Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep

We are redecorating and reorganising the children's shared bedroom at the moment, with an eye to having "a place for everything, and everything in its place" sometime in the not too distant future, not to mention somewhere for homework as they get older (which they are, rather rudely, continuing to do all the time!).  That said, however, Hubs and I were distracted from the more practical side of the shopping when beautiful frivolity by KICO popped up on the radar .

How could we resist this BIRDEY light? It's somehow Pixar-esque.  In fact, we kept having to open the box regularly, to peep at it and get a giggle-fix, until it went up onto the ceiling.  The children love it, we love it and the light is amazingly bright, as are our smiles every time we see it.  Now we just have to resist getting the matching wall lights too!

Cath xx

Get Inventing!

"With tuppence for paper and strings...you can have your own set of wings", or so the song goes.  With a few more varied bits and pieces and some sticky tape or glue, however, the world is a child's oyster.  My boys' favourite pastime is junk modelling, constructing all sorts of fantastic machines, robots and spaceships out of everything and anything that we save for them; everything from loo roll tubes to chocolate box trays, from bottle-tops to lolly sticks. 

Incidentally, don't throw away those irritating bits of plastic that are used to wire toys, almost irretrievably, into their packaging.  They are fab for junk modelling and have made robot legs, lorry grilles, oven racks, you name it!

I want to encourage the creative spirit, but I'm not too keen on the mess all over the house, so today we turned their playshed into their very own 'invention club'.  With boxes, tubes and cartons galore, all sorts of bits-and-bobs and a ready supply of sticky tape, glue sticks and marker pens, they have their own little mad haven of creation...

Cath xx

Just Enough is Good Enough

Confession time. I am not a born ‘clean freak’. I am not even a very convincing pretend one. What I am, at heart, is bone idle. I would much rather sit and read a cookbook than dust the bookshelves and I would much rather bake (and eat) a cake than clean the oven. Even now I would much rather build Lego tunnels and squidge playdough with my son than, well, just about anything else. In fact, just today I made a cardboard-and-tinfoil robot with Christopher, while sitting in a very messy room. And it didn't matter, because we had fun.

I approach housework in rather a slapdash fashion, but I always hate ending up in a huge panic if we're expecting visitors. Living in secret fear of ‘unexpected guests’ is no way to be. The washing machine used to lie dormant for days at a time, then be suddenly confronted with four consecutive loads when we realised that we had nothing to wear.

As a stay-at-home mum, I feel that part of the deal is that I take care of most of the day-to-day running of the house. That is not to say that my hubby arrives home from work, puts his slippers on and sits in his favourite chair for the rest of the evening. This is not a 1950s American sitcom (thank God). Everyone in the family (okay, maybe not the cat) has their part to play. If it’s not done, though, it’s ultimately my problem, and I try to find ways to do what needs to be done without coming over all, y'know, scary. I've discovered a talent for organisation I never knew I possessed. I (usually) know where things are without hours of searching and last-minute panics. I open the fridge and no badly-wedged jar of mouldy jam falls out to smash on the floor. I get dressed easily and quickly every morning, having looked in my wardrobe the night before and chosen an appealing outfit in peace. We can invite people for dinner, or to stay for a weekend, without spending untold hours cleaning just before they arrive. Getting even slightly organised means that it soon takes only a short time each morning (no more than an hour a day for me; during Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4 for me, which seems apt) to finish the majority of the housework for the day.

This is, emphatically, not about being a perfect domestic goddess, nor is it about 'playing house'; spending hours decanting your laundry detergent into fancy bottles and tying up bundles of clean sheets with silk ribbon. I have better things to do and so, I'm sure, do you. A homemade cake and a few pretty touches can make all the difference to your life if most of it is spent at home, but let's not get carried away - this is about doing what needs to be done with the minimum of fuss and still having time to enjoy being a mum, being a wife and occasionally, just being yourself...such heaven.

Best of all though, I can be proud of my home. I look forward to having guests and actively encourage visitors (although we generally need to keep our bedroom door shut to hide the stuff I've thrown in there at the last-minute when I realise I've run out of time). So the fact that often I feel like I’m still pretending to be a grown-up, efficient, houseproud type doesn’t matter. Cutting corners is OK, really. As long as it gets done, there’ll still be time for a G & T.

Deck the Halls!

We put our Christmas tree up yesterday, after Karl and Christopher went out on the annual buying excursion. We spent the afternoon decking out the tree and the rest of the house, so everything now looks, well, as camp as Christmas. Yay! Proper paper-chains, three trees of varying sizes and no less than seven sets of fairy lights dotted around the house mean that it's begining to look a lot like Christmas. I went and ordered the turkey yesterday as well, a job that had been on my to-do list for a while. I can pick it up a couple of days before Christmas and get any last-minute bits from the nearby greengrocer and The Treehouse while I'm in town, thus saving myself the bustle and indignity of supermarket shopping immediately before Christmas.

It would perhaps be the understatement of the decade to say that I love Christmas. I adore it, and start getting excited about the whole shebang earlier than anyone else I know. I love settling down with my Christmas recipe books, planning what I'll cook, and making lots of lists to do with Christmas. The up side of this is that it's all pretty organised. The down side is that it just makes me worse! This year I have also (finally) got around to setting up a database of addresses so that I can print out all the address labels for our Christmas cards (complete with decorative holly clip-art, natch) and therefore have thankfully not practically broken my wrist by writing all the envelopes out by hand.




We've had such awful weather over the last few days that I was quite relieved to have a dry spell this afternoon so that I could nip out into the garden with my shears to cut greenery for decoration. Some ivy sprigs, round-leaved holly, rosemary branches and bay all came together beautifully to frame the mirror hanging over our fireplace. There's a lovely herbal fragrance scenting the room now, which is even better. It's especially lovely to have an open fire at this time of year; it always seems so festive and welcoming. The garland on the mantel itself is an artificial one with tiny baubles already attached, but I think it looks pretty good and the combination is great. I can't wait to sit in front of the fire with a glass of wine tonight. Maybe I should make some mince pies...

The Tidy War

Well, it's been a week since my last post and what a week! After a fab long weekend staying with my friend, the boys' godmother it was back down to Earth with a serious bump today, as I looked around me at the state the house was in after a good few weeks of neglect. So the children and I have been waging the tidy war in every room today. Some of us more than other, it has to be said.


I've also been sorting out baby clothes to go to a bring-and-buy sale in a couple of weeks' time. A little sad, but they can't stay here forever and I've kept some of the 'favourite' items for posterity. Quite a few of the favourite actually, but I plan to revisit the pile in a week or two and edit it again when the initial separation anxiety has worn off. It seems odd to be so attached to things, but some things hold such happy memories of my babies when they really were babies. Christopher is 3 now, James 1. I can't believe how fast the time's gone - surely I only brought them home for the first time a few days ago!



Because it's getting nearer to December, I started to clear the freezer this week, using up as much frozen food as possible, so that I could defrost the small freezer in the kitchen and begin to make way for the festive freezing in a few weeks. Tonight's supper was therefore the first of several hotchpotch meals; a tray of roasted chicken thighs and sausages (cooked with red onion and rosemary) and a big pan of succotash, because I found THREE bags of frozen sweetcorn and had to start dealing with it all somehow... Wish me luck!

A little of what you fancy...

We've been on a bit of a decluttering mission again. While Karl has been building wardrobes in our bedroom, the room has got steadily more and more untidy. Today we started to put things right, hauling out everything from under the bed and from the other junk hidey-holes. We now has a pile of stuff to FreeCycle, and I took the debris to the tip this afternoon (escaping for some girlie shopping time as well - hooray!).

After abandoning our efforts for the day, some junk food seemed very appealing. I really don't like the idea of deep-frying very much of anything, but everyone craves those kinds of crunchy-textured foods occasionally. Chicken and chips is a bit of a favourite with all of us, and this way of oven-cooking it wins hands down with me. I've recently adapted the coating I use from plain flour to a semolina and cornflour mix after seeing Nigella Lawson use a similar coating on her new series Nigella Express. I generally use a ready-mixed Cajun spice blend for convenience, but you could use any seasonings you fancy. A mix of ground cumin and coriander, paprika and thyme or cayenne pepper are all good, though go easy on the latter!

Crisp Chicken

8 chicken drumsticks
2 tbsp fine semolina (or polenta works well, too)
1 tbsp cornflour
1 tsp Cajun seasoning (and see above)

Mix the semolina, cornflour and Cajun seasoning together in a large bowl. Turn the chicken pieces in this mixture to coat them, then place on a rack over a baking tray and cook at 200°c for 20 minutes until the chicken is cooked through and the skin is browned and crisp.

I made some real oven chips to go with the chicken, then cut up some salad veg for a nice big pile of crudités. Ketchup and mayo on the table, lovely!

Beans means Hotpot

One of the problems with going on holiday is coming home to an empty fridge. Having a well-stocked store cupboard and freezer is the only way to avoid the horror of food shopping with two overtired and fractious children in tow. My store cupboard has been rather less comprehensive of late, as I have been making a concerted effort to curb my food hoarding tendencies and avoid the familiar scenario of twenty-odd open packets in the cupboard and not enough of any one thing to make a meal. I plan only to keep stocks of things I actually use on a regular basis and not things I would like to, or feel I ought to, cook with . This is the problem with so many of the 'essential store cupboard lists one sees in the front of cookery books. If I kitted out my kitchen with all the different things that various authors claim are essential (large selections of vinegars being a particular case in point), I'd have no money left for the meat, fish or vegetables. Let alone the gin and tonic.


So, with some good-quality pork sausages (from Edwards of Conwy) and homemade chicken stock out of the freezer, some tins from the cupboard and herbs from the garden, I made this lovely casserole. The only thing I had to go out for was an onion from the shop in the village, and we needed milk anyway. I made a loaf of bread in the bread machine, with 1 tsp of easy-blend dried yeast, 500g flour, 1 tsp Maldon salt and 350ml water. All in all, a good meal, and for very little effort. I used butter beans, which are Christopher's favourite (at the moment), but cannellini, or any other white beans would work in this dish. I've made it using chickpeas too, which was great, especially when substituting the sausages for chicken thigh portions. It will, of course, need cooking for longer if you do this.


Sausage & Bean Hotpot

1 onion
6 pork sausages
400g can chopped tomatoes
500ml chicken stock
2x400g cans butter beans
thyme and bay
black pepper


Heat a little oil in a big pan and cook the sliced onion until soft. Add the sausages and brown them a little. Tip in the tomatoes and stock and add the herbs and pepper. Bring to the boil and stir in the drained, rinsed beans. Simmer for 20 minutes, then fish out the bay leaves. Serve with something starchy to mop up the juices. Some good crusty bread is easiest, but plain steamed potatoes work really well too.

There were quite a lot of beans in tomato sauce left after we'd eaten, so I shall save those freezer for the boys to have, with toast, as a quick lunch or supper.

Sticky Chicken

Well, the weather got better! It's been gorgeous all day and I had time this afternoon to go and do a bit of shopping. It was lovely, driving into town with the roof open, enjoying the sun and listening to music I like, instead of Christopher's cBeebies album again. Even better was finding not one, but two summer dresses in Matalan. Now I've just got to hope that the good weather continues long enough for me to wear them a few times!

For supper tonight I cooked a recipe from BBC Good Food magazine. I've subscribed to it for years and I try to cook at least one or two recipes from it every month. I keep six months' worth of back issues at a time and go through the oldest edition, cutting out all the recipes I want to keep, as soon as my new copy arrives. They now have a website with a pretty comprehensive archive (though the recipe I used tonight is not listed there, so see below), but I still do my cuttings as I can organise them in plastic wallets by categories I choose, and refer to them when I'm planning meals and looking for inspiration. It really saves time, not having to trawl through all the family meals when I want something for entertaining and vice versa. I quite enjoy doing just one issue every month, but when I used to keep more we used to get inundated by old magazines very easily, and I used to clip them then lose all the clippings, then forget to throw the cut-up magazines away anyway. I also take cuttings (anything that piques my interest) from other magazines I buy, food and non-food related, and keep them all in a little filing area I've set up for the purpose, where I also store the current issues of magazines and my collection of mail-order catalogues.

This Sticky Marmalade Chicken was really nice. It had something of a 'sweet-and-sour' flavour and went very well with some Basmati & Wild Rice and steamed broccoli. It's even more appealing because most of the ingredients come from the storecupboard. I had chicken fillets and chicken stock in the freezer so it was cheap, too, with only the broccoli bought fresh this week.

Sticky Marmalade Chicken

4 chicken breast fillets

300ml chicken stock

4 tbsp fine-cut marmalade

fresh thyme leaves

Heat a little olive oil in a large deep-sided frying pan. Season the chicken and fry it for about 10 minutes, turning halfway, until golden on both sides. Add the stock, marmalade and thyme. Simmer for 5 minutes, then remove the chicken and keep it warm while you boil the sauce hard to reduce it to a syrupy glaze. Pour this over the chicken to serve.

The icing on the cake

Well, the frenzy has started. After playgroup today I went shopping for, among other things, a few nice chunks of Welsh cheese from Ultracomida, as I'm offering a cheeseboard as part of Sunday's buffet. We also got a couple of types of ham for a platter of cold meats. After just managing to miss the rain (phew!) we hurried home, as fast as the roadworks would allow anyway, to have lunch.

In other news, I iced James' christening cake this afternoon. The little resin boots were saved from Christopher's christening cake, so it was pleasantly nostalgic to use them again, but I did want the cake to be a little different this time, so I added the cross, studded with little silver sugar balls.

Hubby and I have moved some furniture and done a decent bit of cleaning, so we're about sorted on that front. I bought a cheap IKEA Bambu wooden roller blind to use as a table runner on the buffet table, so I took the draw cord and metal fittings off that, too. With our plain white cotton tablecloth underneath, I'm hoping it'll look really good - but as it was one of those middle-of-the-night ideas, we'll just have to see.

For a quick supper tonight, I made this Sausage and Tomato Pasta. With some grated parmesan to scatter over, and a bit of garlic bread to go with, it was just right for a rainy, but still warm, evening.

Sausage & Tomato Pasta

200g dried pasta (I used conchiglie)
6 pork sausages, cut into chunks
1 onion, diced
3 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
pinch mixed dried herbs
400g tin chopped tomatoes
1 tbsp tomato purée
handful spinach leaves
fresh parsley, chopped

Bring a big pan of water to the boil and put the pasta on to cook. Fry the onion and garlic in a little oil until just soft, then add the sausage chunks and cook until brown. Tip in the tomatoes, tomato purée and the dried herbs. Simmer for 5 minutes or so, then stir it the spinach into the sauce to wilt the leaves. Drain the pasta and toss through the sauce, then add the chopped parsley to serve.

I'm now going to sit and make about 4,000 lists of all the bits and pieces I need to buy or do over the next couple of days. My brother and his girlfriend are staying with us tomorrow night, so I've got to think of something to give them for dinner when they arrive. Time to get the cookbooks out, I think...

Soup, Shopping, Smoked Fish

All in all, it's been quite a relaxed day today - after a morning playing with the boys, I made some tomato soup for lunch, which we ate with some granary bread and a wedge of Applewood cheddar that was languishing in the fridge. Christopher loves this soup, which I call my Simple Tomato Soup, and ate two big bowlfuls, as well as bread and cheese. James had some too, with some coarsely grated cheese and diced bread stirred into his bowl of soup. While the smallest Homer napped after lunch, I sorted out a few odds-and-ends of housework in anticipation of having lots of visitors at the weekend. I tidied up all the shelves and things downstairs, then dusted all the surfaces. I'm very proud of our fireplace, which Hubby built (clever old thing that he is), so I gave it some special attention, especially the mantelpiece, which is half a planed roof beam (Karl again). I cleaned it with slightly abrasive cream cleaner, then gave it a good polish and buff with Beeswax furniture polish. I shall try to do a blitz-o-clean of everything before the weekend, but tempus fugit, you know what they say. If if comes to it, I'll just do the bits that show...don't tell anyone!

We went and did a bit of food shopping this evening, to get some of the bits for Sunday's buffet that would keep well. I need to go to the cheese shop and a couple of other places in Aberystwyth on Thursday after playgroup, then I should be able to pick up everything else as part of my usual shopping on Friday. We've ordered some bags of ice from the petrol station/shop in the village. We'll use it to fill a big storage trug and cool the fizz in that while we're at church. After catering for Christopher's christening two years ago I'm not even going to hope for fridge space to chill wine!

We got some smoked coley from the wet fish counter in the supermarket, plus some bread and a bag of salad, so that was supper in the bag (quite literally !). I poached the fish fillets in milk, with a knob or two of butter, a sprig of thyme and a couple of bay leaves. I cooked some bacon rashers, until they were really crisp, to top the fish. I love the combination of fish and bacon anyway, but with smoked fish it's just gorgeous.

The big news today? James got his first tooth! It's still minute and only just barely visible of course, but still...so proud!

Going a bit 'lentil'

Sunday is my day for 'General Tidying' - that's the task I set myself in addition to my usual daily chores. Today it was more successful than it has been of late. James had a nice long sleep after lunch and Christopher was engrossed in his toy food collection, so I really got cracking and sorted things out. Things are starting to settle back into a routine again now. I've cleared out (most of) the extra clutter we've accumulated since James came along, and a bit more besides. Things are slowly, but surely, coming good on the housekeeping front!

When I planned the week's meals, Hubby requested our good old favourite, Savoury Mince Crumble , so we had that for dinner this evening, accompanied by some steamed greens and baby corn (Christopher's favourite). For James, I defrosted and heated up one of the little meals that I make in bulk and keep on standby in ther freezer. This lentil dish is another recipe culled from my extensive cookery book library; this time from Lorraine Kelly’s Baby & Toddler Eating Plan.


Christopher loved this when he was a baby and it has turned out to be a great favourite with James, too. I cook it in larger quantities, using a little less water and a bit more cheese but, to be honest, I don't think there's much to be done that really improves the original recipe. I do add a little ground black pepper because Karl and I both like quite a lot of pepper in food and I wanted the children to get used to the flavour early on. I chop the vegetables into tiny shards using the large jug of my hand-blender so that it is easier to purée the mixture later, but chopping them any old how will do fine, though it might increase the cooking time a little if the vegetable pieces are a lot bigger.

Cheesy Lentil Savoury

4 tbsp red lentils (60ml)
1 little onion, peeled and finely chopped
2 carrots, peeled and finely chopped
350ml water
black pepper
50g cheddar cheese, finely grated

Put the lentils and chopped vegetables into a pan and pour in the water. Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for 15 minutes or until the vegetables are soft and the lentils fairly mushy. Purée as necessary, then stir in the grated cheese. This makes about 6 portions.