cheese, ham and onion bake in the slow cooker

Here for the cheese, ham and onion bake done in the slow cooker and just the thing for slopping down your nightie whilst the dark nights close in? Of course: it might look like a scabby back, but it tastes absolutely bloody amazing and frankly, I’d have this dish every night if I could, or at least until the good folks at Wansbeck Hospital had me bluelighted in with cheese crust on my mouth.

Speaking of cheese crust, a while ago we published a blog entry from Frederick West detailing his method for making the perfect roast potato. We received record feedback and for those two people, he’s agreed to pen another article. It’s another hot-button topic – not least because his keyboard is eighty per cent cigarette ash – buffet. What makes the perfect buffet? What’s the ideal strategy for winning at buffet? Now, this entry is especially girthy and because I know some of you will be reading this on a Speak ‘n’ Spell powered exclusively by Poundland batteries and tears, I’m going to split it in two.

For those devoid of all joy in your life, click the picture below to be whisked straight to the recipe.

That’s you, that is.

Everyone else buckled in? A slight caveat. Our writer isn’t subtle. Address your complaints to the nearest bin.


Buffet is one of those words that means different things to different people: like fashion, happy or consent. But what is the correct answer? It’s time to get the bottom of this mystery once and for all. I will not rest until we have uncovered the truth or I get hungry. So, join me, Other Paul, twochubbycubs’ roving reporter, a pale imitation of Alison Hammond both literally and euphemistically, on my most important mission to date.

The biggest shitshow that masquerades under the good name buffet has to be the ‘Hot Fork Buffet’. A couple of heat lamp fermented trays of slop, chips and rice and God fucking forbid, a salad do not a buffet make. I made the mistake of having one of these travesties during the evening reception of my wedding.

A tray of curry so bland that you could have had toast and found it spicier, a pan of Scouse (a traditional Liverpudlian stew, not the contents of Cilla’s make up bag) along with completely unseasoned rice and chips. Now my family, they like a drink. They really like a drink. They’d been going since 3pm and they’d just seen their son/grandson/brother/nephew/cousin (in some cases 3 of those, we’re a close family) say ‘I do’ to a bloke that looks like Dawn French shaved her head, came off her mood stabilisers and got woken up by a wasp’s nest in her fanny.

Everyone was far too pissed to touch the food so I’m there hissing to my brand-new husband about it costing a tenner a head and not having room in the freezer for it all. So, I did what any tight arse would do, and shovelled as much of it as possible down my gullet. Sadly, as a result of this greed, about 3 hours later, a tight arse was what I was very much lacking as I pebble-dashed the shitter in the honeymoon suite. If we were a straight couple, it would have been nothing a quick rinse in the bidet wouldn’t fix before the wedding was consummated. You’d be correct in guessing my marriage was not consummated that night. As my shiny new husband so eloquently put it (I’ll use his wedding photo, he won’t mind):

“I’m not putting my dick anywhere near that, it looks like someone punched a Sara Lee gateau through a drainpipe”

Safe to say I did not get a hot forking that night.

If there’s something I hate more than the hot fork fiasco it’s the one’s where fuck all effort has been made. Often found at work events where you can see the lunch spread and you realise that enough food for 20 people has been set out and there are 50 of you there. Pro-tip in these cases – any work event that’s catered, get a seat by the door. The second you break for lunch, you run, I don’t care if you’re 40 stone with ankles that have already buckled under your considerable gunt, you fucking run.

If there are people in the way, take the bastards down: you get one shot at this tubsy, don’t fuck it up. When you’re at the front of the line and ready to fill your plate, move tactically. They put the salads first, followed by the carby items. THIS IS A TRAP. If I have to tell you to give the salad a miss then just delete my number, we can’t be friends. I don’t care if you’ve a cock like the creatures from Tremors, there is no room for salad apologists in my chocolate corridor.

Next come carbs, if it’s chips, build a base layer on your plate, but don’t stack high. This is how they get you. If the only choice is rice, fuck it. It’s going to bland, plain, boiled shit. Once you’re past the carbs, go mental. Fill the plate and stack it as high as possible. You may feel judgmental eyes fall upon you but those are usually the eyes of senior management who skimped on catering and are at the back of the queue. They deserve to starve. You’ll have no chance at seconds here so treat it like a game of Buckaroo, only with a slightly stale sandwich and some Aldi own-brand kettle crisps. Be brave.

The worst case of under-catering I’ve ever experienced was at my mother-in-law’s funeral. Fucking exhausting day: two hours of the people of Oz singing ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’ followed by a full Catholic funeral. I’m no amateur with things like this, but after three hours of sucking off the clergy I’m gonna need to refuel. We arrive at the quaint village pub and straight away my ‘Fat Twat’ sense is tingling.

There has to be 60 people in the pub  and exactly 60 quarter sandwiches covered in clingfilm, a bowl of nuts and two bowls of crisps set out. I’m not entirely sure what’s gone wrong but people are going to go hungry and over her cold dead body it wasn’t going to be me. The only upside to the situation was the facr mourners are quite a respectful bunch, so I easily managed to push past the sad fuckers and pile it high. I’d like think the selfish old bitch was looking up at me and smiling whilst her toes burned for all eternity.

So, dear reader, what should a proper buffet consist of? Well first off: enough fucking food for everyone. Now I trust a blog with a readership consisting of people with portion control issues should be able to get their heads around this concept so I’m going to assume you do not need direction in this area. You need a solid foundation, a theme if you will. Also, remember the golden rule of Mother Dewsbury:

I won’t be challenged on this. I am prepared to fight you and I warn you – I’m 6’4 tall, permanently angry and being punched in the face is foreplay to me.

So, we start with our brown food staple. The Sausage Roll. Quantity is key here, everyone loves a sausage roll so the key is to go mini. Rather than putting out 20 full sized logs of pig’s eyelash and arsehole in soggy pastry, go for 80 mini ones. Tower them high, then everyone feels like they’re getting more. Of course, you can get cheese and onion ‘sausage rolls’ for veggies and if you’ve got vegan guests coming, tell them to bring a packed lunch. My Nan likes to make her own sausage rolls and after many years I’ve finally been able to get the recipe from her, primarily by threatening to have her heating turned off this winter. I think you’ll see that the crafty old bitch was right to keep this secret formula close to her heavy breast because it could change the world:

  • buy any old sausage from the shop. Take the meat out of the case;
  • form it into a sausage shape and wrap in shop brought pastry; and
  • egg wash and bung in the oven until the pastry is browned.

Well fuck me Elizabeth, I can see why you didn’t want that getting out to the masses, you could put Greggs out of business!


James here. That’s a good, devastating image to leave on, isn’t it? Imagining Newcastle without Greggs is like trying to imagine Southend with dignity and a hymen between the entire populous – inconceivable. The next entry will be a guide to the perfect buffet and, if you’ve enjoyed the above, you’re going to be laughing, slapping your knees and worrying about how to explain the damp patch in your knickers to your husband all over again when we publish it in a few days. Even better: I have a rebuttal article planned. That’s twochubbycubs for you: we’ll flog a dead horse, and then make a delicious Croatian stew with it.

I’d LOVE to hear your feedback on this one – get leaving comments! What makes a good buffet for you?


Right, let’s eat. All those words, you’re probably proper Hank Marvin. Let’s just say hello to those hoggish sort who couldn’t wait for the recipe. This bake is never going to win prizes for how it looks, but then, nor will I, and I’ve never had trouble getting my Vitamin D injection.

cheese, ham and onion bake

cheese, ham and onion bake

cheese, ham and potato bake - done in the slow cooker

Prep

Cook

Total

Yield 6 servings

Listen, potato bakes always look like a load of hot arse, and no amount of skilled photography is going to hide the fact you're eating a plate of saucy potato. But: YOU'RE EATING A PLATE OF SAUCY POTATO. I mean haway, what more do you need? Someone to nip over and chew your food? I will, you know.

Ingredients

  • one tin of cream of mushroom condensed soup (13.5 syns)
    • use Campbells, and use the condensed version, it's so much tastier
    • not a fan of mushroom? then fuck off
    • if you must save your syns, use the low fat version for 7.5 syns, but honestly, spend the syns
  • eight large potatoes - we use King Edwards or something from Sainsbury's
  • as much cooked ham as you like - we just buy one of those little precooked hams and cut it into cubes
  • 240g of lighter extra mature cheddar (6 HEAs - but this serves six, so calm yer boobs)
  • two onions, white or red
  •  150ml skimmed milk (1.5 syns)

15 syns between 6 servings. 2 and a half syns. And best of all? No bloody Quark sitting on your delicious dinner like the Devil's Own Smegma.

Instructions

  • thinly slice your potatoes
  • chop up your onion
  • cube up your ham
  • dance through all your fears (war is over for a bit)
  • grate your cheese
  • mix the soup, cheese and milk together in one bowl
  • mix the onion, potato and ham in the other
  • then slop everything into the slow cooker and turn it on high for about 4 hours with lashings of black pepper and smugness
  • it'll be ready to serve after four hours but because we're catty bitches, we slopped it into a Pyrex dish and finished it off under the grill with a bit more cheese

Notes

Get ready to buy buy buy!

Courses slow cooker

Cuisine hearty-fart

Want more slow cooker recipes? No worries, here’s bloody loads!

Mwah!

J

lentil and butternut squash curry

Here for the lentil and butternut squash curry? When is it ever that easy with us?

A few posts ago Paul was given the chance to answer a few random questions from our readers. Because we’re so unspeakably arrogant, let’s roll the dice again! This time, me, James, will be answering. Prefer Paul? You’re wrong – he’s the Lidl James.

That’s not true, he’s better than I could ever dream of being.

What was your first impression of each other?

Great question – our first real time together saw us falling asleep next to each other within twenty minutes of meeting. My conversation will do that. That or my exhaustive anal technique. Anyway, I’d been holding in an almighty fart and I waited until he fell asleep to blurt it out. There was a moment or two of silence then an almighty laugh from Paul, and we never looked back, save for me to check I hadn’t shit myself. I knew then he was a keeper, because anyone who can laugh through the tears caused by my skin-peeling wind is for me. I just asked Paul for his first impression of me and it was simply ‘handsome’. Pfft. I thought Paul would love me more if I turned up looking like a Poundland Triga movie – I turned up in a Newcastle United top, grey trackies and a pair of trainers so clean you could imagine they’d been bleached. Clearly my Chloe Mafia brrrrap-brrrrap swagger won him over.

Do your ‘offline’ friends/family/colleagues know about your online presence/following?

We try and keep offline and online fairly separate. We’ve built up slight caricatures of ourselves for the blog and it can be difficult looking someone in the eye to talk about exciting work stuff when you know they’ve just read a blistering account of the time you accidentally fisted someone on a night out in Hartlepool. I mean, you don’t want anyone knowing you’ve been to Hartlepool, for Christ’s sakes. People are always astonished that the quiet one in the office has over 350,000 followers hanging on his every word. That’s why they call me Jim Jones and stare at me nervously as I’m making squash. We do find ourselves immediately caveating any trip to the website with a warning about the language, content, poor photography and swearing. My parents like to know exactly how much money the blog makes us so when I invariably die early due to a torn rectum, they’ll be able to cash in and bugger off to Alicante for a few months. Ghouls.

What advice would you give your 15 year old self?

Learn to drive as soon as you can. Noshing off lorry drivers for a quick trip up the A69 is never a safe idea. Stop worrying. Jason from Glasgow is going to make you unable to poo without crying for a week, practice first. Don’t grow that fucking awful Enya haircut two years from now. Don’t then dye it blonde so you look like a meth-addled Myra Hindley. Start on the grand plan earlier and you’ll have a house even sooner. Always double-douche. Don’t wank yourself silly over Fred Durst, save some juice for later – he turns into a mega-DILF with age.

If you were prime minister for a day, what would you change?

Mass deportation – straight into the sea, mind – of anyone who starts a sentence with:

  • I’m not being funny but…
  • I’m not a racist but…
  • The thing is, yeah…
  • …I turned around and said…

Coupled with the immediate destruction of anyone who shares ‘97% of people won’t share this’ drivel, anyone who doesn’t immediately acknowledge me letting them in on the motorway and anyone who walks more than two abreast on a path. Oh, and the reintroduction of gloryholes.

If you were only allowed to pick one country for the rest of your holidays where would you go?

Germany. Partly because of happy memories, partly because of shenanigans to come, and mostly because it’s an amazing country full of history and culture. Plus fuck it, I can sneak out on a train to all the countries around it. Want to play properly? Canada. I want to live there – a giant farm by a lake, nothing around me than the corpses of the people I pick up on Grindr. As long as I can still download Dr Who and Paul can still get his subscription boxes, we’ll be fine.

Do you read every post and all replies on your FB page?

Yep! We don’t always reply to them – usually if they’re bad mannered, illogical or lazy. I also make a point of refusing to answer anyone who has bilge in their profile picture. If they look like they’ve ever so much contemplated buying a LIFE LAUGH LOVE wall decal, they can go.

Which female celebrity would be your straight crush?

Not even a straight crush – she remains my number one absolute dream. Gillian Anderson. Sophisticated, beautiful, hilarious, strong and incredibly compassionate. I always wanted to be Scully rather than Mulder, not least because I can run in a set of heels and look great with red hair.

Are you readers as well as writers ? Who is your favourite author and why?

Paul reads fussy books about architecture. They all smell of foist and damp and have words like aggregate and tensile in them. The only way they’d send me to sleep quicker would be if he smashed me in the face with it like Little Mo and her Christmas dinner. (sidenote: I used to have such a crush on Trevor, you know – isn’t that awful?) I like Stephen King. I used to caveat that with an apology because he’s so mainstream but you know what, fuck that – he’s an excellent writer and his books are brilliantly entertaining. He can’t finish to save his life, but nor can I without someone working my balls. His best is The Stand, although I bloody hated Frannie. Stuck up cow. The miniseres is an absolute hoot though – I often do my best Mother Abigail voice to Paul as he approaches climax – makes him last a bit longer to think of me as a nonagenarian corn farmer.

How much weight have you both lost?

One or two pounds.

Image result for winking emoji

Are you still in love with each other?

More than ever. Paul gets such a rough time of it from this blog because I’m the writer for 99% of the articles, but he’s learned to roll with the punches now (quite right, I keep them on his kidneys). Thing is, I can’t imagine my life without him in it – from all the tiny things we do together to the big stuff like holidays and tag-teaming plumbers. He’s been the first person I speak to in the morning for over ten years and the last person I speak to before sleep. He still laughs at my jokes, he still puts up with my nonsense. I woke him up in a crisis the other day because I’d diagnosed a rough patch of skin in my armpit as lymphoma. He pointed out we’d changed the washing powder and it was just a reaction to that, calmed me down and spooned me until my blanket of back hair made him sneeze. He makes my coffee in the morning and my tea in the evening. Even now, four thousand days later, we still think of nonsense to send one another to cheer each other’s days up. I sent him a picture of Enya in a clock the other day and he laughed like a drain. Love comes in many ways, but they all come from him. My life without him in it is as unimaginable to me as the inky blackness of death or a world without bees and I promise you, reader, that not a single day goes by where I don’t remember how much I love him and tell him how special he is to me. The thought that one day all this will end and one will be torn from the other breaks my heart in two but makes me keen to make every day special.

I just wish he wasn’t such a swivel-eyed gypsy-stock bastard, though.

Have either of you ever done that thing where several men are doing each other from behind simultaneously?

No. Definitely haven’t been part of a group of eight either. I say part, I mean the sponge.

That was fun! Might do one last burst on the next blog post. But until then, it’s time for our lentil and butternut squash curry!

lentil and butternut squash curry

lentil and butternut squash curry

lentil butternut squash curry

Prep

Cook

Total

Yield 8 servings

One of our 'dumpbag' specialities which despite it's name isn't part of our behind-the-scenes XTube package. No, just bag these up whenever you like, freeze them and when you're ready to cook them just get them out and tip them in the slow cooker. It really is that easy! This takes no time at all and tastes pretty damn fine. 

Ingredients

  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 1 tbsp curry powder
  • 1 tin chopped tomatoes
  • 300g butternut squash, diced
  • 400g red lentils
  • 1 carrot, sliced
  • 1 tin light coconut milk (14 syns)

Instructions

  • called a dump bag because you dump all the stuff in a freezer bag and freeze it until you need it, then...
  • dump all of the ingredients into a slow cooker along with 1 litre of water and cook for 6-8 hours on low
  • that's literally it - add a splash of hot sauce too, if you fancy punishing that hole of yours

Notes

  • not really much to say about this one! it's ready in no time at all and tastes gorgeous!
  • after a slow cooker? Amazon have a great selection, and if you order through our link we get a few pennies commission!

Courses slow cooker

Cuisine twochubbycubs

Want more slow cooker wonders? Of course you do!

J

crunchy nacho chicken wraps: easy slow cooker meal!

Nacho chicken wraps will follow, but first an apology….ah balls to it, listen, we’re not going to apologise for not posting too often, because we always do it and then have to go away somewhere or get caught up in doing stuff and then we forget! But if Jurassic Park has taught us anything, it’s that Life Finds A Way and Bryce Dallas Howard might have a silly name, but she’s terrifically pretty.

Speaking of pretty, can I introduce you to my favourite ever photo of me?

Blog recipes, she wrote.

A post shared by twochubbycubs (@twochubbycubs) on

I have the air of a seventies DJ that permanently has their hard-drive in the microwave ready to go at a moment’s notice.

I wish I could tell you that our nights have been so full of debauchery and sin that we haven’t had time for the blog, and whilst that’s partly true, the actual reason is so much more boring. We’ve been stuffing envelopes. Lots and lots and lots of envelopes. See after the success of the badges and our impending holiday which we really ought to pay for, we decided to branch out into fridge magnets – because what would put you off eating more than our faces floating into your vision whenever you fancied a Muller-Shite? So I set about designing some tasteful numbers…

http://twochubbycubs.co.uk/shop/

We thought we’d maybe sell 50 or so. We sold over 750. Which is fine, until you realise that you now need to package up 750 magnets, write out the envelopes and get them in the post. That took time, but naturally we decided to make it harder for ourselves by writing sauce on the envelopes. When the first lot landed with our lovely customers, everyone else wanted rudeness and filth on their flaps, and so…it snowballed. You’ve never lived until you’ve sat at 2am trying to think of a joke about a name like Mildred or drawing the eight-hundredth cock and balls of the day. One morning Paul found me face-down on a bed of padded envelopes with a roll of stamps pressed against my face. I still see Elizabeth’s rack when I shut my eyes.

Of course, with us at the wheel, this road-trip through Royal Mail based sauciness was always going to end in disaster. For one, we’ve had a couple of instances where the postman has scribbled out the ‘rude’ bits or put a big stamp over the cock and balls we’ve delicately drawn on the back. That’s fair enough, I suppose, though I imagine you’d need to be fairly joyless to take offence at ‘peel the flaps apart for instant pleasure‘ scrawled on the seal of the envelope. One such censorship annoyed me so much that we dispatched a second envelope to the customer with a giant, detailed knob drawn on the back – but I stuck cat ears on the top. Didn’t get through untampered with. Ho-hum.

But no, that’s not the worst that’s happened. We’ve been affixing random titles and names to people’s names – Right Dishonourable Jane Doe, Marge “Gammon Flaps” Simpson, Sarah “Unprotected Anal, Finish on the Tits” Jones, that sort of thing. Good clean fun. Anyway, things came to a head when we received a message from someone we had posted a badge to a lovely lady who we designated, entirely randomly I hasten to add, as Number One Arm-Wrestler.

Naturally, she only has one bloody arm. We didn’t know, and thank Christ she’s absolutely fine about it and a good sport and found it hilarious, but I can’t help but feel aghast by how badly it could have ended. Plastered all over the Sun, ‘CRUEL AND CALLOUS CUBS LEFT ME STUMPED’, for example. Thankfully, she knew our joke was ‘armless. Rinse and repeat. We’ve had to add an opt-out if you want a clean envelope button onto the page, though. Phew. Anyway, if you want a magnet, we’ve only got a few left! Make sure you mark the order if you don’t want filth. Otherwise it’ll come addressed to you with knobs drawn all over them, or, if you’re male, references to the size of your genitals with some soft focus shots of us inside. If that doesn’t tempt you, what could?

You can order them here, though the Cubs and Speed Police set are currently out of stock!

Now don’t worry, I’m not going to endlessly promote our magnets on here. That’ll be it until we need to pay for a new sling or something. It does give me a giddy thrill to imagine a magnet being slipped into a Slimmer of the Week basket and poor Sandra choking on her cat hair quiche, mind. Shall we do the crunchy nacho chicken wraps? Well why not. Buckle up, Buckaroo, because I’m going in dry.

crunchy cheese nacho chicken wraps

crunchy cheese nacho chicken wraps

crunchy nacho chicken wraps

Prep

Cook

Total

Yield 8 wraps

The beauty with this recipe is that it's what we're affectionally calling a dump bag - you throw the raw ingredients into a freezer bag, pop it in the freezer and then, whenever you can't be arsed to cook, take it out and throw it in the slow cooker. It'll cook nicely through the day and be ready when you come back - and so easy to make! Then just stick it in a wrap with a few extra bits and you're done. The chicken also works well with rice!

This makes enough for eight wraps very easily indeed.

Ingredients

  • four chicken breasts
  • 1 small tin of sweetcorn
  • 1 small tin of black beans
  • the juice of two limes
  • one large red onion chopped
  • pinch of salt and pepper
  • two minced garlic cloves
  • 200ml of chicken stock

To make the wraps:

  • chopped lettuce
  • a pack of white Weight Watchers wraps, which are a HEB each - or you know, find some joy in your life and have a good wholemeal wrap like us instead, and don't syn it because haway
  • 25g of Doritos, crushed up into little wee chips (7.5 syns) (split between eight, just under a syn)
  • why not use your HEA on cheese? 30g of cheddar grated is your HEA, add that for extra cheesy sexiness
  •  

Instructions

  • pop everything for the chicken filling in a bag and freeze it until the night before you're ready to cook
  • throw it in a slow cooker for a few hours
  • give everything a right good mix and use two forks to pull the chicken apart - it'll just fall to bits, it's great
  • to make the wrap, throw some chopped lettuce into a wrap, top with chicken, Doritos and cheese, wrap it up and away you go, get it in you OR, if you're sassy, grill the wraps so everything melts together inside - oh my yes

Notes

A few pointers:

 

Courses slow cooker

Cuisine mexican

There you go – shove that in yer mush! Want more wrap ideas? Here you go:

And look at that: not a single ‘make a cake with a wrap’ load of bum!

Enjoy!

J

slow cooker pork and apple stew

We’re all about the slow cooker pork and apple stew and we’re going to get that out to you in a moment, but first, a clarification from Paul.

Well, Cubettes, I am FUMMIN hun x (it’s Paul here, by the way). After reading yesterday’s blog entry written by James, I’m going to have to put a few things straight. Namely:

Here’s how every single holiday of ours gets planned: I suggest somewhere, Paul sucks air in over his teeth and say ‘oooh’ with that look a roofer gives you when he’s going to need to take your tiles off, I suggest somewhere else, he grimaces like he’s shitting an acorn. 

I’d just like to say this is a total lie and in fact it’s bloody James that does this! I’m totally amenable to going anywhere (as long as it’s not a shithole). In fact, I can think of at least ten places I suggested that were kicked off the list for daft reasons; “too hot”, “too cold”, “we’ve done a city break already”, “they won’t like fat people”, “that’s the kind of place your mum would go”. My suggestion initially for the ‘big holiday’ was Las Vegas but that was knocked back because it was too ‘gambly’.

Honestly. I bit my tongue so hard that it gave me piles. But then, James has always been the neurotic one – we’ve written before about how he is convinced that every electrical appliance in the house is waiting for us to leave so each one can spontaneously combust into flames. Even the smoke alarm is in on the act. Have you ever known someone take out the batteries when they go away on holiday?! He will however happily leave the Mac running 24 hours a day so now those two little bald men at the top are actually burned into the screen.

So that, dear readers, is the truth. And you can rely on it being the truth because I’d never lie to you. Unlike Fatty McFat-tits. Now that’s out the way, let’s move back onto marital bliss, and this absolute belter. slow cooker pork and apple stew

slow cooker pork and apple stew

to make slow cooker pork and apple stew you will need:

  • 500g diced pork
  • 300g baby carrots
  • 1 tbsp gravy granules (2½ syns)
  • 1 onion, diced
  • 2 sticks of celery, finely sliced
  • 175ml apple juice (3½ syns)
  • 150ml chicken stock
  • 2 tsp thyme

We found this recipe on daisiesandpie – thoroughly recommend you take a wee look!

A slow cooker is essential if you’re following Slimming World! You don’t even need to spend much money, a cheap one will do the job just as well! You can pick one up from Amazon for peanuts and help to send a few pennies our way!

to make slow cooker pork and apple stew you should:

  • switch on the slow cooker to the LOW setting
  • spray a little oil into the bottom of the dish (Fry Light tastes shite. Get this instead!)
  • chuck everything (bar the gravy powder) into the slow cooker, pop on the lid and leave to cook for 8-9 hours
  • once you’re ready, take everything out with a slotted spoon and slop the sauce into a pan – add the gravy powder, whack the heat up and thicken that sauce
  • serve with a bit of mash for perfection

See now come on, how easy is that – and cheap too! Perfect winter warmer!

Want more slow cooker recipes? Have a look at these!

Enjoy!

J

slow cooker cottage pie

Super quick post tonight of slow cooker cottage pie – Christmas party was last night and we’re both proper rough! Straight to it!

slow cooker cottage pie

to make slow cooker cottage pie you will need:

I’m going to say this is syn free – if you want to syn the 0.25 syn of milk, then do. If you’re looking for a decent slow cooker, the one we use is reduced on Amazon right now, and pretty to look at!

to make slow cooker cottage pie you should:

  • add the onion and mince into a hot pan and brown off
  • add the carrots, tomatoes, garlic, peas, tomato puree, celery, worcestershire sauce, thyme and stock and stir to combine
  • decant into the slow cooker and cook for as long as you like on low – a few hours is best to really meld the flavours
  • four hours before you want to eat, cut the potatoes into large chunks (no need to peel) and cook in a large saucepan until tender.
  • drain, add the milk and quickly crack in the egg – mash furiously so the egg mixes in well and doesn’t scramble (don’t use the egg if you’re pregnant – treat yourself to some butter instead)
  • use a spatula or ladle to flatten the meat mixture in the slow cooker so it’s level
  • gently spoon in the mashed potato and smooth off with a fork
  • cover and cook on low for three hours
  • about half an hour towards the end, sprinkle over the grated cheese
  • cover with a tea towel so that it doesn’t touch the food but is taut across the top – this helps to absorb moisture
  • serve!

Easy!

Want more ideas? Click the buttons below!

beefsmallfakeawayssmall    slowcookersmallonepot

Enjoy!

J

slow cooker lasagne

Do you know, I’m never comfortable typing lasagne. I dither for ages as to whether it’s lasagne or lasagna and whenever I type it into google my eyes glaze over through boredom and I give up. So, take your pick. 

Super quick post tonight as we’ve only just got back from returning the Smart Car. Paul loves it. I hate it with the passion of a thousand suns. Admittedly, it was surprisingly roomy (but not roomy enough for any backseat shenanigans…not least because it doesn’t have a backseat, unless you fancy singeing your arse cheeks on the engine and having the Mercedes logo branded above your nipsy) but it was so…I hate to use the word lame, I’m not in Mean Girls, but yes, lame. I’ve never heard a car wheeze before. Paul stepped on the accelerator and it ‘shot away’ from a junction like a stubborn poo round a u-bend – going, but just. It did give the neighbours something to look at however and turning around at the top of the street was great fun as it can seemingly turn on a penny, but no, no, we’re not getting one. Sorry Paul! I embarrassed him today by parking outside the Smart car dealership whilst he was inside handing back the keys and putting the Black Beauty theme on loud. 

Tonight’s recipe, then – slow cooker lasagne. This serves six and only uses one 400g portion of extra lean mince, the type that you can buy from our Musclefood deal by clicking here. Just saying! You can bulk this out as much as you like by adding carrots, courgette, peas – any old shite you happen to have floating around in the back of the freezer. Also, this can easily be made vegetarian by replacing the beef mince with Quorn or similar. But ew, right. I hope they’ve improved Quorn mince since the last time I tried it – it was like digesting loft insulation. This lasagne is pretty much the same method as a normal lasagne. The pasta cooks slowly and is so soft, it’s almost like another sauce. Sounds like I’m having a joke but honestly, it’s good. That’s why it is essential to make your mince sauce as tasty as possible, it carries the dish! 

We served ours with roast potatoes and some steamed broccoli. Oh how fancy. 

SLOW COOKER LASAGNE

Look at it bubbling away…

IMG_2348

Looking good! Right. So…

to make slow cooker lasagne, you’ll need:

  • 400g lean beef mince
  • 1 large onion, chopped
  • 2 garlic cloves, minced
  • tin of chopped tomatoes
  • 500ml passata
  • 2 tbsp tomato puree
  • 280g lasagne sheets (about 2/3rds of a box)
  • 340g fat-free cottage cheese
  • 250g quark
  • as much reduced fat mozzarella cut into chunks as you like – 65g is one person’s HEA, and this serves six
  • whatever speed food you have about

to make slow cooker lasagne, you should:

  • in a large frying pan heat a little oil/Frylight over a medium high heat, add the onions and sweat down
  • add the garlic and the mince and stir occasionally until no pink meat remains
  • add the chopped tomatoes, passata, tomato puree and any other speed veg you are using into the pan and stir well, cook for a few minutes
  • meanwhile, add all of the cheeses into a bowl and mix together
  • spoon a quarter of the meat mixture into the slow cooker, top with a few lasagne sheets (break them up if you need to) and then spread over the top a quarter of the cheese mixture – repeat this three more times to make layers
  • cook on a low heat for 5 hours with the lid on

This freezes well, you’ll be glad to know. We portioned some up, put it in the freezer and got them about again 15 minutes later to eat. That’s portion control for you!

J


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slow cooker: chicken coconut curry

I can’t begin to tell you how sick I am of slow cooker week. Everything tastes the bloody same! I appreciate it’s convenient, I appreciate that it probably saves money, I understand that it saves time…but for goodness sake, I feel like I’m in a Wiltshire Farm Foods advert. And let me tell you, if that was the case, I’d give Ronnie bloody Corbett a smack on the chops because I find his hamster-like face upsetting and the fact that he’s hawking mush to old ladies for a vastly-overinflated price to be quite infuriating. Plus he’s got eyebrows like a seventies porn vagina. No, I like my food to have texture – most of the meals to come out of the slow cooker have less structural integrity than a passing fancy. I’ll rattle one more recipe for you tonight and then it’s back to business – proper bloody food that requires a working set of teeth to get through. As a rule, the only meals you’ll need a straw for going forward are the vodka-and-lemonades that Paul and I sometimes swap our dinner for.

Where have I been anyway? Who are you, my mother? I can tell you’re not because you’re not asking me to fix your iPad. No, the ear pain I mentioned last week became a cheery infection and knocked me for six. For four days it felt like I had been kicked in the head by a pissed off horse. It was all I could do to stay in bed demanding ice-cream and comfort from poor Paul, who had to take over all the duties within the house. Actually, he does them anyway, just this time with me being ill he wasn’t allowed to complain about it. The poor bugger. He’s a trooper though and I don’t give him his dues often enough. LOVE YOU DEAR.

So what’s been happening this week? I managed to get into a proper argument with some pallid-faced swamp donkey on facebook who tried to peddle her Juice Plus shite in my group. She private messaged me to tell me that the fact I’d deleted her snake-oil post told her that I hate women and people who try to make a go of themselves. Honestly – I could eat a tin of alphabet spaghetti and shit out a better argument than that. I don’t hate women (except Mylenne Klass…and I don’t hate her, she just makes my skin shiver) and I’m all for entrepreneurship, but as well you all know, I can’t bear the idea of vulnerable folk being duped into buying worthless, untested medicines on the scientific advice of a hairdresser from Worksop. What I can’t get my head around is the fact PEOPLE FALL FOR IT. Why?! I can understand folks who are seriously ill buying a pill in the vain hope of it helping, but spending hundreds of pounds just to shift a bit of weight? Bah! Are these the same people who buy laptops from a car boot sale and get them home to unwrap a cardboard box full of bricks? Or the people who get an unsolicited phone-call from Microsoft telling them they need to buy antivirus software at a cost of two bajillion pounds? Honestly. How do these people sleep at night? Penniless, I presume. Anyway, the argument rumbled on for ages, with Juice Plus curing her of depression, suicidal thoughts, liver disease, tennis elbow, easy living and fast cars (apparently it didn’t cure her of her verbal diarrhoea or dirty mouth), until I copied our chat in with the Juice Plus representatives and left it at that. I know nothing will come of it because Juice Plus is a dishonest pyramid scheme sold by numpties and dolts, but meh, made me feel better.

Now, my next piece is going to feel like an advert for Amazon Prime, and well, although I’m going to stick a link on the bottom, this isn’t really an advert at all. Just an observation. Paul and I are members of Amazon Prime, and have been for a very long while. I can’t remember the last time I paid for it because every time something is late, they stick an extra month on the membership. We’ve become accustomed to ordering something on a whim and having it turn up the next day, which is handy as it gives us no time for buyer’s remorse. Hence the cat tower. Hence the all-in-one breakfast sandwich maker. Hence the shit-you-not Teasmade. A bloody Teasmade, I ask you – I don’t even drink tea in the morning. I don’t get out of bed unless I’m having a palpitation just from smelling my morning coffee. Anyway, we got a little email the other day with the news that Amazon Prime Now has launched in Newcastle. What is it? You order something on Amazon, and it’s delivered within two hours for free.

Well fuck me. The only thing from turning Paul and I into perfect spheres with weak ankles is our inability to muster up the energy to drive to ASDA of an evening to buy ice-cream. Now it’s delivered by Amazon within enough time for Paul and I to have quick marriage-friendly nookie, make tea and watch Emmerdale. It’s too convenient. It’s not without flaws, though. You can only select from a range of groceries and flimflam via their App, which is proper hokey. I put ‘dip’ into the search box and it suggested some taramasalata, tzatziki and er, industrial strength cat-nip. One whole kilogram of the stuff. A kilo of cat-nip delivered within two hours! Unless you’re fighting a fucking tiger in your box-room, who the hell needs that? Nevertheless, we persevered and placed an order full of Slimming World friendly things – the usual Haagen Daaz, Goodfellas pizza and bags of Skittles. Look, we had to spend thirty quid, and I wasn’t going to spend it on bloody quinoa. I bet Mags is sucking on a Bensons and Hedges quite furiously with the thought but you know, I’ve got to let my (apparently Geography-teacher-esque) hair down.

What followed was a tense 80 minutes where we watched, in real-time, our order being picked from somewhere on an industrial estate in Gateshead – all terribly exciting. When the screen updated to show ‘MARK’ had picked up our order and was beetling up the A1 to our house, well, we were agog. It’s a bloody miracle, technology. We had it on the big TV in our living room like the shittest, cheapest version of 24 you can imagine. The whole process fell down at the end though, because the driver turned onto our street and spent five minutes trying to find our house. I’ll give you a clue, mate – it’s the only one that’s not attached to any others, plus we were flashing the lights from green to red whenever he backed his van out of sight. The groceries were all nicely chilled and the ice-cream was spot-on. It took eighty eight minutes from beginning to end, and that includes 5 minutes of the driver being unable to find the only house in the street to be named after a sexual consequence.

Would I recommend it? Yes. Amazon Prime is amazing, anyway, if you’re a big Amazon shopper. Yes it costs £79 a year but you get plenty of perks with it. Plus, you can always sign up for a trial and then cancel. But don’t forget to actually cancel. Otherwise you’ll be one of those turds who complain about getting money taken out of your bank account for something you’ve asked for. This two hour thing is dangerous for Paul and I though – we already dish out way too much of our monthly pink-pound disposable income to Amazon – I can’t help feeling that eventually I’m going to be paying them my wages direct and they’ll be sending a box van of goodies every month, probably branded Amazon Instant, with a picture of a smiling man sucking the pound coins from my pocket on the side. Ah well. If you did want to try it, you can do so here.

 

 

I still can’t believe it. I’m easily impressed, but jesus, Amazon stuff delivered within two hours for nowt. I remember ordering pornography online back when we first got the internet and actually taking time off from school just to sit by the letterbox for about two weeks in case my father accidentally opened my post and wondered who the hell had sent him RUGBY CUM BATH 2: SCRUM, BUM AND ORAL FUN on DVD. I might have made that title up but you get the drift. I feel I should hasten to say that my parents weren’t lax when it came to supervising my internet security…I was just better at it. Honestly, you parents out there who think the kids can’t access what they want on the internet, you’re so wrong.

Finally, Paul, being a sod and knowing I didn’t have the iPad with me on my commute into work on Friday, started streaming Enya’s new album through the car speakers. Yes, I could have turned it off, but then I have to listen to myself swearing at people and I shame myself, so I left it on. Jesus, how does she do it? It’s like she records one song and then changes the key, layers it on top of another song, and plays it backwards. She’s the aural equivalent of a malfunctioning self-checkout. An ex of mine used to be absolutely obsessed with her, almost to the point of being unable to come without me whispering LET THE ORINOCO FLOW in his ear as we made love. I say made love, he was a means to an end, so let’s not romanticise it too much. Anyway, I spent most evenings at the age of seventeen being forced to smile politely as he showed me the Irish tinker caterwauling her way through videos that looked like something even a gap-yah student would deem too pretentious. Christ it’s no wonder I’m so mentally fragile.

Let’s do the chicken coconut curry. I actually typed cocknut curry there. I can’t decide whether that actually might look better.

low syn chicken coconut curry

to make chicken coconut curry, you’ll need:

and to make chicken coconut curry, you should:

  • well, hazard a bloody guess
  • no? chuck it all in the slow cooker, cook for six to seven hours, serve with rice

Serves four. Looks worse than it tastes. I hate slow cookers!

J

slow cooker: colourful mash

Please stop prefixing all of your sentences with the word ‘well’, people. No, come on. It makes it sound like everyone has been holding their breath waiting for the revelation that you’ve put the cat out or spent the afternoon with your feet up having a cheeky glass of Bellabrusco. It’s not needed.

Only a quick post tonight because a) we have ironing to do and b) my ear hurts. Really hurts. Clearly this is my punishment for having a bag of Revels at the drive-in cinema yesterday, but it was either that or a hotdog served up with a side of phlegm from the hairy lass on the food-stall, so I think I made the right choice. The drive-in itself was really quite fun too – not least because I spend most of a cinema trip in some discomfort from holding in a fart, whereas in my own car I could trump to my heart’s content and the people either side of us could do nothing about it other than wind their windows up and gag into their airbag. Inside Out was a bit of a bust mind, but that could be more to do with the fact we were watching it from a distance through the pouring rain. I felt like a peeping tom. I’d still recommend the experience, though.

Tonight’s meal is mash done in a slow cooker. Whilst trying desperately to find a recipe that didn’t involve pulled this or shredded that, I discovered you could do mash in the slow cooker. Do you need to? I’m not sure. But it does look pretty.

colourful mash

Can I just say, you have no idea how much work goes into using mirrored bowls and not accidentally reflecting my knob into the pictures.

to make slow cooker colourful mash, you’ll need:

  • however many potatoes you normally use for your mash
  • one red pepper
  • one yellow pepper
  • bunch of spring onions
  • handful of jalapeños
  • 50ml of chicken or vegetable stock – add more if you have ‘dry’ potatoes – just keep an eye on them and make sure they don’t boil dry
  • 30g of hard goats cheese (optional) (HEA)
  • splash of milk
  • salt and pepper

to make slow cooker colourful mash, you should:

  • chop up your potatoes into manageable chunks and drop into the slow cooker
  • chop up the peppers, onion and jalapeno into nice square chunks and place on the top
  • pour on the stock
  • cook on low for three hours
  • mash up in the pan – don’t aim for super-smooth, you want it looking like a bowl of GINO O GINO GINELLI TUTTI FRUTTI ICE CREAM ABBONDANZA 
  • grate in the cheese and add enough milk to loosen it
  • dunno, serve this with sausages or something, at least the kids will eat it

In fact, let me just leave this here:

Actually, it’s genuinely really good – comfort food! You could add bacon too, if you were feeling like a proper decadent slut.

J

slow cooker: sticky fruity pulled pork burger

Have to be quick tonight, as we’re going out to a drive-in to watch Inside Out. I’m not going to lie, it’ll be unusual for Paul and I to be parked by the seafront at night without a lorry driver poking his knob through the passenger side window, but we’ll give it a go. I’m kidding, we don’t do that. We found a deal for said drive-in on LivingSocial and thought, well why not. We wanted to see Grease but apparently the good people in South Shields beat us to it, which is surprising as I genuinely didn’t think you could drive a car with webbed fingers.

My facebook woes continue – I’ve just been deleted from the Newcastle ‘Pick Up My Tat’ (swapping) page for pointing out that someone’s light-up, flashing, disco headboard is one of the tackiest things I’ve ever seen. Someone with a name that sounds like a company that manufactures t-shirts for a market stall (Demi-Marie?) kicked off, said I had no right ‘dissing her bed’ and blocked me. You can just imagine how devastated I am.

Seriously mind, who orders a bed with a flashing headboard? Humans do two things in bed – sleep and shag. Neither of those activities are helped by a bed that looks like the world’s shittest nightclub. Either you’re going to be kept awake by a bed that resembles the back of a lorry making a three-point-turn on a country lane or you’re going to be held off your vinegar strokes by a seizure. 

Let’s quickly discuss that John Lewis advert, shall we? This one?

Yeah yeah. I’m sure your facebook walls have been awash with emoticons of crying faces and people posting statuses like ‘OMG!!!Q1 TEURS STREEMING DOWN MY ARSE SO SAD’ and the noise of thousands upon thousands of mooing cattle trying to outdo themselves with sentimental guff and tearful reactions. Well honestly. Have a Mars Bar and man the fuck up. I don’t understand the fuss and frothing over the various John Lewis adverts, truly I don’t, and I’m not just saying that to be wicked-cool. They’re pretty to look at, yes, but so is a rainbow, and that doesn’t mawkishly yank on my heartstrings like a coked up campanologist. This advert, featuring a dirty old bugger sitting on the moon lamenting his bail conditions and spying on a wee lass in her pyjamas…well, it doesn’t scream Christmas, does it? Aside from that bit where Alexis and Alexander sit down in their Farrow & Ball coated dining room for a split-second of sprout-eating before letting their child get back to hurling paper out of the window, it’s about as Christmassy as an Easter egg. And that bloody song – is there a piece of software that takes any decent piece of music and runs it through a filter so it sounds like the dying gasp of a sparrow? Pfft. 

Mind, I’m a massive hypocrite, because I love the Sainsbury’s Christmas advert. I do! But there is a giant cat in it, so you know, I can be excused. I laugh at the sentiment though – I can tell you now that if we had a house fire, some of our neighbours wouldn’t be coming around with plates of food and beaming faces. No, we’d get them traipsing across our lawn moaning that there was ash blowing on their washing and could we please do something about the smoke because poor Colin’s asthmatic and he’s two puffs from running out of Ventolin. 

Anyway, tonight’s recipes makes enough for eight. I know we said we’d try and stay away from pulled pork, but well, we had to do it once, and put into burgers…well, it’s amazing.  Plus, if you have any meat left over, you can cook it down with pasta and tomatoes and make a very quick lunch. So there.

FRUITY BUNS

Come on, admit it. You want to push your face into that and shake it all about. Before anyone asks, the chips are from our perfect roasties recipe, found here.

to make fruity pulled pork burgers, you’ll need:

to make fruity pulled pork burgers, you should:

  • mince your garlic, chop your onion, tip everything bar the coleslaw and bun into a slow cooker and cook for nine hours on low
  • remove the pork, put on a plate and pull apart with two forks
  • tip the sauce into a frying pan and heat it on high to reduce it right down
  • tip in the pork and stir, getting everything nice and sticky and thick
  • serve!

The breadbun is your HEB – if you have two, don’t forget to syn the extra bun.

Any leftover pork can be turned into this:

IMG_2238

Just make a sauce of tomatoes, chopped artichoke, onion and garlic and add the meat in. Heat through and serve with pasta! 

DONE.

J

slow cooker: cheeseburger soup (really)

I’m in a bit of a huff, so if you’re old-fashioned about swearing, skip to the recipe. Swearing follows.

Yes, cheeseburger soup. I’m putting this up on here as a rare example of when our food doesn’t look very good! As it was bubbling away in the slow cooker all I could think was that it looked like someone had already eaten it, half-digested it and then brought it back up. It looks vile. But, just to be contrary, it tasted pretty good. So: perhaps give it a go.

Can we talk about this stupid voice that young ladies seem to have decided is just right-and-dandy for this modern world? I know it’s been discussed to death but it drives me so far up the wall I have to stop and fill up at Vertical Petrol on the way. I’ll give you an example. Tonight in Tesco I was in that unhappy situation where everywhere I went, the same shopper and her melt of a boyfriend went. I had to buy peas, there she was, I had to buy KY jelly, there she was again, speaking like thiiiiiiiiisssss and draaaaaawing out raaaaaandaaaam syllaaaaables for god knows why. I just can’t bear it. Things came to a head, as they so often do, in the reduced vegetables bit, where she picked up every fucking item and croaked what she thought was a witty rejoinder to everything – ‘OMG who even (EVAN) needs a baaaaaaay-bee sweet potaaaaahto‘ ‘OMG look at these taaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaangerines they’re like 8p‘ ‘jeeeeesus what’s a squaaash LOL’ (and she SAID LOL) – to which I threw down the peas that had been turning into puree in my hands and stalked off with a loud OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE.

I know, not big nor clever, and probably made me look like an arse on reflection, but I think I’d genuinely rather have my ears pissed in by a horse than have to deal with that. Not everything needs schtick. Why do people pretend so? You’re from Kingston Park lover, not Sweet Valley fucking High. It did cross my mind that her cotton-bud shaped boyfriend might have caught up with me to rough me up in the yoghurt aisle but frankly he looked the sort who couldn’t direct a shit into a toilet bowl, so my fears were groundless.

To be honest, I was just in a huff because yet again it took me an interminable amount of time getting home for the third night in a row. At least tonight I got a bit of satisfaction from sending some douchebag in an Audi down onto the Central Motorway rather than letting him cut in at the lights. I was late yesterday due to someone breaking down right in front of me and blocking the way (fair enough, not like I could help, I know less about mechanics than I do about the female orgasm) and I was late getting home on Monday due to being caught up in a protest by our local taxi drivers. They had decided to go on a ‘go-slow’ protest of driving their cars very carefully around Newcastle, blocking the roads and delaying people in protest of Newcastle City Council scrapping the ‘knowledge’ test that’s usually mandatory for taxi drivers up here. I hadn’t realised anything was different with cars going around Newcastle at 3mph until I heard Carol on Look North explain it whilst I scraped yesterday’s dinner out of the slow cooker. They’ve got a point, though. I hate taxis at the best of time because I like driving and don’t enjoy strained conversation about football and tits, but I can tolerate them if the driver is decent and they know where they’re going. But, more often than not, they don’t – and it’s not like I live in some far-off utopia, I’m just off the A1. I recently had a taxi driver who not only wanted me to instruct him, he also made me sit in the front because he was a ‘bit muff and jeff’. I almost asked if he didn’t just want to go the whole hog and have us switch seats and for me to drive him home, bit was dark and there are a lot of country fields that I could be rolled into a carpet and dumped into, so I didn’t.

There was a taxi driver in Orlando who comes to mind – he took us from Disney to Orlando International Airport. All very pleasant, bar for the fact he was a) off his face and b) on the game. He kept turning around to talk to us, letting his car veer across the road whilst he did so, and went from gentle conversation about Cher to offering us hardcore gay sex and free crystal meth. You don’t get that offer with Blueline Taxis. I remember him tossing us a cigar tube and telling us to take a sniff, which naively I did, before realising it was weed, which pretty much guaranteed me getting fingered for drugs by a swarthy security guard later at the airport. Ah fun times. He did tell us he was going to take his mother to see Cher before she died (his mother, not Cher, I♫ BE-LEE-IEVE ♫ she died many years ago and is just a corpse on strings now) (ah that’s mean, I like Cher)…I wonder if he ever got there. Probably not. 

I’d love to be a taxi driver, although I reckon most of my passengers would be putting in claims for tinnitus because I’m always shouting and bawling away inside my car. It’s stress relief. I can talk to people quite freely when I’m in control of the situation so the social side of things would be fine – essentially if they ever started a sentence with ‘I’M NOT RACIST BUT‘ I could just speed round a corner, open their door and tumble them out under a passing lorry. I’d struggle with people who smell like sour milk or those people who put out their cigarette and stick the remainder back in the packet because you have no idea how bad that makes you smell, but generally, I’d be good.  

I’d definitely be good. ANYWAY look, The Apprentice is on soon and I’m still hooked. So here’s the recipe, which serves 6:

cheeseburger soup

to make cheeseburger soup you will need:

to make cheeseburger soup you will need to:

  • heat a large saucepan over a medium-high heat and cook the onions and mince until no pink remains
  • add the all of the ingredients except for the milk and cheese into the slow cooker and cook over a low heat for six hours
  • when cooked, add the milk and cheese to the slow cooker and stir well to combine – allow to cook for another five minutes or so
  • serve – reassure your guests that this isn’t vomit and enjoy! Decorate with a few bits of cheese, a couple of chunks of carrot maybe…