I did a header!

I did! Took me a while but I got round to it. Feel a bit better about this place now.

Anyway, on to... 'things'.

I'm not too much further forward than the other day to be honest. I'm still plodding on with daily clicks, scratchies, etc. I've also started comping, so I'll let you know about end of month totals when we get there, and any wins as they happen.

I requested a £15 Love to Shop [Iceland food shopping for me, yay!] voucher from Toluna this week. I've heard their voucher dispatch time isn't at it's speediest right now though, so I'm not counting my voucher-based chickens till they're hatched/here.

This week's noms, aside from the abundance of rubber chicken, has been quite mincey, with both spaghetti bolognaise and chili making appearances.

I have found myself eyeing anything that might be eBayable around the house, but seem to be drawing several blanks there.

Fingers crossed, eh?
Alexandra xx

On the Subject of Rubber Chicken, and More...

Well hello there again.

I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and New Year, I spent much of it back in Northumberland with my parents and the other half's family. There was even a boxing day parents-meet-parents type event! It all went well though, and I had a lovely time.

Money is still tight though, perhaps more so. I find my mind turning more and more frequently to the subject of money and any possible way to spend less and perhaps earn more. There are a couple of links in the blog right now, which are affiliation links, generally to survey sites or similar, which normally give me some small cash reward - a pound or so, occasionally more. So if you're not already with them, and you do use my links, I thank you for that. I;d say join them anyway as survey sites really help me.

Still, with limited means of upping my income, it largely falls to the side of saving what cash I do have in order to ensure I have enough for the summer. Food bills are probably the one bill we have the most control on here; it's a shared student house so we don't always get to say if the heating's kept off, and sometimes lights are on when they ought not to be. It's the nature of the beast though and hopefully a lot of that shall be eliminated when we're living just the two of us.

For the time being though, I've turned my attention to our food. I wasn't doing much cooking since we moved here last summer - my boyfriend has done a great deal of it, and while he cooks very tasty meals, they are rarely economical. They tend to be somewhat oversized, meat heavy, and rich. Not great for health, or the pocket.

In the last month or so I have taken over much of the cooking after conquering my fear of the cooker here [it is very hard to light, sometimes resulting in large flames - but a lighter has helped that!] and as such I've begun to notice a difference.

Tonight I roasted my first chicken. I bought the 3-for-£10 on meat deal in Tesco, 2 chickens and a pack of steak chunks, the latter chicken and the steak currently residing in our freezer. I had never roasted a chicken before - shocking I know - so I was strangely proud of tonight's attempt, as it was falling off the bone! :)

Now, on to what makes my chicken "rubber" - I'll give you a hint, it's not the one in the picture!

I first read about the concept of "rubber chicken" a couple of years ago or more, on the MoneySavingExpert forums. The idea is to make the chicken stretch over as many meals as possible. A lot of people use the chicken for a roast dinner or similar for the first meal, but I made my first chickeny meal a pasta one as the mr is quite critical of how much meat he gets and I figured I could get away with less meat with less complaining this way! I used a single leg in the pasta for the 2 of us [and the pasta was packet stuff from approved foods!] and got no complaints...

The remainder of the chicken is in the fridge and will be dealt with tomorrow. There's definately going to be chicken and sweetcorn spun egg soup, chicken lasagne and a chicken curry though, off the top of my head. Then we'll see where we are, there may be some chicken and sweetcorn mayo sarnies this week for uni too, perhaps.

All in all, it's going pretty well. I'll post more on approved food later this week too. :)

Alexandra
xx