Becca Jane St Clair

One of my favourite foods has always been Lasagne, but our family recipe uses three types of cheese, meat, and of course, white noodles. I’ve re-created the dish using foods that are a little more waist-friendly.

You Will Need:

Packet of wholewheat lasagne noodles
500g pack of Quorn mince (or other vegetarian mince or turkey mince)
300-500g cottage cheese (can use more or less, depending on size of dish and how cheesy you want it)
1 carton tomato passata (sauce.)
Herbs – basil, oregano, thyme
Cinnamon
Pepper
Parmesean cheese (optional)
Weight Watcher’s grated cheese (optional)

1 – preheat oven to 200C
2 – cook noodles according to package (optional if you are using the “no cook” style of noodle, but I like to pre-cook those too*). Before I cooked the noodles, I layered them out in the bottom of my dish to figure out how many I would need.
3 – Place Quorn in a microwave safe container and cook for 5 minutes or until no longer frozen. Add passata,herbs (to taste – about a tablespoon of each), cinnamon (just a sprinkle), and pepper (a few turns of a grinder) and combine well. Microwave for a further 5 minutes (you can cook this on the stove too). Adjust your herb and spice level to your individual taste. For a spicier lasagne, you might consider adding chilli powder or red pepper flakes.
4 – Spray your lasagne dish with cooking spray and arrange a layer of noodles. Top noodles with spoonfuls of Quorn, and in between spoonfuls of Quorn add spoonfuls of cottage cheese. Lightly sprinkle the entire layer with parmesean and add another layer of noodles. This time, try to put the cottage cheese where you had the Quorn in the previous layer and the Quorn where you had the cottage cheese. Add another layer of noodles (or make some whole wheat penne if you’ve run out of noodles like I did!) and cover the noodles with alternating spoonfuls of sauce and cottage cheese. If there is any noodle still showing, you can toss on some WW grated cheese. If you leave any of the noodle uncovered, they will get crispy.
5 – bake for 25-30 minutes until bubbly. The cheese should be melted and the no cook noodles should be soft.

Serve with a side salad and veg. This makes enough to feed 4-6 people, or just two people with plenty to freeze for another 2 meals! The nice thing about this recipe is you can adjust the measurements to fit your crowd and sized container. If I was having more people over, I would have used my large 9×13″ pan for this, but since it was just for Tim and I, I used a smaller casserole dish that is only about 4×10″. Since I used a smaller dish, I had some of the “meat” mixture leftover and I just froze it to have over pasta at some point in the future. I’m allergic to onions and garlic, so none of my recipes contain either, but as this is an Italian recipe, it probably wouldn’t hurt it if you added some of either or both!

This meal is appropriate for ovo-lacto vegetarians as well as diabetics and those on a low-carb or low GI diet, though please make sure to check the individual nutritional information on the ingredients you purchase first if you have specific dietary needs. The specific products I used not previously mentioned:

Tesco Organic Wholewheat Lasagne sheets** (Not available on website)
Tesco Light Choices Natural Cottage Cheese
Tesco Organic Passata*** (not available on website. This comes in a glass jar and I used half the jar)
Napolina Grated Parmesean (not available on website)

*I dislike the no-cook noodles because I feel they are very chewy, even when pre-cooked, but sometimes it’s the only option available! You also could substitute in any wholegrain pasta and make this into a pasta bake.
**100g contains 63.2g of carbs, of which sugars 2.1. So a bit on the high side for carbs, however, one noodle weighs in at 20g and a single serving would only contain 1 – 1 1/2 noodles.
**There will be sugar in this, however it is all naturally occurring sugar from the tomatoes.

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, Networked Blogs, the RSS feed(s), or through an e-mail subscription, please notify me.

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[This is a re-post of an entry written for LJ Idol week 15 – preoccupied.]

My husband says I have butterflies in my head. It’s not meant as an insult, it’s said with fondness in his voice and is a reference to my ability, or rather, my lack of an ability to pay attention.

It’s not ADD or ADHD, and in fact I always did well in school and paid attention to most of my classes as I was generally interested in most of them. It’s more that I seem to have too many interesting things to look at, read, listen to, and do.

I’m a housewife, but my house is usually an organized mess of chaos. Tim and I know where things are…for the most part. Every once in a while I’ll get this grand idea to organize something and I’ll start on it and feel the excitement blooming as I come up with a plan….and then I’ll spy a cookbook I haven’t looked through yet, or I’ll decide to check my email. Email leads to Facebook, Livejournal, Twitter, Google Reader, Pinterest, and Sink into Your Eyes. If the story is good on SIYE, there’s an entire afternoon GONE.

And let’s not forget my Kindle. Last week, one of my favoured chick-lit authors released her latest spy/suspense novel and I immediately downloaded it and spent most of the afternoon reading it. I’m also in the process of re-reading the entire Pratchett library, and sometimes I’ll stop just until the kettle boils to read a bit and wind up spending hours and retuning to a cold kettle!

My brain doesn’t stop. I used to use some Guster lyrics on the front page of my LJ years ago and I never knew how perfect they fit me until recently — I’m the center of attention in the walls inside my head / and no one will ever know it if I keep my mouth shut tight — Boy, does that ring true. Even while I’m doing the washing up, my brain is thinking, thinking, thinking. Dreaming up ideas for stories (that never get written), imagining what I would do if I had a bigger kitchen, planning out the redecoration of the upstairs, dreaming about having children, creating new designs for felt crafts….anything and everything goes on in my head.

You know what the say about the best laid plans and all, right? Every week, on Monday morning (sometimes afternoon) I say to myself “this week will be different”. I tell myself that I will get on top of the laundry, including putting it away, I will keep the kitchen clean and do the dishes daily, I will tackle the big pile of mending that’s been waiting for “a few spare minutes”, and I might even get a head start on preparing the spare room for my guests, the first of which arrives in April.

Each week I fail. I spend so much time thinking about what I planned on doing with my week, that I wind up not doing any of it.

So here I sit, Monday afternoon. It’s a new week. What am I going to do with it?

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, Networked Blogs, the RSS feed(s), or through an e-mail subscription, please notify me.

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[this is a re-post of an entry previously posted to my LJ for LJ Idol Week 14’s prompt was “twitterpaited”.]

I’ve always disliked dogs. Dislike feels like it’s too weak of a word, but hate is too strong, so let’s say I strongly disliked dogs. Maybe a large dog tried to jump on me when I was little, maybe a dog bit me, maybe it was just their loud bark or being growled at, but I have never liked dogs and have always been scared of large dogs.

Until the day I met my in-laws dog, Ebony. Ebby was a large, black Alsatian who weighed more than me and was taller than me if she was up on her hind legs and by all means I should have been afraid of her…but she was soft as butter. I was nervous the day Tim took me over to meet his parents and their dog because I knew I didn’t like dogs, and I was worried that this would come out, or that Ebby would somehow be able to sense my fear and do something. Ebby was a beauty. She softly nudged my hand with her nose and wanted me to pet her between her ears, and then she laid down on the floor next to the chair I was sitting in as if to say “right, you’ll do”.

I spent many afternoons walking Ebby with my mother-in-law. Sometimes with Tim or my sister-in-law, but often it was just the two of us walking around the farmer’s fields in the village with Ebby. My mother-in-law didn’t use a lead with Ebby, as Ebby would always respond to commands and never acted up. She even permitted the school children who called her a “wolf” to fuss her and would always sniff the dogs we walked past, but rarely barked at them, even if they barked at her first!

A few months after I moved, my in-laws went away on a holiday and didn’t take the dog with them. My sister-in-law was staying behind, but she would be at work during the day and they didn’t want to leave Ebby alone all day, so I was asked if I could take care of her. I would need to go over to their house mid-morning to let Ebby out, bring her back to our house, take her on her afternoon walk, and then bring her back home. I was nervous. What if the dog didn’t respond to my commands? What if she ran away from me? What if she snapped at another dog, a child, or me?

I didn’t have to worry. Ebby and I walked down to the end of our street and all I had to say to her was “wait” and she stopped before going into the street. I told her “sit”, and her bottom went to the ground. “Go on, girl” was her signal that it was okay to cross the street, and “are you a thirsty dog?” gave her permission to jump into the beck (US: stream) and have a drink and a swim if the water was deep enough. We would go around the fields and the village church and Ebby was always by my side as soon as I called her to me. She followed me around he house all day, trying to squeeze herself into the small rooms until it was time for her afternoon walk, and her return home. Once we got home, she would flop herself onto the living room rug and be content until my sister-in-law came home to feed her dinner.

Many days my mother-in-law’s visit would be announced by Ebby nudging the front door open if it was ajar. I would turn around from washing my dishes and there she was a full five minutes ahead of my mother-in-law because all you had to say to her was “go to Tim’s” and she would start walking over to our house.

I fell in love with the big black dog and would often offer to take Ebby on her walks to give my mother-in-law a break. Evenings spent with my in-laws always included the dog. She would walk around from person-to-person getting petted and fussed over before settling herself in a corner.

Sadly, Ebby is no longer with us. A few months ago the vet found lumps in her leg that turned out to be cancerous and Ebby was put down a few days after Christmas. We were all saddened by the news and I sobbed into Tim because we had just seen Ebby two days before at the family Christmas celebration and we all thought she was okay.

My in-laws have a new dog. She also is a German Shepherd, but her colouring is different and her manner is different to that of Ebby. Bonny (the new dog) is two-years-old and hasn’t had much training from her old owners, so she sometimes scares me when she tries to jump at me or bark, but I am willing to try to get to know Bonny for Ebby’s sake. If I could fall in love with Ebby, surely I can give Bonny a chance.

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, Networked Blogs, the RSS feed(s), or through an e-mail subscription, please notify me.

[LJ readers reading this on the LJ RSS feed: Please click on the link at the top of the entry to go directly to my blog to leave a comment, as comments left on the LJ RSS do not get seen by me. Facebook users reading this from my Networked Blogs link can either comment on facebook or on my blog. If you are reading this through an e-mail subscription, you might need to go directly to my blog to view videos and images.]

I posted a teaser pic on facebook a week ago, and have since been asked for the recipe, so here we go…

I first discovered the idea on one of the food blogs I regularly read. It was either Serious Eats or The Kitchn and was called “Italian wedding soup”. I’ve previously also seen recipes for “meatball soup”. As my recipe wound up being completely different from either recipe previously posted, I decided to call mine Italian Meatball Soup.

You will need:
-a pack of ground turkey (usually sold as 500g or sometimes 630g)
-3 teaspoons fresh or dried thyme
-1 egg
-50g breadcrumbs
-50g parmesean cheese

-2 TBS olive oil
-3 carrots, chopped/diced
-3 stalks of celery, chopped
-1L chicken broth/stock
-200g fresh or frozen peas
-200g fresh or frozen corn
-100g baby spinach
-100g small pasta
-a handful of fresh thyme, or a few TBS dried
-1 TBS dried basil
-juice of half a lemon
-bunch of fresh parsley, chopped

To make meatballs:
-combine turkey mince, egg, thyme, breadcrumbs, and parmesean cheese and form into small meatballs. Flatten the meatballs slightly (they should be about the size of a 50p). Place the meatballs in the bottom of a frying pan or griddle pan and brown meat on both sides. It doesn’t matter if they are cooked through, as they will finish cooking in the soup. This is just to keep them together. You also don’t need to flatten them first, I just found it easier to work with in the pan this way! Another option would be to start with frozen meatballs or even leftover meatballs as that would cut down the amount of time this takes to make.

To make soup:
-heat olive oil in the bottom of your soup pot and add carrots and celery. Cook until vegetables are soft, about 10-15 minutes. (this is an optional step. You can start by bringing chicken broth to a boil and adding both fresh and frozen veg at the same time, but by cooking the carrots and celery first, they get very tender.)
-add chicken broth/stock, thyme, peas, and carrots. Bring to the boil, add basil, then simmer about 10 minutes.
-add meatballs, cook for 10 additional minutes.
-add spinach and small pasta, bringing soup back to the boil and cook just until pasta is tender (the pack of pasta I used said 5-7 minutes). Squeeze in half a lemon (optional).
-test a meatball to make sure it’s cooked through before serving. Sprinkle with parsley just before serving.

Tim loved it, and he’s not a big fan of soup as a main meal, but this soup was hearty enough to satisfy him. It made enough for us to have this as our Dinner plus enough leftovers for Tim to take the following day. I had to add some more chicken broth to the leftovers.

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, Networked Blogs, the RSS feed(s), or through an e-mail subscription, please notify me.

[LJ readers reading this on the LJ RSS feed: Please click on the link at the top of the entry to go directly to my blog to leave a comment, as comments left on the LJ RSS do not get seen by me. Facebook users reading this from my Networked Blogs link can either comment on facebook or on my blog. If you are reading this through an e-mail subscription, you might need to go directly to my blog to view videos and images.]

If this works, you should see the Facebook Album “Profile Pictures”. If this doesn’t work, I have no idea what you’ll see!

From Profile Pictures, posted by Rebecca Jane Lockley on 9/02/2010 (40 items)

Generated by Facebook Photo Fetcher

From a visit to the NRM in July 2011:

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, the RSS feed(s), or through an e-mail subscription, please notify me.

[LJ readers reading this on the LJ RSS feed: Please click on the link at the top of the entry to go directly to my blog to leave a comment, as comments left on the LJ RSS do not get seen by me. Facebook users reading this from my Networked Blogs link can either comment on facebook or on my blog.]

I finally cleared off the video camera this morning and discovered videos taken LAST March. Oh my.

Here’s a vlog I made while we were visiting Edinburgh in November 2011.

As it turns out, I never actually blogged about the trip, either. Probably because I was waiting to edit the vlog! Whoopsie. So, let’s get back in our TARDIS and go to November 2011 when Tim and I travelled (finally!) to Edinburgh for a few days. I booked us into the Travelodge near Haymarket station for £20/night thanks to a room sale and we decided to go for two days over Tim’s autumn break, which also happened to be a few days after our wedding anniversary.

The train ride was long, and we didn’t arrive in Edinburgh until the early evening. After checking into the hotel, we decided to go on a wander to take some photos and wound up near the castle. We trudged back to the hotel and went to bed, for we had lots of plans for the following day!

We got up bright and early and after breakfast headed out to re-trace our steps from the previous night to visit the castle. After we toured all the buildings there, we headed towards the Royal Mile and walked down it as far as the St Giles Cathedral, which just happens to be the church of John Knox, the man who founded Presbyterianism, my family’s religion. I spent loads of time walking around the church and we were given permission to take photos, so I took plenty for my family back in PA.

The light was fading, so we made our way back to the hotel,had some dinner, and went to bed. The following morning we headed back to Haymarket station and the long trip back to Lincoln.

We had a fantastic time, and I look forward to spending more time in Edinburgh!

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, the RSS feed(s), or through an e-mail subscription, please notify me.

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By far, the easiest bread in the world to make. It goes great with soups and stews!

I first made Beer Bread in 2009 out of a box mix that cost over $5.00. We loved the bread, and I knew there had to be an easy way of making this without buying a pre-made mix, so off to the search engines I went. There are loads of recipes out there for beer bread and some of them can get quite involved. This recipe is so simple, anyone can make it. You can even mix the dry ingredients together ahead of time, pop it into a jar and give to a friend with a bottle of beer for an instant gift.

Beer Bread

You Will Need:
375g self-rising flour
3 tbs caster sugar
330ml beer (lagers work best – I used Stella)

1. Pre-heat oven to 180C. Butter the sides and bottom of a loaf tin.
2. Mix together dry ingredients. Slowly add beer (it will foam) and use a wooden spoon to mix until sticky.
3. Pour into loaf tin and bake 50-60 minutes or until the top is crunchy. Cool tin on it’s side on a wire rack for 10-15 minutes before removing bread.

This doesn’t even need any butter, it’s tasty without it!

I might be posting a lot of recipes in the next few days as I seem to have a lot of recipes I haven’t yet posted!

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, the RSS feed(s), or through an e-mail subscription, please notify me.

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I remember saying to Tim back when we were dating that if we weren’t married by the next leap year I would ask him to marry me.

Funny, how things work out.

Happy once-every-four-years day!

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, the RSS feed(s), or through an e-mail subscription, please notify me.

[LJ readers reading this on the LJ RSS feed: Please click on the link at the top of the entry to go directly to my blog to leave a comment, as comments left on the LJ RSS do not get seen by me. Facebook users reading this from my Networked Blogs link can either comment on facebook or on my blog.]

[I got a lot of good feedback on this post both from people reading it through therealljidol and my friends in the garden railway world. I thought it was worth a re-post.]

For Christmas last year, my husband gave his little brother a thin, narrow length of steel (it looked like a ruler), a sheet of brass, a steel cylinder, some rods of assorted length, width, and shape, and a set of plastic couplings (“choppers”). He would have given me the same, but I joined the party a little later on. We gave the same gift to a friend of ours, and my husband had some for himself. We are going to make steam trains for the garden railway*.

Now, I’m a crafty person. I love beading, sewing, and scrapbooking. I used to have a (pink) toolbox and I could fix basic things around the home. I think the most complicated thing I did on my own was fixing the toilet at my mom’s house. But stepping into my husband’s workshop put me in a whole new world.

In 2009, my husband finished renovating the small brick building to the side of our house that had formerly seen life as a washing house and an outdoor loo. I helped him install two long workbenches down either side and hang a wall of shelves in the alcove that once held a toilet. Entering the workshop, your nose was assaulted with smells – the pine of the shelving, the white paint from the walls, the dampness of the building, the metallic smell of butane mixing in with the sharp bite of methylated spirit. A small heater hummed in the corner, and the room was punctuated with bursts of lighting from the three clip-on lights scattered around the room.

The workshop had a narrow aisle between the two work benches, but somehow we managed to fit three people into it. In front of me was the bench that was used for putting things together and Tim had screwed down a large, heavy clamp. The bench behind me held all of the workshop appliances – an angle grinder, a tall drill, and the lathe. Under both benches were shelves holding all sorts of delights – smaller clamps, delicate pliers, oil to grease the machines to keep it going, and various bits and lumps of metal waiting to be made into something.

I was given a set of safety instructions for using the workshop that included the following: Always wear boots and goggles, take off your rings, take off your necklace, and tie your hair back and tuck it into your collar. My eyes grew wide with fear as Tim began to tell me stories he had heard of people getting hair stuck in the turning lathe, or getting a necklace snagged and it strangling them. This was a piece of machinery to be feared. I wasn’t looking forward to using it.

We each have our own plastic box labelled with the name of our eventual loco and where we can keep all our bits and pieces separate. I have named my loco “Orion”, as a dedication to my father. The boxes contained the Christmas present pieces and were just waiting to be cut, drilled, soldered, and bent into shape.

The first thing we had to do was make the base for the engine, called the frames. The frame makes a box that everything will sit on top of or be attached to. Making the frames involved taking the bits of steel that looked like a ruler and sawing them down to size. Then came the painstaking task of filing down the rough edges to make both sides even….but don’t file down too far or you will have to start at the beginning again. It took me a half hour to saw through the metal, and just as long to file the cut side, and I had to do it for four sides. There also are some holes you need to drill in the pieces, as well as filing away a notch, but I hadn’t gotten that far yet before I wound up in the hospital and had surgery on my arm, which left me out of the workshop for a while. My husband and his brother have completed their frames, and moved on to the next part.

My husband and his brother were attempting to cut the wheel blanks one day over the Summer and had agreed to cut everyone’s since it was taking them ages just to saw one. They admitted defeat after two hours and only three wheels to show for it, so Tim rang a friend of his who offered to cut them for us in his workshop.

Of course, having the wheel blanks doesn’t mean we have wheels. They need to be turned on the lathe to be shaped into a train wheel. Unfortunately, our lathe broke while my brother-in-law was working on his own, so we have had to stop production while we search for a new fuse for it.

Even after we have the wheels done, we will all be a long way away from having a finished product. We have to make all the fiddly bits that go into a model steam train. Loads of terms that I don’t understand now, but I’m sure I’ll become familiar with them as we build our engines. Things like a boiler, lubricator, and regulator are all foreign words to me. The only piece of our engines we will be buying pre-made are the pressure gauges. Everything else will be handmade.

We still have a pile of tin, brass, and steel in the workshop, but I’ve got my eye on the end result. Here’s the instructions we will be following just to give you an idea of everything that needs to be done: http://trains.de.jardin.free.fr/minidampf/brazil_uk/contents.html

We all started work on our engines in early 2011. Maybe one of us will get one finished in 2012!

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*Just in case you were wondering, yes, we have a railway in our garden. We model in 16mm to the foot and have models of narrow gauge trains, so our track is 32mm wide. We have small steam trains that usually run off Butane or meths, with a few adventurous souls making tiny coal-fired engines. If you’re interested in finding out more, you can check out the Association of 16mm Narrow Gauge Modellers here: http://www.16mm.org.uk

[This has been an entry for therealljidol Week 12 – Some Assembly Required]

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, the RSS feed(s), or through an e-mail subscription, please notify me.

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[It was so good, there wasn’t any left!]

To make a long story short, I offered to bake my friend Brian a cake and gave it to him when we saw him on Sunday. Brian decided to donate his cake to the group we were with, so everyone got to have a taste and everyone who had some complimented me on it! So, here you go. How to use 500g of butter in one go….

Butterscotch Cake

For the cake:
225g Butter (softened. I used real butter not Stork like I usually do)
125g Muscavado sugar (brown sugar)
100g Caster sugar
225g self-raising flour
4 eggs
2 tsp vanilla

For the syrup:
50g Butter
75g Muscavado sugar (brown)
50g Caster sugar
1 tsp vanillia

For the icing:
200g Caster sugar (or icing sugar if you have it!)
25g Cornflour (cornstarch)
225g Butter cut into cubes
6 Egg yolks
Butterscotch syrup (from above recipe)

1. Pre-heat the oven to 190C and line your cake tins with some parchment paper.
2. You’ll be making the sauce first so it has time to cool. Melt the butter and two sugars together over low heat for 15-20 minutes until sugars are dissolved. If it doesn’t look like syrup, add a tablespoon of butter (I used olive spread) to make it a little runnier. Remove from heat and add vanilla.
3. While that’s cooling, start on the cake. Use a wooden spoon and beat the softened butter. Add the two sugars and continue to use a wooden spoon to mix it together until it becomes fluffy and golden in colour.
4. You can switch to an electric hand beater for the rest. Add in each egg, one at a time, with a Tablespoon of the flour each time and beat thoroughly before adding the next egg.
5. Beat in the vanilla, and add the remaining flour. The mixture should be thick enough to reluctantly drop off a spoon. If it’s too thick, add a tablespoon of milk.
6. Divide between your two pans and bake for 15-20 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool in the pans for 10 minutes, then turn into a wire rack to finish cooling.
7. Time to make the buttercream icing. You will want to clean off your electric beaters for this. Beat together the cornflour, sugar, and eggs until blended and bright yellow in colour.
8. Add butter one cube at a time, mixing constantly.
9. Pour in the butterscotch sauce and mix together.
10. To put the cake together, just sandwich the two layers with a small bit of the icing, and ice as usual.

Yum!!

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, the RSS feed(s), or through an e-mail subscription, please notify me.

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I think I re-did the menu about five times, and have edited the Tesco order at least 10. Good thing I can edit the order until 4AM!

Schedule-wise, Tim’s on the early shift all week until Friday when he rolls into a long weekend off, so I didn’t have to find fast meals to cook. We’re aiming to eat healthier, but I’m not sure how well Tim will cope with a week that has 3 vegetarian meals (four if you count the tacos on Sunday), 3 fish meals, and only one meat-y meal, but…we’ll see. hopefully he’ll tell me if he’s not happy with the meals.

Monday – Quorn Quesadillias with the leftover Quorn taco filling from tonight
Tuesday – Home made/home baked fish and chips with mushy peas and salad
Wednesday – veggie stir-fry
Thursday – Egg fried rice (Wednesday’s leftovers, just add an egg.)
Friday – Grilled salmon, green beans, and pesto packets with a salad
Saturday – Fish pie – This is still my go-to recipe.
Sunday – Hawaiian Chicken in the crock pot, brown rice, salad, broccoli

Tim’s lunches this week will be either Chocolate Cream Cheese spread (his request!) or the rest of the Chicken Tikka sandwich filler from last week (he also takes a banana, an apple, and an actimel).
My lunches will either be a bagel with cream cheese & smoked salmon or a small jacket spud with cottage cheese on top (and grapes, oranges, and an actimel)

Tesco order total for this week: £43, including delivery and a few household items. MUCH better than the previous weeks where we were spending upwards of £50, but this week also doesn’t have much meat in it and several meals are coming straight from the freezer.

Hoping the weather holds out so we can get out with the nordic poles this week!

Off to bed for me. 1:30AM and I have to get up when Tim does at 5 to make his Lunch since I’m too tired to trust myself with a knife right now!

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, the RSS feed(s), or through an e-mail subscription, please notify me.

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This past Christmas, I was sent a copy of the Hairy Biker’s Perfect Pies by my Secret Santa from an Ex-pat group. I’m not a pie person, and as you know, I’m quite loyal to Jamie Oliver, but I paged through the book and marked a bunch of the pies that looked like Tim and I would like them. Last week when I was meal planning, I read out the pies to Tim, and he picked this one. I had planned to serve it with poached eggs, but I forgot to poach the eggs in the end! Oops. As always, my recipe has been slightly modified due to my own dietary restrictions, and based on what I thought would work better.

You will need:
750g Maris Piper potatoes
3 TBS cooking oil
8 sausages (I used Tesco half-fat)
2 x 415g tins of baked beans

1. Pre-heat the oven to 200C. Quarter the potatoes and put in a pan of boiling water. Bring to the boil and simmer for 10 minutes or until soft.
2. Meanwhile, fry the sausages in 1 TBS oil until browned. (or grill them)
3. Put the sausage in the bottom of a shallow casserole dish and cover with beans. Set aside.
4. Drain and roughly cut the potatoes into chunks. Don’t worry about the skins. Some of the skins will fall off after boiling, some won’t.
5 – Fry the potato chunks in the remaining oil for 2-3 minutes. Pour potatoes on top of sausage and beans
6 – Bake at 200C 15-20 minutes until potatoes are crisp on top and the beans are hot.

I think this would have been tasty with a poached egg on top, but Tim thought it was okay on it’s own!

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, the RSS feed(s), or through an e-mail subscription, please notify me.

[LJ readers reading this on the LJ RSS feed: Please click on the link at the top of the entry to go directly to my blog to leave a comment, as comments left on the LJ RSS do not get seen by me. Facebook users reading this from my Networked Blogs link can either comment on facebook or on my blog.]

[picture from Mollie Makes]

In late Spring 2011, I discovered my first issue of Mollie Makes magazine. Unfortunately, it was issue 2, and I never managed to track down issue 1.

Mollie Makes was a new craft magazine and it drew me in because it looked like it was all of my favourite blogs and projects I looked at on US blogs/websites being made in the UK. I was so excited to finally find a magazine I could identify with after being disappointed with scrapbooking/card making magazines on offer here. I tore out the insert and took it into the Spar shop and asked if they could please add the magazine to our order (Tim gets loads of railway and garden railway magazines and I already received Jamie magazine). It took him a few months and a few trips running around Lincoln trying to find copies, but I finally now regularly pick up my issue at the corner shop each month.

Every month, Mollie Makes comes with something attached to the magazine. Usually a kit, but it’s also been ribbon and in January it was a calendar. I always devour the magazine and look at all the amazing projects…and never do them. I wind up putting the magazine in my magazine file “to do later”.

Last night, I pulled out the first issue of Mollie Makes I have. Attached to the front was a cute little felt flower kit – the kit that first drew my attention when I saw the magazine on display in WH Smith. Directions for the flower can be found inside the issue, including the pattern at half-size. In order to make the flower, you need to enlarge the pattern by 200%. Now, this can be tricky for people who don’t know how to us a copy machine, so Mollie Makes kindly puts all their patterns on their website, one pdf file per issue.

I printed the flower pattern out on regular paper, but soon wished I had used vellum or tracing paper as the printer paper was too stiff for pinning to the felt and I wound up with some misshapen petals as a result. The magazine also didn’t give much in the way of sewing instructions, so I had to make things up as I went along. The flower stayed together, so that’s all that matters.

My flower next to the the kit

See? Not bad.

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, the RSS feed(s), or through an e-mail subscription, please notify me.

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We haven’t had any snow all Winter, despite the massive warnings in mid-October that it was going to be a “hard winter” with “snow as early as November”. Granted, it has snowed in other areas of the UK, particularly Scotland, but this weekend was the first time it snowed over pretty much the entire country. When I woke up on Saturday to see the light dusting of snow, I laughed as I thought that was all we were going to get. The hard frost on Saturday morning was thicker than the snow. However, we received more Saturday night into Sunday. As far as I can tell, it started around 8PM or so, it was still snowing when we went to bed, but it had stopped when I woke up around 4AM and looked outside. There wasn’t much by my standards – only about 5cm total in our garden – but it was enough to grind the county to a halt.

As a Northeastern US girl, I’m used to snow. It’s not Winter unless we’ve been dumped on with a foot or more of snow, so it always amuses me how badly most of the UK handles the slightest amount of snow. Busses get cancelled (good thing it was Sunday), local shops are shut, and people can’t seem to understand the idea of shovelling their driveway and clearing the snow off the roof before trying to move their cars. My first Winter here as a visitor, it snowed. It was November 2008 and it was something like the first time parts of the UK had seen snow in over 20 years. I decided to walk down to the Co-op in the next village over, and I was amazed at the state of some of the vehicles on the road. People had barely cleared off their windscreens of snow, let alone the rest of the car. Since then, it has snowed pretty regularly each Winter, with at least one snow “storm”. You would think people would have learned and remembered how to handle it from one year to the next.

If Tim has off work, snow for us is just a reason to get out the snow plow for the garden railway. Fortunately, this was Tim’s scheduled Sunday off. We invited our friends Helen and Mark over to help — well, Mark was outside with Tim, and Helen and I stayed warm inside and chatted over a cup of tea. Our snow plow seems to be allergic to the camera though, because every time I aimed a camera at it, it decided to derail, but I still managed to pull off one nice image:

It took Tim 4 tanks of gas to get the lower circuit done (one tank is good for a 20-30 minute run). Our upper circuit goes into a cutting about 4 inches deep, and the cutting was completely full of snow so we decided to only open the lower circuit. We might have gotten the plow around, but it would have made the cutting unstable and probably would have caused an “avalanche” (at 16mm to the foot that’s what it would have looked like). Plus, the upper circuit has two level crossings across our front walkway, and most of that snow had been compacted down by our boots so it would have been a struggle to move!

Mark used an end of train marker from Austria as a temporary stop sign to indicate that the line off to the left (what line?) was currently closed.

The platform at Horncastle. We actually have 5 tracks here, but only cleared the one for use.

Running the first train completely around the service.

While stating “England doesn’t get snow” might have been an accurate statement 5, 10 years ago, I think these photos prove that is no longer true*!

[This post has been cross-posted to my LJ as my entry for this week’s The Real LJ Idol topic: Current Events.]

*Not something I say, but something a friend said she was told by a friend.

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, the RSS feed(s), or through an e-mail subscription, please notify me.

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The Week 11 Topic for LJ Idol was an open topic, and I chose to go back and pick one of my unfinished entries for a different topic, Sticks and Stones, that I decided against using. I am really pleased with this post, and even though I was stuck in “Tribe Redemption” from the week before, I still scored pretty high on this entry. Remember, if you want to read other people’s entries or vote on the current week, you can go to the LiveJournal Community .

I was an imaginative child. I would make up worlds inside my head, sometimes writing them down on paper, other times just playing in the world inside my head. Each Summer I would go and spend a week visiting my aunt and uncle at their home in Central Pennsylvania. I loved being a “big girl” and not needing my parents for a week.

My Uncle bought the house in the mid-70s and “invited” his parents and two sisters to live in it with him – his older unmarried sister, and his youngest sister who would later get married and become my mom. I always loved sleeping in my mom’s old bedroom because I never knew what kind of treasure from her past I might find hidden in a drawer or in the closet.

It was a large Cape Cod style house with two bedrooms on the ground floor and two bedrooms on the top floor with a full bathroom on each floor. The ground floor also had a large living room, dining room, and the kitchen. A basement ran the full length of the house and it had been divided in half – half of the basement was left unfinished and had been my pappy’s workshop, and the other half was a family room.

Along one side of the family room was a long bar with tall stools. My pappy used to mix drinks behind it, and there were still containers of stirring sticks on top of the mini fridge. Under the bar was a long cabinet that used to hold glasses and trays. The cabinet became the storage area for all of the board games my family had collected — some were from my mom’s childhood, others were purchased new as nieces and nephews got older and needed games to play with. Many were purchased for me.

My favourite games were the games that had lots of pieces to them. The banks from the game Piggy Bank, the triangular shaped Triominos, dice, pick -up sticks, tinker toys, etc. One in particular I don’t even know if it had a name or was just blocks to play with, but it was blocks with different coloured rectangles and triangles on them – red, green, yellow, and blue. There were no instructions. While digging through the cabinet I found an old game my aunt simply called “Milkman”, consisting of some milk floats (delivery cars) and bottles of milk. I also loved playing Chinese Checkers almost as much as I loved playing with the marbles it came with and I would spend hours organizing the marbles and colour-coordinating each side of the board.

If I didn’t play in the basement, then I was upstairs in the sewing room pulling out buttons, ribbons, bobbins, and fabric scraps to make art projects with (I am quite embarrassed to say that there are still two of my creations hanging in my mom’s old bedroom 25 years later). Sometimes I also played in what we always called “the back room” – the second bedroom on the ground floor that had a mustard yellow sofa and some of the games we played more frequently. The back room often times became a school room for playing school or a store if I wanted to play store. My aunt was always willing to play with me and would even keep things from year to year so the box I pretended was a cash register was always there. We usually raided some of the game boxes for money.

When I visited, I was always there for a week. My visits would always include at least one day trip to some place local such as the Land of Little Ponies or Hersheypark and a picnic at Kiwanis Lake. I would also help my aunt with her grocery shopping and housework. We didn’t have a clothesline at my parent’s house, so I loved pegging out the clothing and watching it blow in the wind. My aunt also always let me do the dusting and watering of her plants, but there were always some tasks she either didn’t need my help with, or things I couldn’t do.

I would be sent to play on my own. I always had a choice – the sewing room, the back room, or the basement, unless my uncle had a puzzle on display on the ping pong table. If the table was empty, I almost always picked the basement.

The first thing I always did was get out the coloured blocks. Spread out across the full length of the bar, these blocks would become the base of my village. I used the marbles for people, and I made a swimming pool by putting a bunch of seashells in a circle. The deep end was marked off with a piece of ribbon. The piggy banks from the piggy bank game were coralled into a farmyard fenced off with stirring sticks, the milk man trucks were placed around on the “streets”, and I played town.

I would play with my made up village for the entire week. I always hated the last day of my visit when I had to take everything down and put it away, but I knew I could play with it the following year. As I grew up, my village evolved from a village with farms and a community pool, to separate houses with backyard pools, to city scenarios with row houses.

I probably made my last village when I was around 11 or 12, but I know if I went into my aunt’s basement today all of the pieces would still be there waiting for me to create something.

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, the RSS feed(s), or through an e-mail subscription, please notify me.

[LJ readers reading this on the LJ RSS feed: Please click on the link at the top of the entry to go directly to my blog to leave a comment, as comments left on the LJ RSS do not get seen by me. Facebook users reading this from my Networked Blogs link can either comment on facebook or on my blog.]

I created an Excel spreadsheet to track our grocery store spending throughout the year, and my first month is complete. We have spent £173.18 this month on groceries ONLY. I filter out of the total delivery charges (£17.50 for the month), toiletries (nothing, bought everything at Boots or Wilkos), household goods (laundry soap, etc. £15.21 this month), pet supplies (£2.29 this month as all Prudence needed was a box of wet food), alcohol (£0), and misc (like if we pick up a DVD at the grocery store. £0 this month)

I’m debating about adding onto the sheet all times we go shopping for toiletries (boots/wilkos/etc), as I am interested in knowing what we spend on those things. I might still have my receipts from this month, or I can price things out individually and work out the total. It was less than £25, but more than usual because we ran out of everything this month including Tim’s aftershave.

Still, £173 isn’t bad. We’ve always aimed to spend less than £200. And yesterday was the most expensive delivery because we defrosted the freezer and needed to restock it.

Paying for delivery annoys me sometimes, but I can justify it, easily. If Tim isn’t available to drive me to the shop, I’d have to take a bus at £4.80 Return. Delivery fees hover between £3.50 and £4.50, depending on how fast I book it. Petrol would be negligible, since we live fairly close to most of the shops (though I bet Asda would be more in petrol than the delivery fee), but when you think about how much time you spend in the grocery stores…..the delivery fee is well worth it!

Here’s hoping I can do better in February, though. Ideally, I’d rather groceries be down in the £125-150 range for the month, especially since we will have houseguests in April and May that will add extras! (Dear houseguests: No, I am not asking you to buy groceries while you are here! Stop thinking that!!). We also are going on holiday in June, so groceries become a little iffy then, too. Even with camping, we still wind up doing a daily shop and it can add up since you never have a stocked pantry to work with.

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, the RSS feed(s), or through an e-mail subscription, please notify me.

[LJ readers reading this on the LJ RSS feed: Please click on the link at the top of the entry to go directly to my blog to leave a comment, as comments left on the LJ RSS do not get seen by me. Facebook users reading this from my Networked Blogs link can either comment on facebook or on my blog.]

This is MissM:

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Lately, Miss M has been gaining attention all over the internet for this photo (even though she posted it months back). And every time I read some of the comments, I can’t help but jump in and talk about Miss M, because she is my friend.

When I call her my friend, I mean it. She is my friend. She is not an “internet friend” (though we did meet via a community on LiveJournal years ago!). Miss M and I have met-up on several occasions. I have been to her house, I have met her fiancé, and I have fussed at her kitties. My husband, mother, and one of my cousins have also met her. We call each other on the phone (thank you Skype!), we text (when it’s working), and we keep in touch via email, facebook, and twitter when we’re not commenting on each other’s blogs. I helped her start up PhoenixFunds, and I continue to support her and search for help for her. Therefore, when I comment and say “Miss M is a friend of mine”, I really do mean friend. And yes, I know what the M stands for. No, I’m not going to tell you. While Miss M appreciates all the support she is given, she does not want her full legal name out there on the internet, and I respect that.

As a long-time friend of Miss M, I know what she’s been through. She’s not kidding when she said she tried all other avenues for assistance.

But here’s the sucky part for her. It’s not over. Sure, she had her surgery in October, but the thing with major surgery is it takes ages to get over. Heck, I only had minor surgery on my armpit and it knocked me down for months afterwards. Miss M had major surgery and is looking at at least a year to a full recovery. On top of the months she already was ill. So by the time next October rolls around, she will have been out of work for a year and a half. And while she’s in recovery, she needs to see her doctors. Her insurance costs $250/month. This is on top of having to pay for the part of her surgery that wasn’t covered by the insurance. She owes around $10,000 for the surgery, and for her ER visit before she was able to gain insurance. She’s in a bit of a catch-22 — if she doesn’t pay $250/mo for her insurance, she has to start paying out of pocket to see the doctors. If she doesn’t pay back on the $10k, it goes into collections and puts her farther into debt making it impossible to afford the $250, and if she pays out of pocket to see the doctors, that adds even more to the $10k, never mind the fact that the doctor will want some of that money up front. And if she misses a month of paying $250, she goes right back to the beginning in terms of her deductible, which means shelling out $1000 up front before it starts to cover things.

And then you hear the “advice” – cut out Starbucks, drive a less expensive car, get rid of satellite TV, get rid of your iPhone, etc etc….but the thing is….Miss M doesn’t have or do any of those. She’s not a Starbucks junkie, her car is an older model (which means it needs to be repaired more frequently, which costs money…see? Catch-22), she doesn’t have satellite TV, and she doesn’t have an iPhone. She has an iPod touch that her fiancé gave to her several years ago because it was given to him at work as a Christmas gift, and he knew she wanted one. Her mobile phone is not snazzy, but she can’t get rid of it because since she drives an older car that is prone to breaking down, she needs to be able to call for help when she needs it (catch-22 again). And honestly? Cutting out a $30 bill isn’t going to magic $10,000.

I also know for a fact that Miss M participates in as many points sites as possible and earns points she can cash in for other things, like meals out, Amazon gift cards, her Disney pass, etc. Nothing that this woman does is done for the hell of it, and if she has any “disposable income”, well, I know it goes towards supplies for her business, food for her cats, or other necessities (you know, clothing, toiletries, food…).

It hurts me when people on other websites that have picked up her photo and story make nasty comments about her. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, because if you’re reading this entry, you are probably a friend and have probably read my other posts about Miss M, but if you’ve googled for more information about her, I hope you’ve stumbled upon this.

Ways to Help
I am NOT asking you to donate money to aid Miss M, but if you’re in the market for some jewellery, please visit her site or Etsy shop. Valentine’s Day is coming, and I can vouch that her pieces are stunning. I myself own a tree of life and snowman earrings, my mom has a custom bracelet, and my mother-in-law received a nestlace (bird’s nest pendant) that Miss M personalized with an un-heard of SEVEN birthstone pearls for her children and children-in-laws. I also have many one of a kind pieces Miss M has gifted to me over the years, including some lovely purple earrings I wear all the time and a red and gold beaded bookmark.

If you do want to donate, you can do so via both PayPal and GoFundMe.

Other links you might find useful:

Her Blog: http://giveneyestosee.com/blog

PhoenixFunds: http://PhoenixFunds.etsy.com

PhoenixFireDesigns on Etsy: http://PhoenixFireDesigns.etsy.com

PhoenixFire Designs: http://www.phoenixfiredesigns.com

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, the RSS feed(s), or through an e-mail subscription, please notify me.

[LJ readers reading this on the LJ RSS feed: Please click on the link at the top of the entry to go directly to my blog to leave a comment, as comments left on the LJ RSS do not get seen by me. Facebook users reading this from my Networked Blogs link can either comment on facebook or on my blog.]

Yesterday was probably the most nerve-wracking and important day in our lives. As if getting married and applying for a Spousal Visa wasn’t bad enough, it only lasts for 2 years (technically, 28 months to give extra time in case you arrived more than a month after your visa was issued). To stay in the UK longer, you currently need to apply for ILR (Indefinite Leave to Remain AKA Permanent Residency). You can apply by post or in-person. The in-person appointment has a heftier fee, but it’s an immediate decision and saves weeks of finger nail biting. We decided on an in-person appointment for peace of mind, and also just in case we decide to go abroad on a long weekend (we’ve toyed with a weekend in Paris, but might put it off so we can save more for a trip to Austria in June).

My appointment was for 11:15 at the Sheffield PEO office and the appointment information states you should arrive 30 minutes before your slot. We decided to take public transportation the whole way starting with a bus at 7:40AM out of the village. Our train was running early and we actually arrived at the PEO office with an hour to spare.

Getting through security was an ordeal. There was a couple behind us complaining that their appointment was in 10 minutes and I couldn’t help but wonder why they hadn’t read the information on the website! To get through security, we had to take the batteries out of our mobile phones to show the inside. We were allowed to put the phones back together, but we had to leave them off the whole time we were in the PEO. Tim made the best blunder of the day by forgetting his dress shoes were work issued and had steel toes! Fortunately, security just waved him through after I said “it’s the shoes”.

We checked in early and were quite surprised to get called up to the desk within 5 minutes. Our case worker, Joe, looked at my application and asked me when I filled it out. I told him I had printed it off the website a few days prior and he said “everyone’s been telling me that, but this is the old form”. He then handed me the new form and asked me to fill it out. There are NO differences between the old form and the new form, save for the fact that the bottom of the new form says “10/2011” and the old form “04/2011”. Apparently, the website hadn’t been updated with the new form and everyone coming in this week has had to re-do their form on arrival. I told the man at reception I had finished the new application, and before we even found seats in the crowded lobby, we were called to the desk again.

This time, Joe went through our entire packet. He asked me where in New York I was from, and I puzzled him by answering “I’m not”. I then explained how I was born in Brooklyn, but my parents moved when I was a baby. Surprisingly, he knew where Princeton was after he didn’t know where Hightstown was. He checked to make sure we had the required documents, transferred it into a plastic document folder, and told us to proceed to the payment counter. We had to wait for about 10 minutes while someone came to the counter, but the money was soon out of our account and the woman at the payment counter said she would “pop (y)our documents over to the case worker” and that he would be with us “shortly”.

Shortly turned into two hours. Two nervous hours. I tried reading, but I couldn’t even tell you what I was reading. I couldn’t even speak to Tim because I knew if I opened my mouth I might start crying from all the stress. I kept worrying that we had missed something, or something was wrong. I kept wondering if I should go back up to Joe to ask him if they needed more documents, because I had two years of bank statements, payslips, etc. with me just in case. Finally, we were called to another window where we faced a stony-faced man named John.

From the look on his face, I was expecting bad news, but he surprised me by telling us we had been approved! He then chatted with Tim about his job for a little, and asked us how we met (in some ways, I wonder if he was checking the information on file from my first application, but I’ll pretend he really was interested). He then told us we could leave and return in a half hour to 45 minutes for the visa to be processed. I really wish they had given us the option of leaving and returning during the two hour wait instead!

We left and walked down the river to a Tesco Extra for a snack and by the time we got back and went through security again, my visa was ready! Happy day! What a relief!

We celebrated by having a late lunch at Meadowhall at our favourite restaurant, Frankie and Benny’s.

As of January 2012*, These are the minimum required documents for ILR (if settling as a spouse**):
-Completed ILR application. The bottom of the application should read “10/2011”.
-Life in the UK pass certificate
-Your passport
-Your spouse’s passport
-Two passport photos of yourself
-One passport photo of your spouse
-Three most recent payslips for your spouse and yourself (if applicable***)
-Three most recent bank statements (jointly held or singly held)
-Six pieces of post spread out over the previous two years illustrating that you and your spouse share an address. Alternately, you may use six addressed to each of you for a total of 12. They should be from at least three different sources****.

Anything else is just extra fodder and they honestly don’t need it unless you need further documents to prove residency, employment, or funds. If you are in doubt, contact an immigration lawyer^.

All hurdles are complete for settlement in the UK. Once you have ILR, as long as you do not leave the country for an extended period of time (I believe it currently is two years), you are permitted to live here.

My plans? Citizenship, once I become eligible. As a spouse and under current rules, I will become eligible on January 22, 2013, after three years of residency.

*Please check the UKBA website for up to date information as requirements can change at any time and use my information as a rough guide.
**ILR applicants that fall under other categories have additional requirements. See website and application for details.
***Include payslips from whoever is employed. If you both have jobs, include payslips for each.
****My documents were council tax bills for both 2010 and 2011, e.on bills from random months in 2010 and 2011, a barclay’s bank statement, and a Santander/Soverign Bank statement. If you have changed address, you might require more documents.
^ I did not contact a lawyer to review my application as I felt fairly confident I knew what I was doing based on my own research. However, I brought along additional information in case we were asked for it including our birth certificates, marriage certificate, expired passports, Tim’s payslips for the previous two years, bank statements for the past 6 months, mortgage statements for both 2010 and 2011, and pieces of mail for each month from January 2010 to December 2011 addressed to either myself, Tim, or both of us. If I was sending my application by post, I might have included some of the other documents.

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The contents of this post, including images are © Rebecca J Lockley and Tim Lockley unless otherwise stated and should not be reproduced without permission. If you are not reading this on http://blog.beccajanestclair.com, my facebook page, the RSS feed(s), or through an e-mail subscription, please notify me.

[LJ readers reading this on the LJ RSS feed: Please click on the link at the top of the entry to go directly to my blog to leave a comment, as comments left on the LJ RSS do not get seen by me. Facebook users reading this from my Networked Blogs link can either comment on facebook or on my blog.]