Money Saving March: Batch cooking

I'm on a mission to save money in March! I'll be posting three times a week with ideas and challenges. Free free to join in! :)

I sometimes get home from Uni pretty late and the last thing I want to do is cook something from scratch. It would be so much easier to just heat something from the cupboard or freezer, but wait! Cooking from fresh is cheaper and healthier! What a dilemma!

The solution? Get organised. Batch cooking!

Challenge 11 of Money Saving March is to do some batch cooking this bank holiday weekend!

The great thing about batch cooking is that you can just make extra of whatever you're having for dinner, then reheat it for lunch the next day or stick it in the fridge/freezer for a later date!

What sort of things are good for batch cooking? Anything that can be frozen and reheated easily is great because you can make a few day's worth of meals at once without having to eat the same soup every night for a week! Meals like chilli, soup, pasta bake, curry, cottage pie and stews freeze well and can be separated into portions for easy reheating later on.

Don't forget you can also make all sorts of desserts to freeze for a later date - no more excuses about eating the whole batch of cookies before it goes stale!

Food safety: Make sure you stick the food in the fridge or freezer as soon as it's cool enough to do so. DON'T leave it out on the side for hours - bacteria can breed on food left at room temperature. Defrost frozen food in the fridge overnight. Reheat food thoroughly so that it is piping hot all the way through. :)

My batch cooking:
I don't know about you, but I have five days off for Easter! It's a pain to be busy all day and then come home and cook, so I have pre-made some stuff for us to eat! 

Today I was making pasties, so I made extra pastry and turned the rest into a quiche that we can have for lunch for the next couple of days.

Whilst the oven was still hot, I decided to make some carrot cake using this recipe. The orange-flavoured icing really makes it taste delicious, although I definitely should have sifted the icing sugar first!! I made two cakes and stuck the un-iced one in the freezer for future snacking! :)

I also made some sweet potato soup using Anthony Worrall Thompson's recipe, but I forgot to take a photo!

We had vegetable chilli for dinner, so I made twice as much to store in the freezer for an easy evening meal.


All in all I spent about two and a half hours preparing and cooking enough food for six meals each for the two of us, plus 16 pieces of cake! :) By investing time in cooking this weekend, I can have hassle-free meals later on, with less cooking time and most importantly, less washing up!

Do you batch cook? Care to share some recipes? :)

Money Saving March: Packed Lunches

I'm on a mission to save money in March! I'll be posting three times a week with ideas and challenges. Free free to join in! :)

Hello and welcome to Money Saving March! I will be taking on various money saving ideas and challenges; some lasting a day, some all month!

One of the common frugal tips is to bring your own lunch to work. I do generally do this, however the numbers are in and last month I bought lunch five times! Granted, the £3 supermarket meal deal isn't likely to break the bank, but that would still be almost £200 a year wasted on me being too lazy to make lunch in the morning!

So, challenge 1 for Money Saving March is to bring lunch from home, every single day, NO EXCUSES!

What makes a good lunch?
I take simple lunches to Uni. I tend to make it late the night before, or in the morning while I'm waiting for coffeeeeeeee, so it has to be quick and easy. Examples include:

• Cheese and pickle sandwiches, a tomato and an apple.
• Couscous mixed with pesto and a roughly chopped tomato, and a banana.
• Leftovers, such as lentil soup.

Yep, you won't find me chopping up 100 ingredients for the world's greatest salad or something in the mornings, but I still manage to eat relatively healthily for a fraction of the cost of a supermarket meal deal!

Back-up plan!
I know me. I know there are days when I sleep through my alarm and wake up with seconds to get ready and go! These are the days when I'd say, "Screw it, I'll buy lunch later". I need a back-up plan.

My solution? Keep emergency food at Uni! I've got cheap-o super-noodles, instant soup, bananas and apples that I can store under my desk. If I forget to take lunch, I won't have to resort to going to the shop!

Savings
If a homemade lunch costs about £1 a day, I should save £10 compared to last month's supermarket meal deals, and eat more healthily to boot!

Anyone else want to take on this easy challenge? How much do you think you'd save?

Cheap meals: Lentil burgers

I'm currently doing a challenge to eat for £1 a day. Using my stash of value ingredients, I've been living on a few basic meals over and over again!

Luckily for me, Frugal in Derbyshire sent me a recipe for lentil burgers, which turned out to be the tastiest thing I've had all week!

Ingredients:

50g split red lentils (I used 50g as I'm running low, but they would hold together better with 75g!)
300 ml stock
a carrot
a small onion (mine are super small!)
25g oats
10g baking fat (to fry)

Total cost =  26p (or 31p if you use 75g lentils).

SO TASTY!

How to (all credit to Frugal in Derbyshire):

• Boil the lentils in the stock until they're mushy, then remove from the heat and drain.
• Grate the carrot and finely chop the onion.
• Mix the lentils, carrot, onion and oats in a bowl
• Form the mixture into burger shapes (mine were about 1.5cm thick) and fry for around 3-4 minutes on each side.

These were some seriously nice burgers and made a great change from all the food-in-a-bowl I've been eating lately! Thanks for the recipe!

£1 a day - Cheap Meals

Hi guys! Thanks for all your comments on the £1 a day (£7 for the week) challenge. 

I just want to make it 100% clear that I am only doing this challenge for 1 week. I've had a lot of awesome suggestions about gathering food or using £28 for the whole month to get a better selection of foods, but this is strictly a single week challenge! 

Having said that, there have been a lot of tasty suggestions for cheap recipes and ways to eat for less. Frugal in Derbyshire commented yesterday with a recipe for lentil burgers made with red lentils, carrots, onion and oats and gillibob linked me to a website where you can feed a family of four for £100 a month,  which looks like a really handy resource for anyone looking to keep their food costs down!
 

 
I have been eating some seriously cheap meals so far this week from my £6.98 shopping trip.

Breakfasts have been porridge made with UHT milk and water.  Total cost = 13p.

Lunches have been lentil soup (21p a portion because I used a small and more expensive pack of lentils) with two slices of bread "buttered" with baking fat. Total cost = 26p.

I made two portions of stew out of potatoes, carrots, onion and a parsnip. Cost per portion = 24p. Eaten with a slice of bread, making the total meal cost 26p.

I've also made a sort of vegetable ragout out of red kidney beans, chopped tomatoes, carrots, onion and stock, which cost 37p a portion. I had it with rice, bringing the total cost to 40p.


Tomorrow for dinner I'm pretty excited to try making those lentil burgers!

All the meals listed above are very filling. It's amazing how cheaply you can make something that will keep you going all day!

Here are a few more cheap meals I've made in the past:
Quiche
Lentil Salad
Pumpkin soup

Cheap snacks:
Rhubarb crumble (vegan)
Chocolate cake (vegan) 
Caramel shortbread
  
Just out of interest, how much do you spend on food each week? 

Bodge It Together Quiche!

Things never go to plan when I'm cooking! I thought I'd make myself a nice cheese and onion quiche for my lunch for the next couple of days. Unfortunately my last onion was all had gone all pink, fluffy and squishy. Not a good look for an onion.

I decided to improvise with a couple of shallots left over from when The Boyfriend was doing some fancy-pants cooking. Hmm... squishy too. To be fair, these guys had been sitting around for a good few weeks.

After raiding the fridge, I thought the only thing that sounded vaguely quichey was a red pepper (plus cheese, of course!).

The small portion!

Other problems I ran into:

• I forgot to chill the pastry (as per usual - turns out fine!)
• I don't have a rolling pin - I stick flour on the outer layer of a roll of cling film, then pull that layer off when I'm finished!
• I don't have a quiche/flan tin - I used a cake tin instead
• I don't have baking beans - for the pastry's blind bake I covered it in foil with some dry rice grains on top.
• I made the pastry too short on one side and the quiche filling ran down the side
• I dripped egg and milk mix into the bottom of my oven, which was hot from the blind bake so I couldn't clean it and had to smell it burning for half an hour!

It turned out pretty well, despite me making it! The cost of the recipe works out to 34p/51p per person depending on portion size (not including the cost of a rotten onion!), and I didn't have to go out and buy more ingredients!

The recipe (bodged together from this original recipe):

190g of plain flour - 8p (based on 60p for a 1.5kg bag)
80g margarine/butter - 18p (based on £1.10 for 500g of Vitalite)
half a tablespoon of oil - about 5p
one red pepper - 31p (£1.25 for a value bag of four peppers)
3 eggs - 74p (£1.48 for six free range eggs)
300ml of milk - 17p (based on 6 pints at £1.89)
90g cheese - 50p (based on 2 x 450g packs for £5 - always on offer!)
black pepper - about 1p.

Total = £2.04

This quiche serves 4-6, so it is 51p for a meal portion or 34p for a side portion. 


The eggies are by far the most expensive part of this quiche, but I will only eat free range eggs after seeing the state of rescued battery chickens and visting a barn of uncaged hens.

If you confine yourself to a smaller portion, Calorie Count will give you a C+ grade. The recipe has a fair amount of saturated fat (6g), but it's very low in sodium and has a fair whack of vitamins and minerals from the eggs and milk. Not super healthy though I'm afraid.

Anyway, my point is - who cares if you don't have the right ingredients/equipment/cooking ability? You can bodge a cheap meal together without having to run to the local corner shop every time you cook!

Make it do or do without!

Halloween Cuisine: Three Easy Pumpkin Recipes

Halloween is upon us, which means there are a lot of pumpkins in kitchens this week! If you have pumpkin flesh or seeds left over, read on for my tried-and-tested tasty pumpkin recipes!

I got a small-ish pumpkin for £1 in Tesco. To give you some sense of the amount you'll need, my little pumpkin weighed 1750g when it was intact, and yielded around 1350g flesh and a lot of seeds! Don't buy a massive pumpkin unless you have a small army to feed!

This is the first time I've bought a pumpkin and NOT carved it, so I drew a little face on it to make up for it!

OK, on to the recipes:

Pumpkin Soup

OH NO!

The Boyfriend thinks I'm obsessed with soup, but that's ok because he's gone on a Uni trip to Holland (alright for some!). That also means I was free to play with the Big Boy Knife!


I've adapted this recipe from The Soup Bible by Debra Mayhew.

To make four large portions of pumpkin soup you will need:

• One onion, chopped
• 675g pumpkin flesh, peeled, cut into chunks
• 450g potatoes, sliced
• 600ml vegatable stock (I actually used a litre then tipped out 400ml at the end)
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg
• 250ml milk (you could leave this out for a vegan recipe)
• black pepper

Soup-splattered wall...

1. Fry the onion until soft in a little oil or butter.
2. Add the pumpkin and potatoes. Sweat them on a low heat for ten minutes, stirring frequently.
3. Stir in the stock, nutmeg and black pepper. Bring to the boil and simmer for around 20 minutes until the vegetables are very soft.
4. (Pour out excess stock if you used 1 litre). Tip into a large bowl and blend the ingredients together. Try not to get it on the walls like I did.
5. Pour the soup back into the saucepan, mix in the milk then heat gently.

Very tasty and very good for you. :)



Pumpkin Pie

I had never tried pumpkin pie before, but I followed the recipe on the BBC's Good Food website. Although I halved the recipe quantities because I had a small cake tin rather than a tart tin.

I also made my sweet shortcrust pastry from scratch, unlike Antony Worrall Thompson's lazy recipe! (We've never trusted him since he crimped pasties with a fork!). The recipe I used was from Jamie Oliver, which I also halved the quantities of.

My small pie serves six, or four greedy people!

For the pastry you will need:

Cut to fit whatever tin you have!

• 250g plain flour
• 50g icing sugar
• 125g butter/margarine
• one egg
• a splash of milk
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon (use in place of the lemon zest listed in the recipe)

For the pie filling (in a cake tin) you will need:

• 375g pumpkin, peeled
• A third to a half of the pastry you made above, depending on tin size
• 70g sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 egg
• 15g butter, melted
• 85ml milk
• 1/2 tablespoon icing sugar

Please see the websites for instructions on how to make the pastry and the pumpkin pie itself.

One tip is to use a hand blender on the cooked pumpkin, rather than trying to push the stringy pumpkin flesh through a sieve. Also, wait for the pie to be fully chilled in the refridgerator before eating because it has to set.

Whilst you have the oven on, why not try the next recipe too...


Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

Even if your Halloween carvings haven't yielded enough flesh to make soup or pumpkin pie, you'll always be left with a bunch of stringy pumpkin goop and some pumpkin seeds. Why not roast the pumpkin seeds to bring out their flavour as a snack?

I followed a recipe on the All Recipes website.

Just wash the gunk off your fresh pumpkin seeds, cover with a little oil and sprinkle with salt. You then roast the seeds for around 15 minutes at a low temperature (perhaps on the lowest shelf of the oven whilst you have something else cooking). When the seeds start making a popping noise they are done. You can store them in an air tight container in the fridge.
  

Give one of these a try for Halloween themed food! 

I made all of these things in one morning. I had pumpkin soup followed by pumpkin pie for lunch, pumpkin seeds for a snack and then roast pumpkin for dinner. I can't get enough of it!! :)

Cheap Meals: Lentil Soup

I recently tried a brilliant recipe I found on Not Delia. It's really simple, easy to cook, very cheap and pretty nutritious. (It is also vegan if you use either vegan margarine or oil to soften the veg.)

The recipe can be found here and uses some seriously cheap ingredients:

• 250g split red lentils - £2 for 2kg, so can be as cheap as 25p. 60p buys a 250g pack.
• One onion - 19p
• One carrot - 9p
• 1.5 litres of vegetable stock – Can be free if you use water used to boil veg, or if you use stock cubes like I did then 10p for a pack of 10 stock cubes, of which you will need 3, so 3p.
• Margarine/oil – probably freely available in your kitchen.

Total cost = 56p (or up to 98p to buy the full packages of lentils and stock cubes), which is 14p per portion.

(Prices from Tesco's website, so could be even cheaper elsewhere!)

Nutrition

The recipe analyser on Calorie Count shows that this soup is pretty good for you (grade A). It's low in calories, high in vitamin A and super-dee-duper high in fibre. 

The biggest problem with it is the sodium content, which pretty much all comes from the stock cubes. If you have homemade stock yours should be even better!

Simplicity

I love the simplicity of the recipe. You basically just soften the chopped vegetables in the oil/margarine and then boil everything in stock for half an hour. I didn't even need to blend it; it was a nice thick soup but not too chunky!

One tip I will add is to slice the carrots as thinly as you can. This will let them break down in the soup more easily. I could nearly see the chopping board through mine!

There are only two of us, but I made the full four-person's worth. You can either freeze or refrigerate the leftovers for a homemade ready meal another day. The Not Delia website has a few different ways to jazz this soup up with other ingredients too. 

For 14p a portion I would definitely make this soup again. It was one of the nicest soups I've had!

Anyone got a suggestion for more ways to jazz this soup up? I think meat-eaters might want to try adding some bacon pieces to it; apparently lentils and bacon is a brilliant combination. Let me know if you try the soup!

My Garden: Trials and Tribulations

Tomatoes!

 

As Pamela over at Feral Homemaking pointed out in a recent post, gardening is a hobby that can cost you dearly in both time and money. Depending on what you grow, there can be a significant outlay for buying seeds, compost, special fertilisers, etc., and it can take a fair bit of time to make sure everything is sown, watered, transplanted and weeded!

I agree with Pamela that it's best to view gardening as a hobby, rather than a surefire way to lower your food costs. It's fun, and you'll probably have SOMETHING to show for it, but you don't always get the yield you were hoping for.

For example:

• Pigeons ate my carrot seedlings
• My onions are still pitifully small due to bad weather
• My peas were chomped by slugs
• The currant bush has some strange virus
• Haven't seen much from my swedes yet!

As I said at the start of the season, there are a lot of unknowns between sowing the seeds and harvesting the crop!

My entire potato harvest...

You certainly couldn't feed a family on my harvest of potatoes. I planted five potatoes I think (from chitted potatoes, not seed potatoes, so no real cost outlay) but they died back too early, possibly from a combination of bad weather and dodgy stock potatoes to begin with! (Note to self: buy seed potatoes next year). My “bounty” contained six medium sized potatoes, about eight small ones, and another eight or so truly tiddly ones!

But as they say, you win some, you lose some (and you learn a lot on the way).

My tomato plants are finally starting to fruit and I'm going to have a LOT of cherry tomatoes to eat in a couple of weeks. The plants are throwing out flower trusses faster than I can pollinate them! Our cabbages are looking pretty good too! :) There are a few that could be harvested soon, with some more developing more slowly that will provide greens throughout the winter hopefully (although I'll be at Uni by then!).

How are all your lovely vegetables doing? It's been a bit of a mixed bag here with the weather, but my Nana (veteran gardener extraordinaire) said her plants have been a bit useless this year too, so I don't feel too bad!

Do you think you've saved money gardening, or is it a black hole for time and money? :)

Vegan Garlic Straws Recipe (An Alternative to Cheese Straws)

I managed to mangle that middle one!

Just a quick little recipe for vegans or people who don't like cheese (if such a thing exists).

I made cheese straws for a board game night, but didn't know any quick-to-make vegan alternatives. I decided to try garlic-flavoured straws. With this recipe you can make a big batch of vegan pastry then add cheese to some and garlic to the others.

The recipe (makes around 12 straws):

• Mix 200g vegan margarine (I use Vitalite as it's easy to find in UK supermarkets) and 300g plain flour together and check it can roll into a ball. (May need a splash of cold water, but the Vitalite is often enough to hold the mixture together).

• For CHEESE straws, you can now mix in 200g grated cheese and half a teaspoon of mustard (for the best straws you've ever tasted).
• For VEGAN straws, add at LEAST two decent-sized crushed garlic cloves. Three cloves would make it pretty garlic-y.
  
  
• Chill the mixture for 30 minutes, then roll the pastry out to 0.5cm thick and cut approximately 10cm x 2cm slices. Place them on a greased baking tray.
  
  
• If you're making CHEESE straws, this is the point to brush the straws with beaten egg for glazing. If you're making VEGAN straws, there's not really much you can use to glaze but they'll still cook and look fine. :) 
   
• Cook in the centre of a pre-heated oven for 15-20 minutes at 200°C (gas mark 6). They will be a light golden brown when cooked.

Both recipes won the approval of my family and didn't last more than a couple of hours, which is always a good sign!

P.S. If you're looking for more vegan recipes I made a vegan chocolate birthday cake back in May

Father's Day Treat: Apple and Rhubarb Crumble!

To celebrate Father's Day yesterday I made him one of his favourite desserts; apple and rhubarb crumble. Yummmm! :)

This recipe is vegan-friendly (Mum likes crumble too!) and pretty much fool proof. Just chop fruit, add sugar and spice (and all things nice), top with crumble and leave in the oven.

Ingredients

3 x bramley apples, peeled and cored.

2 rhubarb stalks

150g light brown sugar (I used muscavado)

Half a teaspoon of cinnamon

Half a teaspoon of ground ginger

150g (vegan if necessary) margarine + around another 25g for the filling (Our vegan margarine of choice is Vitalite, made from sunflower oil)

300g plain flour

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 180ºC (gas mark 4) and grease a casserole dish. Mine was 8.5 inches in diameter.
2. Slice the rhubarb into roughly 1-inch chunks. Cut the apples into chunks slightly larger than the rhubarb. Cut them into a bowl of water to prevent the apple browning before you finish.
   
   
   
   
   
3. Mix the apple and rhubarb pieces together in the casserole dish. Mix 75g of the sugar with the cinnamon and ginger and sprinkle it over the fruit, then dot small knobs of margarine over the top.
   
   
   
   
   
4. In a mixing bowl, sift the flour over the butter and add the remaining 75g of sugar. Rub the mixture together until it forms breadcrumbs, which you then use to cover the fruit in the casserole dish. Ensure this crumble topping is at LEAST 1cm thick (preferably 1.5cm), or it may go soggy when cooking and nobody likes soggy crumble!
   
   
   
   
   
5. Bake for 50 minutes in the centre of your pre-heated oven. Check your crumble halfway through to ensure the topping is not cooking too quickly. If it is already golden brown, cover the dish with aluminium foil. Remove the foil for the last 10 minutes to harden the crumble topping.
6. The fruit filling will be extremely hot, so allow to cool for 10-20 minutes before enjoying with ice cream!

I hope you all had a nice father's day. Happy Father's Day to you, Dad!

Lovely Weather for Ducks and Vegetables!

Most of southern Britain has been hit hard by the rain during the past week or two. It's starting to feel more like Spring or Autumn than Summer! The good news here in Cornwall that the rain has been interspersed with periods of warm sunshine; perfect veggie growing conditions!

Tomatoes are taking over!

My tomato plants are getting almost big enough to flower. I have sixteen plants, which are currently taking up my entire windowsill. I am trying to harden them off, but it takes a good 10-15 minutes getting them all arranged for a day in the garden because I can only carry two at a time!

Top tips for tomatoes:

• Make sure you tie your tomatoes firmly to a stake at several places along the main stem, leaving just enough room so you don't damage the plant (about half a centimetre).
• Regular watering is essential, especially when fruiting. If you allow the soil/compost to completely dry out, the tomatoes will split when they next receive water.
• Apply fertiliser weekly once the fruits begin to develop.

Basil

I planted some basil at the same time as the tomatoes. Can you believe the difference in size of the two plants?? The basils are about 1.5 inches high, the tomatoes are about three feet tall!

I also sprinkled some out-of-date carrot seeds in a tub of compost in the hope that I might get some germination. Usually we have very little success with carrots but lots of them have come up (far too close together, so they will have to be thinned later on). They're starting to get their true leaves now too! :)

Tiny carrot seedlings

Top tips for carrots:

• Carrots require a sandy soil, so if you have a clay-type soil like mine, your best bet is to grow them in a deep container.
• Try not to damage/crush the leaves because the smell will attract carrot fly (top tip from my Dad!).
• Keep plants well watered to avoid woody carrots.
  
  

Pea

 

I have three tiny pea plants too. The seeds were again old ones from a couple of years ago and did not germinate very well. I need to stake the plants now because they have started putting out tendrils looking for support.

A month ago I had a few cooking potatoes left in the bottom of a bag that had started to sprout. This is “chitting” and means that if planted they should develop into new plants. We planted them and the resulting plants are coming up nicely.

Potato plants

 

Top tips for potatoes:

• Potatoes should be watered during the growing season if there isn't regular rain.
• Apparently you should cut the green, above-ground part of the plant off two weeks before you lift the crop. This enables the tubers to develop a thicker skin less prone to damage from digging up and storing.

Sharing the vegetable patch with the potatoes are some onions (growing nicely from sets), some lettuces, swiss chard, swedes and some cabbage plants. (The leeks did not fare well against marauding pigeons!) These little guys are coming along well, although none of them are without a few slug-chomp-marks.

Cabbage

 

Tips for growing cabbages:

• Grow cabbages in a different spot every year, to reduce build up of the many diseases they are prone to contracting.
• Watch out for butterfly eggs (small oblong-shape) on the underside of leaves. Caterpillars can devastate your crop almost overnight!
  
  
  
  

Over to you, Mary, Mary, quite contrary. How does your garden grow?

A Week in the Sun on the Cliffs

This is a post about my trip from Bude to Newquay (Cornwall). Normal posts will resume shortly!

I'm baaaack. I have weird tan lines, including hiking boot feet with flip-flop lines on top for good measure! That can only mean one thing: it was sunny in Cornwall!! Yessss!

We visited: Bude, Boscastle, Tintagel, Padstow and Trevone. (And much of the coast between them!)

We only spent about £100 each for the week too, including accomodation, food and drinks and fuel. We already had tents, hiking gear and rucksacks, but once you've got them, they last a LONG time, so if you fancy a cheap holiday, invest in some good camping gear!

The Plan
My Mum and I went hiking and camping around the northern Cornish coast. The original plan was to carry our gear on our backs like nomads/snails. Unfortunately, two people need almost as much stuff as four people (tent, food, fuel, camping burner, plates, pots etc. etc.), but with fewer people to carry it all!

We tried lugging it all in hiking rucksacks from Bude to Boscastle (17 miles), but it was roasting hot even at 8am and the cliffs are some of the highest in the country. We made it 11 miles (to Crackington Haven) and collapsed in a pub, calling a taxi to take us the few miles to the campsite!

(Check out my sweat patches in that photo! Niiiiice!!)

Change of plans!
That first day of walking was hard; too hot, too heavy, too far, too steep and no fun. Luckily we only live in mid-Cornwall, so we were able to rope good ol' Dad in to move our gear some days, so we could live it up with small day bags. The walks were still long, and it was still hot, but we skipped up 500+ ft high cliffs with relative ease! :) It was fun!

 

Look at the size of these cliffs!

 So here are a few photos of our trip. I would thoroughly recommend hiking the South West Coast Path. It is one of the best maintained paths in the country. We met some people attempting the 630 miles between Minehead (Somerset) and Poole (Dorset). (Even they only made it to Crackington Haven that first day!)

Alpacas in Bude!

Huge vegetarian pasties! (Not quite peppery enough mind you!)

Cornish language. (I can speak a little Cornish too. Little known fact for you there!)

Boscastle harbour. I loooove Boscastle. I don't think I've been before. It's a beautiful village.

The coastal watch outpost at Boscastle. Volunteers work 4 hour shifts to keep an eye on people on the sea and coast paths. They especially watch for people walking alone and make sure they reach the next outpost.

My Mummy. :) She loves her hiking poles!

The thrift was beautiful. It covered most of the headlands!

Me! :) Do you like my sunhat? :D

This is the remains of Tintagel castle, where King Arthur was meant to have been born. There's really not much there now.

Windsurfer in Padstow.

If anyone wants more info about Cornwall just leave a comment and I'll get back to you! (I live in mid-Cornwall, but have visited most parts of the Duchy by now!)