Time and Money

Don´t forget there is often a strong link between time and money. When it comes to cooking better and eating well they work together, in the same direction, in that…

A lot of time savers can also save money.

And to create more time, you might have to create/spend some money!

How we value and use time and money can dictate our living experience.

We used to have more spare money than we had spare time… then we simplified our lives by getting rid of most of the material possessions and ties ( and income! ).

Now we feel an incredibly free, and have more time than money.

As well as beavering away at online work to create an income to feed us – cooking, living, growing, and staying happy is how we love to spend our time. In fact when we´re happy, and grateful, it makes us really appreciate and value what we´re spending time on each day. We can´t do everything, everyday, and we used to beat ourselves up a bit about that, but we´re now conscious of doing some good stuff every day, so that we feel good about it at the end of the day.

We´ll make a note in this section about all the products, services, ideas and experiences that help us all physically or mentally have more time.

This week´s time & money saving tip – How to make 2 meals out of 1!

NEWS: First, check out the 99p book on creating Food from Plenty through this link ( It’s a limited offer for Dec 2022 ) – it’s all about dovetailing food you have to create more and more meals from the plenty you already have.

This week the fridge constantly looks empty as it has all been about using up and re-inventing new dishes with leftovers! Roasted veggies have been re-invented into easy comforting fry-ups, and leftover tofu curry sauce will be a more tomato style lentil curry tonight ! It´s feeling colder now and I didn´t fancy salad so, see below what I did to make it a fabulous soup base.

Use it up

This week I decided to use up all the salad veg in one go to save me even thinking of how to make something special with it and how to eek it out too. I was worried it might go off before I got round to using it all. So I ad libbed a cold gazpacho / salmorejo ( see the classic recipes here !) with what I had. (half red onion, small garlic clove, half cucumber, a little stale sourdough bread, 2 or 3 deseeded skinned tomatoes, a dash of vinegar and some olive oil to emulsify at the end.)

Divide it out

I made the base of the soup ( blitzed it all with my hand-blender- that´s all !) and then in a separate jug I blitzed 3/4 of a mango and then added the soup base to that until I had enough for two bowls. It was perfect ! And, I had half of the soup base for using later in the week ( I could have frozen it too !)

add a special ingredient

I´d picked up a beautiful green mango too so I thought… hmmm it will be less ripe so have less sugar and that way be better for me. Actually it was perfectly ripe and firm so it didn´t make the soup too liquidy. Later in the week, I spied a nice piece of watermelon on the way home so I added most of that to the next portion of the base. Perfect ! I blitzed the black seeds and all as they´re good for you.

Here they are… two pretty yellow and pink soups. What easy, healthy and filling lunches they made too.