage pie baked till the top was golden and crisp. Just knowing you've done this often put-off chore will help you breeze through the rest of the day. And don't forget to tick off another pre-Christmas task.

One of the many things we do here is to keep an eye on our house, car and garden maintenance. We don't want things to get out of hand and then not be able to do the repairs ourselves. In the past, Hanno and I could do almost everything we needed to do here but in the past year we've started to slow down a bit and sometimes we need help with some tasks. Kerry cleaned the gutters and the solar panels for us just last month because is not safe for Hanno to be up there now.  We're still as enthusiastic as ever about living our lives here, doing everything we can to keep our slow routines going, but there are changes taking place.

This is where Hanno is building the extension to the chook house.

We often discuss what's coming up for us as we have morning tea on the front verandah; recently the topic of chickens came up. We're getting more chickens from Kate at Beautiful Chickens soon so we decided to enlarge the chicken coop to give the hens more room to shelter from the rain and provide a bigger isolation area for new and sick chooks. Sounds straight forward but there was only one way for us to make the extension and that was to build into the vegetable garden. We'll lose one garden bed. We talked about it for a while and agreed that we'll be doing less gardening in a few years time so the garden reduction will just speed that up a tiny bit. We also agreed that even when we don't do as much gardening as we do now, and when we stop altogether, we'll still keep chooks.

Over the past week, Hanno has been collecting recycled materials from his own work shed and around the district so we can keep our costs right down. We got a quote to have a small cement slab poured and it was over $900! We bought enough 400x400x40 cement pavers (seconds) to cover the same area for $150. The outside wall will still be the outside wall when it's moved back and the dividing wall inside the coop will be wire netting. The girls will see each other but still be separated and they'll eat and drink from different containers. It's quite a big change, and we've had to give up some garden bed, but it will be much better in the future.

Out in the front garden, Hanno has brought in pine mulch and applied that to a few beds. He also attached the old shutters (above) we had in the shop to the lattice work on the front verandah so we can close them off for more protection when it's raining or windy. The shutters had just been sitting around in the shed so it's good to have them in use again.

In the back garden, Hanno moved some of our taps. I always like to have a connected, working hose close to the house in case of fire. The one near the back door was attached to a very old and badly rotted piece of timber. Hanno attached it to a very solid post and rolled the hose up so it can hang neatly out of the way but close enough for us to use in an emergency. He used an old hose hanger we'd been using over on the other side of the yard, attached to one of the tanks. We've both almost tripped over the hose when it was laying on the ground so he bought a hose winder to eliminate the tripping hazard. This thing is really easy to use. It recoils just like a cord on a vacuum cleaner, winds itself up and stays protected from the sun in a plastic case. He had to lower the tap so the hose case can swing around freely but now there's nothing for us to trip over. 

I'm getting on with my maintenance work inside the house too. My latest project is to clean the oven before Christmas, and I'll be doing that today and writing about it tomorrow. I'm hoping to get some others to join me. Are you up for the challenge? All you need is a pack of oxy-bleach - Napisan or the generic form of it. I'm using Di-san, from Aldi.  You'll also need bicarb/baking soda and vinegar. These products are environmentally sound so you won't need the rubber gloves and mask that many of the commercial oven cleaners call for, and if you're asthmatic, like me, you won't be gasping for air.

We enjoy our maintenance work. We see it as part of the daily work we do to enable us to live productive and useful lives in our own home. We hope to be able to do that for many more years to come.  Do you keep on top of your maintenance tasks?


Dear friends, I've changed the commenting guidelines. There have been a lot of links left in the comments lately, including commercial links. I check everything that comes out of my blog because I don't want to link to commercial sites or non-family friendly sites. I no longer have the time to do that so I'm not allowing any links in the comments from now on. Someone emailed a couple of days ago and asked if she could link to her ebay page in her comment! Every time you leave a comment, it automatically links to your blog or Google page through your name at the top of the comment. Readers will find their way to you via that link. I thank you sincerely for your understanding.

We're coming into the danger zone, a time when we all have to watch what we do, stop listening to the incessant Christmas advertising about buying the biggest and the best, and commit, again, to living true to our values. Of all the times of the year for falling off our frugal wagons, this is the worst. Those Christmas advertisements portray loving families, happy children and attentive parents but they're using those images to pull the money right out of your pocket; and they have no shame, they know it works. Christmas has stopped being about religion or family for many people and has become a free for all, with a lot of showing off afterwards. I think it stinks.

Christmas is about family for me and this year we'll have two Christmasses. We'll have a family lunch on Christmas day with Kerry, Sunny, Jamie, Jens, Cathy and her mother Kathleen, then visit Shane, Sarndra and Alex a few days after to enjoy it all over again. Now we have grandchildren the fun has come back to Christmas because we see it all through their eyes. We don't go to church, we gather together and enjoy each others' company. We always have a family lunch, usually with the foods we all love and have grown up with - ham, chicken, roast pork, potato salad, garden salad and home preserves. Along with the beer and wine we'll also have homemade cordial. Dessert will be a tropical fruit pavlova and there is always Christmas cake, heavy with fruit and nuts. I'm hoping to make that in the next day or two; I've had the fruit soaking in brandy for three weeks.

The day after Christmas we have another tradition to enjoy - the Boxing Day Cricket Test Match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground; we watch it on TV. The test goes for five days and it's one of the highlights of the sporting year in Australia. Boxing Day is also the day the sales begin. It's many, many years since I took part in the post-Christmas sales. I always keep an eye on whether we will need towels, sheets or pillows during the coming year and if we do, I'll buy them at the Christmas sales, but I'll go sometime in January and I'm usually in and out of the shop in under an hour. I don't go looking for things to buy.

For us, Christmas is the time we celebrate our own family, we share good food, add some spectator sport, I take note of the sales but I'm not obsessed by them and our focus is on family rather than on commerce. We'll put up our tree and lights in the next week and start wrapping presents. It's a little bit early for us but I want Jamie to enjoy not just Christmas day but the season as well. He's been learning about Santa at kindy and this is the first year he's felt the excitement and wonder of it all. I think Alex will be the same and I'm looking forward to him telling me about Santa when we visit. I doubt I'll be here to see Jamie and Alex with their own children so I intend to take pleasure in every bit of the lead up to Christmas, the day itself and our Christmas visiting.  What are your plans?

Happy thanksgiving to all my American friends. May your day is full of family, friends and good food.

Quick Tip: If you need ice over the Christmas holidays and you have room in your deep freezer, start making ice now. Whether it be cubes or blocks of ice, you've got three weeks ahead to get it organised. I'm making two litre blocks using a tall 2 litre plastic container. The made blocks are stored in a plastic shopping bag.

I hope you all take the chance to slow down and rest over the weekend. I have a cold so I'll be doing what I need to feel better. See you next week.

Fabulous Fashionistas - average age 80, Youtube 

The people's revolution

When did you know it was time to "retire" and come home? Have you ever thought that if you had known sooner how good it would have been, would you have left the work force sooner?

Often when you have to save money on food one of the things that suffers is flavour.  This is a good dish that uses a small amount of meat but it's still very tasty. About 300 grams/10.5oz topside mince will feed four, including hungry meat eaters. Along with the meat, you'll use whatever vegetables you have on hand. I used two carrots, two sticks of celery, a quarter capsicum/pepper, a small amount of cabbage, garlic and two onions, plus frozen peas right at the end. It's also handy to keep in mind that frozen vegetables such as peas, corn, carrots, broccoli, spinach etc, are easy to store in the freezer and, depending on the season, can be cheaper than the fresh vegetables. Often, in our summer here, the frozen vegetables are cheaper than fresh. If you're cooking something like this dish, you really don't need fresh vegetables but you'll still get the nutrients you expect to because frozen vegetables are generally snap frozen very soon after it's harvested.



Minced steak, topside mince, ground beef or whatever you call it where you live is a fairly cheap choice if you want to put meat on the table that everyone will eat. You can make it into meat balls or serve in a tomato sauce with pasta but bulking it up with vegetables and spices will allow you to get away with using less meat.  This meat cost $7.99 a kilo, so the 300gram portion I used here cost about $2.50.

I served this with mashed potato and the following day with rice. Both were delicious. You could also make up some flaky pastry or use a pre-made square of butter puff to make a large family meat pie. Just the thing for those colder nights my friends in the norther hemisphere are having.


Being frugal folk we always need to use all our leftovers as well. If you make up too much of this for one meal, the leftovers are very tasty the next day warmed up with toast, or in a toasted sandwich made in a sandwich press, or placed, warm, into lettuce cups and eaten as a loose lettuce roll. I haven't had it but I think a very spicy savoury mince would go well with a fried egg too. Let's face it, there are a lot of options with this kind of frugal food.

RECIPE and METHOD

• 300grams - 10.5oz of minced steak/ground beef
• splash of cooking oil - I always use olive oil
• vegetables of your choice
• seasonings
• curry powder or chilli flakes
• cornflour and water

Heat the frying pan and when it's hot, add the broken up beef. Stir it around in the pan to break it up so you have no lumps of beef. Allow beef to cook and become brown - that develops the flavour, so don't bypass this step. While the beef is browning, prepare the vegetables.

Vegetables of your choice. Use what you have in the fridge, or use frozen from the freezer. I think the one vegetable you have to use is onion. It gives you a good foundation for the rest of the strong flavours.

When the beef is brown, add your chopped vegetables and continue cooking. Allow everything to brown slightly. If you use frozen vegetables this will take a little longer because of the ice. When the mix is nicely brown, add your seasonings.

The seasonings will include salt and pepper to your taste along with some curry powder or chilli flakes. I used two flat dessertspoons of curry powder in mine. Use a good a quality powder or a paste. Mix it all together and add one teaspoon of sugar. Add water to cover the mix, bring it to the boil then let it simmer on a low heat for about 30 minutes. The spices need to cook for a while to develop their flavours. When the liquid has reduced by half, add a thickener.  I used two tablespoons of cornflour mixed with two tablespoons of water - mixed to a smooth paste and added to the mix. Stir it in and let it simmer for another two minutes. Then serve.

This meal will freeze really well so if you want something in the freezer, packed in portion sizes to suit your family, this is the one to go for. It will improve in flavour the longer it sits, but use it within four to six weeks to get the full measure of it.