Food and drink in Cardiff

 

Our first contact with Welsh food came in the welcome session, after a comforting coffee in a freezing , rainy, windy morning. Mr David Evans gave all the course assistants, along with the coffee, tones of interesting information about Wales History and Culture, and the last papers we were given dealt with traditional Welsh recipes. We could try some of them in the following days.

Most of them were cakes and pastry. I could taste Bara brith, a sweet bread cooked with black tea and fruit, very tasty and with a surprising spicy flavour. That spicy touch was really both  shocking and pleasing. 

Other recipes, like Teisen lap and Welsh rarebit, were fat-rich  traditional recipes. Rarebit is specially simple, basically melted Cheddar cheese on thick wholemeal bread, with a pinch of cayenne pepper: great! Sometimes, the recipe name can be misleading, as in Glamorgan sausage. Not a little bit of sausage or meat in it! Mainly just breadcrumbs, cheese, eggs and some veggies, such as leek, spring onions, parsley and thyme.

However, my favourite was Welsh cawl, a lamb meat and vegetables stew. Somewhat similar to Spanish caldereta de cordero, with a bigger variety of vegetables. I couldn’t help cooking it, back in Spain. There wasn't barley available, so I used brown rice instead, with a more than acceptable result. Like caldereta, Welsh cawl enhances its flavour if eaten the following day.

As for food and drink during our stay in Cardiff, we used to have a continental breakfast in the hotel dining room, (Oyo Sandringham Hotel, small but clean and cozy). In the afternoon, during the lessons break, just some sandwiches were usually our brunch.  Sometimes we got to a nearby arcade, and we had coffee and cakes at Barker’s Coffee, a beautiful place, very tastefully decorated. After our visit to Welsh Assembly, in Cardiff Bay, by Cardiff harbour, cod  fish and chips, although not tipically Welsh, was a must.

Cardiff is a small capital city, compared to other huge, massive capital cities in Europe. That makes it a lovable / livable city, where you can walk and find warm, welcoming and inviting places to have a chat and a drink. In the evenings, we usually had dinner in one of the nearby  restaurants to refill our energy levels and talk about the day and the course.  There is a lot of international food offer in Cardiff, so we could have Mexican, Italian or Indian dishes for dinner.

 But a really comforting and enjoyable seasoning for fajitas, or pizza, or whatever you may be eating is music. In many of these places, excellent singers and musicians performed a rich repertoire, mainly covers of all-time hits. No surprise British music rules throughout the world. It seems to be part of their lives and their culture;  both playing and listening in such a natural, easy-going way…really pleasing.