My love is like a daffodil

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It’s been a while now since I’ve written any poetry, or anything for that matter (combination of being busy with other things and just generally not having anything leap out at me to write about) so when it was decided to hold a Valentine’s themed poetry competition at work I thought I’d enter and see where it got me. Turns out, it got me first place, and I’m now the proud owner of a Love2Shop voucher as a result – go me! :D

I’ve pasted the poem below – it was one of those when the first line just sort of jumped into my head, which gave me an idea (in this case, that a parody of ‘My love is like a red, red rose’ but with a Welsh slant might be fun) and then the rest very quickly tumbled together, so it only took about ten minutes to write – ten minutes well spent as it happens!

My love is like a daffodil (with apologies to Robert Burns)

My love is like a daffodil
That’s newly sprung in Splott :
My love is like that Calon Lan
That’s sung by choirs a lot.

Aye, tidy you are, my lovely lad,
And much in love am I:
And I’ll adore you still, my boy,
Till Cardiff Bay runs dry.

Till Cardiff Bay runs dry, my boy,
And the barrage rusts with rain:
And I’ll adore you still, my boy,
While it rains, then rains again.

So hwyl fawr, for now, my love,
I must cross the Bridge a while!
But I’ll pay the toll to come on back,
Though it be to Barry Isle.

© Catherine Smith

It’s official – I’m a Zumbaddict!

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I’m now up to three sessions a week and loving it! Various bits of my person definitely feel somewhat on the used side, which hopefully means it’s doing me some good too. I will admit that tonight’s session, which was with a different instructor, was a little harder to follow than I’m used to, being, as it was, held in the dark with only a disco ball for (not very much and rather flashy) light! On the plus side, it was also much harder to see myself in the mirrors, which can only be a good thing if you ask me :)

The trick to Zumba…

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…I have discovered, is to start in November or December, keep at it for a few weeks until you sort-of-know some of the routines, then turn up to a session in January and reap the rewards: lots of Zumba-newbies kicking off their New Year Resolutions who not only look as confused as you were back in November, thus making you look way better at it than you actually are, but make it harder to spot the ones who’ve been doing it for ages, thus helping you think you’re better at it than you actually are :D

Another thing I’ve discovered is that Zumba can be quite an effective contact sport if performed in the right sort of numbers.

Chicken Kievs

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I’ve made these a few times but it’s taken a while to get them to the point where they’re the right balance of ‘easy’ and ‘yummy’ – having cooked them for my hubby and his parents for dinner last night, I think I’m now there :)

You’ll need:

  • A number of large skinless chicken breasts roughly equivalent to the number of kievs required
  • A couple of cloves of garlic per kiev
  • About a tbsp of butter per kiev
  • Some plain flour
  • 2 eggs, beaten
  • Roughly a slice of white bread per kiev

To make the kievs:

  • Put the butter into a bowl, crush the garlic over it and then, using your hands or a fork (I find my hands easier), mix the garlic and butter until they’ve combined
  • Put the bread into a blender or food processor and blitz until you’ve got breadcrumbs
  • Using a sharp knife, make a slit about an inch or so deep and a couple of inches long into the side of each chicken breast, creating a pocket
  • Using your hands, fill the pockets with enough garlic butter that they’re mostly full but you can still roughly close the pocket, sealing the butter inside – I find this is a messy rather than a scientific process, so don’t worry too much about getting it perfect.
  • Dunk the chicken breasts in first the flour, then the beaten egg, and finally the breadcrumbs, making sure they’re fully coated, and place them onto a baking tray lined with tin foil
  • Place in pre-heated oven at about 200°c for 25-30 minutes, or until they’re golden in colour and the chicken is fully cooked through
  • Serve immediately with whatever you like to have chicken kievs with!

 

Husband Compatible Pizza

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This recipe came about as a result of me wanting to try out the Pizza Dough setting on my breadmaker and my husband saying what he most fancied having on a pizza – teamwork or what? :) I often serve it with homemade Tear and Share Garlic Bread (I’ll put that recipe up here at some point too) and it’s become a staple in our household. You can, of course, vary this recipe in any way you see fit to make it compatible with your husband of choice.

Ingredients

PizzaFor the pizza base (taken from the dough recipes that came with my breadmaker)

  • 300g strong white bread flour
  • 1.5 tsps fast-action dried yeast
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 2 tbsp olive oil
  • 170ml water

For the topping

  • A chicken breast
  • A few rashers of bacon
  • A few rashers of prosciutto ham
  • A red onion
  • A jar of tomato pizza topping sauce
  • Some chilli powder
  • Some cajun powder
  • Grated mozarella
  • Cooking oil (for frying)

Method

Put the yeast, flour, salt, olive oil and water into your breadmaker pan, set the breadmaker to the Pizza Dough setting and leave it to do it’s merry thing whilst you go off and do something else. Mine takes 45 minutes.

When your dough’s finished, transfer it from the breadmaker to a floured surface, knead it for a few moments and then roll it out to make a vague pizza shape that’s about 10 inches in diameter. Transfer this to a greased baking sheet and leave it somewhere warm to prove for however long you have, but ideally for about half an hour – I usually shove mine in the airing cupboard.

While your pizza base is proving, preheat your oven to 220°C (200°C if it’s a fan oven) and get your toppings ready. Put the oil in a frying pan, add the cajun powder and mix together before heating to make a sort of runny cajun paste. Slice the chicken breast into thinnish strips and the bacon into smallish pieces, and fry both in the cajun mixture until they’re thoroughly cooked. Set aside.

Chop the onion, tear the prosciutto ham into slithers and set both aside.

Pour about half of the jar of pizza topping sauce into a dish and add as much chilli powder as you fancy – mix this together and set aside.

When you’re ready to assemble your pizza, spread the newly chillified pizza sauce over your pizza base and add the chicken and bacon, red onion and prosciutto ham. Cover the pizza in a generous helping of the mozarella and put it in the oven for about 20-25 mins, or until the cheese looks as if it’s turning golden and the base has started turning a touch brown at the edges. It may take a few attempts at making this to gauge what’s ‘just right’ and what’s ‘a little overdone’, but that just means you get to eat more pizza finding out :)

Serve with whatever you fancy, although if you’re sharing it between two, it often does on it’s own with a nice glass of something.

Enjoy!

Unbelievably Easy Mince Pies

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Mince PiesIt’s that time of year again, and I thought that my 30th Christmas on this planet, combined with the work Secret Santa yesterday, warranted a first attempt at making mince pies. After scouring my Christmas recipe book and finding nothing overly helpful (how can you have a Christmas recipe book that doesn’t include mince pies??) I resorted to Google and quickly found this - they really are as easy to make as the title suggests (if you ignore my hands’ tendency to cramp whenever I have to rub in butter and flour, anyway) and were bloomin’ lovely, if I do say so myself!

I’d originally intended to use pastry cutters to make the pie cases and lids but found it much easier in the end to just do as the recipe says – pick small chunks of dough from the main ball, flatten them with your hands (holding the dough in one hand and squishing it with the bit of palm nearest the thumb of my other hand to make a slight dome worked quite well as methods go), and press them into the holes/cups/whatever-they’re-called of your tins. The net result of this is that they looked very homemade (ie: a bit messy) but the pastry tasted amazing and, whilst adding egg to the pastry dough would no doubt have made it possible to roll it out and use afore-mentioned cutters, resulting in prettier pies, I’ll take taste over looks any day.

I did amend the recipe slightly by sprinkling golden caster sugar over the pies before putting them in the oven, which gave the tops a nice extra bit of crunchiness. I also used the best mincemeat I could find – I can highly recommend both Robertson’s Classic and Tesco Finest in this department; I used the former, but have sampled the latter, and both are very yummy indeed!

 

Sticky Chocolate Pudding with Marshmallows

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Sticky Chocolate Pudding with MarshmallowsBetween you and me, I quite enjoy cooking and trying out new recipes or adapting old ones, particularly if they fall into the ‘dessert’ department – I love making cakes, biscuits, pastries and that sort of thing, and I try to always bake instead of buy unless I simply don’t have time, or the effort involved in making something isn’t worth it for the result – a classic example of this is pain au chocolat, which take hours and hours to make and don’t taste that much nicer than good shop-bought ones, in my opinion anyway.

Last weekend I gave this a try, and I’d recommend it to anyone as it was really easy to make, can be prepared up to 24 hours in advance (not that it took very long to prepare, but handy never-the-less!), and it’s very, very yummy :) It even came out looking like it does in the picture which is something I rarely manage. I would, however, bear a few things in mind:

  • The recipe says you need an oven dish capable of holding 2-3 litres – I’d say that if you think the biggest dish you have will be big enough, assume it isn’t and buy a bigger one. Mine overflowed whilst cooking and I ended up having to clean the oven afterwards (Top Tip for this by the way: empty the contents of a tub of bicarbonate of soda into the bottom of the oven, pour cold water over it, leave overnight, and wash off in the morning – works much better than any oven cleaner I’ve ever tried, and doesn’t smell!)
  • Don’t worry (as I did) about pouring boiling water over it – it looked like a muddy swamp by the time I put it in the oven, but it all sorted itself out whilst cooking and did what it was meant to do :)
  • It’s very, very rich, and only advisable in small portions if you’ve just eaten a big meal – it definitely needs ice cream or something with it too.
  • I made a pudding that served 10 for two of us, but it kept really well in the fridge for about a week, reheated well in the microwave (you only need to pop it in for 30 seconds or so), and actually tasted pretty good cold after some time in the fridge :)

As an added bonus, you’ll probably end up with leftover marshmallows, which you can then add to hot chocolate, which is what I’m about to go and do right now – to the kitchen!

Zumba – take two!

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Having decided last week that Zumba is pretty enjoyable as well as being pretty good for me (why can’t more things in life be like that? Chocolate is one excellent addition to this list that springs to mind), I turned up for my second session yesterday, wondering whether it would be any easier the second time round or if I’d somehow manage to be worse. Super-fit instructor-lady? Check. Funky Latin tunes? Check. Still fun? Check. Any improvement at all? Check, actually. I definitely found it much easier this time, my arms and legs having managed to remember some of the routines from last week, a task my hips are seemingly not yet up to.

Roll on next week :) Sorry, hips.

 

Zumba!

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As an alternative to spending Wednesday evenings flopped on the sofa in front of recorded telly of some kind or other, this week I decided to give Zumba a try, what with my local health club having started a new Wednesday evening class and everyone I know who’s tried it having said it’s brilliant.

I began to suspect I might be in for a tough time of it when super-fit-instructor-lady turned up looking fresh as a daisy and apologised for looking a state before explaining that she’d just come from a Spinning class. My suspicions were further aroused when she proceeded to demonstrate the first routine for those of us who hadn’t been to Monday’s class or the one earlier that morning, implying not only that there are people out there who are able to do such things twice in one day, but that she was one of them…

Forty five minutes later, I emerged from my Zumba debut, bedraggled, panting and very, very thirsty, having spent half the time not quite sure what I was meant to be doing and the other half doing the right thing but not really all that well. If there had been a judging panel present I feel my efforts would have garnered a ‘sevuuuurn!’ from Len for enthusiasm with advice to work on my footwork. I shall spend the next several weeks having fun endeavouring to do so – turns out everyone was right, Zumba is pretty brilliant :)