energy saving cooking

Apologies for the hiatus in posts – I find cooking in the summer a bit meh and uninteresting, and had nothing new to write. Thus I welcomed the autumn weather with glee, exhumed a chicken carcass from the freezer, and made stock, then soup, in the slow cooker. Of course, immediately the weather turned into an Indian summer, so the soup went into the freezer, but hey …

Autumn has returned now – we have cut and stacked all the wood in the yard into its nice new log store, the cats are sleeping on the bed again, and winterous cooking can commence. However British Gas, from whom we also buy our electrickery, sent us a nice little meter to monitor our electric usage and it has given me palpitations. When we refitted the kitchens we went for electric ovens and my dears – the power usage! It makes me feel quite faint, and of course they require much longer running to heat up than the gas one we had previously.

I’m trying to be parsimonious with all our power usage these days – we have pretty much abandoned central heating, and just heat the living room with the wood burner and I’m also going to try and use the multi-tiered steamer for veg cooking more – just requires a bit more organising.

This has paid dividends in that our gas monthly payment has gone from £65 last winter, to £21 last month, but it’s hard to do much about the electric given we work at home and have Lots of computer equipment. But we do have as much as possible on those little remote control sockets, so one blip on the remote and everything is off, not on standby.

We have a baby Remoska (I don’t think they sell this model any more, which is a shame). It is ideal for two servings of cauliflower cheese, or pasta bake, for cooking off onions, bor baking two (small!) spuds, for thawing frozen casseroles. And for a long time, I’ve been considering a bigger one. I love my slow cooker, but a big Remoska can bake a cake or loaf of bread, can do roast veg, or a small chicken, and all sorts of things.

So we went to the Lakeland shop in Beverley to have a look at the relative sizes of the medium and the large, or Grand, as they call it. And bought a Grand, because I could get a dish of lasagne in it, or sausages, or a vegetable gratin, or roast potatoes, or all sorts of other things, and I’m quite looking forward to trying it out once I have found room in the kitchen!

 

Of course, today’s dinner is planned: cauliflower cheese, roast potatoes, plum and apple crumble. So I’ll be putting the big oven on to  cook that lot, but it’s a grand idea in theory, no?

Mirrored from Reactive Cooking.

how much wood does a woodchuck chuck?

Attentive readers (if there are any) will recall that we installed a woodburning stove last year – a thing of much joy, and much smaller gas bills (even more joy). We have been acquiring cheap wood all summer, and even scavenging from the tip, in preparation for the threatened freezing winter that awaits us, to the point that our little back yard was overrun with bits of timber waiting to be chopped up – but nowhere to store it.

We were keeping our bikes in a bike tent, which was not, shall we say, the most durable of shelters, and it died completely during the gales last month. So we measured up, and got the local shed place to quote us for building a bike store plus log store, to go all along one wall of the yard. £790, they quoth. So when we’d picked ourselves up, we googled a lot, and ordered a wooden bike shed off t’internet for £159, and a log store similar for £200. They arrived this week, and Pete manfully assembled them; the bicycles are now ensconced cosily in their new abode, with the bike trailer and various other bits and bobs, and the log store is now not quite where we planned, but in a more convenient place. This entailed trimming a bit off the kitchen window sill, and taking the log shed roof off and cutting it to shape, but this didn’t seem to phase ‘im indoors, and up it went.

So yesterday and today, between us, we have split pretty much all the logs we bought cheap a couple of months ago, and stacked them in the woodshed, and have chainsawed up all the other bits and bobs of salvaged wood, and we have space for another trailer load, which I have reserved for a hundred quid from the bloke we bought the last trailer load, and that will be enough to see us right through the winter, $deity willing.

There’s also about six bags’ worth of logs in the house, in the log station and stacked round the fire, and several bags of rubbishy (but very cheap, or free) bits and bobs that came from last year’s skipful, or salvage, or whatever. So at least the living room will be warm, even if we can’t afford to heat the rest of the house ;)

And the gas direct debit is now £21 per month, which is nice (although I bet it won’t stay there).

In other news, I have new glasses – my prescription had changed a huge amount, to the point where I needed less strong lenses (!), so I now have rimless ones for the first time ever, and I’m really pleased with them. And I can see properly, which is a bonus – no longer have to take my glasses off to read my phone! Also got a pair of photochromic ones in cool Gok Wan frames, and tempted to give up contacts all together for now, as they’ve been playing me up, but then of course that might be due to the script change, I guess.

Mirrored from kestrel.org.