Mending clothes by hand

They are very, very good. Just follow the instructions on the package -

10 minutes to table. I had a fit when my pan I use fell off the rack and dented. My handyman put it back in the "round" - almost perfectly.

One of my tenants had his fridge die on him while he was away. In the summer. Yikes! I very quickly bought him a new fridge.

That's really nice to know, thanks! I find cooking for one to be my least favorite thing.

I'll be gone for 11 days, I suspect all kinds of EEEeewwwwwy things would have been going on if it had failed while I was away.

Beverly

The chef's magic wand! I have one of these:

The original and best! :) I first used ome when working in a hotel kitchen back in the '70's. Took another 15 years for them to hit the domestic market, and now there are cheapo versions all over the place. But I love this one and use it a lot (like today for preeing a whole pot of HOT soup in the pot!). I have several attachments for it, which are also great at what they do. Shoving a gallon of lentil soup through a sieve with a wooden spoon stikes me as a complete waste of my time when this blends the whole lot in 2 minutes, and leaves all the nice vegetable fibres still in it to aid digestion. If I wqanted it without the fibres, I'd use the Mouli, which is fun but hand cranked, so takes more time.

I make my own TV dinners and freeze them. I keep one or two pre-made things in the freezer for dire emergencies, but when you were brought up with fillet steak or lamb chops or salmon fillest and salad grown in the garden as fast food, and dinner for many can take as little as half an hour to prepare from raw to table, pre made holds little attraction. Pizza takes too long to get out here, and I can usually fling one together in less time than ordering it or going to get it would take, and we get to eat it hot! James had some friends over the other day, and I made acres of pizza for lunch. There was none left and they were all very complementary.

Though my mum, brother and sister all live alone, they all also cook from scratch almost every day, and have home cooked food prepared in batches the rest of the time.

And I love cooking, we have some slightly odd dietry needs (I'm fat and gluten free, and Alan is a Type 1 diabetic, so we have to watch certain foods carefully), so it's usually quicker, easier and better for us to cook real food from mostly raw ingredients, and a hell of a lot cheaper. I do use some sauces like Worcestershire sauce and Tobasco, tinned tomatoes, frozen peas, and tinned beans like harico and red kidney beans and chick-peas. If I had more room in the freezer I might cook those from dried in large batches and freeze them.

We had lentil and lamb soup today... The remains of yesterday's Sunday Roast boiled into stock, with lentils and other fresh veg. It's a rare roast bone or chicken carcas that doesn't end up in the soup in this house!

I've posted part of a prolonged discussion of mending at

have not yet written the rest)and a short discussion of hand sewing at good second-hand straight-stitch machine can be pretty cheap, butthere's the matter of house room, machine-sewing also has to bepracticed, and some mends are *much* easier by hand -- re-sewing aripped seam through the original holes, for example. I remember learning to sew as a prolonged struggle -- but I was getting results right from the beginning; it's learning to do it quickly and well that takes a lot of practice. My "embroidery gig" students can produce a simple medallion all by themselves -- well, I re-thread their needles a lot, and don't let them touch the hot iron or the scissors -- in less than three hours.

Since of late I've had them for maybe half an hour -- at my next gig, I will amuse some of the children who finish their Pinewood Derby cars before it's time for the van to take them home -- I do the running stitch around the edge myself to speed things up, .

My mother avoided having to re-thread my needles by tying the ends of the thread together and letting me sew with a double thread. This method has so many disadvantages to it that I suggest that you sew with a loose tail from the beginning -- after all, you don't have to chase down an adult to get your needle rethreaded. Also, USE A THIMBLE right from the beginning. (It is very important that a thimble fit properly:

"find" to jump down to "thimble"))Buy "crewel" needles, which have big eyes. I *still* use crewelneedles for everything, except when I need a needle that's longer andthinner than comes in crewel. It's much easier to push a finer needle through the fabric, and I'm somewhat frustrated that crewel needles don't come any smaller than #10, but I start my children with #8 at the finest, and the youngest get darning needles -- a darning needle is a huge crewel needle, for all practical purposes. Coarse needles punch big holes in the fabric, but you can find them when you drop them.

Start by mending something coarse that won't mind a coarse needle.

Joy Beeson

Yes.

I think I'd use the blender, if I could remember where I put it.

Joy Beeson

We have to *buy* bones to make soup. Luckily, DH knows a little grocery in Leesburg that sells the loveliest ham shanks.

Also whole chickens. I baked one a few days ago, and we wondered why I'd ever given up "roasting" chicken. (It was probably about the time supermarkets started buying their chickens pre-cut with band saws.)

Joy Beeson

So do I, I almost always, (when I'm in the mood to cook) make at least double batches. Saturday after I discovered the freezer was not working, I threw out several containers of stew, some spaghetti sauce, three baked chicken breasts, half a pizza, and a cooked chuck roast...

Beverly

Our supermarkets regularly have boneless chicken breats, whole quarters, drumsticks, thighs, whole legs, breasts with bone in and whole chickens from poussen up to almost 3kg. They do poussen spatchcocked and seasoned for the BBQ in summer, too... And that's just in the fresh chicken section! I often buy a large whole chicken. I fling a bottle of cheap wine over it to bake first time round (3 portions), then it gets served up re-heated in the gravy another day (3-4 portions), some becomes something like blmanger of chicken, a mediaevil dish we love (4 portions), and then the carcass and the remains of the meat and gravy become soup (8-10 portions). A small turkey can do the same job.

Lamb legs and shoulders and beef can be had bone in or out. Lamb bones often become lentil and tomato soup. I tend to buy legs rather than shoulders as there is a lot less fat and I have difficulty with fat and red meat these days. I love it, but red meat doesn't like me in any quantity. As there are only three of us we don't often have a big enough chunk of roasting beef to buy bone in. I tend to buy that boned and rolled in cheaper cuts and pot roast it in the pressure cooker.

I like boiled ham, so if we have that, I save the cooking liquid and some of the meat for ham & green pea soup. This is the one my son said was so thick it needed hammering flat to fit in ther bowls!

I don't usually need to buy bones for soup, but if I should, there are a couple of good butchers round here that would oblige.

Lamb & Lentil Soup:

Have a whole leg of lamb for Sunday Dinner... Put it in the roasting tin with some fresh rosemary and bay leaves and a bottle of cheap but drinkable red wine. Cover with greaseproof paper and seal up with tinfoil. Bake at 180 degrees C for 20 miniutes per pound, plus 20 minutes if you like it pink inside, 25 per pound if you like it not so pink... Use the liquor to make gravy: pour into a jug and skim off all the fat. Pour back into a saucepan, add 2-3 tablespoons of quince ir crab apple jelly, and a little cornflour blended with cold water. Bring through the boil and simmer until translucent and thick. Pink gravy!

Towards the end of the week, when it's getting a bit dry and difficult to carve, break the bone at the joint and put it and any remaining gravy in a large pot. Cover with water, bring to the boil, and simmer gently for a couple of hours. Aim for about 3 pints of stock. Fish the bone and any bits out, skim off any excess fat, and fling into it:

200g little red lentils 3-4 carrots, chopped 1 large onion, chopped 2 stalks of celery, 1 large red capsicum pepper, some mushrooms, all chopped Add 2 cans of tomatoes, chopped, with juice, a good shake of Tobasco and a couple of tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce, some sdalt & pepper, and a teaspoon or so of sugar. Bring to the boil, mix well, and simmer for 20-30 minutes.

Meanwhile, shredd all the lean meat off the bone and reserve... When the soup is cooked, whizz it up with the hand held blender, add the shredded meat (it's usually little chunks in this house!) back in and heat through. Serve with fresh crusty bread, home made if you have time.

Ah, thank you! A daughter in law, a superb cook, has one but she never uses it. She suggested that I might like to use it to make mayonnaise and I did try it but I'd have preferred a fork - just as quick, easier to wash and electricity-free :-)

At home I use a horlicks blender (manual), it's fool-proof!

Mary

Mary

...

I can't see why anyone would want to sieve lentil soup :-)

Mary

I wondered why I didn't know that then remembered that we buy whole sheep at a time and burcher them ourselves. A daughter has an organic farm, we pay her more than she'd get from the abbatoir but far less than a butcher's price. We have to use every part of the animal which is interesting.

We also buy half a cow forom her but she doesn't rear pigs so we buy a whole pig from a local organic farm and butcher to our needs. Lots of sausages :-)

If we want ham we do it ourselves but mostly we prefer not to have such salty food.

I admire your use of bones, we're thought of as weird because we waste nothing! The bones, when finally finished, are either used to make needles or shuttles or ear scoop/tweezers or they go to the little dog up the street.

Children today never seem to have heard of stone soup :-)

Mary

Our kitchen is so small that there's only one cupboard and it's used for small things which won't fit into drawers. Only five of those too ... The meat press lives on a very high shelf because it's only used about once a month and takes up a lot of room. The mixer has to be on the counter. The newly acquired microwave had to have a shelf rack built round it to accommodate the things which used to be where the oven now sits.

When my cooker gave up the ghost Spouse insisted on a 90cm job to replace it. Very nice to use but to fit it in necessitated translocating the (slim) dishwasher and washing machine.

Our small steps are used a lot :-)

He's been talking about extending the kitchen for forty years but in a way I like having almost everything within arm's reach :-)

Mary

Mary

Back on topic and excellent advice!

Mary

I do hate the time wasted as well as the food when something like that happens. Mine died on Christmas day when I had the whole family staying one year! AARRGGHH!

Puree-ing. I think my dyslexia caught up with the spelling checker!

Some people like it better smooth as cream. Me, I like a little grittiness. :D