Author Archives: chubbycubs

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July 29, 2015

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chinese, fakeaways, mince, noodles, poultry, recipe card, syn free, thai

thai basil turkey mince with glass noodles

Apologies for the lack of entries, but I did warn you all that the next few weeks are going to be a bit light on content as I have various men coming up my back passage to wield their tools and suck air through their teeth. Pfft, I wish it was that exciting, it really isn’t. I had a thirty minute conversation with a locksmith earlier in the week where I swear he said the same sentence eighty-seven times over. There’s only so much enthusiastic nodding and ‘oh never’ one can muster before giving up. The bones in my neck sound like a cement mixer turning over.

You’ll be glad and delighted to know that we did indeed return to Sofa Hell on Sunday and managed to haggle a cool £700 off the price of our sofa. Paul refuses to haggle – he always pays the first price they say, regardless of how obviously overpriced their initial offer is, and even then I always have to stop him handing over an extra ten percent as a tip or a ‘bit extra for their trouble’. I have no problem tipping but he’d put £2 into a £1 parking meter if you’d let him. I, on the other hand, am entirely unabashed when it comes to haggling and I have no shame in trying my luck.

That said, I actually didn’t think we were going to succeed on the old haggling front as the lady serving us seemed exceptionally strict – she had the air of someone who’d cackle maniacally if she hit a child with her car – but shy bairns get nowt, and after an hour of ‘I’ll go upstairs and talk to my manager’ (and then glowering at us over the railings) we got her down by £700. I tried to crack a joke when she mentioned ‘male and female connections’ (regarding the way our modular sofa fits together) – I said ‘OOOH THERE’S NONE OF THAT IN OUR HOUSE’ but she just nodded primly and disappeared in a cloud of Elnett. Just before I signed the contract I asked if she could throw in one of the show-cushions and her lips went so thin her entire mouth disappeared. Ah well.

Of course, being Britain, my sofa is due to arrive in November 2027, so that’s something to look forward to. The cats are already sharpening their claws in anticipation. I also haggled £150 off the cost of our new carpet which is so thick and luxurious that we’ll probably lose a cat or two. That haggling was so much easier – he gave a price, I gave a price, he accepted. No fuss, and I didn’t even need to chuck in a ‘persuading’ handjob. Everyone’s a winner!

One thing I wanted to touch on before I post the recipe – this blog isn’t meant to be a cutesy-poo diet blog full of hearts and flowers and false, insincere guff and inspirational quotes. That isn’t our style and it never will be – one thing I’ve found whilst dieting is that there is an absolute rash of these type of blogs out there – some very successful, and all the very best of luck to people who go down that route. I’m not sincere enough for it. No, twochubbycubs is meant to be an honest look at dieting, with decent food made with good ingredients. We started out just posting recipes but as our readership has grown, most of you tell us you like all the piss and vinegar that comes before the recipe, hence that side of things has extended. Plus I’m a vainglorious bastard who likes writing about himself. This ethos extends to our Facebook and Twitter accounts. We welcome all, but please, if you’re sensitive to a bit of ribald humour or tasteless comments, then exercise caution, because that’s all our group is full of – we have a laugh and don’t things too seriously. Laugh yourself slim, that’s our motto.

Right, that’s better. As we’re having to cook quickly at the moment, you’ll notice a slight increase of ‘quick dinners’, and it doesn’t get any quicker than this basil and turkey mince, which I hastily cribbed from a Nigella Lawson recipe. Oddly, it didn’t contain the usual eight kilos of butter that most of her recipes require, though I did have to keep deliberately pushing my tits into shot as I cooked. Oh Nigella.

thai basi

to make thai basil turkey mince

  • three cloves of garlic
  • a thumb sized piece of ginger
  • 500g of turkey mince (we buy ours from Tesco)
  • 60g of basil leaves
  • one red chilli
  • one decent sized onion
  • two tablespoons of fish sauce
  • chinese vermicelli noodles (also known as glass noodles, but you can use any dried noodles)

then you should:

  • finely chop the onion and fry it off in a little oil or some Frylight
  • get your little mincer ready – he’ll need to get you a microplane grater out of the dishwasher so you can mince your garlic cloves and ginger into a nice paste
  • yep – it’s time for my usual BUY A BLOODY MICROPLANE GRATER moment – look, seriously, chopping up garlic and ginger is a faff and fart on. Buy one of these bad-boys and you’ll be done in no time at all, plus they’re dirt cheap and you can grate lemon rind and parmesan cheese on it and make things go that bit further. It’s probably the tool we use the most in the kitchen. You can pick one up on sale for less than £9 here!
  • cut your chilli up very finely and wash your hands – don’t do what I did and absent-mindedly scratch your balls (or, ladies, if I may put this delicately, your grot-slot), because it’ll hurt like buggery;
  • chuck the chilli, garlic and chilli in with the onions and cook for a couple of minutes
  • boil a pan of water and cook off your noodles and set aside whilst everything is cooking – our glass noodles only take four minutes to soften
  • pop the turkey mince in and whack the heat up a bit to fry it off, breaking it up with a wooden spoon as you go, and drop in a couple of tablespoons of fish sauce whilst it cooks
  • finally, finely chop up your basil and once the turkey is cooked, stir it through
  • serve hot on a bed of noodles and enjoy!

So there you go – it’s a quick, tasty, flavourful dinner which is syn free!

Yum.

J

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July 25, 2015

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bacon, breast, lunch, pork, poultry, recipe card, salad, syn free

chicken chopped salad – and buying a bloody sofa

They say that moving house is one of the most stressful things a couple can do – well, that’s bullshit. Listen, we moved the entire contents of our flat to our new home in a Citreon C2. You’ve never lived until you’ve hurtled down the A1 with the threat of a chest of drawers tumbling off the roof of the car and littering the road with boxer shorts and buttplugs. 

No, moving house was easy. It’s decorating that’s really turning my teeth to dust as I grind them with impatience and anger. Today Paul and I went sofa shopping, see, and quite genuinely I’d rather spend the afternoon having various items of kitchenware roughly inserted into my anus in a display window in House of Fraser rather than repeat it. It was just awful, with each shop bringing a fresh horror.

We made the mistake of starting in DFS, where we were immediately accosted by someone fresh out of nappies and with more product in his hair than there is on our freshly plastered ceilings. I reckon he took longer on his hair that morning than I’ve spent cumulatively on mine my entire life. And I used to have long, luscious hair, like a fruity Meat Loaf. His opening gambit was ‘So are you thinking of buying a sofa?’. I resisted the urge to throw my hand to my mouth in mock surprise and go ‘Heavens no, I’ve come to have the car’s tyres realigned and my brake fluid changed, how DID I end up in here?’.

I can’t bear nonsense questions like that (and I’m never rude to shopworkers, mind, they’re just doing what they’re told) – I’m hardly going to be renting a sofa for a weekend, am I? We shuffled around the store until his Lynx Africa got too much for my sensitive nose and we bid him goodbye, promising to ‘come back later’. Honestly there’s more chance of Princess Diana ‘coming back later’ than me.

Next was Barker and Stonehouse, which is pretty much the antithesis of DFS in terms of ‘style’ but I found it ghastly, not least because I immediately felt incredibly out of place in my George jeans and painting hoodie. There are some beautiful pieces of furniture to be had, but it all felt a little bit overpriced, and the only assistance offered amounted to nothing more than such an angry glare from an bumptious oil-slick of a man that I actually thought I’d trod muck in on my shoes. Perhaps he was looking disdainfully at our B&M carrier bag full of hot chocolates, but what can I say, I like a bargain. I got a quick snipe in as I left that ‘perhaps if I was opening an upper-class brothel, I’d consider it’, but it fell a little flat.

The next shop was some ‘Sofa Warehouse’ or suchlike – the only thing I remember about it was that, when I enquired about leather sofas, he immediately showed us to this god-awful brown number that looked like the first turd after a bout of severe constipation…and had cupholders in it. I’m sorry but no, cupholders in a sofa is strictly the domain of people who put tomato ketchup on everything they eat and who breathe loudly through their mouth. I mean honestly, I don’t even have a tattoo of a loved one’s name in copperplate on my neck. I bet the same people who leave comments like ‘RESIPEE PLZ K THX HUN’ under my food pictures have cupholders. Is it so difficult to strain forward and pop your can of Monster down on a coffee table? We made our excuses there and then.

And so it went on. We visited almost ten different places and each one was absolutely rammed full of awful shapes, awful textures, awful colours and awful people. There was one settee that looked like it had been stitched together by Stevie Wonder at gunpoint – about eighty different textures and patterns all stretched horrendously over some cheap metal legs. It looked like a corrupted MPEG of a colonoscopy. Who buys stuff like that, seriously? I wouldn’t burn that in my garden.

We did eventually find a settee we like, but then being tight-arsed Geordies, we dashed home to see if we could find it cheaper online and via Quidco, which we’ve dutifully done, but no – it’s cheaper in store! So that means tomorrow we’re going to go back and haggle like we’ve never done before. The sales assistant looked hard-faced (although it was hard to tell under her fifteen inches of Max Factor – she sneezed at one point and I swear half her cheek fell onto her blazer) but I reckon I’ll be able to get £200 off the asking price and free delivery. That’s my goal.

Tell you what though, you couldn’t pay me to deal with the general public – we witnessed some appalling behaviour from families with children today, including one set of parents who let their litter tip a fucking settee over and ignored the somewhat plaintive cries of the poor assistant who clearly knew that a call to a claims solicitors was mere moments away. You also get arseholes coming in like me who fake-smile at you, take a free cup of coffee and then spend thirty minutes clumsily pawing their way through the fabric selection book before hurtling home to order it online and put a hammer in the nail of the coffin of your job security. In my defence: I’m always super-polite and I’m never, ever rude. Plus anyway, I’m going back tomorrow so she’ll be getting her commission.

Christ though, it’ll be ten weeks before delivery. Ten weeks! What are they doing, pulling it with their hair from Penzance? Bah! That leaves nearly no time at all for the cats to completely destroy it before Christmas comes and we have to host family. 

Anyway. That was my day. When we came back, we threw together whatever shite we could find in the fridge and the cupboard and fashioned together a ‘chicken chopped salad’ of sorts, made up of various bits of nonsense. It was tasty, but does it require a recipe? I’m not sure. I’ll give you a picture though, so be happy.

chicken chopped salad

our chicken chopped salad contains:

  • healthy extra amount of light mozzarella (65g each)
  • two chicken breasts, cooked on the grill and coated in lime juie
  • four boiled eggs, sliced
  • diced crunchy iceberg lettuce
  • two rashers of bacon which Paul dutifully turned into shoe-leather on the grill
  • sliced beef tomatoes
  • tin of black eyed beans
  • tin of sweetcorn
  • sliced red cabbage

You could make this veggie friendly by omitting the chicken and bacon and replacing it with peppers, mushrooms, sofa cushions, horse farts, anything. I don’t often cover salads but it did make for a nice photo and a quick dinner, so here we are. Enjoy! 

Oh dressing: we just mixed some fat free yoghurt with mint from the garden. Easy!

J

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July 23, 2015

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beef, chinese, diced beef, fakeaways, low syn, noodles, recipe card, rice, steak

beef in a honey and black pepper sauce

Remember me twittering on about our fancy lights? We’ve went and bought a new gadget – it’s a NEST smoke alarm. We need a new smoke alarm – we’ve been using our old one to prop the dishwasher up, and given the amount of vodka and aftershave in our house, it’s too risky not to have a working system. Now, this isn’t just a smoke alarm. It’s fancy. Real fancy. Our house is becoming the gadget city we always wanted, see. This smoke alarm hooks into my WiFi and will alert me if the batteries are low or if it detects smoke. And how does it do this? IT BLOODY WELL TALKS. Admittedly it’s in a plummy ‘don’t be scared, but you’re about to be cremated’ voice, whereas if I’m about to die, I want a fucking air-raid siren, not Joanna Lumley whispering me to the grave. If I’m honest, we only bought it because it a) works with our thermostat (it’ll thoughtfully turn the boiler off if it’s pumping out more poisonous smoke than the shelter outside a Mecca Bingo at the interlude) and b) it glows. It will momentarily glow green when you shut all the lights off so you know it works. It’ll glow red if you’re on fire. It’ll even glow white for 20 seconds in the hallway if you get up for a piss, which is handy if you’re like us and your bathroom lights are so intense that your helmet blisters as you urinate. 

Speaking of bright, they say you should always look on the bright side of life. I generally do. My days aren’t often filled with wonder and drama but they’re always littered with tiny moments of joy or laughter, and that’s a nice way to live. For example, I take great solace in, every day at one attosecond past five’o’clock, I hurtle out of my work office, straight to my car on the 11th floor of the car-park, throw ‘The Final Countdown’ onto Spotify and hurtle down the ramps as fast I can so that as my car pulls out of the car-park, ‘IT’S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN’ plays. There’s just enough time to do it as long as no-one gets in my way. That said, more often than enough, I’ll get stuck behind someone who’s as thick as a submarine door and is trying to operate the barrier by inserting her Boots Advantage card and calling for help on a box of Lillets. But it’s still good fun – a simple pleasure, but a pleasure none the less. I mean, that happiness normally dissipates a second later as I’m stuck behind some numpty in a BMW who thinks the indicator stalks are somewhere to rest her ankles when she’s got a client in the back-seat.

The reason I mentioned happiness is because I actually got myself upset earlier – and you need to realise, I have a heart of solid black granite. The only time I get upset is when Paul eats more than half of the Ben and Jerry’s. GOD-DAMN IT. No, I was reading an article on the BBC News (link) about a young Iraqi gay lad who was forced to leave his country simply because he was gay. His own dad told him that he would be happy for ISIS to chuck him off a tall building to his death, or burn him alive, simply because of his biological leanings. I couldn’t comprehend it. Men are being sent into the desert with their arseholes glued shut so that they die an incredibly painful death just because they like a bit of cock. All very distressing and we shouldn’t linger on the details.

What it did make me think though was how bloody lucky I am / we are to live in a country where being gay just isn’t a problem. Not really, not on the scale it once was. The fact that I can live with my husband in the middle of Menopauseville, Northumberland and no-one really bats an eye is testament to how far we’ve come. My nana, god bless her, told all the old wrinklies at the WI about my wedding and challenged anyone who had a problem with it. She literally took all comments on her whiskery chin. I can’t personally remember the last time I experienced any sort of homophobia.

Sure, there’s the well-meant but incredibly offensive comments – I was told once by a colleague that ‘my religion doesn’t agree with gays, but don’t worry, I can tolerate you’ – like I was a bad smell, or an ingrown toenail. I resisted the urge to snip back that I don’t agree with grown men in frocks putting their holy willies into little boy’s bottoms, but what’s the use. You also get a lot of people asking ‘how it works’, like there is a hidden user guide (a gayde?) that explains all the mechanics (when he pushes, so do you), but that’s fair enough. I don’t mind answering questions as long as you’re comfortable with vivid descriptions and use of the term santorum. It’s a given now that if I’m filling out a form, I’ll be able to choose ‘Civil Partnered’ or ‘Married’ as opposed to ‘Living with Partner’, which was simply a euphemism for being a chutney-ferret.

Actually, the most devastating thing about filling out forms these days is that I’ve gone up an age-bracket – I now fall into the 30-34 category. Sniff. Might as well order myself some piss-knickers now. Sigh.

iPad running slowly now, clearly don’t feel with my sass. So let me chuck you a recipe like the decadent bitch that I am.

beef in honey and black pepper sauce

you’ll need these (serves two fatties):

  • 2 tbsp honey (5 syns)
  • 3 tbsp soy sauce
  • 1 tbsp fish sauce
  • 2 tbsp mirin
  • 1 tsp coarsely ground black pepper
  • 600g dried noodles
  • 1 onion, finely chopped
  • 400g diced beef
  • 1 broccoli, cut into florets
  • half a cabbage head, chopped

 

and you’ll need to do this

  • soak/cook the noodles according to the instructions
  • put a pan of water on and boil the broccoli and cabbage for about 5 minutes, drain and set aside.
  • honey,  soy sauce, fish sauce, mirin and black pepper gets whisked together next, and set aside
  • into a pan goes a little oil or Frylight and heat until it starts to smoke
  • next, add the onion and reduce the heat immediately to medium-high
  • cook for about a minute
  • throw in the beef and cook it however you like it (we always prefer a bit of pink meat…)
  • empty the pan of the beef and onion and set aside
  • return the pan to the heat
  • final stage now – add the sauce mixture to the pan and thicken into a syrup
  • add the broccoli and cabbage to the pan, and stir
  • chuck in the noodles and the beef to the pan and mix well
  • enjoy!

Mmmm!

J

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July 21, 2015

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recipe card

when will we share precious moments? more Slimming World shenanigans

Evening all!

Just a quick post to explain where we are – we’re currently having extensive work done to Chubby Towers (you can sum it all up by saying we’re chucking out everything we own and buying new stuff) – we’re also having all our walls painted, new carpets throughout, plastering, new central heating, new doors – all sorts of shite that I’m just too much of a Mary to do myself. It’s long overdue – we’ve been saving up to make the house look less like somewhere you’d go for an assisted suicide for a long, long time. Now we’re flush, we’re having it all done out.

What this means is that a lot of our belongings are packed away in boxes, including a lot of our kitchen pieces, just while all the dust and paint and gruff manly talk is flying around. This in turn makes writing the blog a bit difficult – our computer has gone to the garage (replaced with a shiny Mac which I’m not allowed to use yet) – and it’s quite difficult to type a long entry out on an iPad. So – I’m still going to be updating for the next couple of weeks, but it’ll be shorter and probably just me wobbling my lips about stuff that has vexed me! It’ll be worth it though. 

So yes! We’re still going to be around – you’ll see more of us on our facebook/twitter accounts and plenty of Slimming World recipes:

  • twitter: @twochubbycubs
  • Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/twochubbycubs
  • Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/588599111240512/

Enjoy!

J

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July 19, 2015

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beef, beef mince, budget, fakeaways, italian, pasta, recipe card, syn free

baked spaghetti bolognese pie

Christ almighty. We’ve had the plasterers in (it’s like having the painters in, only I’m not getting all hysterical and crying into a box of Milk Tray) (I’m kidding, jeez) and the house is an absolute and utter bomb-site. He’s expertly taken all of the Artex off the ceiling and made it smoother than a silk worm’s diarrheah. Which is apt, given it’s an awful brown colour. However, the dust. Good LORD the dust. It’s literally everywhere imaginable. We’ve had the Dyson out all day – which is a feat in itself, given it’s one of those fancy digital cordless ones that powers down after twenty minutes – but I’m still finding pockets of orange dust everywhere. I swear I farted on the sofa earlier and it looked like a little firework going off behind me. Awful.

Just awful. Speaking of farts (as you know it’s one of our favourite topics), I need to confess something dreadful. See we had those chicken gyros on Friday night and all day yesterday, our farts smelt like a tramp’s sock boiled in death itself. They were dreadful – intensely potent and incredibly wide-ranging. Of course, being us, this was just hilarious, and we were farting and pooting and trumpeting all the way around Tesco, beside ourselves with laughter and merriment.

But then, when we got to IKEA, I topped them all. We were there to look at possible storage solutions for our fitted wardrobe (oh the decadence) when I had a faint rumbling in my nethers. I say a faint rumbling, it was like someone testing a speedboat engine. So, sensing an opportunity for mischief, I ducked around a corner, opened one of the doors on the showroom wardrobe, and let out a guff. It was tiny, like I’d startled a duck, but I knew it would be concentrated. I hastily shut the door and called Paul over, on the pretence that I wanted him to check what type of hinge it was on the bottom of the door. He came lumbering over in his own special way, knelt down and opened the door, only to be hit full in the face with the contained fart. I almost saw the skin on his nose blacken. Honestly, you could see the fugitive zephyr as it bounced around the interior. He immediately turned around and called me a filthy see-you-next-Tuesday and I almost broke my back bent over laughing.

Mind, at least we have fun. We might not have the most exciting lives but we’re always laughing. We came away from IKEA the same way we normally do, with absolutely nothing in our trolley but our pockets bulging with a quarter-tonne of IKEA pencils, ready to be shoved into the same kitchen drawer as the other 323,537 IKEA pencils we’ve stolen. Perhaps we should get a log burner after all, we could keep it going for a good few months on nicked stationery alone!

Because the plasterer was going to be in our house all day, we had to fill up the time ‘out of the house’, so we thought we’d spend a gay few hours tripping around the Metrocentre, which, if you’ve never heard of it, is the North’s answer to an American shopping mall from the nineties. It has everything! Closed clothes shops, closed food quarters, closed gadget shops, a plethora of e-cigarette and mobile phone cover stands AND any amount of imbecilic fuckknuckles walking around getting IN MY BLOODY WAY. I remember when the Metrocentre was worth going to – namely when it had Metroland, where the thrill of going on an indoor rollercoaster totally made-up for the risk of getting inappropriately touched-up behind the ferris wheel. It was a haven for nonces, apparently, though I never experienced that. Must have been my ungainly weight and C&A haircut that put them off.

We did spend half an hour in the Namco Games bit, which is full of those totally rigged but faintly fun arcade machines where you win tickets that you can redeem for lead-covered tat later on. We played a giant version of Monopoly, we did some virtual fishing and, I shit you not, I managed to win a proper licenced Flappy Bird toy from one of those claw machines that usually have all the grip of Jeremy Beadle. I couldn’t quite believe it. We did nip next door to the ‘adults only’ bit where the proper slot machines were but fucking hell, it’s just too depressing watching adults feed money into the slots at 10am in the morning. Nobody wins.

Anyway. This recipe is for a baked spaghetti bolognese pie, but it’s pretty much spaghetti Bolognese served in a different way – we couldn’t get a good picture of the meal when it was on the plate but understand that the cheesy spaghetti acts as a ‘crust’ to hold the meat in. Haha, meat.

baked spaghetti pie

to make baked spaghetti bolognese pie, you’ll need:

  • 500g lean beef mince
  • one onion, chopped
  • 8 tbsp tomato puree
  • 1 tin of chopped tomatoes
  • 1 tsp oregano
  • 1 tsp basil, chopped
  • ¼ tsp pepper
  • 170g spaghetti
  • 2 eggs
  • 25g grated parmesan (HexA)
  • 340g fat-free cottage cheese
  • 1 tbsp dried parsley
  • 1 reduced-fat mozzarella ball, torn into pieces (HexA)

and once you’ve got all that, you should:

  • preheat the oven to 180°C
  • cook the spaghetti according to the instructions, drain and set aside
  • stop your cat from eating any cooled spaghetti
  • on a large frying pan gently sweat the onion in a little oil (or Frylight) until softened
  • add the mince and cook until browned
  • add the chopped tomatoes, tomato puree, oregano, basil, salt  and pepper and mix well
  • simmer over a low heat for about 10 minutes
  • meanwhile, in a large bowl mix together cooked spaghetti, egg and parmesan
  • press the spaghetti mixture into a non-stick, deep 9″ tin
  • in another bowl whisk together the other egg, cottage cheese and parsley
  • add the cheese mixture to the tin, spreading evenly
  • next, add the meat mixture on top of the cheese; shake the tin gently to even the top out if necessary
  • place in the oven and cook for about twenty minutes
  • scatter the mozzarella onto the top and place under a medium-high grill for a few minutes until bubbling – the sauce that is, not yourself

Easy, right?

J

 

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July 17, 2015

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breast, fakeaways, greek, lunch, poultry, recipe card, salad, savoury snacks, snacks, syn free

gyros and roasted veg

‘ello ‘ello.

No post last night because I was quizzing it again with the rabble – after deciding that ‘Bender and the Jets‘ was a cursed name, we switched it up and called ourselves ‘Puff and Bluster‘. We came mid-table, which wasn’t very nice for the barmaid to clean up. Use a dab of bleach love, it’ll thin it out. The best name of the night goes to ‘Quizlamic State‘ followed by ‘The Mad Twatters‘.

Next week we’ll be ‘Bruce Jenner-talia’ (of course) and then the ‘Menstrual Cycle Display Team’. Apparently calling ourselves ‘I wish this microphone was a big throbbing cock’ isn’t allowed as it would make the Quizmaster blush when he was reading out the scores. He’s a poor sport, not least because he doesn’t get dressed up like the Quizmaster from Sabrina.

Damn, I miss Sabrina. We had a black cat when I was growing up called Salem, who managed to sleep through being on fire. We had a coal fire and it would spit out sparks all the time – one such spark landed in his fur as he dozed in front of the fire, and we only realised what had happened when a flame appeared on his back and the air was thick with the smell of burning cat. We hastily threw a cup of tea (warm) at him, dabbed him out, and he just went back to sleep happy as larry. Not quite as dramatic as the time I threw a packet of cheap cigarette lighters on ‘to see what happened’ – let me tell you, it was like Hiroshima. He went on to live a long, uneventful life save for when he went missing for three months and returned with his hair so matted around his arse that we had to use a set of hair-clippers to get rid of his shitty tagnuts. We threw out the clippers afterwards. Hey it was unending glamour in our household!

Remember me waffling on a while ago that we’re active members of the Reddit Gift Exchange, where you send a random stranger (well not entirely random, they sign up for the service) a themed gift and another random stranger sends you something? It’s like a global secret santa and it’s GREAT fun. Hell, even I’m happy to take part, and I’m tighter than a astronaut’s arsehole. Anyway, this month’s theme was cookbooks, and we sent some nice Thai cookbooks off to a lovely lady down in Dorset and today we came back home to find a nice parcel waiting on the side. I say on the side, the cat had clearly decided the best place for it was on the kitchen floor so he could sleep on it. Which he did.

Turns out not only did we receive a charming Ching Chinese cookbook (her name, not me being all Bernard Manning) and a guide to Mexican food, but also – and I really think this is brilliant – a load of personal recipes that our Gifter had typed out and put in a binder for us! A mix of Scandinavian recipes that they’d found and even better, a collection of their own personal recipes! On top of that, a handwritten note saying how much they loved our blog (oh you!). I genuinely adore it – you all know how cynical I am – someone could give me a bunch of flowers and a cuddle and I’d be thinking is that they were trying to set off my hay-fever and/or bugger me – but this really touched me! IN MY SPECIAL PLACE. Thank you – massively – Jenny and Fox! We’re going to plan a Scandinavian themed week using your recipes as a thanks! 😀

GASP I’m all emotional. Let’s get some bloody dinner down wor pie-holes shall we. We were going to make pizza pies just to continue the theme of trying out what every fucker else is making but after the ‘sumptious’ steak bakes I really can’t be persuaded to try it. Perhaps I’m a little jaundiced by seeing 856 badly-focused photos of the bloody cheesy crusty things littering my facebook feed. Seriously my wall looks like a Google Streetview-tour of a burns unit.

So, Paul’s made gyros and roasted veg!

roastedveg chicken gyros

you’ll need these (makes easily chicken gyros enough for four)…

chicken gyros

  • 1kg diced chicken
  • 3 garlic cloves, crushed
  • 3 tsp white wine vinegar
  • 3 tbsp lemon juice
  • 3 tbsp fat free greek yoghurt
  • 1½ tbsp oregano
  • 1 tsp salt
  • ½ pepper
  • 4 BFree Multi-grain gluten-free wraps (HexB for one)

roasted mediterranean vegetables

  • 800g potatoes, cut into chunks
  • 1 aubergine, sliced and quartered
  • 1 red pepper and 1 orange pepper, deseeded and cut into chunks
  • 1 red onion, cut into chunks
  • 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
  • 1 tsp mixed herbs
  • 4 garlic cloves, finely chopped

tzatziki

  • ½ cucumber
  • 250g fat-free natural yoghurt
  • 1 tsp white wine vinegar
  • 2 tsp lemon juice
  • ½ tsp salt
  • pinch of black pepper

salad

  • 3 tomatoes, diced
  • 1 cucumber, diced
  • 1 red onion, diced
  • handful of mint leaves, chopped

and you’ll need to do this…

  • firstly combine all of the ingredients for the gyros (minus the wraps) into a large bowl
  • cover and leave to marinate for at least two hours
  • next, prepare the tzatziki – cut the cucumber in half lengthways and scoop out the seeds
  • grate the flesh into a bowl and discard the skin
  • add the rest of the ingredients and leave to rest for at least twenty minutes
  • next, prepare the mediterranean vegetables by mixing together all of the ingredients
  • spread out onto a single layer in a roasting tray, spray with a bit of oil and place in the oven at 190 degrees for around forty-five minutes
  • whilst that’s cooking, mix together the salad ingredients and set aside
  • when you’re ready, spread out the chicken onto a single layer and cook under a medium-high grill until well cooked, turning regularly
  • finally, assemble your gyros by spreading the chicken, tzatziki and salad onto a wrap and roll

SEE IT’S THAT EASY.

J

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July 15, 2015

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beef, british, classics, diced beef, fakeaways, fast food restaurants, lunch, recipe card, sandwiches, savoury snacks, snacks, steak, syn free, taster ideas

the steak bake

For most blokes, the idea of having a soaking wet bird angrily thrashing around on their face first thing in the morning would be an entirely wonderful way to wake up. Well, admittedly, we’re not “most blokes” but let me tell you, it’s not all that. Nevertheless, that’s how we started the day, with my cat bringing a bird in through our bedroom window and throwing it against my face. Normally we’re woken very gently by our fancy alarm clock that fades unnatural light into the room like a sunrise but clearly Bowser thought that was far too decadent and we needed a new alternative.

There was a LOT of screaming. I screamed, Paul screamed, the bird was screaming and the cat got such a fright at our apparently ungratefulness that he puffed up into Giant Cat Form, picked up his prey and took off with the bird in his teeth into the living room, leaving a lovely smear of blood across the floor from where it’s wing was hanging off. We spent the next ten minutes trying to remove Bowser from the room and rescue the bird and, after much flapping around (by all of us) and some judicious use of a tea-towel, I slingshotted the poor bugger out of the living room window. He survived for all of about ten seconds before Sola, our other cat, jumped from the roof (we live in a bungalow remember, she’s not THAT good) and tore his head off. In all, we’d gone from sleeping peacefully in our beds to watching a violent murder on our front lawn, with all the screaming and dramatics that entails, within fifteen minutes.

My heart was still racing as I backed the DS3 off the drive.

Of course, the fun didn’t stop there, as when Paul posted a dramatic recollection of the encounter on Facebook, he was immediately set about by someone telling him off for not taking the bird to an animal hospital. Paul was being terribly polite and British about the whole thing but I immediately weighed in on the argument to point out that ‘the Sparrow Ambulance was tied up attending to a coal tit with hurt feelings’ and that I lamented the fact I hadn’t had the foresight to fashion the poor bugger ‘a tiny sling from a spent match and a doll’s shoelace’.

I think we can agree that I won the argument.

Anyway, that’s America week over – what fun! To recap, we covered:

That’s a lot of decent dishes! Give one a try and report back. Our next theme will be budget week – we’re going to try and map out a whole week for around £40/£50, which is half our normal shopping budget for the week. That’ll be in a couple of weeks and I’ll break with tradition by putting a meal planner on here before it starts. You know, because I’m nice like that.

Anyway, tonight’s recipe is interesting and tasty, if you’re a fan of cat-food pressed into a bit of fake-bread. This isn’t one of our own recipes – we’ll gingerly call it a Slimming World classic – but people have been foaming at the gash over these “steak bakes” which tastes “just like the ones from Greggs”. Well, really. The only thing I get from Greggs is overcome with static electricity from all the bustling masses of polyester leisure suits. Remember, I’m from Newcastle – we’ve got more Greggs than we do bus-stops. A romantic day out here is a sausage roll from Greggs and a quick fingering in the cinema. Nevertheless, it’s the new ‘in thing’ amongst all the big groups so you know, I thought we’d take our foot off the gas and relax a little, and let someone else do the thinking. So this isn’t our recipe, no no, but you might enjoy it.

steak bake

Mmm. Appetising. Paul enjoyed it, but it felt like mush in my mouth – like someone had already had a bash at eating it. Look, I’m not fussy about what goes in my mouth (fact: I don’t have a gag reflex, and god knows many have tried to find it), but the meat in this stewing steak had all the structural integrity of a licked stamp. Plus the pattern on the thins reminds me of pitted keratolysis. Did it fill me up? Perhaps, but we served them with new potatoes out of the garden and peas, so I reckon it was probably those that filled me with goodness.

for a steak bake then, you’re going to need:

  • a tin of ASDA stewed steak (syn free, but you can find plenty others that are low in syns)
  • Kingsmill wholemeal thins (one ‘sandwich’ is a HEB)
  • an onion
  • an egg
  • tip: add worcestershire or chilli sauce

and you’ll need to:

  • warm through the delicious looking tin of Whiskas stewed steak
  • add in the chopped onion (cooked if you prefer)
  • spread over the thins
  • press down and secure the edges by pressing with your finger
  • wash the top with a bit of beaten egg
  • cook for around fifteen minutes.

Enjoy. It’s free for one. That’s one thin, not one packet of thins. Or: alternatively, go cook something…healthy. I dunno. I’m not your Master.

J

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July 14, 2015

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bacon, beef, beef mince, burgers, fakeaways, fast food restaurants, low syn, pork, recipe card

the reuben burger and perfect chips

Bah! Off to a great start with having work done – having left work early, powerminced to my car and drove like a loon to get home in time to clean the skidders off the toilet and to file away the cats before the gas-man turned up…he just didn’t bother to turn up. All he had to do was come over, take away our god-awful fireplace, disconnect the gas and bugger off.

But no. No, he turned off his phone and when I called him this morning, he informed me that ‘he was stuck on a big job’. I resisted the urge to tell him to eat more fibre and fuck off, so I told him primly that his services were no longer needed. He’s a fool, because, given we’re naïve and foolish with money, he could have totally taken advantage, told us we needed to demolish the front of the house to take the fire out, and we would have hurled notes of money at him until he disappeared in his little van. Urgh.

It’s only a very quick post tonight of the recipe as we’re starting to move furniture around ahead of our plasterer coming to sandblast the Artex, so I won’t even push my book. BUT PLEASE BUY IT. PLEASE. I know American week has rumbled on a bit, but damn…the food is so good! These Reuben burgers are delicious – just a few different toppings make a world of difference.


reuben burger

reuben burgers – you’ll need:

  • your healthy extra bread bun choice
  • chopped cooked ham
  • two slices of swiss cheese (Leerdammer lighter – two slices is a HEA)
  • lettuce
  • burger sauce (which you can find the recipe for here)
  • sauerkraut (you can leave these off, but why would you)
  • 5% beef mince (500g)
  • pepper, salt

and it’s as easy as this:

  • shape the mince into four decent size burgers
  • mix in some salt and pepper
  • grill until cooked
  • assemble the burger by toasting the bun, smearing the sauce on the bread, adding lettuce, a burger, cheese, a burger, cheese, ham, sauerkraut and the top of the bun.

Easy!

We served ours with chips:

IMG_1782

  • use a decent, ‘wet’ potato, like a Maris Piper
  • don’t use oil if you’re putting them in an actifry, just use worcestershire sauce
  • crumble on an Oxo cube
  • COOK

Heaven! Get an Actifry man, you’ll never look back and you’re a long time dead. What you waiting for? The big one is currently reduced from £250 to £140 on Amazon. Nice.

J

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July 12, 2015

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desserts, fakeaways, fast food restaurants, low syn, naughty, recipe card, snacks, sweet snacks, vegetarian

apple pie and ice-cream

Do you ever get that feeling, deep in your stomach, that you’re going to do something and get a raft of angry-faced people throwing badly-typed obscenities your way? I feel like my face has just been published in the paper next to something obscene and I’m about to have my windows put through?

Why? Because…I’m posting a recipe that HEAVILY involves tweaking. 

TWEAK

I know! Christ. Someone better get me some aftersun because I’m about to get my fingers burnt. 

Our official position on tweaking can be found here (it’s a fun read, I assure you) but to put it succinctly, we don’t class blending veg or fruit up as a bad thing, unless you’re eating substantially more than you would normally. Slimming World will tell you that if you mash a banana up on a bowl, it’s five syns, but if you mash it up in your gob, it’s free. The logic being that you derive more ‘satisfaction’ from putting it in your mouth and whilst that is normally the case for me being a cheerfully homosexual young man, I don’t agree with it here. It’s up to you which side of the debate you fall on and either way is fine – but please, I don’t want anyone telling me off. I know the rules, I’m just flexible.

Tonight’s recipe then is apple pie and ice-cream, which was the most American thing I could think of – and it tastes amazing, genuinely. It’s 5 syns if you believe in tweaking and 13 syns if you don’t, but even then – 13 syns for a good quality dessert is fuck all. It’s better than sobbing into your eighty-fifth Freddo and wishing you were dead. And because I love you, I’ve included a way to knock five syns off the entire thing.

BUT before we get to the good bit, here’s one more extract from my American diary. If you’re enjoying it, and seemingly loads of you are, buy it or recommend it and make me a happy, happy bunny! You’ll find the link here.

Day 12 – See, World?

Seaworld! The last time we visited you we were left unimpressed and cold by your displays of penguin entrapment and subpar rides. Would this visit go the way of the Disney parks and win us over for good? There’s only one way to find out! A super-quick breakfast at McDonalds and a trundle on the best I-Ride trolley ever (singing driver announcing all the stops) and we were standing by that lighthouse, posing for pictures. Bit mean of a passing tourist to call me Shamu like. We decided to upgrade our tickets to the Rapid Queue benefit but it wasn’t really needed once you were in.

Can you guess what the first thing these two roller-coaster nuts went on? Of course! Manta. Several times. We drifted through the proper queue area first to see all the theming that has gone into the area, and it really looks something else. It’s worth wandering through even if you weren’t planning to ride. This would be my first time on a ‘lying-down’ rollercoaster and I was nervous, I’ll admit. Paul, having done Alton Towers, knew what it felt like and reassured me that a) it wouldn’t hurt and b) the supports would be able to handle my considerable mass, so I felt good enough to go on.

Oooh and I’m glad we did. It’s possibly one of the best rollercoasters in Orlando – so incredibly smooth, just the right side of scary-fast and a very different experience. I think we rode it about six times in a row, each time trying a different position – the back is probably the best as it is so much faster, but a young lad next to me upchucked his breakfast as we were going round which put a stop to any further journeys around, at least until my own belly settled down. Anyone else like that? I can’t bear seeing people being sick, especially when it looks almost exactly like the breakfast you just bolted down yourself at the McDonalds over the road? He got a really, really dirty look off me (as in angry, I wasn’t given him the flirt-eye, I’m not a emetophile)  and we wandered down to the bottom of the park.

We were gutted to see Journey to Atlantis shut down for the entire length of our visit – between this, Dudley Do-Right closed due to fire and Splash Mountain closed for annual repair, we were destined never to have a holiday photo of our heaving busoms showing through our cheap wet t-shirts. Sigh. I wouldn’t care but I LOVE water-rides. My mum has always said I was a water-baby. But I think that’s her way of making herself feel better for leaving me in the bath for several hours with nothing more than an electric toaster to play with. Sorry Ma…

Kraken next, of course. One of my favourite rollercoasters, if only for the first drop where it feels as though your belly is going to rise up out of your mouth. We can’t get enough of rollercoasters and plan to do a tour of American Theme Parks for our next holiday. But in the present, we were thrown round, span round and dropped down several times over, all the while screaming and swearing, until we got close to the people taking pictures as that’s ‘Disappointed Face’ time. I’ve mentioned it before – give it a try – when it comes to the bit where the photo is taken, put on your most deadpan, miserable face. It’s almost as fun as walking past people filming their holiday videos and QUIETLY swearing away to your partner, so when they get home and stick the video on, they’ll hear a sole voice muttering away. Heh. We do it at home too, though I got caught out walking past someone and saying ‘I didn’t know Ronseal did tans’ – but her unintelligent comeback was hardly worth a comeback. Anyway…

A day out wouldn’t be complete without an ice-cream, and it’s yet another thing that you can’t get a ‘small’ version of, not that we were complaining as we had developed reverse diabetes since then – if we didn’t have our body weight in sugar during the day we would get the shakes and you’d find us in the toilet trying to melt a Jolly Rancher on the top of a spoon. We headed to the ice-cream parlour and enjoyed a couple of smooth creamy ones, all the while watching this American family – the parents had massive ice-creams, the kids had what looked like mini-milks. That’s a method of parenting that I can get on board with! We fannied about a bit on the soft toy attractions and Paul won me a delightful…dragon. Very Seaworld. Given the look of some of the ‘attraction workers’ mind, I was half-expecting to come away with crabs. This poor dragon was promptly given away to a passing child (not because I’m mean to Paul, but because it was huge and we couldn’t be bothered to carry it around) and I won him a little octopus. We still have him, of course, sat on top of the computer.

Thank heavens for Southwest Airlines and their air-conditioning Sponsorship of Cruelty! Yep, it was time to look at the penguins. And I don’t like it. They’re cute as a pin, but that room seems so small, and whilst I’m not a lentil-eating-sandal-knitting hippy, I don’t think it’s right. We took a couple of cursory pictures and moved on. Am I the only one who doesn’t like dolphins either? They leave me cold, with their dead eyes. I did fancy feeding them, but as you have to pay extra and the thought of spending money sends us into a cold sweat, we moved on to look at the manatees. Our kind of animal! Perhaps the most terrifying sight of all was, whilst in the underground viewing cave, we spotted two dolphins seemingly in flagrante. Either that or they were fighting…but he very clearly had his little lipstick out! Dirty rascal. We moved swiftly on.

Oooh, the shows! I can’t remember the names but we watched the show all about clever animals (dogs, cats, pigs, birds etc) and the whale show. As ever, the whale show was cheesier than my previous ingrown toenail – if I wanted to see an overgrown beast flap around and spurt in the water, I’d make Paul take a bath with me.

The show is all about the trainers now, instead of the whales, and it seems daft. No-one cares about your special necklace love. Resisting the urge to heckle, we left just before the rest of the teary-eyed imbeciles, and both agreed never again. The other show mind, the almost-live-You’ve-Been-Framed doodah, was great! We are cat-people see and as we were sorely missing our own litter (Luma and Sola) it was nice to see some pussy action. How do they get the cats to open doors anyway? The only trick our three have managed to come up with is pooing in our shoes if they don’t care for the cat-food, then smirking about it afterwards. Mind you, they’ve since learnt that smirking is indeed bad for their health, as a boot to their buttons can offend.

Coming to the end of the day, there were only a couple of things left on the map to do. Clearly, as you can see, we chose the most masculine attraction of them all, and spent a gay twenty minutes paddling our pink swan (Laura Labia) around the tiny paddling area. All the other swans were filled with little children delighted by the splashing water but we don’t really care for recommended age limits. We had to come back to the jetty once our swan started listing perilously when we were trying to get a nice photo of the two of us. It was JUST like the Herald of Free Enterprise. The last thing was the Skyride Tower, and I just couldn’t do it. I have no idea why, heights don’t faze me, but I think I was worried about having a panic attack whilst up there because it moves so slowly. Maybe next time. A couple more rides on Manta just to ram home how good it was, then we set off for the Wyndham.

Seaworld seems to be a divisive place, doesn’t it? I see a lot of people seeing that they will miss the park out of their schedule as there isn’t much to do. I disagree – they’ve now got two of the best coasters in Orlando, plus plenty for people to look at. It’s a nice day out, less pressured than Disney, more organised than Universal. I’m not so keen on the cooped-up animals but there again, Seaworld do a lot of good for the sick and poorly critters, so it’s a bit catch-22. Ah well. Let’s not  get too deep. This is my big gay trip report, not Peer bloody Gynt.

We ended the day with a meal in TGI Fridays. They’re so different to their English counterparts. The last time we visited one of these in England we were served by staff more interested in talking to each other than serving the customers and the food was horrible. The American version could not have been more different. Our waiter actually sat outside with us for a while asking about England and brought us a little box to take our free desserts back with. I know he was chasing a tip but still, it’s always good to feel welcome. The food was delicious and we worked our way down the cocktail list – it’s about the only place where I can order a Woowoo and still feel comfortable. We walked home – got offered many a lift from those pedicab things where you can sit in the back and let someone cycle you back to the hotel but I didn’t fancy having to pay his medical bills for thigh strain, so we declined. Throbbing feet though, but Paul sorted me out by giving it a good rub so all was well. As for my feet, I just stuck them in the fridge for a bit. Kaboomtish! Day twelve: DONE.

OK, so onto the apple pie. I’ll just park this here…

apple pie

Seriously though, how good is that? This is what you’ll need:

for the apple pie (to make 1):

  • 115g of chopped apple (if you don’t believe in tweaking, this is 3 syns, if you’re tweak, it’s syn-free)
  • a tsp of sweetener (gasp)
  • a squirt of lemon juice
  • a pinch of cinnamon
  • 5g of sultanas (25g is 3.5 syns – so this works out at less than a syn, but let’s call it 1 syn for ease)
  • 25g of Tesco Lighter puff pastry (4 syns)

to create the apple pie:

  • stew the apple by putting the chopped pieces into a pan with a few tablespoons of water, some cinnamon and the sweetener, put the lid on and let it sit on a medium heat until the apple turns mushy
  • break it up with a fork but leave some lumps
  • put into a pie dish
  • take your lump of pastry and roll it nice and thin – then use a pizza wheel or a sharp knife to cut into stripes and lattice across the top of the pie dish. You could decide to cut the pastry into stars or something – but trust me, 25g will go far if you just stretch it!
  • rub a drop or two of milk across the pastry, sprinkle with cinnamon and put into the oven for around thirty minutes on 180degrees – keep an eye on it

to drop five syns:

  • substitute the pastry (4 syns) for 35g of oats mixed with cinnamon
  • miss out the sultanas

for the ice-cream (this serves four reasonably or two greedily):

  • chop up four large bananas and freeze the pieces (takes around two hours)
  • in a decent blender, blend the frozen bananas until smooth, adding syn-free natural fat-free greek yoghurt to loosen a little
  • add a drop or two of vanilla and a pinch of cinnamon
  • pop it into a freezer-proof dish and allow to settle
  • serve!

I’m off to hide under a flameproof blanket. But look at it above, it’s a thing of beauty.

J

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July 11, 2015

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desserts, low syn, overnight oats, recipe card, snacks, sweet snacks, taster ideas, vegetarian

peanut butter and jelly overnight oats

Today’s recipe is for overnight oats – but a new combo! Peanut butter (3 syns for two level tsp of lighter variety), raspberry jelly (1 syn I think, but it’s probably less, but let’s err on the side of caution before someone hurls a brick through the window) and oats, all mixed together for a sweet and crunchy breakfast! If you’re a little squeamish, I’d probably skip the next two paragraphs…

I know what you’re thinking – I’ve lost my mind. Well yes, probably, but it’ll have fuck all to do with the flavours of the recipe and everything to do with the hatched-faced harridan we’ve got over the road. Remember I alluded a few days ago to someone random visiting our street? She’s clearly a loon. I’m not one to cast aspersions but it’s quite clear she doesn’t have both oars in the water. She stares at us, rants to herself and GOOD LORD her parking. She struggles to get her Renault Shitbox into one of the many giant spaces on our road. You’d think she was trying to turn a grand piano around in a lift. Anyway, she overstepped the mark something chronic the other day by, instead of parking in the designated bay like a normal person, she parked on our lawn, with our front path passing underneath her car.

I mean honestly. It’s bad enough she can’t park in a double bay, but to ruin our lovely clover-filled lawn? The other half took immediate offence and wheeled our dustbin right down the path and about 10 atoms away from her bumper. Sounds simple, but see our gardener had thoughtfully chucked in the carcass of a bird the cats had killed a few days previous, and sadly, we had a maggot infestation. I know, gross, but we’re normally so hygienic and he knows not what he does. We propped open the lid just a fragment and went to work. When we came back, the car had gone and our bin was clear as a whistle. I do hope she didn’t need to move it or that a couple of the maggots hadn’t fallen on her car. That would have just been terrible.

Anyway, today’s American entry from our book (which I genuinely can’t believe you lot are buying – thank you!) deals with our day at Harry Potter land! If you want the full story, chuck me a couple of quid and buy our book by clicking here! If you have bought it, leave us a review! The recipe is below this, get ready to scroll!

Day 23 – Harry Potter and the Sobbing Child

Harry Potter day! Let’s get one thing straight right from the off. For YEARS I poo-pooed Harry Potter as being only for kids and stupid and that I was far too cool for it. Until one night, when I was stranded at London Stansted waiting for a flight home and someone had left a copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone sitting on one of the bum-crushing plastic waiting seats. A mere two hours later, I was so engrossed in the story that I almost missed my flight. I was lucky in the sense that I had five books to wade through, and many years later, I’m still a fan, and I’m unapologetic of that fact to the point where I can’t BEAR those people who get all snotty about it, saying it’s a kids book. Perhaps so. But Disney is meant for kids too. So shut yer face.

THAT SAID. If you’re one of those über–gimps who dress up as people from the book and thinks magic is real, then you should be shot.

What a cheery start eh! With that out of my system, we were power-mincing our way to the early opening breakfast offered to everyone who booked with Virgin Holidays. They opened the gates to the early-people at 7.30am prompt (I think) and despite there only being about 50 of us, we were all jostling into Hogwarts like our lives depended on it. I sacrificed a small child to the lake just to ensure I didn’t have to wait a moment more for the magic. And well, blow me – it was magnificent. They’ve done a terrific job of Hogsmeade, with the snow-capped houses, shop displays and even the talking toilets. It was immense.

Our breakfast at The Three Broomsticks on the other hand? Dire. I appreciate the gesture, but giving us cold toast that tasted like we were eating the ceiling tiles wasn’t exactly fantastic, and given the porridge looked like what I imagine Katie Price’s cervix to be lined with, I politely declined. The castle opened at 8am, and we were straight in, greeted with characters from JK Smiler’s little known eighth book, Harry Potter and the Impossibly Bad English Accent. It’s a poor job when your accent makes Mary Poppins’ Dick van Dyke look like Stephen Fry. Who I loathe, incidentally – he’s a thick person’s idea of a genius. Paul countered them with an ‘Awight guv’nor’ and I died a little inside.

There was NO time to look at the castle, as we hurried past all the delights we would later see in the haste to ride what has been hyped up as an amazing experience. Oh – one thing – both of us managed to get a green light (not even a fattychops amber) on the ride, so they definitely cater for the more Hagrid-esque amongst us now. The ride took off, we screamed at the scary bits, we screamed at the quick bits, and we screamed when it finished and we didn’t have to wait two years to go back on – they let us stay in the bench and go around again! It is AMAZING. No exaggeration, no hyperbole – it’s genuine class. They’ve realised it so well, from the timing of the movement to even the voice acting. Well, save for Draco Malfoy, but he can’t act for toffee. I even managed to go the whole ride without cringing at Emma Watson’s Hermione, who always delivers her lines like she’s just been punched square in her wizard’s sleeve. It’s brilliant, and perhaps the best ride at Universal now.

After the Forbidden Journey, we had a quick go on whatever-they-have-renamed-the-Flying-Unicorn as (still good fun, and fact fans, the first rollercoaster I went on in Florida) and then onto Dragon Challenge. Remember I got smashed with an egg a few days ago? Well, I think that was karma paying me back in advance for laughing at some poor bloke who, in his haste to get onto the ride first, went running up past the Ford Anglia, tried to stop to take a photo, and went completely arse-over-tea-kettle. He could NOT have fallen over more comically, it was like he hit a wall. Being ever sympathetic, I had to go sit in the toilets for five minutes before I came close to stopping laughing. I actually thought I was going to pass out and it was only after I took two gasps on my inhaler that I managed to settle myself down. The park was getting busy now, but we still managed to do Dragon Challenge a fair few times before we decided to nose around the shops. For the record, the front of the coaster is fine for this ride because it never seems to slow down and you get a scarier view, but the real money is at the back, where you’re whipped around like crazy. I ALMOST lost my glasses – the first and only time that has ever happened on a rollercoaster, and it was only by sheer fluke that I grabbed them as they shot off my face. Otherwise, we’d be screwed – I need my glasses to actually see, for I am proper blind without them. Still one better than poor Paul, who has to wear a prism lens sticker on his glasses which refract the light so much it’s like living in a permanent gay club nightmare. I call him Biggles. He hates it.

I’m going to save my write-up of the rest of Islands of Adventure for later in the week and combine the two days together, as there’s no point in writing the same things twice. I might have a nice way with words but there be limits to my creative talents!

At the end of the day (argh!) we made our way back to the hotel to freshen up and relax by the pool. It’s a fantastic pool, shaped like a guitar and with a cheeky little waterslide (clearly meant for kids, but didn’t stop us barrelling down it in a blur of fat and giggles). The pool started filling up with kids ready to watch the in-pool movie, which is SUCH a good idea, so we retired back to the room to ‘get ready’. That done, we changed into smart clothes, and decided to sniff out some food. The Club 7 room didn’t disappoint with its tasty chicken skewers and free booze, but we needed something more substantial.

As we were making our way out for our evening walk and to try and find somewhere to eat, we happened upon the Happiest Kid in the World in the lobby of Club 7. He was bouncing a ‘squishy eyeball’ toy from Harry Potter World all over the place. His face was lit up with joy and wonder. It DID look great fun and I smiled my least-child-threatening smile at him as we passed. Being precocious and American, he handed the toy to me (remember, it was a goo-filled bouncing ball) and asked me if I wanted a go. Well, being a big kid, I did. And I swear to God, I didn’t chuck it that hard, but the very second it hit the floor it burst wide open, showering the lobby with goo.

I was mortified. You know how Puss in Boots in the Shrek movies pulls that face with his sad eyes to win people over? This kid did exactly that – big wide eyes, full of tears, and then he exploded too. In sound. Wailing. Immediately worried that I was about to be done for being mean to a child, I started telling him not to cry, that I’d buy him some sweets or get him a new one, but then Paul pointed out how THAT looked. Jesus. THIS is why I don’t have children. Well, that and the whole dropping anchor in poo-bay lifestyle I lead. His father came rushing out and to his credit, laughed the whole thing off, but I could see the distress in that child’s eyes and knew then I’d ruined his holiday forever. I did try and give the dad some money for a new toy but he said it was fine. To cap that off, we later saw him acting up in the same restaurant we were at, and I couldn’t finish my dessert for the guilt.

Well, not strictly true, I was just full, but I like to make myself sound more sympathetic than a holiday-wrecking child-hater really should.

We wandered around the grounds of Hard Rock, then meandered down to look at the Royal Pacific, which looks lovely but a bit too…not classy as such, but well, a bit SAGA. We definitely had the coolest hotel. It was charming though, just walking along by the side of the canal hand-in-hand, and not one person made a comment about it. America’s a lot more laid-back then I thought, or perhaps Universal just attracts a cooler sort of person, who knows? We actually ended up back in the Hard Rock and went down to the Kitchen for dinner.

I heartily recommend! Paul had a burger, I had a steak – I know, we sparkle with originality, but both came highly recommended by our very-gay-very-hipster waiter. Normally ‘hipsters’ make my skin crawl (you know the type, all Hot Topic and stupid glasses) (watching T4 on a Sunday actually gives me a stomach ulcer) but he was lovely, actually – he even had a Mario tattoo which, to us Nintendo geeks, was AMAZING. When Paul and I lose some weight and don’t have such colossal arm-hams, we’re going to get a Mario tattoo (for me) and a Luigi tattoo (for Paul). Because we’re just so cool. I’d love to get a Piranha Plant all the way up my back coming from a green pipe above my bumcrack but I don’t want the old people laughing at it when I’m in a home, so perhaps not. After dinner, and an excellent tip, we had a quick drink in the Velvet bar and spent the rest of the evening watching yet more American Office on the Pay-TV.

One final thought – DON’T even take things out of the minibar unless you plan to pay for it. I took out a jar of jelly-bears and the $14 charge appeared on the TV-Bill system. That’s the most I’ve ever paid for some coloured cow-hoof! Nevermind. It was time to snuggle up with my very own mass of jelly and await day 24. Four days to go. Sad face!

And you’re back in the room, and onto the main event:

overnight oats peanut butter jelly

I appreciate it looks like I’ve already had a bash at eating it, but it was tasty! Jelly in America is actually jam, but well, jam is sugar and fruit and that would send Margaret herself into a fit of the vapours, so I’ve replaced it with sugar-free jelly. Delicious! So…

for peanut butter and jelly overnight oats, you’re gonna need:

  • 40g of Quaker or store-brand oats – we use Quaker because we like them
  • 2 tsp of peanut butter (crunchy, lighter – 1.5 syns per tsp, so 3 syns)
  • some sugar free raspberry jelly made up to instructions (use any leftovers for dessert!)
  • a vanilla yoghurt (or, in my case, I used around 60ml of almond milk, and didn’t syn it…what a slut, but it’s about 0.4 syns)

then you’ll need to:

  • decant the milk or the yoghurt into a bowl, and add the peanut butter – mix it together as best you can, but don’t worry, it doesn’t need to be smooth, just try to blend it a little – if you’ve having difficulty, microwave for the briefest of moments
  • add the oats and stir
  • add the jelly on top
  • when it comes to the time you want to eat your oats, give everything a right good stir!

You can drop the syns by lowering the amount of peanut butter, but haway, life is too short to shit your pants over 1.5 syns. 

Enjoy! 

If you want more overnight oats, you’ll find them here:

Goodnight!

J