Chicken and Broccoli Bake

This is another Mother-in-Law special from Mummy J. I am always pleasantly surprised by how much I like this because I am not a huge fan of broccoli, but the fact that it is with chicken and a delicious sauce somehow makes it more edible! Fussy, me?! ;-)

It is very simple to make and freezes well. Don't be put off by the peach juice, it adds a nice sweetness. If you didn't fancy it, you could just add more milk and lemon juice.

Chicken and Broccoli Bake

Serves 4-6

Ingredients

4 large chicken breasts, chopped into chunks

1 large or 2 medium heads of broccoli, cut into florets

1 tin of Campbells condensed chicken soup

1 tsp curry powder (I used hot)

4 TBSP mayonnaise

Juice from 1 tin of peaches

1 tsp milk

1 tsp lemon juice

1 cup breadcrumbs

1 cup grated cheese

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees. Brown the chicken in a frying pan and cook the broccoli until al dente. Layer the chicken and broccoli in a lasagne dish or similar. 

In a bowl or measuring jug, empty the tin of condensed soup and mix with the curry powder, mayo, milk, lemon juice and peach juice (I used about 2 thirds of the tin as I didn't want it to be too sweet). Pour the mixture over the chicken and broccoli and sprinkle with breadcrumbs and cheese.

Bake in the oven for 45 minutes until the top is brown and the sauce is bubbling. 

Serve with buttered wheaten bread

It got Mr's seal of approval for being as tasty as his mum's, which is always a sign of success!

Let me know if you give it a go!


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Messy Church Craft Share - Easter

Image used with kind permission

It's Easter crafts galore in this edition of Messy Church craft share. I realise that for many the Easter crafting season may be over already but just in case you wanted to do some more then here are some ideas! 

As you can imagine, Easter is a very special and important time in the church calendar. It is a time of hope, new life, repentance and joy. We celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the new life which that can bring. And of course, we celebrate the new life shown in Spring warmth (ha!) and new growth. We tried to convey some of these messages in our Messy Church crafts. Some are specifically Christian, others are more general. Please feel free to use any of these ideas with your family or children's work.

Edible Easter Garden

This is far and away our most popular craft. I got this idea from my lovely friend Tina from uni, and I don't know where she got it from! 

 There are a lot of components, but some you may already have in your house and if you are doing it for a crowd then get a conveyor belt production line system going! The garden is assembled inside a large takeaway container (I bought mine in Bookers) and is made up of:

• Rice, put in a lidded box with a squirt of green food colouring, then shaken to coat all the rice. Obviously this bit isn't edible!
• A Coco-Pops path
• Iced Gem flowers
• A muffin hill
• Matchmaker cross - glued with edible glue bought in a craft shop
• A brownie tomb - using mini brownies cut in half
• Fondant icing grave clothes
• Cookie stone...rolled away!

Add caption

Each one looks a bit different but that's the beauty of it!

I believe this is a wonderful way for children to remember the Easter story in a multi sensory way.

Painted Eggs (taken from Messy Church)

In order to make life a bit easier for myself I bought some polystyrene eggs from Yellow Moon for the children to paint. They used normal ready mix paint in a variety of colours and different paint brushes to use. We found it handy to rest the eggs on milk bottle tops for both painting and drying. We made sure each child's name was on the bottom of the lid because inevitably some get left behind and we have to reunite them with their owners!

Decorated crosses (from Messy Church 2)
As I was buying the eggs I spotted some wooden crosses on sale and decided to snap those up instead of cutting out 50 or so from card....! The children decorated them with felt tips, tissue paper and sequins and then wore them round their necks with pride for the rest of the session!

Tissue Paper Flowers (taken from Messy Church 2)
This is such a simple and easy task. Just take a few squares of tissue paper, pinch them in the middle to make a point and stick the point in the end of a straw. Secure with some sellotape, then tease the "petals" of the flower out a bit. A nice way to celebrate the colour Spring flowers bring after a deary winter.

Big Picture - Lambs
Each month we try to do a big picture that can go up on display in our hall for church folks and visitors to see. It is a nice way of showing families that we value their creations as well!

First of all an amazing lady called Rosie painted a wonderful background on lining paper for us, then we filled it with sheep! We drew around our hands on black sugar paper, then stuck on cotton wool and wobbly eyes. Our thumbs made the sheep's head and our fingers the legs. I think this might be one of my favourite crafts, it looks so effective!

Unfortunately I didn't manage to get any pictures of the children doing their sheep but you can make out their little handprints clearly. I also encouraged them to look at their handprint in amongst the "flock" and remember that they are part of the Messy Church family.

When the crafts were over and the queue to do the Easter garden died down we went into the church for the celebration. It is always difficult to do the Easter story sensitively with children without glossing over the key elements of the story. I used pictures to bring the story some meaning and I hope I was able to help them understand the message of hope, happiness and new life in Jesus that Easter can bring.

We also gave the children a gift. You may have seen the "Real Easter Eggs" in supermarkets this year. They are from the Meaningful Chocolate Company and aim to celebrate the Easter story along with the joy of eating chocolate! Each child who came today got one of these eggs, which also comes with a story board and stickers so they can remember the Easter story. It was a real blessing to be able to give them this gift and I hope it has a positive impact on them to receive it.

What Easter crafts have you done this year? I'd love to see some.... I can store up ideas for next year ;-)


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Doing Free Play at KidZone!

In case you are wondering, KidZone is the youth club I run for primary school kids! It is great fun and as it was the first thing I set up when I started the job, it's kind of my "baby" and I am really proud of how it has developed and the great team I have in place to make it all possible.

Free Play is something I brought in last year as a result of a Playwork module I did for my degree. In it we learnt that play is a form of learning and "work" for children, and can reach its best potential when the children have as much choice as possible. This is naturally within certain boundaries, and rather than being a crazy free for all, it is actually carefully managed. A good playworker is one who can create the best atmosphere for children to play and learn safely and effectively. Play of this sort is child-led but adult managed, the adult creates the play environment but the children decide how it is to be used.

Normal nights at KidZone involve some free time at the start of the session where they get tuck, can play board games or the Wii, watch cartoons, colour in or just chat and chill. This works well for the most part. Then they split into 2 groups - games or craft. "Or" being the operative word here. Because we have a limited amount of leaders and a rabbit warren of corridors the children chose and activity and that is what they do for the evening, no wandering around in between, for their own safety more than anything but also so that they are doing something productive. This works and the children enjoy it but I wanted to bring in these Free Play nights to give them a different experience and a bit more choice.

I put more leaders than normal on the rota so that we could use more rooms in the church and children could be properly supervised. Here's a rundown of the different activities on offer:

Physical Play
The hall was filled with large empty cardboard boxes (courtesy of the Christian Aid book sale in half term!), balls, uni hoc sticks, skipping ropes, space spots, hoops, beanbags, cones, mini netball hoop and blankets. These were laid out in a way that didn't suggest they had to be used for any particular game - children could chose what they wanted to do.

Obstacle course

Above you can see that a couple of the girls created an obstacle course with the hoops and space spots, having to skip through them using the ropes. Not pictured is another group of children who engaged the leaders in a game of netball. I emphasised to the leaders that they must be led by the children and it is interesting to note a mix of those happy to do their own thing, and those wanting to play a structured game.

Messy Play
This was the room I was in charge of! I set up tables with painting, water beads, cloud dough, and "gloop"... and of course a basin and towels to wash their hands. I was pleasantly surprised at how much they engaged with this. The water beads, gloop and cloud dough were all ideas I had got from Pinterest and parent bloggers and had been used with pre-schoolers. But even my top end primary kids enjoyed these tactile activities.

Getting the hands gloopy!

Cloud dough - 4 cups plain flour to half a cup of baby oil - reminded the children of baby powder. 

Cloud dough is soft and silky but can be moulded into solid shapes.

Water beads - a great tip from The Boy and Me - start off minuscule and gradually get bigger in the water

Still not at their full size!

 There were some great comments as they were playing:

"It feels like rotten milk" (gloop)  

"It's all hard at the bottom but water on top" (gloop) 

"You can't pick it up!" (gloop) 

"I'm going to make it freeze" (cloud dough) 

"It feels soft in my hands. Is that why you call it a cloud?" (cloud dough) 

"I found the biggest blue one. Did it go in first?" (water beads) 

"They feel like berries!" (water beads)

One of the children, who attends Sunday morning worship with her family, asked me to keep the beads in the water so she could see how big they get and show her younger brother and sister.

Creative Play and Junk Modelling
A great way to get rid of (clean!) recycling ;-) This is the "making" room - 2 tables piled high with cardboard boxes, plastic tubs, LOTS of masking tape, card, paper and various collage materials like tissue paper, pasta, ribbon, sequins, feathers etc. I have a couple of kids who would happily spend their entire lives creating beautiful things from junk and adding sparkly glitter and sequins to anything., so they were in their element here. Rather than a specific craft, they were able to make whatever they wanted and proved themselves to be creative and imaginative.

Making a kite

Chill Out Zone
This was a place where they could just sit and chat, play quiet board games, watch cartoons and grab a drink if they wanted. Often the kids came and went from this room, but one little boy stayed the whole evening watching cartoons. I wanted to encourage him to go and try some other activities, but held back. If after a busy week this was what he wanted to do, then I wasn't going to stop him!

Board games - can you spot the retro Mr Pop? One of mine from the 80s! 

Enjoying Looney Tunes!

So that was our Free Play night, and it went down a treat. They just loved it - "Can we do this every week?!" Well, considering I was on my hands and knees for 20 minutes scrubbing cornflour gloop off the carpet afterwards....perhaps not ;-) But we will definitely do it once a term I think. It's well worth the extra effort.

Do you have any ideas you can share for my next Free Play session?!

I've linked this post up to Edspire's Messy Play blog hop, in memory of the beautiful Matilda Mae x

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Messy Church Craft Share - Jesus' Baptism

Image used with kind permission

As I was sorting out my display for Messy Church at work today, an idea came to me. But first of all - you may ask, "What IS Messy Church?!"

Well, Messy Church founder Lucy Moore (along with Diane Louise Jordan no less!) explains it best herself on their website. It is a church for people who don't go to church. It isn't on a Sunday, there's no sermon, no standing up and sitting down in certain places at certain times. It isn't an outreach event designed to get people in to Sunday morning services. It is a chance for families to spend time together, having fun, experiencing Christian community, sharing in yummy food, and learning a little about God in the process. The "Messy" part comes not only from the crafts we do (which do get rather messy!) but also the fact that community can be a bit messy! We have messy lives and creative minds and that is something to be celebrated.

So anyway, as I was sorting out the crafts from this month's session I thought, I wonder if these ideas might be helpful to someone? I see loads of parents blogging about the craft they do with their children, and perhaps they might find some inspiration here. For Messy Church, the crafts are "Bible based" - that is, we link them to our theme and Bible story for the month. But they are not exclusively religious (in fact many aren't religious in the slightest!) so they may be helpful if a parent, teacher or fellow Children and Family Worker is looking for inspiration.

This month's theme was "Jesus' Baptism" and these are the crafts we did:

Water pictures (adapted from Messy Church 2)
We used various colours and shades of paint to recreate the many hues we see in the water around us. I especially like the dark moody one at the top!

Water pictures

Glitter bottles (taken from this website)
We added glitter and sequins to a bottle of water (I used the travel bottles you can get in Boots... you can imagine the looks I got when I bought 30 of the things), along with a squirt of glycerine to make the water thick and gloopy. The children loved swirling them around.

Glitter bottles

Sandy footprints (adapted from Messy Church 2)
Because baptism is something that Christians do when they decide to follow Jesus, we picked up on the "following" theme with these sandy footprints. We drew around our feet, cut them out, covered in glue and dipped in sand.

Sandy footprints

"Footprints" poem (adapted from Messy Church 2)
If you haven't read the footprints poem there is a link on the caption. I think it is beautiful, and makes me a bit emotional. I see it as a reminder that God is always with me, I am never alone. And it is also a timely reminder that in those times when I feel that God has deserted me the reality is I will look back and see that he was the only thing keeping me going. We used foam footprints to decorate the poem and if they wanted, children could write a message to someone so that they could be encouraged by it.

"Footprints" poem

We also made dove shaped biscuits, the dove appearing at a key part in the story of Jesus' baptism, which we decorated with white icing and lots of sprinkles. No photo though, sorry!

I also really wish I had taken photos of the "celebration" time, when we gathered together to listen to the story. I opened up the baptistery in the main church and the children all sat around the edge with their legs dangling. No water in there obviously, but it was still wonderful for them to be able to see it. It made describing baptism so much easier and I hope it gave them an experience that will stay with them.

Let me know if you use any of these crafts!


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Chicken fried rice

I luuuuurve Chinese food. Chinese food makes me so very happy. It is a real treat for us to get in a takeaway or head out to the all you can eat buffet. However I've never really attempted Chinese cooking at home, save for honey chilli chicken and Mary Berry's sweet and sour chicken. And of course, Mr's famous curry sausages and rice are made with Chinese curry sauce concentrate we get at the Chinese supermarket. But apart from that we haven't been very adventurous, and I always worry that without the MSG from takeaways it won't taste as good!

This recipe - loosely based on a Slimming World recipe I saw at my mum's house - is hardly adventurous either but it is so deliciously authentic I'd actually say it was as good as the real stuff. Give it a go and tell me what you think...

(Apologies for lack of picture, every time I make it I am so keen to get stuck in I forget to take one!)

Chicken Fried Rice (serves 1)

Before you start, it's helpful to have the following ingredients chopped and ready to go. This dish is stir fried and needs to keep moving in the wok so you won't have time to prep as you go. It seems a lot but worth it, I promise.

Ingredients
One garlic clove, minced
Small piece of ginger, chopped finely or grated (sorry for vague amounts but I use 1 tsp of the Very Lazy stuff!)
One small red chilli, finely chopped, or 1/2 tsp of chilli flakes
Half a carrot, sliced into thin batons
Half a red pepper, sliced into thin batons
Handful of frozen peas
Shredded cooked chicken breast
One portion of COLD cooked rice (do not used recently cooked rice or it'll turn to mush)
One egg, lightly beaten
5 spice powder
Soy sauce
Shaohsing rice wine (if you have it, not necessary)
Sesame oil (ditto)

Method
1. Heat a couple of tablespoons of vegetable or other flavourless oil in a wok. Add ginger, chilli and garlic and stir fry for a few moments.
2. Throw in the carrots, peppers and peas and stir fry until beginning they start to colour and pick up all the flavours.
3. Add the rice and chicken and stir well. Slosh in some soy sauce and a sprinkle of 5 spice.
4. After stir frying for a few moments, push the rice to one side and pour in the egg. Wait until it sets a bit then start breaking it up with a fork. Then mix the whole lot together - the egg should mix through in little shreds.
5. Add a splash of rice wine - this will help deglaze the wok if the egg has made everything catch a bit.
6. Finally sprinkle a few drops of sesame oil over the rice (only a few, this is a strong oil and would quickly overpower everything else).
7. Serve up and eat immediately.

When I have made this, the flavours exactly match those you get in the stuff from the Chinese. And it is low fat too - only about 400 cal according to MyFitnessPal!

Let me know if you give this a go!

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Hummingbird Bakery Breakfast Bran Muffins

Lots of my Meal Planning Monday readers expressed an interest in these muffins so I thought that I'd share the recipe with you! It actually worked!


I made these because I wanted something to have between breakfast and lunch to save me succumbing to crisps or a chai latte and caramel waffle from Starbucks. I am a little and often eater, so need to graze, but often don't graze on the right things! Lately I have been having a smoothie or carrots and salsa which haven't quite hit the spot, so I gave these muffins a go.


Hummingbird describe it as "having cake for breakfast" but they do actually feel more virtuous and definitely kept me "topped up" til lunch.

This recipe is from their "Cake Days" book. 

Breakfast Bran Muffins

(makes 10-12)

Ingredients

180g plain wholemeal flour

50g rolled oats

50g All Bran (note - NOT Bran Flakes!)

1 tsp finely grated orange zest

20g raisins

20g sunflower seeds

1 TBSP baking powder

1/2 tsp bicarb of soda

pinch of salt

120g soft light brown sugar

250ml whole milk

2 eggs (large, at room temp)

80g butter, melted

Method

Preheat the oven to 170degC and line a muffin tin with muffin cases

Put the flour, oats, All Bran, orange zest, raisins, seeds, baking powder, bicarb of soda, salt and sugar in a large bowl or mixer and mix together.

Pour the milk into a jug and crack the eggs into it, whisking it all together.

Make a well in the middle of the dry mixture and whilst mixing at a slow speed, pour the wet ingredients in slowly. When the ingredients have come together, increase the speed to medium and pour in the melted butter.

Once it is all incorporated, spoon the mixture into the cases, filling them about 3/4 full.

Bake in the oven for 18 minutes or until the muffins are golden brown and springy

Elevenses!

They are delicious - I am most definitely back on speaking terms with Hummingbird Bakery! They taste wholesome, the raisins and seeds providing nice texture. They are not too sweet either, yet feel like a treat. I might make a new changes next time, perhaps adding grated carrot or a pinch of cinnamon. 

Have you got any elevenses favourites?

Auntie Vi's Honey Chilli Chicken

My husband sacrificed a lot to come and settle in Somerset when we got married - he left his job, his family and friends, and the country he was born in! But most important and sacrificial of all were the foods he left behind, staple favourites which cannot be found here in England. Namely:
Pear-picking Porky and Polly Pineapple ice lollies from Dale Farm (no, not the travellers' site, it's a dairy!)
Veda bread (malted bread, no fruit, delicious toasted with butter and cheese)
Tayto crisps (cheese and onion crisps that taste like no other!)
Fifteens and top hats (tray bakes which grace the table at every single child's birthday party)
Sausage and egg sodas (no, not a drink - sausage and egg on a toasted soda bread)
And..... honey chilli chicken

Honey chilli chicken can be found on any Chinese takeaway menu in Northern Ireland. It is one of the most popular dishes, and yet it seems to be exclusive to Ulster. Since moving to England hubby has yet to see it served in any Chinese restaurant either here or in Devon where my parents live. He has had frequent tantrums about this, believe me. So in a vague attempt to shut him up placate him, we have endeavoured to make our own. This recipe is from his Auntie Vi, so it is authentically Norn Iron! There is a lot of chopping and preparation but I personally love that. Once it is all ready this dish is fairly simple to make.

Honey Chilli Chicken

(serves 4 - 6)

Cut up some chicken - you can use any type you want. Auntie Vi recommends drumsticks, we used thighs. You could use breast as well. As long as you have enough for 4-6 portions (we used 12 thighs). Cut it up nice and small so it is bitesized, then toss it in some flour seasoned liberally with salt and pepper.

Heat 3 TBSP sunflower or groundnut oil in a wok or deep saucepan. Fry the chicken in batches and then put in an ovenproof dish. The flour will make it nice and crispy. Just fry it til it is brown and then transfer to a 150degC oven to keep warm. 

Discard the oil from your wok, give it a wipe, and put in 2 TBSP of fresh oil. Fry 2 chopped onions, 3 crushed garlic cloves, and 3 tsp grated ginger until soft. Add 5 TBSP honey, a diced red pepper, a diced green pepper, and 2 chopped red chillis (we deseeded ours, you might feel a little more brave!). Fry for a few moments.

Mix 1 TBSP soy sauce, 4 tsp cornflour, 2 TBSP lemon juice, 3 tsp hot chilli powder, and 1 pint water in a jug (we did this beforehand so it was ready to go) and pour into the wok. Lower the heat and simmer gently until the sauce has thickened. Give it a taste to see if you want to add more honey or chilli. 

Pour the sauce over the chicken and put back in the oven for 10 minutes to bubble and thicken.

Serve with boiled rice. 

Delicious!

Hubby declared it a success, and although it still doesn't beat a takeaway from Little Fat Buddha in Ballyhackamore, it's a close second!