Soup Season.

 Hello everyone , how are you all today?

It's a bit warmer here today , i was surprised when i popped out to the compost bins, our local weather forecast actually gives a chance of  thunderstorms today??. I am sat in the dining room as i type this looking out the windows and see grey skies, showery rain and  2 big Magpies swaying about in the big conifer at the bottom of the garden, needless to say the wind is now picking up, so the garden project is on hold yet again. Never mind it will get done and be worth it.

As the temperature drops and the darker days take hold i look forward to something filling and delicious to eat. Soup is one of the faves on the menu.

I make Carrot soup by the bucket load because sometimes one bowl is not enough. It's rich and creamy and as my old granny used to say " it warms your insides up". To me on a wet miserable day there is nothing better than having a steaming bowl of home made soup. 

I love it and having slices of home made bread to dunk are the topping off for me.

Needless to say it doesn't last long when i make a batch, so i have started to double it up and freeze portions in the tinfoil tubs you can buy. I slowly but surely fill my chest freezer with tubs of soup ready for wintry days. Not just Carrot which the favourite by far but also Leek and Potato , French Onion Soup as well, i have to make sure i label  them as at some point i didn't for some weird reason and we all ended up with soups different to what everyone wanted,lesson learnt there.

We also have a stock of tinned soups, my home made Tomato just didn't have that same zing as the Heinz one , no matter what i tried i just couldn't match it. Now don't get me wrong i cannot afford to buy Heinz soups anymore so we tried Lidl and Aldi. Both are good ,no where near Heinz but the prices are definitely something we can afford and in this day of prices going up we have learnt to compromise and soup was one of them. It does make me wonder how Heinz keeps going as a company when the prices are ridiculously high.

What food items will you substitute for others is a question i have often heard over the last year or so. Well for us it was Cereals, i absolutely love Kellogg's Cornflakes but at nearly £4 a box i won't do it, when i can go to Lidl and get 4 boxes of Cereals for that price, so there is one we replaced and one that we won't is HP Sauce, hubby refuses to have any others, we have tried and they are runny and tastes of more vinegar than anything else so that is one thing we still buy, thankfully he is the only one that has it and it doesn't run out quickly. Red Sauce is what the girls have and love the cheaper one we found, i can't stand the taste of it so i don't have sauces on my chips. Tea is the main thing, we have Yorkshire Tea it's strong and a nice flavour, we tried Tetley and i found it watery and had a tang, fussy i know.  We buy the Sauces and Tea bags in bulk off Amazon,works out a bit cheaper and i don't have to worry about replacing them every time i go shopping.We have literally changed a majority of what we used to buy and eat to something similar or as in the case of Cornflakes i just don't bother. I have tried other shops Cornflakes and they are not the same and no one can tell me they are. 

Baked beans are another that we swapped  , we now have Aldi cheap ones, i buy 3-4 trays and stack them in Pantry, also tinned Spaghetti, i used to have Heinz but those days are long gone. 

Don't get me wrong if any of the things i love are on offer and i mean a good offer i will buy them  and think myself very luxurious to have them again and i appreciate them more.

We can compromise just about everything we buy but you can do it til the cows come home and the food bill still creeps higher and higher every month. Good quality food is a basic human need. Having 2 Allotments gives us the fresh fruit and veggies we need but unfortunately they do not provide everything , yet our fruit and veggie bill is very low which is a godsend. I try to make a majority of our meals from scratch and somehow that is ending up expensive. 

Our Government is oblivious, people have compromised, swapped and plain ole just stopped buying it and still no one is doing anything and people are going hungry which is a shame to our Government when no one should ever be hungry or made to choose between having food or heat, yet that is the world we all now live in. 

So ladies what have you totally changed in your food shopping to make those pennies go a bit further?

Sorry i went off on a tangent there😊..

Have a good day everyone and take care.

Love Ftm🍂