Feather your Nest Friday, Jan 23 2015.

My hopes and aims were that this week would be good and we would do some getting back to normal and catching up!

And we did!

I had more free fruit. The first peaches were yellow ones and smaller. These are much larger white peaches.  Wendy suggested I made jam with some which I did. She said to me that peach jam tastes like summer. That sold me! It turned out a beautiful colour too. I used the yellow peaches as I had some that were fading fast and this used them up.

My aunt gave me beautiful plums. They are the most glorious colour! You could have them in your kitchen as decor they look so nice. There have been so many comments on various photos I have taken in my aunts garden. The series of lovely fruit on all her trees. I think we all love seeing fruit and dreaming what we could do with all this produce! Her recently released book is partly about her garden. It is called "A fig at the gate" (By Kate Llewellyn) and she literally does have a fig at the gate...

I made plum cobbler using the recipe I mentioned Monday on the post about using up what comes your way. You simply grease a pie dish and spread your cut up fresh fruit over the dish. Then you make up a batter that you pour over. Bake until risen and golden, about one hour on a medium oven.
Sever with cream or ice cream.
These can be frozen to use later in the year when there is no fruit.  I took a photo as I filled the dish as the colour was so lovely.

I also made plums into my trusty Use it up fruit cake. I called it "Ruby Cake". It looked and tasted so lovely. The fruit looked a deep ruby colour, very pretty.
I have kind of let the secret out that I make all these things and call them fancy names and they are all really the same. (I linked to these recipes in Mondays post, they are super easy recipes designed to use up what you have)

A  cake like this would make a lovely gift. For a birthday present or just a gift of kindness, a cake is a beautiful thing to give someone. From now on I will call the plum version Ruby Cake.

So from free peaches and plums I ended up with so many things including gifts to give. I made plum jam also which turned out the most pretty colour.

Working my way through all this fruit I felt very blessed by great abundance.

Andy walks in saying "what smells so good?!" which is nice I think and he comes snooping to see.

My next frugal thing was a great find. Two doors away there are a block of units. People seem to move out and leave half their things on the side of the road. Many times I think the tv's etc are better than ours and consider a swap. I'm not kidding either! Recently I was thinking my washing machine is getting on and worrying about it a bit. So the other day what appeared to be a brand new washing machine was put out next to the rubbish with a stack of appliances.  I went and looked. It had the new stickers on it and appeared new. Why would anyone throw out a brand new washing machine? On closer inspection it all seemed good. And fancy. I googled it and it was over $850! It has a function for everything. Much fanccier than anything I have ever had.

Soooo... I convince Andy (who says it mustn't work. No one would dump a brand new washing machine) to collect it and test it. He hauls it home, connects it up and says "away you go."  He was skeptical! I googled the manual and pressed the right buttons and away it went. Andy stood there waiting for it to explode or something. It ran it's cycle and we concluded there is nothing wrong with it. Maybe someone bought it PLANNING to wash something and never did?

So here it is. I now have such a fancy spare washing machine that I wish my current one would hurry up and croak. And when it does I will save myself hundreds or to be precise $850!

Next, my daughter is having a clean our/decluter and offers me a heap of skin care that she has mostly been given as gifts and things arent't right for her skin... would I like any of these things? There was plenty that I would love and suit my skin! So I had a little haul of all brand new things that would amount to a few hundred dollars worth of skin care.

During the week I did all the things I always do... line dry the clothes and linen, water the garden with household water, cook all our meals and send all the work lunches and coffee etc.
With the fruit coming in I added fruit to the freezer, jam to the pantry and was able to share it as well.

It was a really good week and it went too fast!

What did you do to feather your nest or save money this week? I hope it was a great week and you have a lovely weekend. Mel said to me that Feather your Nest Fridays help her as she goes along and thinks how she can add this or that to her list! Well, it helps me too and hearing what you have been doing is wonderful to me! xxx