Last week, I went to Ikea to buy fancy kitchen storage jars. I’ve started buying pulses and stuff in huge, hugely cheap 2kg bags. Unfortunately this means leaving open bags of lentils on the worktops. And lentils get everywhere.

So, I went to Ikea to buy jars to put things in, and came back with a shelf load of large jars and some matching smaller ones. Big jars full of colourful lentils and red beans and so on look smart enough to have out on display, freeing up some cupboard space.

Only I bought too many jars. I figured ‘can’t have too many’.

Today I found myself buying more, different pulses, just to use the jars up.

Anyone got good chick-pea recipes? I thought not…

I made strawberry jam this evening. It’s just now cooled enough to sample, and it’s wonderful. It’s set just enough to resist the knife, but loose enough to close back over the hole in the jar when you’re done. It’s such a lurid colour that I’d have assumed food colouring was involved somehow, if it hadn’t been for the fact that I’d made it myself exclusively from fruit and pectin-enhanced sugar.

The initial plan was actually to make bramble jelly, but I didn’t find any blackberries. I drove almost to Leicestershire, found a layby and footpath, but no accessible berries. This is frustrating. There must be thousands of blackberries nearer here than that going unpicked. I just don’t know where to look. More frustrating still is that from my house, I can see brambles heavy with fruit, but they’re in a private garden I can’t get into.

I suspect even getting free fruit (which I didn’t with the strawberries) it’s going to be difficult to make jam for less money than it costs to buy. But it tastes good 🙂

Money has been really short over the last few days because of some large sums of money we’ve had to spend on the new house: down payments for the mortgage, the estate agent and the solicitor. Vast wads of cash that only represent small deposits. A mix up with jobs means I didn’t get my full salary this month either, so it’s been a bit of a juggle. And of course my savings are untouchable because they’re going to form the deposit on my house.

The last week, I ran out of cash completely, and wasn’t able to take any more out of the bank or my credit card without going over limits and incurring large fines.

So rather than the haphazard shopping for today’s meal that I usually do, I’ve been restricted to cooking from what’s in stock. Usually we have some frozen meat in stock, but we ate it all before the money ran out. So I’ve only been cooking from staples. Basically, that’s been pulses and lentils, bought in very large quantities from the cheap Asian shops in the neighbourhood. A kilo bag of lentils lasts a very very long time, even when you’re cooking from it every day. Storecupboard ingredients have included canned olives, canned tomatoes, red lentils, green lentils and white lentils (urid dahl). I keep a small-change pot on my bedside table which I’ve been raiding for pennies to buy onions and carrots.

I’m not, and never have been a veggie, but I have lots of friends who are. I can do reasonable veggie and vegan cooking when I need to. We’ve been eating dahl, Greek olive and potato stew, lentil bake.

I still miss the meat.

Money turned up in my bank account this morning, firstdirect alerted me by text message, so as soon as I got in from work I went to Sainsbury’s and bought sausages.