A wartime meal

HI all,

AS you know, i quite enjoy making something for not a lot of money. I have quite a few recipes from the second world war, most of these are quite frugal with the ingrediants, but in this day and age, i think we all need to be quite clever with our store cupboard ingrediants. Here is a recipe which does just that, its very tasty and very cheap to make.

Wartime Stew;


ingrediants;


1/4 pound of meat
onions
1 cup of haricot beans
carrots
turnips
salt and pepper

method;

chop the meat and brown, (use more meat if you have it)
add the onions and the haricot beans (soaked overnight)
Add 2 or 3 carrots and the turnip, all chopped into even pieces.
Pour over some stock or water and simmer for 2 or 3 hours.
season with the salt and pepper. serve hot but arrange the meat on top so that it doesnt look completely meatless.

house update, ( the rear )

Hi all,
I hope your all having a great beginning to the New Year, i just wish it would stop raining, i keep telling myself, it'll be Spring soon, lol

Our house when we first arrived was a 60's Bungalow, made of wood, we dug out the lower portion of the house, making it into a 2 storey.
I the basement garage and store room, the floors where just gravel, and there where some small slit like windows. we made one of the windows into the outlet for our woodburning stove for the living room, of coyrse in doing that we also had to construct a chimney stack on the outside wall, here are some piccies of the before and after, hope you like them...
The inside floor;





the back view

under the corrugated sheeting was the window






the after, view of the new chimney stack;




as you can see, we also added a verandah.....


the chimney stack works very well, i hadnt realised that they would be a lot of mathematics involved with the building of the stack, but apparently , you have to work out the height required, with the depth of the floor, like they do on boats, its very important because the ground floor is lower. we had help with that, from a friend who used to live on a barge.

we do paint it every year, so it stays pristine, my hubby is not a lawn man, he likes to paint the house lol.

kitchen changes galore 2014

I decided to change my kitchen, after 8 years of hard work, my poor little kitchen needed a facelift, i decided it needed to be updated and lightened up a bit, so i took the bull by the horns and painted my doors white. They where originally a creamy , yellow colour which i liked, but i wanted something different, so out came the paint brushes. It took me 3 weeks because of my dogs, ha, they are very nosey so i did it piece meal. I am very happy with the results, the only thing was, it made me eager to paint everything else white lol.. the stairs, the oak supporting beams to the stairs and the spindles separating the dogs from the bench seat, it took me a while, but is has brightened up the room.
here are some before and after piccies, i hope you agree with me that the afters are better...

the after

i also made new checked and french linen curtains. The windows are all different so i tried to reflect this in the curtain styles.

getting on with it

My youngest child, Bryn had decided to come with us to live in France, he was only 13 years old, so we needed to get him into a school, we had been told of a lovely lady who was French but spoke perfect English, who could help us to settle in with things like, getting the electricity changed over to our names, enrolling Bryn in school, doctor, dentist all the things you dont think in the initial stages of shock lol.

Bryn was quickly enrolled at our local secondary school, which for a small town, was very modern and had all the mod cons. We where intorduced to the headmaster, he made us feel very welcome, there was a lot of paperwork to sign, and they wanted a list of Bryns vaccinations since babyhood, and he was in!!!

The day dawned for his debut, and let me tell you all, he was scared and i dont blame him, he spoke no french at all, we had arrived in France with the rose tinted glasses and no preparation at all. Bad parents, but to be honest he was more or less fluent after 6 months of total immersion at school, they gave no concessions to those who didnt speak the lingo !! including me at times when i had to visit the school about Bryns work. I learnt very quickley too.
He was also very popular with the girls, which helped, he had a new girlfriend every week.

Whilst Bryn was occupied at school, hubby and I got on with the house changes and exploring where we had actually landed.

The first thing which was a shock, was the distance to things like shops, garages, oh and the local roads. In England, because its a smaller country, everything is more or less on your doorstep, here France is 3 1/2 times the size of England with only the same size population, so you travel longer distances. The local roads, the Route Nationale are fantastic, no pot holes anywhere, very well sign posted, the other " roads " , well the only way i can describe them , would be to say their just like a country lane, these usually lead to communes, houses, the bins etc, these too are very well maintained, but many times we thought we where lost because they just dont look like roads.

we had a lot to get used to;

more piccies on the progression of the house;

working on our new home

Well we had arrived!!! very tired and disorientated, the next step was to settle in, look for the shops, and d.i.y.materials.
What a shock, we had moved to an area that was very rural so of course, our little village didnt do anything in the way of great d.i.y. materials and they where so expensive, compared with the U.K......

I was going to concentrate on making the upstairs of our home comfortable, whilst hubby worked on getting the downstairs into some sort of order....
Our new home was originally a 60's wooden bungalow, what ??? i hear you cry, yup a bungalow, and not a very nice one either.

It was originally constructed in the earley 60's for a dutch lady, who used it as a hoilday home, and then the owners we bought from purchased it in the 70's. They also used it for a holiday home, until 2 years before they sold to us, they used it permanently. They where in their 80's.

Here are some piccies of the exterior before we changed it into a 2 storey house.

As you can see, she was pretty much needing some tender loving care, and a new outer skin, it was very rotten.
We had Rats, big ones.... no insulation anywhere, no heating anywhere, no hot water.
I remember thinking, why would we leave a beautifully renovated, centrally heated, extended, totally finished modern, and up to date house in England for this??

Had we made a big boo boo, by coming here?? i asked myself this question a lot in the first few days i can tell you.
But we got on and really we had burned our bridges,having sold our lovely house, kissed our family , friends and children , goodbye.
Next post will be the progression we made to the house and socially.

happy st patricks day to everyone xx

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before piccies of living room downstairs in old garage

This was the old garage underneath the house as we bought it,this was what was going to be our new living room!!

below are the after piccies....



I hope you like what we did.... let me know if you've done any major renovations to your house, I'd love to hear from you,

Take care everyone, until next time, when we go upstairs...