Our weekly meal plan! 9th - 15th March!! #MealPlanningMonday

How was your weekend? Ours was good. Everyone was home but it was a quiet one. I pottered around the house for most of it, waiting for parcels and having a spring-clean. I always feel so motivated at this time of year when the sun has been shining. I say it has been shining because it was pretty dull and grey over the weekend but at least it didn't rain!

Last week's meal plan went pretty well. We swapped around a couple of meals but everything was eaten! Our favourite meal of the week was of course the Crispy Chicken Katsu Curry Burritos! I love meals like that where you take something you already enjoy and put a slightly different twist on it. They were easy to make and almost everyone enjoyed them. Becky decided to have garlic chicken in her wraps, so Stu, Ellie and myself quite happily ate her portion. Hehehe

This week is going to be a week of ticking things off my monthly to-do list! I am going to sand all the wood on and around the fireplace and hopefully get that painted, make a start on planting seeds and if I have time, I will start a Lego set that I have.

On the menu this week we have:

Monday - Gousto meal - Smoky Hunters Chicken With Sweet Potato Mash & Greens!

We had this at the start of the year and really enjoyed it so it's back on the menu again. It is chicken smothered in a smoky BBQ sauce with plenty of cheese on top. Served with sweet potato mash and garlicky greens.

Tuesday - Gousto meal - Marmite & Peanut Butter Pork Udon!

I'll caramelise pork mince in Marmite until crispy while making a Marmite and peanut butter satay sauce. Spinach and udon noodles will be mixed in and topped with crushed peanuts for a bit of crunch. It's funny half the family hates peanut butter and half hates Marmite but we seem to really love these sorts of dishes and they always go down so well.

Wednesday - Gousto meal - Red Wine Fable Mushroom Ragù Tortiglioni!

A hearty pasta dish with a rich tomato ragu made from Fable mushrooms, carrots and shallots. The pasta is finished with Pangrattato, crispy garlicky breadcrumbs sprinkled on top. (Yes I had to Google what Pangrattato is.)

Thursday - Fish fingers, home made chips and baked beans!

Easy to make and enjoyed by everyone. The fish fingers will just be out of the freezer. There's nothing fancy about this meal unless you count my homemade chips. I have been told they are pretty good!

Friday - Pizza!

This might be homemade, out of the freezer or ordered in. It really depends on how the week has gone!

Saturday - Gousto meal - Sage & Onion Pork Stuffing Yorkshire Pudding Wrap!

I am so excited to try this one! The Yorkshire Pudding Wrap is filled with sage and onion stuffing balls, roasted vegetables and spinach, then covered in plenty of onion gravy.

Sunday - A help yourself evening!

Sunday is usually a lazy day for us all, so everyone can just help themselves to whatever they fancy. I know I won't be cooking as it's Mother's Day and it's my day off from all of the cooking! 

What are you eating this week?

A photo every day for a year! 1st - 7th March Week 10 of #Project365

Happy Sunday, again! This week seems to have flown by for me and a lot of what has taken up my time is admin! Ugh! It was my Word of the Week yesterday and my photos prove it. lol. I don't know why I'm surprised, because it seems to be around this time every year that a lot of admin needs doing. Emails, forms to fill in, printing things, checking things, waiting for replies and chasing up things I sent days ago! Double ugh! At least it's the weekend so I can have a break from it.

Yesterday was a busy day of just pottering around waiting for parcels. As of writing this yesterday morning, I was waiting for parcels from I think every delivery service going: DPD, Royal Mail, Evri, DHL and Amazon. Most of it was just practical things for the house and garden. I have seeds and compost arriving as I’m determined to get a bit more organised with the garden this year. I also ordered some paint for a little project, a new washing basket because the old one has seen better days and a few other bits and bobs that I probably didn’t need but added to the basket anyway,

Hopefully, today stays dry because Stu is wanting to cut the grass in the back garden. It has suddenly started growing again over the last couple of weeks and it’s getting quite long. He will finally get to try out the lawnmower that my dad gave us late last year. It’s one of those that has a box on the back which collects all the cut grass. Our old mower didn’t have that, which meant raking everything up afterwards, so this should make the job a lot quicker.

Now for a photo every day!

60/365 1st March

I love this time of year for sunsets. During the winter they seem to happen in the middle of the afternoon but once we get into March they usually happen when I am in the kitchen making tea so I can run out and snap a photo when I see a pretty sky!

61/365 2nd March

It was a warm but dull day on Monday and no one had their washing out on the line so Stu decided to have an hour of burning cardboard and papers that we really should shred but why go to the effort when the fire does the trick. The fire pit is something he made about four years ago using an old drum from a washing machine. It’s one of those things that turned out to be really useful. It works perfectly for little garden fires and has held up really well over the years.

62/365 3rd March

I have spent a lot of time this week waiting for emails. It reminded me of that old saying: a watched pot never boils. The same applies to email inboxes. The more you stare at them, the longer everything seems to take and the second you stop looking the email turns up.

63/365 4th March

I had a battle with the printer. Stu unplugged it when he painted the dining room and it was a nightmare getting it working again. For some reason printers and I have never really got along.

64/365 5th March

We got the leaflet about the bins! It's all change, with the recycling boxes not being used, we're getting a bigger recycling bin, food waste will go in the garden bin and our collection day has changed too. It felt like a lot of information to take in all at once.

65/365 6th March

I love that all the daffodils are popping up all over the place. They are very impressive on the walk to my dad's. One side of the grass verge is full of them.

66/365 7th March

Lots of parcels arrived, more than I thought because some were for Becky! I can't even complain as I know she ordered my Mother's Day presents and those could be them.

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This week my Word of the Week is: Admin!! #WotW

This week my Word of the Week is:

My week has been filled with admin and I am so done with it. There have been bits and bobs that needed sorting and it has been a constant flow all week. Nothing scary or stressful just lots of things!

I found myself more than once sat looking at my email inbox waiting for messages to come through. Refresh, refresh and refresh again and nothing until I walk away find myself busy doing something else and when I come back to my laptop the message I have been waiting for has been sat there an hour! Grr!

The start of a new month had the usual bills to pay. We tend to pay most of them ourselves instead of setting up direct debits. I know, I know it would probably make life easier with the direct debits but we like being in control of what goes out and when. It does mean that the first few days of the month are basically just me logging into account after account ticking things off. It’s not hard, it’s just a repetitive process. I did it all on Sunday because I didn’t have much else on my to-do list and it was nice not to rush. While I was in the paying mood I even went hunting online for our new council tax bill. It’s due to be sent out any day now and I couldn’t wait to see how much it had gone up. I braced myself but thankfully it wasn’t too bad. Ours has only gone up by £8 a month. Not amazing but in the grand scheme of things it could have been worse.

Then there was Sky TV to deal with. Stu got an email saying our package was going up in price. He was ready to march into battle, they’d previously said we were in a 24 month contract and the bill wouldn’t go up, so he was all fired up to complain. I reminded him about something I’d discovered a while ago. We’re going to be getting Disney Plus included with the package come April and with the price rise, we’ll actually end up saving money because we can cancel my Disney+ subscription which is now £14.99 a month. Eesh!

I got a message at the start of the week saying we needed to prove that Ellie is in full time education. In the two and a half years she’s been in college, I’ve only ever had to prove it when she first started. So I was a bit surprised. I contacted the college and they were so quick getting back to me. They gave me options about where I wanted the proof sent. My email, Ellie’s email, by post or Ellie could pick it up from reception. I replied joking that the only option they didn’t offer was carrier pigeon. After all that it turns out the proof wasn’t needed anyway. Someone somewhere had made a mistake and it had already been verified that Ellie was in education. So I sent the proof anyway. I felt petty but they asked for it so they were getting it.

Then there was the online weekly food shop. Usually I leave it until the evening before delivery, grab a slot and put everything into the basket in one go. This week I decided to be organised. I started the order on Monday afternoon. I added everything I could think of and thought I was done. No! Every single day my family asked me to add something. It went on all week, by the night before delivery I’d been in and out of that basket about 20 times. Next week I am going back to doing it the night before. Being organised is overrated!

Midweek I had a full on battle with the printer. Not even to print something, it was just to use the scanner. When Stu painted the dining room he unplugged the printer and didn’t plug it back in. So first I had to find the cable, eventually I found it hidden away in a bag of cables, I am still not sure it was the right one but it worked. Then came the joy of reconnecting it to the Wi-Fi, an hour passed before it was even switched on and connected. Getting it linked to my laptop was a whole other saga! 2 hours it took before I was finally ready to scan. There were five pages to scan and of course the fifth and most important page was missing. I had to go through every single folder where we keep paperwork. They're supposed to be organised, they are not! In hindsight I should have just taken photos of the documents on my phone. That would have been more than enough to send and would have saved me a lot of time.

How has your week been? I hope you have had a good one! I am of course linking up with Anne who blogs at Raisie Bay to join in with her Word of the Week linky!

What I have loved this week! Week 10. #FridayFavourites

Happy Friday! I hope you have all had a good week! I've had a week of it with life admin to do. It's something I don't enjoy but this week was extra tedious waiting around for emails to be sent to me and fighting with our printer. Anyway, on to the good stuff. As always, I’m linking up with Erika and Andrea to share the things that I have loved over the past week.

A lazy Sunday!

I stayed up way past my bedtime on Saturday night watching a live wrestling event. Usually the start times are 1am but it started early at midnight. I said I was only going to stay up and watch the first couple of matches. Half way through the 3rd, I dragged myself away from the TV and took myself to bed. On Sunday morning I had a lovely lie-in, I didn't get up until almost 11am. I stayed in my PJ's all day, only changing them for bed and watching the wrestling I didn't see the night before. I would like to start a petition to have a new month start on a Sunday every month. I know, I know it wouldn’t work, but just imagine! The 1st on a Sunday does make life so much easier. I got to sort all the bills without having to rush and it was a nice treat!

The new F1 season!

This is something I never thought I’d say a year ago: I’m actually excited about the new Formula 1 season! My youngest Ellie got me into it slowly over the last year, talking about drivers, team colours, cars and all the drama that comes with it and now I know who drives for which team and can even hold a basic conversation about the races. The season officially starts today and while I won’t be watching all the races live I’m definitely keeping an eye on the highlights. Ellie, bless her, is planning to get up at 6 or 7am to watch some races throughout the season but the Australian Grand Prix has a nightmare start at 4am here in the UK. She’ll have to catch up later but it's nice to have something new to share with her.

Revels!

I’ve rediscovered an old favourite this week: Revels. I hadn’t eaten them for a good couple of years but now I’ve had a bag and a half in a week and I'm not even sorry. For anyone who hasn’t indulged in these, Revels are a bag of surprises. They’re all milk chocolate-coated but inside there’s a mix of centres: caramel, raisin, orange creme, coffee creme and a Malteser-style crunchy malt one. Most of them look the same from the outside, so you never quite know what you’re going to get. The orange ones are my favourite.

Seeds!

I’ve finally ordered my seeds for the year and they should be arriving any day now. I almost bought them from town but they seemed so expensive compared to what I could find online. I used Seeds to Suit. I’ve gone for all the usuals: sweetcorn, sunflowers, tomatoes, strawberries and a bunch of random flower seeds just to keep things colourful but this year I’m getting a little adventurous and I’m trying melons and onions for the first time. Melons might be pushing it but fingers crossed and the onions because we go through so many in this house that it just makes sense to grow them ourselves rather than buying them week after week. I just need to get my hands on some compost and then the planting can begin.

The girls have been shopping!

Mother’s Day is next weekend here in the UK, and my girls have been shopping for gifts for me. Bless them! It’s so funny to watch how they shop. Ellie, my youngest hates online shopping. She prefers wandering around the shops and sends me multiple photos asking, "Do you like this, or this, or this?” She hasn’t told me what she’s actually bought but she admitted a couple of the photos were decoys to throw me off track. Becky, my eldest, loves online shopping. She gave me a website to look at and asked me to pick out a few things I liked. I already had a few things in mind so it was so easy for her to shop. Now she’s panicking that things might not arrive in time while Ellie is gloating, saying "You should have just shopped in town!"

The old/new sideboard.

Last week, I shared a photo of our new sideboard in the living room. I was planning to take the old one to the tip, but Stu had a better idea. He was going to paint it and put it in our bedroom. I love it when he comes up with these ideas because he is really good at DIY and upcycling things.

He sanded it down, painted it and even used leftover vinyl from when he painted my dressing table for the top. I love it! It looks like a proper piece of furniture and it’s now in our bedroom., we have a sort of matching set now.

Setting the printer up!

Linking our printer to my laptop wasn't on my to-do list this week but it happened. I had to use the scanner on it and for some life admin, it wasn't fun getting it working but I got there in the end thanks to my helpful friend ChatGPT. I've not used the printer since the summer but now I'm connected, there's no stopping me. I am printing out to-do lists, recipes and I am waiting for some photo card to be delivered so I can print out some photos.

Strawberries!

It seems ages since we had strawberries in the fridge to snack on or have for dessert after tea but Stu called in the shop one evening after work and there was a tub in the reduced section, so he picked them up for me. I had them with cream during the week and they were good, so good that I added more to the weekly online food shop. I forgot how much I love strawberries.

What have you loved over the past week?