Goodness, I meant to post this lemon, garlic and rosemary roasted lamb recipe over Easter, but I completely forgot. I’m terribly sorry. I was only reminded to do so as I drove through the countryside yesterday and saw the cute little buggers prancing about finding their feet and trying out their little baa? Yes, I was so struck by their cuteness that I thought I must tell you all how best to cook them. Ah I’m kidding, I’ve had this recipe typed up for ages. If lamb isn’t your thing, that’s fine – remember, we do an awful amount of vegetarian recipes too. We cover all bases here at twochubbycubs! Look, I’ll even break with tradition and put the vegetarian button in right at the front! No excuses!

Right, with that out of the way, let’s get to eating! But first, the next part of our caravan tale! Would we have a comfortable sleep? Would Paul become Patient Zero on a super-gonorrhoea outbreak? Would I get change from a £20 note for any transaction? Read on!

REMEMBER OUR CAVEAT! Loads of people out there love caravanning. If you’re one of them, don’t get sand in your vag just because it didn’t look like it would be our cup of tea. Everyone has different tastes, remember! Also: the staff were amazing, each and all. Everyone was enthusiastic and cheerful and exactly the right sort of person you need working a holiday park.

click here for part one

When you last left us, we had emerged from our caravan, blinking feverishly against the one ray of sunlight that had managed to penetrate the completely overcast skies, and headed to the bar / arcade / moneypit. I think I had touched on the fact it was like being in a Joop-scented sea of badly-inflated balloons wearing fake tan and Matalan trainers? Clive James once described Arnold Schwarzenegger as looking like a ‘a brown condom stuffed with walnuts’ and it’s all I could think of. But anyway, let’s not go for the low-hanging fruit, eh?

We spent an hour in the arcade which, to be fair to them, was very decent indeed. It goes without saying that it feels as though most of the machines are rigged to buggery but that’s par for the course in places like this. We decided to see how many tickets we could rack up, knowing that as two grown men we’d be able to smash it no problem at all. I’d seen  a cute, if most likely highly flammable, Mario plushie in the ticket redemption box and damn it, I wanted it.

After a few goes on the ‘Deal or no Deal’ interactive game, where we won a few hundred tickets and only had minor trauma from seeing Noel Edmonds, then moved onto a ‘shoot the hoops’ game where Paul, with his boss-eyes, managed to not only miss the hoop but also ricochet a ball off the wall and straight off a passing child. Thankfully the kid’s parents were too busy smacking their other child to notice and Paul managed to placate the poor bugger with a few tickets. I won the jackpot on the ‘drop the ball into a tube’ game which meant another 1000 tickets dispensed into our waiting hands. What can I say, if there’s one thing I excel at, it’s handling the balls until we get to the money shot. Boom boom!

We attempted to play the fruities but I sharp realised we’d have more financial success if I just threw my pound coins into the sea. I don’t get how people spend all day in front of these things – I get a cold sweat if I lose a fiver, for goodness sake. The kid next to me was pumping his coins into them like he was feeding the electricity meter for Las Vegas and I couldn’t help but worry for his future. I wanted to slip him the number of Gamcare but didn’t fancy having some wardrobe-sized brute think I was propositioning his child and putting me in intensive care.

We did, however, hit the jackpot – Paul found a broken machine. It was a simple enough set-up – one of those crane machines where you move a crane with all the grip of an arthritic vicar’s handshake and pick a toy – only with this one you were guaranteed to win a prize, namely a little token with varying amounts of tickets on it. Here’s the thing: it wasn’t recognising when you won something so it kept letting you play, picking up more and more tokens. I’m not ashamed to say we absolutely rinsed the machine for about 4000 tickets, stopping only when Paul couldn’t fit any more of the little blocks into his pocket. We reckon we had about 6,000 tickets between us and boy, did we walk through that arcade like we were Rockafella. It might be a slight exaggeration to say we strutted, but our mince was definitely on point. We talked about plans for the future, what the riches so crammed in Paul’s pockets could bring us, happy times.

I resisted the urge to shout ‘DERRRUCK WE’RE AFF TO BENIDOOORM’ like the slobbering Rab C Nesbitt stunt-double from the Postcode Lottery advert.

What bounty did we claim I hear you shriek? Are we rolling around in pound coins like Scrooge McDuck? No. Here’s what we managed to trade our haul in for:

• a slightly off-model Thomas the Tank Engine, now with 40% less asbestos fibres;
• a little foam aeroplane
• a little pig moneybox which Paul promptly dropped and they wouldn’t let us replace;
• a bag of Starmix. Not a big bag, oh no, but one of the little bags you dish out at Hallowe’en if you’re a tightarse

PFFFT! To get the amount of tickets we’d ‘acquired’ you would have easily needed to spend over £100. I was spitting with rage. There was a prize up there that needed 14,000 tickets – I assume if you decide to go for that prize a loan advisor will come and have a chat with you next to the Mario Kart ride. Britain man, always trying to shake you down.

We decided to go for a calming drink and watch the entertainment ahead of the ‘PRIZE BINGO’ that we’d seen so many mentions of around the site. Paul found us a seat at the back – a good choice as the Lynx Africa and Charlie Red fumes had sunk to the floor – and I ordered us two pints of Stella. Well, when in Rome, do as the Romans do, right? Did the Romans beat their wives? I should have asked them to stick a cocktail umbrella and a sparkler in it for Paul as ‘my wife’. I took my seat and watched the entertainment, which consisted of lots of little children dancing and shrieking, off their tits on e-numbers and sensory overload. It frightens me how much energy children have and only reinforced exactly why we’ll never get one. I feel inconvenienced and hard done to when our cat meows too much of a morning, imagine having some screaming urchin smashing his fists on the kitchen table and knocking coco pops everywhere. BRRR.

Still, people were happy, everyone was having a good time and it was pleasant enough, until they brought out the mascots – from what I could tell, with my eyes scrunched up through cringing so hard – they were ‘lifeguards’. Lifeguards with normal sized bodies, of course, but those giant plastic faces.

I’m sorry, but these models were terrifying. Faces all weirdly shaped and big glassy dead eyes. Thinking about it, from the perspective of a small child, they probably look cute and heartwarming but to me all I could think of was the knock-off Frozen characters who came to a town event near me last year. Look at this picture and tell me they aren’t absolutely fucking terrifying:

Seriously? I can only imagine they’re from the rarely mentioned Frozen sequel where a mumps outbreak sweeps through. They look like the massively off-brand toys you win from a funfair run by thieves. Basically, if Bill Clinton fucked the Queen of Arendelle, this would be the result. I ought to stop. I just think these would be the last faces you see before death took you in its cold caress.

I winced and shuddered for the next half hour before the next big event was queued up. Now, let me warn you, the next bit is horrific.

Let me just describe a moment of the entertainment to let you decide whether you think we’d enjoy it. You know that awful song ‘Baby’ by Justin Bieber? The one that goes

“And I was like baby, baby, baby oh
Like baby, baby, baby no
Like baby, baby, baby oh
I thought you’d always be mine“

Yeah? Annoying little shitrat, isn’t he? But that’s by the by. The only person in the world now who doesn’t think Justin Bieber is a putrid bellend is himself. Anyway, imagine that song being sung live by two people but changed slightly to advertise the prize bingo, so it now becomes:

“It’s nearly time for bingo, bingo, bingo ooooh
Prize bingo, bingo, bingo oooooh
Prize bingo, bingo, bingo ooooh
Try out for a house or a liiiiiiiine”

I’ve genuinely never been closer to glassing myself. Paul had to pin my hands to the table so I didn’t try and ram a bingo dobber down my ear-drums. It was excruciating cheese. Through teeth so gritted you could strike a match off them, we stayed and endured twenty minutes more of the entertainment before finally getting to the bingo. The room fell silent as though someone had died on stage. I took a final gulp of the gassiest pint of Stella I’ve ever tried and had to suppress a burp as I didn’t fancy having my nose knocked through to the back of my head for causing a disturbance. Numbers were called, it was all super tense, but then someone shouted bingo and the tension was released in a sea of hissed ‘lucky bitch’ and ‘fucking sneaky c*nt’ – and mind this was just for a bloody line where you could win some tat from the gift shop. You know the folks you see on the People’s Postcode Lottery that I mentioned before, mooing on about winning whilst spittle and wind rattle through their badly-fitted dentures? This was them wrought large.

The battle to win a full-house proceeded but I can tell you now, even if I’d managed to get every single number on every single card including the prices for the beer on the table menu, I still wouldn’t have shouted house. There was no way the person who did shout house wasn’t going to be bundled into a giant wicker man on Berwick beach and set on fire. We didn’t even bother to stay to see which snaggletooth secured the ‘prize’ and instead, headed to the fish and chip shop to pick something up for dinner.

Christ, that was an experience. We ordered what I thought was a fairly simple order for a fish and chip shop to carry out – in that we ordered fish and chips – but we waited there almost twenty five minutes whilst they fussed about. It was the first day of opening, I understand, but I hadn’t factored in waiting for the potatoes to grow when I placed the order. At least Paul and I were able to entertain ourselves by admiring the very dishy security staff. I was tempted to push over a fruit machine in the vain hope of being pinned to the ground and ‘accidentally’ penetrated.

After waiting for ages, the fresh-faced young lad who had served us emerged with a full beard and handed over our dinner. All very nice, bar the curry sauce looked exactly like the holiday trots. I put that in the caravan bin so we were able to enjoy the smell for the rest of the holiday.

And so: to bed.

The recipe, then. I’m just going to give you the recipe for the lemon, garlic and rosemary roasted lamb by itself – you can serve it with whatever you like but the next recipe I post will be for sunshine potatoes and a pea crush, so perhaps hold your lips together until then. If there’s only a couple of you I’d still make this recipe, as I have a recipe for leftover lamb coming down the line too. And look – it’s worth using the syns for this. A decent leg of lamb serves eight. The olive oil is 18 syns so technically that’s about 2 and a bit syns. Given most of the marinade ends up in the bottom of the serving dish and not on the meat, I’m going to syn this at 1 syn per serving (if the leg serves eight). Up to you how you do it! This needs prepping in advance – at least an overnight dish.

I found this recipe at compassandfork – click here for their website, it’s full of interesting dishes!

to make lemon, garlic and rosemary roasted lamb you will need:

• a big old leg of lamb – we bought ours from the butchers and I think it was about 1.8kg? It was a big bugger!
• eight cloves of garlic – 6 minced (using one of these, oh it’s been so long since I was able to put a link in: a little mincer!) and two cut into slivers
• 3 tbsp of fresh rosemary all chopped up, plus 4 small sprigs – don’t have fresh rosemary? Buy a plant and put it in the garden, it grows easily – but if not, dried will do
• tablespoon of good salt
• tablespoon of ground black pepper
• 3 tablespoons of olive oil
• 2 big lemons

to make lemon, garlic and rosemary roasted lamb you should:

• unsheath your big slab of meat, you saucy bugger
• make a marinade from the juice of the lemons, olive oil, salt, pepper, the chopped rosemary and the minced garlic
• whisk it
• whisk it real good
• stab your lamb all over with a good sharp knife and push little slivers of garlic and rosemary into the slits
• coat your lamb with the marinade – rub it in all over, really finger it
• cover in tin foil and put it in the fridge – at least overnight, but even better you can wait 24 hours – I like to take it out and turn it over halfway through, spooning the marinade over
• take it out two hours before you want to cook it to get it to room temperature
• cook in a preheated oven (180 degrees) for about 1 hour and 45 minutes – check the lamb is cooked – this should give you medium cooked lamb, take it out sooner for rare
• serve it with whatever you like but bloody enjoy it!

Looking for more meat recipes, you callous scoundrel? Click!

Enjoy!

J