Comfort Blanket

"The thrift book - live well and spend less" - book review

 

Photo by nikkicookiebaker

I am about a third of the way through this book and have dipped in and out of many sections and already I can quite confidently recommend it to you as a great resource. A couple of weeks ago I honestly never imagined I'd open a review of this book with anything approaching those words. I'd had a look on Amazon and read the reviews which alternate between loving India Knight in every way possible and gushing with delight, to those who claim to find her patronising and more than a bit clueless about the real world.

I will freely admit I expected to tell you that this was the painfully embarassing ramblings of a rich woman who'd just realised that money does not magically sprout from your purse and was passing on this handy tidbit to the rest of us, blissfully unaware that we were already more than ten miles further down the road. Better get on and justify myself then:

India Knight writes really well. Some people may take issue with this and object to the casual language she uses (refering to things as "crap" or "twattish", for example). If you feel that to write well means only adhering firmly to all rules of grammar and syntax and spurning the use of any form of slang then you may well disagree with me and not enjoy this book. Personally I find her really easy to read and very funny. And those are two attributes that are very welcome in a book full of facts and website addresses and advice. Her book reads like you are chatting with your funniest friend.

This is in contrast to Kath Kelly's writing style (see previous post), and to be fair to her as far as I could make out Kath was not a writer and had never tried to be a writer. She ended up producing her book as the first hand account of the person who'd lived her remarkable project and that gives it it's own value. However, as I mentioned in my previous review her writing was sometimes "clunky" and a trifle awkward, to the point where it did detract a little because it was so noticeable in places. It did give it a thrifty hand made feel I suppose.

 

Photo by Allim

Many of the scoffing reviewers of India's book dismiss it by saying there is nothing here they didn't know already, or laugh at the sections on "how to knit". Come on people, didn't your mum tell you that no-one likes a know-all? Each chapter is broken down into smaller sections and there are plenty of headings and highlighted boxes, so if you find yourself reading through something that you either know all about because it happened to be your masters dissertation or something that just doesn't interest you at all it is the easiest thing in the world to skip on to a section you do want to concentrate on. No-one is insisting that you read from cover to cover. Its a dip in where you need book.

I think its quite a plus that really really basic things are in the book. If you are a dab hand at knitting or have run a swapping scheme for years you have probably forgotten all about what it felt like to not know where to start or how to do a single simple thing.

And I think it is the sheer amount of facts and references to great websites and blogs that makes this such a potentially useful book. For example, I know quite a lot about craft and have frequented the majority of the inspirational blogs, but there were still enough new ones listed in this book to keep me quite happily occupied for an afternoon.So I would challenge those dismissive all-knowing reviewers to read their expert subject section properly and in full - I'd be surprised if there wasn't something new there even for them.

Others mock India for being the spoilt little rich girl who has never really known hardship and recommends a few expensive things like organic meat. I thought I would be one of them, but there is nothing more charming than someone who is fully aware of their own limitations (and the opinions others hold of those limitations) and can both freely admit to them and gently mock themselves. She is self-aware, and also quite clear that while she wants to save money she also wants some quality, some comfort, some nice things too. And that dear friend is about balance, and is about the very thing the Comfort Blanket espouses. We want to be warm and happy, not living on a diet of twigs or spending five weeks glueing lollipop sticks together to make a coffee table and not stressing over how close bankruptcy is.

As with any book of this type, you take the things that are useful to you and leave the rest behind. You will never, ever find a 'frugality' book that is full to the brim of new and unknown tips, and miracle 3-step solutions. Every single one will contain the blindingly obvious, the things a small child could achieve and the dull plodding common sense things that are necessary and unavoidable. But within those chapters each one will have other ideas that may be obvious to others but have slipped you by, or ideas that you need to hear explained in a new way to find their resonance with you. Its easy as pie to mock and go through list after list scoffing "who on earth wouldn't know that?". Urm, well, lets face it, if everyone knew and practised these ideas we may not be in half the pickle we are in just now.

I have heard many of these things before but sometimes reading it anew prompts you to try again. Its like dieting - we all know the fundamentals, eat less of the bad things, the right amount of the good things and do some exercise ("who on earth wouldn't know that?") but from the massive sales of diet books we clearly don't object to be told that simple message over and over.

This won't be everyone's cup of tea, I accept that. If you are allergic to anyone who has money then don't pick up this book and give yourself hives. If you yearn to go live in a commune and milk bees and live on nettle soup, try another book. But I like it. I have borrowed my copy from the library but I may very well go out and buy my own copy of "The Thrift Book - Live well and spend less" by India Knight to keep for future reference.

"How I lived on a pound a day ..." book review

Before I launch into reviewing Kath Kelly's book I want to make a couple of general comments about this genre of book and the ones I have chosen to review. Feelings on eco-thrift/ frugal/ money scrimping books seem to be split mostly into two clear camps - in the green corner the devoted disciples who already live this way or who have pledged to turn their lives around and never touch a new item again, and in the red corner the cynics who criticise the writers for being kill-joys, smug middle class experimenters or mad idealists.

I have looked at quite a range of websites, blogs and books on the subject of saving money and surviving the recession. The first thing to say is that there is no magic one touch solution sitting out there that will revolutionise your finances and take all your problems away. The answers and the methods primarily require simple common sense, an amount of self control and willpower, some work and effort, and being orderly and organised and keeping track of things.

Some of the cynics who would toss these books onto the nearest landfill site seem disappointed and let down to find yet another book with the same fundamental message instead of a map to the promised land along with free first class tickets.

The second thing is that most books and blogs are written from a particular standpoint and will not cover every possible personal situation. However, most have a selection of ideas that you can take away and use or adapt to your circumstances. You just pick the things that are useful to you and leave the others be.

So, onto "How I lived a year on just a pound a day" by Kath Kelly. Kath is not a "smug middle class intellectual" carrying out a social experiment as one Amazon reviewer claimed - clearly they hadn't read the book very well or possibly at all. She starts the book living alone in a rented room and working in job that I would imagine was not that well paid. The whole adventure begins because she needs to save up to buy her brother a really good wedding present and she can't think of any other way to do it - and a deal of alcohol encourages her thinking too.

Actually alcohol is a bit of a recurring theme through this book - any poor students who want to drink for free should definitely read/buy this book as it will be a godsend to them and their student loans.

Kath's situation and outlook were very specific so unless you are single with no dependents and willing to do things like hitch hike, walk a great distance in all weathers and scour the supermarket shelves just before closing time for whatever is available, you won't be in a position to take on her formula in its entirety. However, providing you accept and understand that, and aren't so blinkered as to see that as an insurmountable barrier there are still plenty of ideas that you might harvest for your own situation.

She is never arrogant enough to suggest that everyone should live this way, although she certainly becomes more evangelical as the book progresses and the anti-consumer culture turns from a financial necessity to a way of life and a new outlook. And although she does not dwell on it, in fact just the opposite, living like this for a year was hard work. In fact that would be one of my criticisms of the book. She makes light of all the obvious physical privations she had to put up with but if you have to do this for real then a good percentage of it is pretty demanding, for example:

"Because I was living on a pound a day I didn't use any heating in my room the whole winter" (but you have to bear in mind it was a shared house so chances are she benefited from the fact that other people were using heat, and possibly slightly more each day because her room was so cold and drawing any heat to it).

A lot of things were made easier by virtue of living in a large city (Bristol) with a strong cultural life. If you live in a small, dull provincial town or the depths of the countryside you'd find it so much harder to do it her way. Her social and cultural entertainments depend on free events and the fact she can walk or cycle to them:

"Bristol had so much to offer, was so good to me. I couldn't imagine having so much fun, on so little money anywhere else in the world". Well, quite, my point exactly.

Photo by Mike Warren

She also joins Freecycle, an online way of recycling items you don't need or want any more. Living in Bristol also makes a big difference to that:

"Undoubtedly living in a big city helped. It was easy to link up with people and pick up or drop off things". But at least she concedes that, and as I mentioned earlier you can't take the whole thing and replicate it but most people should get at least a few good ideas or leads from the book so you shouldn't let that put you off.

Pretty much everything is either common sense or things that you probably could find out about fairly easily surfing the web, and there is not much that you won't either know about already or be able to work out pretty smartish if you had only a single pound coin to your name. But it is good to have so many ideas together and to hear about her real life experience living this way.

I do get the feeling that one essential thing that really helped Kath to make a success of this year is a lot of natural optimism and resilience. It could also be that she has missed out the descriptions of the really bad days when everything goes truly horribly wrong and she just hides under her blankets wailing and gnashing her teeth and dreaming of a life of luxury, or just some warmth and a big piece of pie. I know that if I wrote this book chances are a) I would simply not get very far through the year, and b) you would read frequent pathetic descriptions of me feeling miserable and cold with sore feet and a streaming cold. Darned good job I didn't write it then!

The things I didn't like or found too odd were:

Occasionally the writing is a bit clunky - "for once I got out of the building without encountering any precipitation". Come on! How often does the conversation in your house go "hello dear, you look wet" - "yes, nasty lot of precipitation out there tonight".

I found her logic or her way of justifying things a bit out of kilter in places. She shows how you can live on virtually nothing and embraces the anti-consumer mantra - you don't have to spend money to be happy or get things out of life, but seems to miss the point that someone else has to pay for a lot of these things and thus they have to remain tainted by the evils of a consumer life:

• Whenever she hitch-hikes she might travel for free but someone had to buy the car and fill it with petrol, and her added weight will have increased the amount of petrol used.
• She attends a great many free cultural events and makes the most of the wine and food on offer, but again even though she isn't paying someone else has had to.
• She meets a man near the end of her year and when they start meeting up she makes him promise not to take her out for meals saying "I really want to get through this year and be able to say I'd done it without cheating". But why is someone buying her a meal any different from someone giving her a free ride in their car? Its not really is it?

One of the strangest things in the book is the amount of dropped money she picks up from the streets. Apparently there are literally millions of pounds in loose change down the back of the nations sofas, but also glittering across the streets. Kath seems to find lost £20 notes and piles of small change with amazing regularity and amasses over £100 this way. This felt like it had an element of truth in it but I found it hard to totally accept it. I have very good eyesight and I'm good at spotting all sorts of things and often troop along staring at the pavement, and I have to say I've only once in my life found a dropped note.

Photo by Marcin Wichary

Overall I would say this isn't a perfect book, but it is generally interesting and has a lot of ideas about every area of life and how you could live for less. It possibly makes it sound a little too easy, and perhaps a few more descriptions of dire moments when she wanted to give up or had the day from hell would have made me feel more sympathetic towards her. Having said that, I have to take my hat off to her for accomplishing something I know I could not have done, probably not even for a month let alone a year. It is certainly worth borrowing from your library, even if all you do is skim the last few pages for the lists of suggestions and particularly websites.

I'm not going to score it out of 10 because I'm rubbish at that sort of thing, but I will be interested to see how it compares to India Knight's book. That will be a contrast between the ordinary person and the little rich girl.

Puddings

Photo by J.Pauley

I have reminisced in an earlier post about food nostalgia and written dreamily about my grandma's repertoire of Sunday lunch puddings, including her sublime lemon meringue pie. All these years later I can still taste the sweet fluffy meringue dissolving on my tongue to be followed by the sharp blast of the lemon. Puddings aren't really so fashionable in January when everyone is dieting and avoiding cream and chocolate as if they carried seeds of the plague. However, ever one to swim against the tide, I am going to think about the joy of puddings. If you need comfort on a cold day a warm pudding may be your best friend. Puddings don't need to be expensive or fancy or drain your bank account. They can be as simple and as frugal as you like. Take bread and butter pudding...

Bread and butter pudding - this is a fine and straight forward recipe by Griff Rhys Jones on the BBC site. And what a great way to use up some bread that might otherwise go to waste. OR you could go the other way and be disgracefully decadent and replace the bread with slices of brioche. Even if you thought you didn't like bread and butter pudding, you'll like this version. Very very rich though and not to be tackled lightly - no wolfing a small bowl and then dashing out for a jog. You may feel like you won't need to eat again for a day or two.

How about something very simple. Take a thick slice of lemon drizzle cake, heat it in a microwave for 30 seconds to 1 minute, then pour a little cream over so that it soaks into the cake - then eat.

Lets step it up a notch and go from "sitting in your jammies on the sofa" simple to "let's do a dinner party and impress the socks off them" sophisticated. I feel the need to include something from one of my all time favourite blogs, Chocolate and Zucchini. This was posted on 6th January and I have looked longingly at it far more times than strictly necessary. I haven't tried it, possibly/probably never will, but doesn't it look the bees knees? Raspberry Dacquoise ... you can tell from the photograph just how melt in the mouth delicious it would be.Even the most dedicated Weight Watchers devotee would surely be willing to give up the fight if that was placed in front of them.

Then there's the dark side of Jamie Oliver. We hear a lot these days of his campaigns to improve school dinners and get everyone cooking - and hip hooray, quite right too - but he's a dab hand at a wicked pudding or two. How about these:

King of Puddings - more meringue, but lets be really honest, you can't actually ever have too much meringue.

Lovely Lemon Curdy Pudding - ok this time more lemons. We're getting a bit of a theme of my favourite things.

Or Chocolate Fridge Cake - what's not to like, there's chocolate, there's no actual cooking, and it could be claimed to be healthy, what with all those nuts and that dark chocolate pumping up your serotonin levels like nobody's business.

Maybe, just maybe, I'll give myself a little test. Maybe I should try one new pudding each week. That way I could expand my range from chocolate, lemons and meringue to, well, 52 new puddings. Now there's a thought to get me reaching for the cookery books...

Thrifty Book Reviews

This post is more of a teaser really, but I am borrowing and buying four different books on ways to live more thriftily and I will make my way through enough of each to give reviews of them, and if appropriate, recommendations. The four books are:

• "The thrift book: Live well and spend less" by India Knight
• "The spend less handbook" by Rebecca Ash
• "How I lived on just a pound a day" by Kath Kelly
• "How to feed your whole family a healthy balanced diet.." by Gill Holcombe

Each of them has a varied selection of reviews on Amazon so it will be interesting to see how I find them. Each seems to have a balance of people who love the book and people who are deeply cynical.

I haven't forgotten about my promise to review the Efergy Energy Saving Meter back in November - I will come back to that soon.

Mindless, or not so mindless, distractions

Picture by r.j.wagner

Now lets get one thing clear right out of the starting gate - I'm not talking about drinking yourself into oblivion or anything of that ilk. This is altogether more wholesome so don't panic, I'm not diverging from the principles of the blog.

I think its very easy in the day to day all-pervading atmosphere of never-ending news (almost all bad and depressing, and as if that were not enough, repeated, analysed and predicted over and over to really emphasise the badness of it and make sure you have no chance of forgetting or escaping), it is very easy to feel as if you are drowning in the worst aspects of human nature. Anyone looking in from outer space could be forgiven for giving the human species a miss and quietly moving on to galaxies new. Who would want to know us if the non-stop news was the only truth about us? I think we need to regularly give ourselves permission to disconnect ourselves from the endless babble of the news and allow our minds to float free, to let other kinds of thoughts wash over us.

One way of doing this is to listen to some music - loud, quiet, bouncy or restful. Anything to change the soundtrack. This is all fine and dandy on its own but sometimes it also helps to keep one part of our minds active and engaged, and that way you can't drift back so easily to all the depressing stuff - it does act like a magnet sometimes. There are many good ways to achieve this. Doing a crossword or a sudoku puzzle is one approach. In this manner your mind is completely absorbed in the task of getting the solution and so cannot easily find itself taken up with the grimness beyond. Just escaping for a short while can do you the power of good. You break the pattern, you remind yourself there are other, better things out there.

Christmas time is often the time when a jigsaw puzzle is dragged out. I find these a great way of occupying my mind, and a good way to train your eye to observe and see what you can otherwise miss. I love to do puzzles of the great paintings, as this is a way to become really intimate with even the tiniest of brush strokes, and you begin to see fine inflections of colour that otherwise pass you by.

Knitting is another variant, providing you can get relatively proficient. You are either concentrating very hard to keep up with an intricate pattern - and the intrusion of any other thought would turn it into a random splodge of wool - or you can switch off to the repetitive rhythm of knit and purl rows. I have a lovely little book which is basically a sort of Zen and the art of knitting which promotes exactly this and it paints a seductive picture of knitting in a zen like state, mind clear and blissful ... and lo, at the end you have a useful dishcloth. Two birds with ... two knitting needles. 

So, instead of thinking that jigsaw puzzles are a childish waste of time, or feeling guilty about picking up the crossword, throw yourself into it knowing that you are giving your mind a well earned rest and allowing it to not think at all for a while. You owe it that much. And you will do yourself a power of good, refresh a tired brain and come back to whatever you need to achieve with some renewed vigour and enthusiasm.

... Perchance to dream ...

Picture by Aaron Escobar

It struck me that the ideal follow up from the last posting on fabulous beds and at one and the same time the ideal thing to write about on New Years Eve would be dreams. Day dreams, the things you hope to do and the places you hope to visit in the coming year or further ahead. You could look at day dreams in a rather pessimistic way as an idle waste of time lost thinking about things you may never get to do, hoping for things out of your reach. But I disagree. I think they are all part and parcel of the weft and weave of your own comfort blanket.

Sometimes it is just the language we use that loads a concept down with all sorts of unhelpful baggage. Calling something a daydream brings to mind a wistful longing, lying around wasting the hours in front of you in pipe dreams. But you can call it other things and the very same thing becomes a healthy pursuit in moderation. Call it visualisation instead and it becomes a powerful psychological tool, a way of imagining yourself doing something that also helps you to achieve it. If you can see yourself in your minds eye already acting in a confident manner, having a better job or being on that dream holiday, it is now well accepted that you are that little bit closer to achieving it. Call it planning and it starts to become even more mundane, and even becomes practical and sensible. But what is planning other than directed and purposeful, focused day dreaming? 

Don't forget that old adage "it is better to travel than arrive". Often the anticipation and expectation is one of the best parts of the whole experience. Maybe one of the nicesst things to do over the next day or two would be to plan something, maybe a holiday, or redecorating your house or finding a more interesting job (or maybe any job at all in this climate). Traditionally this is the time of year for holiday adverts. Maybe you won't be able to afford your dream trip, or even any trip at all this year, but you could still get plenty of pleasure from looking on the internet and in books and planning the places you'd visit, how long you'd stay and the special attractions you'd make sure you'd see. Maybe you will feel a bit frustrated that you can't afford it now, but work out a rough budget and see how much you'd need to save if you want to go in 3 years or 5 years. It may be a long wait but the amount you have to put by might be attainable if you have that long to save up.

So lets hear it for dreams, for looking ahead and thinking of what might be, what could be. Lets hear it for planning ahead and helping ourselves to realise our dreams.

Nothing beats bedtime

Picture by tarraleah media

There are few more comforting things than snuggling down in a warm cosy comfy bed and drifting off to sleep at the end of a tiring day. I realise that for some people a bed is just a bed and it is nothing more than a practical device to keep you flat and comfortable while you are asleep. But for me and many others a bed is so much more. Childrens beds these days show a great deal more imagination than they used to. Little girls who dream of being princesses can have a bed like a fairy castle, complete with turret. Boys can have beds shaped like racing cars or space rockets. If you have the money, beds for grown ups can also be far from mundane. I found the following wonderful site of (very expensive) beds designed to be different, imaginative, and amazing. OK, so I would be slightly nervous of the private cloud rocking bed. One sudden move to rescue a tissue disappearing behind your pillow and you could be rocking violently for 10 minutes by the looks of things. On a similar vein, and with a few repetitions, here are what this site describes as "extreme beds". Interesting!

Porridge - a comfort food and so good for you too?

Picture by Wordridden

When I woke up this morning it was raining and grey outside and little different inside my body. A jolly evening with friends left me feeling 'tired and emotional', so I cooked up a pot of porridge in the hope of perking up all my unperky bits. It did the trick. So what's so great about porridge? Pretty much everything actually ... so here goes with Fifteen Fascinating and Fab Facts about porridge, comfort food extraordinaire:

1. It regulates the levels of fats and sugars in your blood thereby reducing your risk of heart disease ...
2. ... and it reduces your blood pressure if taken regularly
3. It reduces the risks of diabetes because it absorbs the sugars thus reducing your body's need to release insulin - which reduces the likelihood you'll become diabetic
4. It can help reduce hangovers because it absorbs toxins and neutralises acid
5. Regular consumption lowers cholesterol
6. It reduces hunger and snacking during the day because it has a very low GI index and releases its energy slowly and steadily
7. It is a good source of folic acid
8. It can help reduce depression because it is high in vitamin B6 which promotes serotonin production
9. It contains lots of soluble fibre for 'regularity' 
10. Apparently it boosts your libido
11. And can help you quit smoking
12. It is cheaper than chips - 69p for 1kilo! Worth buying in a few bags to fill you up for next to nothing.
13. It makes you lovely and warm inside
14. It is versatile - you can add lots of lovely things including fruit, honey and golden syrup (yum)
15. It is quick

Don't fall prey to buying those little sachets that boast about being so much quicker - for two simple reasons:

1. It takes no time at all to heat up your oats, water and milk in a saucepan. In fact I'm not sure that the microwave is any quicker.
2. If you have to use a microwave you still don't need those sachets. Mix up your oats and water and milk in a microwavable bowl and zap. You have to keep a careful eye on things otherwise it can boil over very quickly but otherwise it is no harder or slower than opening a sachet - and its tons cheaper!

I give you porridge, wonder food, comfort food, and healer of the sick.

A little revision never hurt anyone - let's summarise those money saving tips

Picture by Luismi1985

Pay attention at the back, there may be questions at the end. Over the last couple of months I have offered up a number of options to help save and make the most of your money. I thought it might be useful to do a round up of the ideas covered to date, so they are all there in front of you. Just a quick reminder - the thinking behind these ideas is not to "get rich quick" but to put forward those achievable things, (sometimes only small things), but things that give you a bit of control and a bit of power over your money and expenses. Psychologically this is really important. Where people feel they at least have an element of control they actively and positively participate. However, where people believe they have no control and no choice they often give up and, feeling depressed and overwhelmed, just allow things to take their course and deteriorate. So although some people may feel this is small beer and really rather tedious, it is an important part of my personal comfort blanket. Anyway, enough of the rambling, let's revise:

• Do your weekly grocery shop online. It saves time, it saves money and it saves endless aggravation ... that thoughtless woman who keeps leaving her trolley blocking the whole aisle, the wonky wheels on your trolley that keep turning left, the shopping bag that splits and deposits a bag of flour over your feet in the rain. And you avoid falling prey to those tempting offers in the big sticky cream cake section. See the virtues and rewards of online shopping for more details. 
• Use mySupermarket.co.uk to really fine tune your online grocery shopping skills. It is a very useful portal that does a number of clever things (and it is very visual making it a doddle to use). You can compare your trolley of shopping between four supermarkets, and you can also go for the swap and save options to either save money or reduce calories. Perhaps one of the best parts of the site is the ability to see the effect of swapping brand name items for own brand goods. I was amazed at the amount it saved. Obviously some things are the very same identical goods just in a different box, while other items may be a different quality. Go to my second post about online shopping for more information.
• Once you have all of that food home and in the cupboard its time to start cooking. A good way to control your weekly spend is to plan out your meals rather than buying a range of things on a whim. There are lots of ways to produce healthy tasty meals without burning money. So far I have offered up two posts, both containing 7 recipes each for an approximate cost of £1 per head per recipe. You can have a look at these now by clicking on these links feed your family for under a fiver and more food for less.
• Don't forget to visit Love Food Hate Waste - a great site that helps you, by various methods, to cut the amount of food that ends up getting wasted and make the most of leftovers.
• Christmas can be a challenge and a real strain on the wallet (as well as the nerves and the patience!). There are things you can do to make it a little easier. And even if its a bit late for this year, you can make a big difference to next Christmas. See my post on Christmas in the credit crunch.
• For sensible ongoing daily tips you could do a lot worse than visit these two sites, Get Rich Slowly, and Frugal Dad
• How about making a bit of money? Yep, you've guessed it, its not going to make your wallet burst, but every little helps. Try getting paid for taking part in online surveys. There are a lot which are, well, maybe not so kosher, but I have been completing surveys on these two sites for several months now and have certainly not had any bad experinces as a result, and have earned some money.

  YouGov UK

  Pure Profile

• Of course we need to shop for other things too. Ebay is a popular place to grab a bargain, but you can find even more bargains by using Fat Fingers. This gem of a site is simplicity itself. It checks for mispellings of the item you are looking for, items that won't come up via the ordinary Ebay search ... and therefore probably won't get many bids, apart from yours!

So that's what we've covered so far - and not a bad collection all told. Each tip on its own may only save a little here and a little there, but once you start putting them all together you see the savings mount up - so go wild, try them all.

Waste not want not!

Ok, before you develop an image of a deranged finger wagging woman sermonising from the pulpit, just stop! I want to guide you to a site that is incredibly useful and has lots of good ideas to save money and make your food go a lot further than you imagined it could. Its called Love Food Hate Waste and it has earned a very valuable position in my favourite bookmarked sites. It has various sections including:

• A section on portion sizes - invaluable if you are a bit like me and frequently just take it into your head to cook something with no recipe in front of you. How often have I ended up with enough pasta to last the rest of the week or a mountain of rice?!
• Meal planners and advice on storecupboard essentials
• Recipes divided up into things you can cook and then make a different dish from the leftovers, time savings recipes and recipes to use up the things you thought were beyond use
• Tips and advice on the best ways to store food

Ok so its not dance in the streets exciting, but it does its bit quietly and without fuss and all of a sudden you'll realise how often you are dropping by the site and making use of the information in it.