I've made an interesting discovery. When I was first married, one of the cookery writers whose books I liked reading was Shirley Goode. She was very popular for a few years and often appeared on TV on "let's cut the budget" type programmes. How-much-food-can-you-prepare-with-£5 type of thing. She seemed to drop out of sight after that. I've googled for her every so often to no avail. Last week, I thought of her again, after using a recipe from one of her books - and there was her blog. I was thrilled! She seems as down to earth as ever. She started writing her blog in September 2006, so needless to say, I've read it all now.

www.shirleygoode.com

Her books are among the most used on my shelf of cookery books. The best used one is "More for Your Money" which is nearly falling apart but I can't seem to find a secondhand copy to replace it. There are very few of them around - which probably means that other people have used theirs until they've fallen apart too.

I've also been reading www.moneysavingexpert.com forum threads too. In the moneysaving Old Style threads, there are treasures to be found in economical recipes/menus. I find that reading things like this reminds me of dishes that we haven't had for a while. I haven't found a brand new recipe idea for a while because I've had a lot of years of practice at that. But I like to be reminded of recipes because I forget. I've had lots of practice at that too! I find that we eat lots of a particular style of dish over a season and then it just doesn't seem to appear on the menu for a while. Perhaps because the main ingredient just hasn't been on special offer or maybe one of us says that we are tired of that and we just don't cook it for a bit. Whatever the reason it is encouraging to read what others are doing to eat well but economically. Food is one area where it is relatively easy to economise - and the more pennies that stay in the coffers, the sooner that smallholding will become a reality rather than a dream.