The Splat Cooking Blog

I helped guides finish off their chocolate badges on Thursday evening, Debbie and Cath who run guides said that I wouldn’t have a hope of getting the guides to try dark chocolate – hah, gauntlett has been thrown down.

I began by talking them through where chocolate comes from, how it grows, my friend Kate who runs this fab company called The Chocolate Source and amazing chocolate parties leant me lots of goodies for this.  We then moved on to tasting and discussing the whole where do you ‘taste’ from, I handed out dark chocolate and told the girls to hold their nose, put the dark chocolate on their tongues and once they began getting the flavour to release their nose and it would change taste – most ‘aaaaahs and ooooohs’ came from the adults but I GOT THEM ALL TO TRY DARK CHOCOLATE – YES!

I was very proud to be asked to present the girls with their chocolate badge, a bit like being asked to open a village fete.

these are the finished bouquets at the children’s cupcake bouquets workshop last week for Mother’s Day, the youngest child was 6 years old, the oldest was 9, I think they did brilliantly and made amazing bouquets.

Saturday morning cooking club and this week we made pitta bread and hummus.  The pitta bread was amazing, brought back memories of Turkey last summer when they bring these huge balloons of pitta bread as a mezze, well the pitta the children made this morning brought gasps when the mini balloons came out of the oven.

The children had a choice of how to flavour their hummus, all bar one chose to use lemon and coriander, one little girl bravely opted for sun dried tomato as she doesn’t like lemon.  When we tried both flavours just about everyone agreed that the sundried tomato one was nicer and regretted not being brave and choosing to make that one.  Leave it to the 5 year old to be the brave one, bless her.

The pitta tasted amazing, so much better than shop bought, in fact, there is just no comparison and it’s so easy to make.

After a week of no sleep (puppy) following on from 2 weeks of no sleep (flu) I at last ventured out on my bike for what feels like the first time this year and I now feel fat and desperately unfit.

I thought I was doing OK until this bloke came belting past me going twice as fast (on a bike), then about a mile further on two old geezers (yes, even older than me) did the same, and it just got worse after that with a whole bunch of them (not sure what the collective noun is for a bunch of roadies is, think it’s probably a ‘mud’ of mountain bikers, so maybe it’s a ‘razor’ of roadies as they all shave their legs).  Anyway, felt very demoralised and also very depressed at the sight of my legs in my cycling shorts – deeply unpleasant.

So there’s nothing for it – have to shift 7 pounds and really tone up before I can get these pegs out in the air, haven’t done very well today, cooked roast beef and all the trimmings and ate 3 roasties and a yorkshire pudding instead of JUST veg and beef, then had Eve’s pudding and ice cream – very, very bad. So from tomorrow my aim is:

2 x swim sessions (starting with 40 lengths, building up to 62+ over the next few weeks) Mon and Tues

3 x early morning gym sessions (groan)

2 x 1 hour bike rides

Pilates on Tuesday

Yoga on Wed

Turbo trainer for at least 30 mins 3-4 times per week

No chocolate, biscuits, cakes, roasties, toast, other carbs, hoo hah –  have to get into bloody minded determination mode and figured that if I blog it I’ll have to keep to it as you’ll be reading it and it will be just too embarassing. So here goes, let’s see what happens,

Did an hour on  my bike this morning so that counts and 60 crunches (yes, I know that’s pathetic, need to do at least 100)

I WILL BE LEAN AND TONED……I DO NOT NEED CHOCOLATE AND BISCUITS…..MY BODY IS A TEMPLE THAT ONLY ACCEPTS HEALTHY FOOD AND FRESH FRUIT AND VEG……OM!

Saturday lunch today was different, trying to cut costs I decided to buy a pack of puff pastry, caramelise some onions in butter and olive oil and make a caramelised onion tart with salad and leftover roast veg for lunch, made onion tart surprise for the children aka puff pastry pizza with passata, ham and mozzarella.  Served this up to yelps of joy from husband and small children and everyone raved about how wonderful it was and begged me to cook  it again.  Makes a nice change, I’m so used to ‘yuk,I’m not eating that, what’s in it, don’t like the look of that, can I just have some bread, etc, etc, ‘ it was wonderful and now on the list.