DIY wedding reception on the cheap - part 2

In between cleaning and decorating the house, I got on making the food.  We were 22 people in total and I reckon we could hace accomodated 30 with the amount of food we had.  

Food
My girlfriends provided the salads and desserts, and I spent my time baking breads and meats.

I made:
Paul Hollywood's garlic baguette ( so doesn't look like a baguette, but tastes great)
Jamie Oliver's rolled bread (though it was just the inspiration, in one I put salami, basil, cheese, olives and peppers, and in the other I left otu the salami and swapped tomatoes for peppers).  If you only want one bread, or enough food for about 5 decent sized portions, half the recipe.  The first time I made this I used the suggested olive oil and ended up with a greasy mess.  Now, I skip that part.
Smitten Kitchen's brisket - which I cooked for 10 hours in my warming oven, and seved with the reduced sauce.
Finally, I cooked up some pork loin with a marinade recipe that my mom gave me and which people go mental for.  They say it's the best pork they've ever had. 

Pork Loin Marinade

1/4 C soy

2 T red wine ( I used Pinot Noir because it's what I had in the house and it was too thin.  You want a merlot or some other kind of deep flavoured wine)

1 T Br Sugar

1 T honey

1/2 t cinnamon

1 garlic

1 green onion sliced

mix all together - pour over pork loin - turning pork occasionally let sit in sauce for at least 2 - 3 hrs 

This recipe is seriously amazing.  I have no idea where it's from, but it's like omg never need another pork marinade ever again kind of amazing.  

Beer

We served homebrew exclusively.  I made 4 brews and we had a friend who made a keg.  Homebrew is a revelation.  It's easy and CHEAP and amazing.  And no, it's not super strong.  Why do people just assume it's super strong?  Most of my brews are betwen 3.5 and 4.5%.  I like to drink my beer, not get wasted from it, thanks.  

I *love* the new Festival range of homebrews, available from several different retailers but I buy from BrewUK because they have sales quite a lot which makes them often the cheapest. 

Trust me, this beer is amazing. 

DIY wedding reception on the cheap - part 1

We got married in April of 2012.  We were meant to have our reception in California in December, but then my visa didn't come through in time and we were stuck in the UK over Christmas.  Then we were going to celebrate in the States in September, and my brother went and got himself engaged.  So, we sacked the US celebration idea and focused on the UK.

We decided to plan the reception to coincide with the work on our house being more or less done.  Well, even building in lag time the work was NOT more or less done, but we went ahead anyway because I knew it was now or never.

We lost a lot of money on the failed US reception and honeymoon plan of 2012 so this party was on a pretty tight budget.  We originally talked about marquees, portable toilets and the works but scaled it right back and, honestly, had a better time for it.

Decorations
I had some decorations that I bought for the US reception that I was able to use for this.  My favourite purchase was fabric flowers from Jane Joss on Etsy - they're not your grannie's fake flowers, they're creative and colourful and look fantastic, and of course the best part is that they can be kept forever.  I got a friend to bring me some of his empty swing top beer bottles, put a bit of sand in the bottle to bring the level up a bit, and voila!  I scattered my funky vases and flowers around the house.
(note how construction-tastic our house is)

Felt balls and felt ball garlands are all the rage these days (on Pinterest and Etsy, anyway) and I thought it looked like a fun project, so got myself an assortment of felt balls on Ebay, some twine, a big needleand a friend and had at it.  Our husbands referred to our crafting as "kids' corner" but we had a blast and created some really pretty super easy to make felt garlands.  As with so many of my pictures these days, ignore the construction going on in the background...

Food and drink coming soon in part 2...

Experimenting with Natural Deodorants - part 1

 When my mom was receiving radiation for her breast cancer, her doctor told her to stop wearing antiperspirant and to only wear cornflower.  I had heard a number of times that the aluminum (or aluminium, depending on what audience I'm speaking to) in antiperspirant wasn't good for us, and the fact that a doctor told a cancer patient to stop using it spent my spidey senses tingling.

In subsequent trawling of the internet, I read that the aluminum can interfere with radiation (something about the beam, I believe?) so the advice that my mom got was theoretically not based on health, just on the basic workings of the radiation she was receiving.

It seems that there have been loads of studies looking for a link between breast cancer and antiperspirant and, thus far, no clear link has been defined.

I've pulled up a couple of articles here and here.

Then a friend of mine with kidney problems posted in Facebook saying that HER doc had advised her to stop wearing antiperspirant.  Now to be fair, I haven't read up on this at all and haven't asked her why.  But, these two instances got me reading.

We're meant to sweat.  Sweating cools us off and is part of how the body releases toxins.  Why are some people more sweaty than others?  I don't know.  What I DO know is that the kind of antiperspirant that most of us use hasn't really been used by people long enough for scientists to really have a completely accurate view on whether it's 100% safe for us.

I'm starting to come to the realization that there are a *lot* of chemicals in our daily lives that even our parents' generation didn't have around, and ultimately it's not going to do us any harm to take steps towards reducing the number of chemicals that we come in contact with daily.  

So I started experimenting.

I started off by buying Tom's of Maine Calendula deodorant.  Interestingly, I sweated buckets for the first couple of days off the antiperspirant but then my sweating died down.  I've always been pretty sweaty -even wearing ap I would sweat through tops- so this was a pleasant surprise.
I also smelled less.  With ap, I would wear a shirt once and then throw it in the wash, I could smell the ap but also the undertone of stinky sweat.  On the Toms, I could smell a little swear but it wasn't stinky and it was really just a slight undertone to the lovely smell of the deodorant.

Win.

From Tom's, I moved onto home made stuff where I could have complete control over what was going on my skin.  More on that in part 2.  

Hippy Questing

So, I've started a hippy quest. 

The irony of this is the fact that I'm from Berkeley, CA (aka, in contention for being the hippy capital of the world) and as a result I've always talked about "dirty hippies" with a bad taste in my mouth.
I now now that what I wasn't keen on was the 'tude, and not the lifestyle.

I dig the lifestyle.

It started when we bought our house.

We have a big garden in which we're growing fruit a vegetables, and every year we're learning new things about what we want to eat, what we grow well, and what's more trouble than it's worth (sorry, onions).

We have a greenhouse, though we soon plan to upgrade (or downgrade, if you're my in laws) to a polytunnel.  The polytunnel will be much less likely to explode due to an errant football/baseball/anything that our as yet non-existent children will decide to throw. 

Greenhouse!  It's full of tomatoes.  Also, kale and poppies!

We want chickens.  A lot.  We will absolutely get chickens once we are a bit more established and once the garden is a bit more setup.

We want bees.  Save the bees, man!  I am much more interested in growing stuff I can eat than stuff that just looks pretty, but I also really like bees.  Fortunately for me the bees really like the stuff that's easiest to grow and I have plans for a wildflower meadow at the back of the garden, around the fruit trees.  As a hay fever sufferer, I love the health benefits of local honey, and I also use beeswax in a number of my hippy potions, so I'd really like to find out more about beekeeping. 

We also have a house, obviously.  We bought it from a woman in her 90s who had lived there for 30+ years, and you had better believe it was decorated exactly how you're picturing it.  We ripped out a lot of psychedelic carpeting, steamed a lot of crazy wallpaper, knocked down walls, built other walls, rewired, replumbed, moved rooms, painted, sanded, varnished, insulated and found ourselves with a pretty cool home.

We put solar panels on the roof.  We've only had them one summer, but so far so green.

We bought a woodburning stove, with a view towards putting in a masonry stove in a few years when a) they become DEFRA approved (it's a no-go on smoke where we live)
b) we can work out how to integrate the masonry stove in with solar panels for year-round green water heating.  Of course by "we" I totally mean my guy, because he's the engineer in this family.

We make beer.  Well, I make beer.  Husband helps drink it.  

We make bread.  Again, this is more or a royal we.

I think I could get used to this whole "hippy lifestyle" business. 

Healthy eating on the cheap - this week's revelation

I hate wasting food.  I hate buying something and then either not using all of it before it goes off or, more commonly in my household, the fridge freezes it (we really need to get a refrigerator that doesn't freeze produce and yet somehow manage to leave the drinks warm).

In order to combat that, we used to make a list of meals for the week and do a big "weekly shop" at our nearest big grocery store.  Then we discovered the the Lidl nearest to our house is actually really quite good.  The problem with Lidl is that you can't walk in with a list and expect to be able to buy everything on it, they just don't have that kind of selection and a lot of the freshest food changes often. 

This week we did a version of the weekly shop in Lidl.  I still had a list of a few essentials that we were out of, but didn't have a weekly meal plan so concocted food plans as we walked through the aisles. 

I always thought that you could limit waste live more economically if you plan meals.  The problem with planning meals is that you have to think days in advance of what you might want to eat and, if you're me, you often end up making the same types of foods week on week.  These foods are good but it's nice to mix it up a bit.  

Amazingly this week's shop in Lidl, topped up with a few mid-week items from Tesco, came to about £35.  This covered the two of us for lunches and dinners and (due to us often buying lunches at work) ended up being nearly half of what we would normally spend on food in a week. 

Now, we did eat a lot of produce from the garden, but veggies tend to be the cheapest part of a weekly shop anyway so even if we had purchased everything I can't see it being that much more expensive.

This week saw me creating two new dishes that were super easy and healthy, which I'll post on here. 

Thumbs up to the Lidl shop. 

This year, 2013, has been pretty full on in terms of health/body type stuff (and it's not even over yet):

I went off birth control
My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer
I got pregnant
I miscarried
I gained weight
I got acne for the first time since I was a teenager.
My mom got a really awesome doctor and breezed through her operation and radiation

All of the above got my brain ticking.

I was already into food.  I love food passionately and will never ever be able to diet because, in my (not so) humble opinion, I'm actually pretty darn good at making food and really really enjoy eating it too.  Lots of eating of the food.

Along with this love of food came a garden, a big garden.  Have you ever eaten a carrot out of someone's garden?  It's insane.  You have no idea what a carrot tastes like if you've never picked and eaten one.  Peas too. Wow.  These things are so sweet and amazing that I almost can't bear to cook them. 

I had never eaten kale until I grew it.  I grew it because my father in law brought me a bunch of seedlings he didn't have space for, and it was one of the only brassicas that survived the caterpillar and slug onslaught of 2012.  I now do my best to work kale into as much of my cooking a possible.

I've totally digressed from my point.  My point is that I was already into healthy living and eating, but the events from the start of 2013 shook me into starting to look at other ways I could live a more healthy and wholesome life.   

So, because the world obviously needs another blog about food/life/healthy living, here I am.  In case you're interested.