Finding the chase and cutting to it

The temperature dropped this week in the UK, as the wind was coming directly down from the Artic. Today, it was 20°C, but on Thursday at the same time, the temperature outside was 13°C, with over night dropped to 4°C.

That meant we got to see the heat pump properly in action. It worked really well, we were cozy. Without costing the earth. More importantly, our annual carbon footprint is currently 0.3tonnes of CO₂ per annum and that’s including me using the electric car for commuting.

Yawn, this, again?!

Rude! The main topic today is food. Today, it being the weekend, I cooked some cheese soufflés. They turned out surprisingly well – always a bit risky doing something for the first time.

For me, getting cheese soufflés premade from the supermarket would mean a lot less washing up (7 items, not that I’m counting). But the premade one needs 1.2units of insulin. My home made one doesn’t need that.

Because I made it at home, I used corn flour, so it was glutton free. My one tasted a little bit nicer. I made it with Gruyère, but I’m keen to try it with some English cheeses and maybe some Irish. That will reduce the food miles dramatically. Cooking it in our combo microwave meant it used as little power as possible.

Economising, eh?

Not really. I mean, my shopping this week came in £50 less and I bought alcohol for us both.

But it is more than that. The food works better for my insulin.

Cooking at home, my insulin requirements have dropped considerably.

Traditional northern European food is brilliant, lovely blood sugar curves, without scary peaks and troughs. For lunch, I did meatballs, with boiled new potatoes, broccoli, baby corn, and green beans. A touch of bisto gravy and redcurrent jelly. Delicious: I needed less than 2units of insulin!

Much of the southern European and American cuisine features huge amounts of processed flour. Often with huge amounts of oil. I appreciate that studies show that olive oil is good for you, but it’s nearly twice as calorific as sesame oil! Huge amounts of fat, with sweet sauces and vegetables. Little fibre. I don’t see how that’s beneficial long term for desk jockeys.

Many professional chefs, as my fella says, distain having skins on tomatoes – which is a key source of nutrition and fibre.

This week’s plan is as follows:

• Sunday – I am doing a smallish chicken for lunch with veg. In the combo microwave to reduce the energy required. We’re sharing white chocolate cookies for afternoon tea. Then toast and eggs or cheese or baked beans. I should get a portion of chicken stock out too.
• Monday evening – carrot and ginger soup with dough balls.
• Tuesday evening – vegetarian risotto.
• Wednesday evening – spaghetti bolognese.
• Thursday evening – remainder of the soup, with fresh wholemeal bread or a baguette.
• Friday evening – quorn chilli with brown rice.

It’s then my husband’s turn to cook for the week. If my son wasn’t coming round tomorrow, the roast chicken would have been portioned (£3.15! from Waitrose for a 1.59kg chicken) to do a coq au vin on Sunday with rice, and a chicken risotto on Tuesday.

As a back stop, there’s the makings of pasta carbonara. Or onion soup with some of the grated Gruyère that I haven’t yet used.

Easy!

If you have been following my blog for a while, you’ll be familiar with my love of automation.

It is not necessarily a passion my immediate family shares, but working with them, we have a situation we can all see the benefit of and all have equal control. (If you are in such a position, that really helps).

I cannot get Alexa or Google home to work with my voice, but in the evening, the TV and lounge lights all come on with my press on my home screen or my husband’s, so we are enjoying living in the 21st Century.

While casually noticing my favourite brand has ceased to be replaced by “Tapo”, I noticed some GU10 bulbs…

Oh no, I feel for your family, where are you going with this?

Eh! Actually, my beloved helped me swapped the four LED GU10s in the bathroom for the “smart” Tapo L610s. We did them one at a time to get them paired with the network and updated and correctly labelled but I now have four bulbs which will always switch on with the light switch (or off with the fan) but can be individually dimmed or switched off through my phone – if I have a bath late afternoon, I can have the lights come on automatically as the sunsets…

Yawn, so what?

Like many households in the UK, ours was built with the light switch automatically turning on both the lights and an extractor fan in our bathroom.

Which is great, unless, like me, you do bathing marathons. In the daylight. Or at dusk. Four lots of 4.5W of bulb sitting there shining when you don’t need them is a bit heartbreaking. These Tapo bulbs are 2.2W each.

I can now turn the lighting down or off while the light from the window pours in and the fan will keep turning as long as I need it.

I can dim when my head hurts after a hypo or a hyper.

I have the power to have it as I want. What’s not to love?

This week has been the first with the fully operational butcher’s block and much cooking has been done. From a tasty carrot and corriander soup, enjoyed on Tuesday evening after work and for lunch on Wednesday, to chocolate cookies.

It has fulfilled its promise. Indeed, it’s almost too easy to cook from scratch.

Since we have someone in the house who will have some free time, there’s a great deal we can do between us.

A whole chicken, circa 1.5kg is £4.50 in the UK in September 2024. A pair of chicken breasts, 380g is £4.40 – and if we portion the chicken we get the legs for use too, and the fillets and the bones for stock.

Since lockdown, I’ve been making bread. Yet to venture into sour dough, but my insulin works so much better with my home made bread, it is well worth the washing up. The french bread I make is dreamy.

Not every meal needs to be a feast…

I watch cooking shows – but listening to the professional chefs is not the way to have good nutrition and keep your waist line in check!

Last night, I microwaved a chicken breast for the both of us for tea – it was a late tea and that was a way to keep the time down. I served it with a home made ratatouille made earlier in the week. A lovely home cooked snack that cooked in less than 7 minutes. Cheap on the power too.

Our roast today will do three meals. I have a stock ready for a small chicken pie for too, some rice for a special egg fried rice, and probably some curry. Team with a home made soup (probably carrot and corriander) or some baked potatoes for the last couple of meals in the week and that’s food for the week for two people.

The original chicked served 3 people for a hearty Sunday roast. 1 meal for three, 3 meals for 2.

It’s harder work than bung-em-in-the-ovens. But it is all tasty. No ultra processed foods here, either.

Frustrating. Given the layout of my kitchen, I have bought a butcher’s block to allow me to have my food mixer out all the time and have all the attachments at hand.

I have stayed my hand a little since buying it 8 weeks ago. Why struggle, when nivana is close at hand.

But when it turned up yesterday, the top needed oiling, once every 8 hours or so. I am sitting looking at my loaded butcher’s, waiting for that final coat to dry.

Boring!

Patience is a virtue. That goes for you, as well as me.

I’ll take you through the prepping stage – moving everything for the processor over to the cupboard and drawer. Now it’s here, I can also put my pasty board on it and the scales.

All the attachments are to hand. Even the spatulas and rolling pin. And no need to lift the mixer in and out of it’s current home.

Meanwhile, my main worktop remains clear.

Longer term, that worktop disappears. It’s going to be my fridge. That means the empty cupboard also disappears.

But we can wait. We have wiggle room and options.

I know fixed islands work brilliantly for many people. But I want options, flexibility and ease.

In a few hours I get to see if I have acheived that.

Patience is…

Delayed gratification is all well and good, but it hard when you’ve waited 8 weeks for a butcher’s block to turn up and then have to oil it before use to avoid staining. It will be tomorrow morning at the earliest.

Thank goodness it’s a 3 day weekend (note to self – do not work on Monday!). I should be able to scratch my cooking bug but in the meantime, we’re ordering in a pizza.

As a child, I hated pizza – even now I go a long way to avoid cooked cheese on things – because I always felt so crap afterwards.

For type 1 diabetics, food with low glycaemic indexes are incrediably hard work – what I know now is that I should have given half the insulin for the meal when I ate and the rest an hour later for a pizza.

Of course, not knowing that, even having the smallest piece possible just meant pain, nausea, and fatigue – high blood sugar to you. It’s hard to see that as a treat.

So when I left home, pizza wasn’t something I had. Indeed without my husband and my insulin pump in 2001, I might still feel that way.

My favourite is a pollo ad astra romano – it’s a thin base, by far the easiest to deal with. Even with the pump 😉

Having got a decent bonus and no mortgage to shift, we have been buying furniture. We are living the good life!

It’s also been BBQ season, with trips to see friends and have little company ourselves. Of course, when it is going so well, a little rain must fall and after 16 years with his present employer, my husband is in a consultation period which will result in his job being ceased next month.

The joy is, having just about caught my husband up, we’re going to be OK. Many families survive on a lot less than I take home a month. We have no big outlays each month and, because my beloved was a professional, he is getting nearly a year’s pay as a package.

It still feels a little scary.

We’ve got our living expenses, including the council tax (our state or local tax in the UK), food, heating and lighting, down to less than half my take home. That’s without budgeting down. We live comfortably off that money. The heat pump has been our only big expense and I got that on an interest free deal. We have no loans otherwise. So the year’s pay is not having to go anywhere but ensure he can last until his pension is drawn.

My beloved is talking about taking on the house work, as he’ll have more time. I’m hoping he can find something, so we can keep it evenly shared. Everybody does things their own way and it’s good to keep that interest in the house.

We’re fortunate to be in this position. While he’s hunting for a job, he will be eligible for Job Seeker’s Allowence – open to anyone who has a good national insurance record. It’s not a fortune, but means you have cash coming in (and a full NI record) for six months – you can eat well off that money and have enough to travel to interviews etc. Unlike universal credit, it’s not means tested.

You cannot be frivilous, but there’s no need to turn the heating off or starve with Job Seeker’s Allowence.

Hopefully, my work place won’t need to cost save “my role down”, too. Then it would be significantly more interesting.

The reaction to our heat pump has been interesting.

Many questions have been about how much more it is costing us? It’s not, actually, we’re saving about £3 a day on heating our water compared to the gas boiled at today’s prices.

It’s summer, and for the past eight days, for 7kWh of energy we’ve bought we have had 37.5kWh of “heat energy” out. That means the pump is currently 537% efficient.

It’s not going to be that great over the winter, but should still return more than 300% efficiency compared to the best gas boiler, which returns 80% efficiency – for every 1kWh most people get 0.8kWh of heat. Electricity is more expensive than gas, at that rate, and the fact we have solar power means we’re not paying for the electricity… Hard to make your own natural gas.

How’s having cold water? Actually, the water is pretty hot and plentiful – the bath has a mixer and I have HAD to turn it down so I don’t need to add cold water at the end of the run! With larger pipes, the water pressure is better too.

Is it noisy? No, it’s silent, significantly quieter than the gas boiler. What is really lovely, the exhaust at the moment is really chilled. It’s lovely.

So far, so good. We’re happy bunnies.

And I am not talking about slaying a Scottish King to seize the throne!

We have had our heat pump going for three days! So, everyone should be thanking us for the more than clement weather we’ve been having.

Little note to the manufacturer: in normal operation, it is perfectly reasonable to prevent the heating circuits to be activated if the external temperature is above 20°C. There should be an over-ride while testing if the installation has been successful, however .

So you don’t know if it’s working?!

We have hot water being produced. Currently, feeding in 4.8kWh of electrical power is giving us 19.2kWh of heat to our hot water. Which means piping hot water for all our uses. A hot tank stores this for when we need it.

How do I know this? Well, the heat pump manufacture (Viessmann) have an app and you can see what’s happening:

We are not in Kansas any more, Toto! The hot water tank has a temperature gauge on it (seriously)… we set the temp to 50°C but we still have a solar diverter, so during midday, this free energy is heating our water to a little above that (I know I’m up late – I passed at least one kidney stone last night)…

The sharp witted amongst you will notice that while the heat pump is heating to 50°C, the gauge is reading 60°C. Over the summer and sunny winter days, we use a solar diverter to heat an immersion heater and that goes above 50°C. As a type 1 diabetic, that should allow me to keep safe as well as scheduling a “hygiene session” once a week.

Looks like you’ve got what you need?

Well, we have been in training for this for the past couple of years with our Tado system. We never let the house get cold, and running with cooler water is efficient even with gas doing that, we only warm the rooms we need, when we need them using a timer.

Given the SPF (Seasonal performance Factor) for our system is good up to -5°C, we should be well catered for. We’re in the south of England, in a suburban area, so it will only be a few moments a year we go below that.

Of course, I will give you an update in January during the dead of winter. But at the moment, it all looks promising.

Here are the photos from the install:

We spotted our house in January 2013 on an estate agents web site. My husband was away, so I took our son over to have a look – he was anti-moving, but I was shattered with the commute and where we were based – anything we did needed the car or motorbike or a long time to cycle.

We looked at three houses before hand, always with an open mind, but having had a double garage (motorbikes, remember!) and people coming round, a private driveway was an essential.

I love our place – I’m realising a dream of being gas-free in a couple of weeks – but like anywhere, it has its quirks. Be warned, these are definitely “boomer” and “first world” problems.

My kitchen took a long time to get into its current format, making the most of its L shape. It has 34m², which is nice, but the way it is laid out means there is only one way you can put anything and have a workable space. (First world issues, I know).

I’m beating this, a little, I hope by buying a butcher’s block. This is a trolley (in this case) with cupboards and drawers that will allow my Kenwood Chef mixer+ to come out of the double cupboard it is currently consuming. This has several pluses, not least the fact I can use it without taking up more counter space. All the bits and pieces will be in the cupboards and drawers, making life much easier and cooking much less involved.

I hope. I have been specifying it on paper for eight months, so this is no rushed decision. I hope I’m right about the cost benefit analysis!

It should also allow a space for the Kenwood after we get the kitchen re-fitted. I have been pondering this for the past eight years (big purchases need to be correctly made and this will make a huge impact for all our lives, twelve times as long as a butcher’s block sounds appropriate, don’t you think?).

The overall plan is to lose four cupboards – one of which is the Kenwood’s home – and 1900mm of worktop, mostly where I use the mixer. Hopefully, the trolley will tide us over for both kitchen’s and the transitional stage. This will allow us to fit our current fridge into the main kitchen rather than sitting in the dining room area: on the plus side, anyone cooking learns to plan or gains a significant number of steps while cooking – it’s not so much a cook’s triangle as a 20′ dash to the fridge.

Of course, this all comes at a cost. Therefore, not happening any time soon. My butcher’s block will be a stepping stone between the old and the new. Helping solidify what we actually need.

When you DIY a project, preparation is key. If someone is coming in for you, making sure the decks are clear saves valuable time.

The heat pump is coming and the old boiler and water tank are disappearing. With luck, the old gas pipe too. How do we know which is the gas feed? Well, whoever installed the old gas pipe stuck the word “gas” at 9″ spaces along its length. Thank you 🙂 .

The new fitters are stopping the gas feed, so the space for the old pipe can be reused – the air to water heat exchanger uses water fed into the hot water tank. Magic.

Now, we are not saints. So, there is some prep we need to do for the install.

Making use of these two weeks leave, we buffered two days before leaving the house for a week for sorting out the house work as there is nothing worse than coming back to a dirty house! The couple of days we tagged at the end have been used to clear out the garage in prep for the heat pump gubbins…

It’s ended up being a little bit of a “holding pattern” area. Some of it was for the dump, some for charity shops. I was frightened it would take forever, but two people, three hours, and we have it all sorted. We have a space booked at the dump – annoyingly, I didn’t know we had some plaster board left, so that cannot go on Sunday – but the rest is good to go in the electric car: it’s bad enough we’re throwing stuff away, without compounding it with taking the ICE cars…

My beloved is just taking the “good to be reused” to our local charity shop, Sue Ryder’s. If you are not based in the UK, they do a great deal for people needing pallative care, details are here. They are a local charity, founded in the 1950s by a Suffolk woman looking to help those injured during World War II, which is one of the reasons I try to help them.

We’ve also tried to tidy for the crew. At least make the area safe. We’ve got next weekend to finish off the job, but all in all, glad I did this while on leave. A change is as good as a rest.