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March 22, 2015

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low syn, noodles, pork, pork chops, recipe card, rice, slow cooker

spicy pork in a citrus sauce

First, a question – does anyone else make the car dance around when they’re driving along and a particularly good song comes on. I almost crashed before coming back from Tesco making the back of the car boogie along to Funkytown. Honestly imagine that on my death certificate – cause of death ‘Lipps Inc’s infectious grasp of beats’. Mortifying.

Hey, we’ve been gardening today. Outside of our kitchen is a square of soil that nothing other than the rosemary beast seems to grow in – it’s exceptionally thick clay and well, I can’t be arsed to treat it. So, we dug everything out, buried these nice coloured plant pots, filled them with compost and have replanted the rosemary, bay, thyme and chives and added garlic, mint, parsley, oregano and sage. We’ve then covered the soil around the buckets with bark. It needs levelling out and the bricks pressure washed and the fence painted (that’s for the gardener to do) but it got dark and we got lazy, but it doesn’t look too bad!

Anyway, I forgot to mention yesterday that we actually went back for our weigh-in to our NEW group – Saturday morning. We did try a couple of others during the week but they’ve either been too big or don’t quite marry up with our availability. Problem is…it’s 8.30am in the morning! The plan is that it’ll encourage us to use up the remainder of the Saturday instead of languishing in bed until 1pm and then sitting naked until one of us ventures to the shop for breakfast.

So how did we do? Well, badly!

james – 2lb on; and

paul – 1lb on.

Fuck. Well actually no. It’s not suprising – I’ve been eating all sorts of crap at work given I’ve been working crazy hours (almost 90 hours overtime in two weeks) – I’m actually pretty chuffed it’s only 2lb! I’ve had Wagamamas, a Chinese, Dominos pizza, more chocolate than I know what to do with (and wait until you see tomorrow’s post). I’ve been eating healthy at home, and I can only presume that Paul has been comfort eating through the lack of my wobbly arse blowing around the house. Plus, without wanting to be crass, both of us had brown dogs scratching to be let out but hadn’t had time to free them, so there’s probably a good 1lb for the each of us right there. I do think the damage could have been so much worse if we’d been eating crap at home too.

However, we’re not going to be able to weigh in next week because…we’re going on holiday! Here’s the twist – we have absolutely no plans. We both finish work on Friday at 5pm and then we have ten days off. We could end up absolutely anywhere – the only thing that we’ve done is set a budget. We might turn up at the airport and jet off, we might hire a campervan, we might get a train into Europe, who knows? Given our maximum level of adventure is normally eating an after-eight mint at half seven, this is new grounds for us. OH and before anyone thinks of burgling our sweet little home, my cousin is staying here for the week to look after the cats. SO THERE.

So our next weigh in will be Saturday 5th – but with a week of holiday AND my birthday, it might be catastrophic. But after that, we’re doing our Nuclear Week (see the 7777 banner above) and we will still be posting recipes until we go away – and if you’re really good, I might even queue up some recipes to come on when we’re away!

Speaking of recipes, this was a beauty – pork carnitas made in the slow cooker. It’s pork cooked slowly in orange and lime juice, with a blend of spices and a little bit of stock. Tasty and although GASP you’ll need to count syns, you’re only using…1.5 SYNS. Call the motherfucking police!

to make spicy pork in a citrus sauce, you’ll need:

four pork chops with all fat removed and cut into little strips, two medium onions (diced), 4 garlic cloves (minced – how many times have I told you about these? Get one!), 1 tsp of cumin, 1 tbsp of chilli powder, 1tbsp of chipotle mix (we found ours in Tesco), 1tbsp of finely chopped oregano from your herb garden or dried from the cupboard like a pleb, 1 tsp of salt and one of pepper, 100ml of chicken stock, 4 tablespoons of lime juice (microwave your lime for 5 seconds and then squeeze, you’ll get shitloads more juice) and 250ml of Tropicana 50/50 orange juice (1 syn for 100ml – so 2.5 syns for this, which serves two).

NOTE: Batchelors Super Rice is now 2 syns a packet. Boo. But haway.

to make spicy pork in a citrus sauce, you should:

chuck everything into the slow cooker, stir, and whack on high for six hours or low for eight. Then, scoop the pork and onions out and shred the pork with a fork. Set the juice aside. Put the shredded pork back in the slow cooker on high for fifteen minutes just to dry out a smidge and put the juice into a pan and heat on a medium to high heat for that fifteen minutes to thicken the sauce. Combine the lot and serve with rice! We were lazy and used Batchelors Super Rice which is syn free.

TASTY.

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chubbycubs

Posted on

March 18, 2015

Posted under

fakeaways, italian, kebab shop, low syn, pizza, recipe card, savoury snacks, snacks, taster ideas, vegetarian

syn free cheesy garlic bread

I can’t begin to describe the absolute cuntnugget that I happened across yesterday. I was queued up in Subway awaiting my usual lunchtime trough of food (plain chicken, all the salad bar onion, double gherkin, double pickle, honey and mustard, no drink, cheers yes, haha) when in walks some twat wearing a top-hat. In Newcastle, in Subway, with a waxed pointy moustache to boot. It gets worse – when he got to the counter, he actually came out with ‘So how on Earth does this work, then’. I was filled with irrational hatred. All I could think about was dashing back to the counter, pushing his face through the glass sneeze-guard and holding his head down in the pickles container until he stopped struggling for life and the police arrived to take me away. He was singularly the most achingly try-hard hipster twat that I’ve ever had the absolute displeasure to orbit.

It is, without doubt, the worst ‘subculture’ that exists right now. Zip backwards fifteen years ago and it was easy (at our school at least) – you had normal kids, then on either side of those you had chavs or Goths. And mind, these Goths were the starter Goths – none of this professional goth/emo whatever you see around town. They all had knock-off coats like Neo from the Matrix and a Livejournal account for photos of their self-harming. I had long, black hair for a good portion of my later school years but I was never a goth, not least because I was too fat – there’s nowt worse than a tiny muffin-top popping out over a pair of New-Rock boots. One of my exes told me he was a goth before we met up but that only extended to have long hair – I’m not sure how gothic giving someone Enya’s A Box Of Dreams on a first date is.

Chavs on the other hand are less tolerable but I just put most of that down to being thick. It was the time of coke-can fringes and Kappa tracksuit and for the most part, given it was a fairly posh school I went to, we’d only really see them out and about in the wild, their tracksuits rustling in the breeze. As I get older I find myself growing more contemptuous of a subculture that seems to revel in stupidity and an ability not to throw a trampoline on any square of dog-shit littered grass bigger than a postage stamp, but that’s by the by – it’s hipster that draws my true ire.

It’s just so loathsome, so affected, so nonsensical. Every year – including going backwards and forward through time, no doubt – it’s the same. Newcastle becomes awash with students all trying to outdo each other on the poncy twat stage. Instead of the booming Geordie dialect ricocheting around the streets of the city centre, you’ll hear trust-fund rah-rah knobheads, whose idea of living dangerously is a quinoa salad on a terrace in Jesmond, stumbling around in their lollipop trousers and 1920s make-up. We have bars opening up all over the town catering to such predilections, all copying the ‘trends’ that London washed its hands off three years earlier – a drink served in a jam-jar? Oh outrageous. And I fucking hate it.

I don’t hate garlic bread, mind, but being a fat twat means I can’t have it. Sniff. But I can have this…

This photo doesn’t really do it justice, I must say. I had to hurry through the kitchen like Electra from the Starlight Express whilst Paul juggled three separate courses at the same time. This tastes almost exactly like cheesy garlic breadsticks you get from the takeaway, with the exception that it’s healthy!

This will make about eight breadsticks – enough for two.

to make syn free cheesy garlic bread you’ll need:

one cauliflower (or 600g-ish defrosted cauliflower florets), one egg white, 2 cloves of garlic, 40g grated cheese (2x HexA), salt, pepper, oregano

to make syn free cheesy garlic bread you should:

preheat the oven to 190 degrees (gas mark 5). Cut the cauliflower into florets and bung into a large food processor. Blitz until it has a ‘rice’ texture with a few bigger chunks. Spread out onto a baking tray or Pyrex dish and bake in the oven for about 20 minutes. Allow to cool for about five minutes. Tip the mixture into a dry, clean tea towel and pull the corners together. Squeeze the ball of mixture as much as you can (if it’s still too hot, let it cool down for a bit more). This will take about ten minutes of squeezing, until it has quite a dry, crumbly texture. In a bowl, add garlic and egg whites to the cauliflower with 10g of grated cheese and mix well. Tip onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and shape until it’s about half a centimetre thick. Top with the remaining cheese and bake in the oven for about twenty minutes, and grill for about three. Cut, and enjoy!

Don’t be put off by the cauliflower – yes, it does taste a little like cauliflower but if you’re not a fan of you really won’t mind – it gives a great ‘doughy’ texture. Make sure it’s nice and firm when it’s cooked so it’ll hold it’s shape for dipping. If it sags a little, bake for a few minutes more.

On a final note…

This uses half a cauliflower each as a base. Some might consider it a tweak and therefore requires synning, but given that half a cauliflower isn’t an extravagant amount of veg to have in one go and you haven’t magically deep-fried it in lard as you moved it from the oven to the tea-towel I haven’t bothered. You can if you wish.

Buon appetito or summat.

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chubbycubs

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March 16, 2015

Posted under

desserts, low syn, quark, recipe card, snacks, speciality ingredients, sweet snacks, vegetarian

tiramisu – 1 syn, 5 syns, take your pick!

James (doing overtime again) says two things: people will never know the trauma of trying to diet with over 200 chocolate eggs surrounding you, and damn – a disappointing new song from Muse. Ah well. Over to Rose West…

Do you know what gets on my wick? And I mean really gets on my wick? Staff tuck shops. You know the ones I mean – some enterprising colleague decides to clear out a filing cabinet drawer and stuff it to the brim with chocolate and crisps and all sorts of delicious treats. These are also the ones that probably send around 30 CC’d emails around the office every other day for some Cake Sale event that going around. Comic Relief. Sports Relief. Colon Relief. That last one was made up, but equally as satisfying, believe me.

Now, I know my anger with this one is misplaced. I’m not angry with the drawer (it’s a very pretty, sleek affair) or with what’s in it – oh no. A slightly-undersized Snickers at hand provides a national service on-par with the NHS in my book. And the cost is entirely reasonable, especially when the menstrual vending machine wants to charge three-times that amount on a battered, broken Twirl. No, my anger on this issue is placed solely at the type of people that do it. Wholly pleasant people, naturally, but they’re always tiny, or skinny. The one in my office is completely lean, not an inch of fat on him and it was the same in my old office. How do they do it?! I can only assume they have complete self-control, something probably unnatural inside them that stops them from diving headfirst into it like Scrooge McDuck does into his pile of money which is exactly what I would do if I didn’t think I’d get stink-eye from the typists.

I managed to stay away from our drawer at work for a whole 14 MONTHS (I refused to be allowed to be told where exactly it was) before succumbing to a 40p can of Diet Coke and since then it’s like an aluminium Mermaid, sending out a siren song, enticing me to just drop a few coins for a roll of Rolo’s with the label in Turkish. Gah, it drives me mad. I try my best to instruct everyone around it to form some sort of Transformers-style Berlin Wall whenever I hoist myself off my orthopaedic chair but it never works. So the fault is entirely theirs that I’m so fat. Yup.

Keeping a mental note of what sweet treats have syn values can be a right fanny-on. I always like to save a copy of those pictures you often see fly around Facebook that has syn values printed over various bars of chocolate. I have to suck air through my teeth as I notice the 5 different notification bars at the top and the MS Word red-squiggly line under some words (one day the world will know how to do these things properly. And I will be happy) but on the whole they’re very useful.

And this got me thinking – how exactly can you enjoy a sweet treat on Slimming World? I’m sure you’d agree with me that desserts are by far the most neglected part of any diet. Dessert for me is the absolute highlight of a meal. I always position myself as close as possible to pregnant ladies on meals out because I know they’ll never let me down and I can at least half-pretend to have a pudding in solidarity. After I’ve spent a week telling them of course that the baby would want a dessert, and have you seen the dessert list? And oooh, you must be craving crumble by now. Never fails. It’s almost worth the effort knocking them all up.

Where was I? Oh yes. Dessert. Or Pudding if you’re rough (just kidding). Like me you’ll probably balk at the idea of a bowl of sliced fruit with a spoon of Splenda slung money-shot style over the top of it, or a bowl of Quark with an Options stirred in. These aren’t all bad, but they always seem to lack that indulgent factor that makes a dessert a dessert. That’s why, with this baby, I’m sure you’ll be pleased. Slimming World Tiramisu! The Cilla Black of the dessert world, granted, but this really was delicious. Just healthy enough to keep you on track, and indulgent enough to make you giggle like a horny housewife at a meter reader. A few elements of this are the standing Slimming World fare– quark, Options, sweetener, but to add a bit of depth to it I’ve added a spoonful of Baileys – one – for a bit of creaminess, two – for a boozy taste that you need for Tiramisu, and three – for a bit of boldness to the flavour. We like to use the mantra that a few syns are good for you – it’s those that keep you on track. A syn-free diet will only lead to ruin. This is great for a weigh-in night treat.

Here’s the recipe, and this will serve up two big portions, or four small ones.

to make tiramisu, you’ll need:

Tub of Quark (I’d use the Golden Acre or any ‘thicker’ style of Quark – a ‘spoonable’ one won’t quite give you the right texture, unless you put the whole thing in the freezer for an hour or so, so it firms up, two Cappucino Mullerlights, 1tsp sweetener, 2tsp of Camp (one syn), 50ml Bailey’s (eight syns), pinch of sea salt and a pinch of cocoa

to make tiramisu, you should:

Throw the lot together and mix. I used a stand mixer and it was done in less than a minute. Stick a sponge finger at the end and pretend you didn’t eat the rest of the pack whilst it was mixing. 5 syns a portion, or 2.5 if you’re having a smaller one. You could reduce the syn value to just 1 if you’re feeling virtuous if you left out the Bailey’s, but I think it gives it a kick. As always, please give it a go, and let us know what you think!

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chubbycubs

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March 14, 2015

Posted under

beef, beef mince, fakeaways, italian, kebab shop, low syn, one-pot, recipe card, syn free

cheesy meatball skillet

I am gutted that, yet again, we’re sending a load of dross to Eurovision! Have you heard it?

It sounds like the type of ditty that would play out over a Buy as you View advert. I’m not one of these tubthumpers who claim we’ll never win Eurovision because if we sent a decent act, pumped a lot of amyl nitrates into the air and actually spent some money on publicity, we’d do well! Paul and I will still be watching it, eating our Austrian food (that’ll be our European tour country for that week) and screaming at the telly, but just once I’d like to see us succeed. Still, it’ll be a good night in front of the TV regardless.

We don’t watch a lot of TV – at least, not British TV. We used to be well into Coronation Street (rock and roll lifestyle) but that went dull, fast – and Eastenders is only decent when something big is happening, otherwise I end up trying to cut my wrists with the butter knife by the time it’s over. We’ll take in the odd documentary and we do love a good drama (for good drama, I’m talking about stuff like Lost over crap like Broadchurch – if you want to see Olivia Colman cry, watch a film called Tyrannosaurus, she’s brilliant in that). If you like reality TV but with decent production values, download a programme called The Amazing Race – UK TV doesn’t show it because we’d sooner watch tone-deaf bumholes singing on a talent show. Doctor Who is a guilty pleasure as is popcorn fodder like 24. What we DO enjoy is a good quiz show, not least because we like shouting at thick people on TV.

That said, I’d be shit on that new show, 1000 Heartbeats, where your heartbeat is monitored as you answer questions and your clock counts down faster the quicker your heart beats – I’d be so out of breath climbing the three steps up to the podium that I’d only have four seconds to answer fourteen general knowledge questions whilst getting shouted at by besuited Yorkshire lamp-post Vernon Kaye. I’d love to have a go in The Cube, but I know for an absolute fact that when they did that swooshy camera movement where it spins 360 degrees around The Cube in slow-motion, my arse-crack would be hanging out of my George boxer shorts and I’d be pulling that cum-face I usually pull when I’m concentrating – tongue half out, brow furrowed like a crinkle-cut crisp. I’ve mentioned before that Paul and I would adore the chance to go on Coach Trip, and indeed we auditioned successfully for the show, but then they took it off air for three years, perhaps hoping our clogged-up arteries would kill us off before we had a chance to get on the bus, call someone a jumped up shitbag and get asked to leave Lithuania in an armoured car.

I’d have been absolutely top at The Crystal Maze though. I say that from the comfort of my living room, admittedly, but I would have been a guaranteed two-crystal winner and that weekend canoeing in Middlesex could have been mine. Of course, no sooner was I old enough to apply, they took it off the bloody air. There’s been talk of bringing it back time and time again, including, horrifically, the idea of having Amanda Holden present in the Richard O’Brian role. Amanda Holden! A woman so pointless and personality-free that you could put a privet hedge with a crow stuck in it where she sat on Britain’s Got Talent and people would be hard-pressed to tell the difference. That’s what ruins TV – ‘celebrities’ famous for fuck all (in her case, having the dubious honour of turning down Les Dennis’ cock in favour of the unfunny one from Men Behaving Badly) taking part in shows and quizzes in lieu of decent folk from Ordinary World. Even if they somehow resist the urge to throw celebrities into the mix at every opportunity, they try and turn the ordinary folk into celebrities instead – like the gay couple from Gogglebox for example. Yep, they’re funny, but why are they in an advert with Kevin Bacon for bloody mobile phone services? Actually, why the hell is Kevin bloody Bacon in an advert for a mobile phone service? Kev, I’ve seen Footloose, you’re worth so much more!

Gosh, that was a bit of a rant. See that’s probably why they didn’t come back to us re: Coach Trip.

Anyway, it’s just a little post today because I want to spend the day with Paul as I’ve seemingly been at work since Tuesday morning. But, because we care, here’s a recipe for cheesy meatball skillet. A quick google shows that a skillet is pretty much the same as a shallow frying pan, but we’ve actually got a proper cast-iron skillet so we used that. Whatever you use, make sure it can go under the grill. Something like this would be perfect, plus you could use it for frittatas and other nonsense!

This serves four.

We used the new Slimming World meatballs (syn-free) available at Iceland and do you know, they were actually pretty decent! Nothing like proper meatballs and I’ve got a syn-free recipe for those right here. Getting quite good at this cross-linking on my blog-posts!

Also, in my tomato sauce, I added 175ml of red wine (hence the syns) but that’s only because we had dregs left over in the fridge. You can easily leave this out, but it does add a nice note to the sauce.

to make cheesy meatball skillet, you’ll need:

ingredients: meatballs (either Iceland or home-made), two tins of tomatoes, one large red onion, garlic (powder or grated (especially if you use this fancy pants microplane grater), dash of worcestershire sauce, red wine (optional), big ball of reduced fat mozzarella (65g is one healthy extra which is more than enough, but because we’re decadent bitches, we’re using 130g – that’s fine for Paul and I as it is a healthy extra each, but if it’s just you, remember mozzarella is 5 syns for 50g if you’re synning any extra). You can decorate with chopped chives, if you’re feeling poncy.

to make cheesy meatball skillet, you should:

cook off your meatballs in the pan – if they’re homemade, great, as they’ll release oil that you can use in the next step, but if they’re not, just keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t catch. Once they’ve cooked through, set aside
chop up your onion nice and fine and add that into the pan (with a tiny bit of oil if the meatballs haven’t released any) and gently soften – then add garlic, and cook a little longer
whack the heat up, throw in the red wine, let it deglaze the bottom of the pan and simmer off for a couple of minutes, then add the tomatoes
pinch of salt and pepper
add the meatballs, put it on a medium heat and let it bubble down for a bit until the sauce has thickened
cut the mozzarella into discs and scatter them carelessly all over the pan
whack it under the grill for five minutes or so until the cheese has melted, bubbling and looks ready
SERVE.

Have a think about what you want to serve this with – spaghetti is fine, but this would also go well with any old pasta you’ve got knocking about, or even slimming world chips and a salad. Enjoy!

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chubbycubs

Posted on

March 11, 2015

Posted under

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

takeaway style beef and broccoli

Yet again I find myself working late with nothing but a Wagamama menu to look at. I’m lucky to have a fairly interesting job and I do enjoy working in the city centre, but it’s an absolute ballache if I have to work late as the only places near me that deliver are Wagamama and Pizza Express. I mean, I COULD walk further, but I’m a lazy, lazy man. So – as I’m busy working – I’m pressing the button on a ‘saved’ blog-post – my fourth chapter on our visit to Germany. You can read the previous instalments here, here and here. Because we’re amazing, there’s also a recipe for takeaway style beef and broccoli at the end which is genuinely delicious. Enjoy! Normally skip holiday posts? Give this a whirl – feedback welcomed!

Now, I’m going to be honest, I lost my page of notes for the last day of what we did in Berlin, so I can’t go into any great detail – good riddance I hear you cry, this’ll be a short entry. Nope…

We woke on our last day in Berlin with a heavy heart, and only a small part of that was down to the amount of cholesterol and fats we had taken on during our short stay. Berlin was amazing – something happening on every corner, history all over the place, fantastic mix of people. Having all of the Christmas markets on only added to the atmosphere and neither of us would hesitate in going back. Heartily recommend. Nevertheless, we traipsed down to the checkout, gave our luggage to some hipster fucknugget who had left his little afro-comb in his afro (argh!) and wandered out to kill the time before we were to get our overnight train to Munich.

One last look at the view…

First, Checkpoint Charlie, which took us about forty minutes to find. It shouldn’t have – if we’d just turned left instead of right as we breathlessly climbed out of the underground station, we’d have been there, but instead we walked for forever in a massive circle until we found it. Meh. I know it’s historically very important but I felt its impact was lessened somewhat by the McDonalds just to the side of it. Plus, they had a really ropey statue of a soldier with a bit of tinsel on his head. How respectful!

Afterwards, we spotted the Ritter chocolate museum on a map, and headed there. Again our sense of direction failed us, and we wandered and wandered and wandered, all passive-aggressive sighing and bitchy looks at everyone else who were clearly going exactly where they wanted to go and knew exactly how to get there. The smug twats. After gradually turning our feet to corned-beef in our shoes, and with the blood pouring out over the top of our socks, we FINALLY found Ritter World. Well, honestly, I was expecting Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, I got Billy Vanker’s Chocolate Camp. It was full of tourists and fat children jiggling about with sticky hands and gleeful expressions.

Paul immediately managed to cause international offence by declaring loudly ‘well you’d know all about that’ in response to young slave workers picking cocoa beans along the chocolate highway – he was actually talking to me in response to eating chocolate but the young Puerto-Rican couple in front of us looked pretty crestfallen. I’m surprised he manages to brush his teeth in the morning – whenever he opens his mouth his boot automatically falls in. We loaded ourselves up with 24 bars of Ritter chocolate, ostensibly to give to co-workers – we had the box open by the time I’d put my wallet back in my pocket.

A trip to an experimental computer art-gallery followed next – yet again our normally faultless navigation failing us, leading us into a proper run-down sink estate where I started my ‘protect everything in my pockets’ Macarena dance that I mentioned in a previous entry. In our defence, the art-gallery was tucked away down a side street full of chavs smoking weed. I felt like I was in a Paddy Considine movie.

Oh! We did spot this. Goodness me.

The art gallery was, as you may expect, full of experimental videogames and controllers, and we had a whale of a time geeking out. It was smashing but the best part was the virtual reality headset at the end. Paul normally can’t manage anything like virtual reality – he gets dizzy looking at a magic eye puzzle due to his boss-eyes. Ah bless. He’s got lovely blue eyes – one blew to the East, one blew to the West. Kaboomtish.

We did stop for one of these. My reflex action already had me on my knees until Paul pointed out it meant garlic bread.

Anyway, you think me writing about videogames is exciting? Well you haven’t heard anything yet, because after the videogame museum came the…font museum! That’s right! We saw this on tripadvisor and thought it would be right up our street, and indeed it was, being only a mile or so mince from the videogame museum. We’re sticklers for the right font – it really makes my face itch when I see screenshots that people have put on from their phone and they’ve chosen to use Comic Sans as their display font. Comics Sans should only be used in care homes to illustrate which tap is hot and which is cold, and nothing more. The museum was full of ‘letters’ – random letters from hotel signs, train stations, massive installations – some old, some new, some neon, some metal – it was really quite interesting! I don’t know if I’d pay the amount we paid to go around but I still got to crack a joke as I left and they shook the ‘suggested donations’ box at me – I said ‘Are you taking the P’. Well, as you can well imagine, how we all laughed – we were still chuckling and shaking our heads whimsically as Paul pulled me out by my fagbag. Spoilsport.

By this time the night was cutting in, so we wandered back to the hotel, picked up our suitcases and nipped into the closest restaurant for a last-minute meal before we got on the train. Well fuck me. We couldn’t have picked a more German looking place, it was like being in a themed restaurant. The waitress was wearing lederhosen, there was oompah-oompah music playing, the menu was full of words longer than this bloody blog post…you get the picture. I ordered something that sounded like a bad hand at Scrabble and received a pile of meat and potatoes which was absolutely bloody delicious. I washed it all down with a bathtub sized glass of German beer and suddenly the restaurant seemed like the finest on Earth. Paul had duck and a fizzy water, the great big puff. We settled the bill and waddled, clutching our stomachs full of fermenting beast, to the train station.

We were planning on driving to Munich but I’ve always fancied an overnight train journey, and it was around £200 for the both of us to have a private cabin. That makes it sound infinitely more grand than it was, but it was surprisingly roomy, with two bunkbeds, your own netty, a table to rest at and even a shower! A shower! On a train! The only time I’ve ever managed to get wet on a train is when I’m sitting next to the toilet on a Pendolino and it lurches around a particularly sharp corner.. Once the train pulled in, we were escorted to our ‘room’ by the train conductor, yet another officious looking man with a face full of woe who looked as though he’d push you under the train if you asked him anything. He assured us he’d ‘look after us through the night’ like some creepy fez-wearing Harold Shipman. I was left more than a little terrified. He shut the door and Paul immediately dashed to the toilet ‘to try it out’. I optimistically hoped that this meant testing out the flush or, at a push, having a tinkle, but no, it meant hearing the world fall out of his arse, punctuated by ‘OOOH THAT’LL BE THE CURRYWURST’ and ‘I’M NEVER HAVING SAUERKRAUT AGAIN’. Just once I’d like to be able to relax in a new environment for longer than ten minutes without having to hear my other half straining out a poo. It’s not too much to ask. Course, it gets worse – no sooner had he pressed ‘flush’ then the train conductor clicked the door open and asked whether or not we wanted food. Fuck food, all I wanted was a tank of oxygen, and he totally knew what Paul had just done because I saw his nose wrinkle. Frankly, I’m surprised his nose didn’t burn up like a dry leaf in a bushfire. He didn’t come back until the morning.

The glamour! Look at that size of that toilet – now imagine how small the shower is, to the immediate right of the loo – then read on…

Mind you, it wasn’t just Paul causing embarrassment – about half an hour into the journey I remembered that we had a shower in the tiny bathroom and immediately undressed. The shower cubicle was approximately 80% the size of me but by gaw, I was determined. Through the human equivalent of pushing a beachball into a postbox, we managed to get me in, but I literally didn’t have space to move, so it was a case of standing there letting the water pool around my shoulders as Paul lathered shampoo into my scalp. Finally, there was a loud sucking noise and the water found a way through the dam of my back fat and down my bumcrack and disappeared. I win again! After ten minutes, Paul pulled me back out of the shower and back into the little living room area. Now this is where it gets embarrassing – in all the excitement of working the shower, we hadn’t realised that the train had stopped at a rural passenger station and was obviously taking on a few more people – us looking out the window could barely make anything out because our room was bright and it was night outside. This situation wouldn’t have been so bad had I been dressed, but I’m ashamed to say that at least six good, honest German folk on the platform opposite were treated to the sight of Paul changing into his nightwear and my hairy arse pressed up against the glass like two paint-filled balloons. We only realised our error as the train pulled away – probably ahead of schedule to save my blushes. Wars have started over less than my arse in a window, trust me.

The rest of the journey passed without incident, although I had trouble sleeping through the rocking of the train. Paul was out like a light, but I remained fitful on the bottom bunk, sure that every creak and groan of the metal bed above was a sure sign that he was going to come crashing down on top of me and that I’d be smeared up the side of the train like a fly on a windscreen. I kept myself amused by writing up the first few days of the holiday and looking wistfully out of the window as the night turned black. Oh, saying as I indulged in some toilet talk before, I’ll add a bit more – the combination of good, rich German food and the rocking of the train meant that we were both full of wind – and when one wasn’t farting, wafting and laughing, the other one was taking up position. The poor bastards in the room next door must have thought a brass band was tuning up before a key performance. When we awoke in the morning, the air was so thick I almost swam to the toilet. Even putting on my glasses didn’t remove my blurred vision. I’m only thankful it was a no-smoking train else it would have been like the Paddington Rail Disaster all over again. At six there was a sharp little tap on the door and the conductor, barely hiding his wince, set down a tray of breakfast goodies on the table. It was the usual German fare – apple juice, jams, bread (the bread was fresh when brought in but after two minutes in the fetid air of our room, had gone a lovely toasted colour) and minced animal. They love their indistinct pâté, that’s for sure. Still, it was free food and I couldn’t waste a crumb, so I didn’t, and it was delicious.

The train pulled into Munich at around seven and we were unceremoniously dumped on the platform as the train hastened away, probably to be burnt to ashes thanks to our almost inhuman farting. We jumped onto the underground and after a short ride, we were at our hotel. The guy checking us in clearly thought we were checking him out, and he was posing and fluttering his eyes and being all coquettish. He didn’t have a fucking chance, he had more make-up on than Dame Barbara Cartland for one thing, and he gave us a proper ‘knowing’ leer when he realised that we were a married couple with a king-sized bed. I really hate that! He might as well offered us an upgrade, rimjob or felch for the amount of subtlety he was displaying. We gave him fairly short shrift and were allowed up to our room, where I’m disappointed to say we stayed for the rest of the day. Actually – disappointed is the wrong word, a holiday is for resting, and we had a lovely day in the room, ordering room service, watching the German version of Air Crash Investigation and sleeping. No word of a lie – we pretty much slept from 8am to 8am the next day. The room service was extortionate – €60 for two burgers, although they were the size of footballs and delivered with the usual German élan (i.e. no care at all – they crashed the tray down like they were delivering a verdict on England itself).

Mind you, that’s not surprising, given our hotel room probably smelled like the countryside of England did when we had the foot and mouth crisis and all the cows were being burnt. Fact: the foot and mouth outbreak started less than a mile from my house. I still blame my mother for feeding the dog Aldi stewing steak and starting it all off.

I’ll write more about Germany tomorrow, but in the meantime, speaking of well-cooked beef…

This recipe is dead easy to make and only takes about fifteen minutes or so. It might be helpful to have all your ingredients prepared beforehand. Having the beef cut into smaller chunks means it goes further, and cooks faster.

This serves six people.

to make takeaway style beef and broccoli, you’ll need:

ingredients: 500g diced beef, 1 tbsp cornstarch, 2 tbsp + 60ml light soy sauce, 1 large onion, 5 cloves of garlic, 2.5cm cube of root ginger (grated/minced), 250g broccoli florets, few pinches of red chili flakes, 250ml beef stock

to make takeaway style beef and broccoli, you should:

recipe: in a bowl drizzle 2 tbsp of soy sauce over the diced beef and mix until it’s coated. Heat a large non-stick pan on a high heat, add Frylight (or use a drop of oil, like sensible folk) and add the beef in one layer for one minute, and then flip over for another minute. Put the beef to one side on a plate.

In the same pan and still on a high heat, add more Frylight (see above) and saute the onion, garlic and ginger for three minutes. Add the broccoli and two pinches of the red chili flakes and sauté for another three minutes.

In a bowl mix together beef stock, 1 tbsp of corn starch and 60ml soy sauce. When mixed and there are no lumps pour this over the broccoli mixture and mix to combine and cook for a further three minutes. Add the beef back into the pan, mix, and serve immediately over rice.

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

March 4, 2015

Posted under

low syn, recipe card

croatian horse stew with gnocchi

For week five, we’re going to Croatia!

And be warned, today’s stew contains a stable ingredient. Literally, because I’m using horse. When Paul told me I’d be getting my lips around a black beauty, I thought my birthday had come early, but he merely meant this tasty horse-based stew from Croatia. Now listen – you can swap beef in if you’re a big fan of the whinnying little buggers, but I’m not, so into my belly it goes.

Speaking of horses, I’m handing over the reins tonight to my other half, who I’ve blackmailed into writing a blog post to give my fingers a rest. He’s out of beta, and releasing on time! Enjoy!

A bit of an unusual one for today – and not just for the choice of meat but because I (Paul!) am writing today’s post, instead of James!

I’m usually the ‘behind the scenes’, younger, more handsome (James edit: he’s not) half of Two Chubby Cubs – I tend to cook the meals whilst James works his magic on them fancy words in the posts. I don’t mind, I quite enjoy cooking (though I’m still very much an amateur) and I can never be arsed after a day typing at work to then do the same at home. And, it lets me catch up on my boring programmes that James whinges about (look, Korean war bunkers ARE interesting. I don’t care what everyone says) (James edit: they’re not).

I’ve had a bit of a backward route into cookery, it has to be said. At school I can remember making shortbread and rolls, and the rest of the time was spent gossiping and trying to stealthily hit the ‘Emergency Stop’ button for the electric ovens so we didn’t have to do anything (90%+ success rate, btw) and could go back to yakking. It’s only really been in the last few years that I’ve had a stab at anything other than the plastic film on a ready meal and bunging into the microwave.

I suppose I can blame my mother for that, mealtimes at home at their most exotic never ventured past a jar of Uncle Ben’s Sweet and Sour Sauce poured over a pack of slightly-frosty Kwik-Save Chicken Wings in a Pyrex dish. She did dally with switching to BBQ Sauce somewhere in the mid-90’s but realised the error of her ways and went back to the lesser of the two evils. The chicken was never pre-cooked and whilst I’m not sure if that mattered it always had a slight pink hue and a chewy texture that made you feel like you had a corner of a baby wipe in your mouth. To this day I still can’t eat chicken that has any bones. For the only time in my life I’m solely a breast man.

One thing I did like though was Mince ‘n’ Mash which I still love, though is essentially a pack of mince boiled in the water of tinned carrots and chopped tomato juice. I love it. James can only digest it if it has half a jar of Bisto poured in and half a pack of couscous so the actual meal itself is so diluted he can’t taste it. He just doesn’t appreciate a bit of povo-grub.

It was during my mid-teens that I learnt that too much of a good thing can actually start to get on your wick. Ma offered me once a ‘Freschetta’ pizza that was on offer at the local Spar – you remember it – the four cheese (and it was only ever the four-cheese one I was given. Pepperoni was 10p more) – where the crust rose in the oven. It was DELICIOUS. But, of course, once I said that it was like a red rag to a lazy bull. The very next day I counted and I swear this is all completely true) SIX of the bloody things piled on top of each other, a pile that never, ever seemed to go down no matter how hard I tried (and by God, did I try). To begin with I was in absolute heaven – I even managed to figure out the best way to eat it – use the crust to squeeze out the sauce from under the cheese and mop it up, so that it doesn’t spoil the true heaven that is frozen four-cheese gooiness on a frozen yeasty-floury slab. Lahhhvely. Soon though I started to miss actually going to the bog and the Freschetta love affair was over. “But you said you liked ‘em!”, she said, dodgy tab hanging off her bottom lip that she bought from some gypo at Whittlesey market. “I did! But after three weeks I could really do with some bloody vitamins!”. My protestations fell on deaf ears and I had to wait until the offer at Spar ended before I could once again actually have a crap and eat something else. A similar crisis of the bowel nearly erupted a few weeks later when a delivery of water-damaged Findus Crispy Pancakes filled up the freezer but I knew I had to act fast and feigned an allergic reaction to the breadcrumbs. I cried in relief when I saw those yellow fingers reach into a plastic bag and put that jar of “Uncle Den’s” (times were hard) into the cupboard and calm was restored.

That’s probably why I got so fat. Not that I was ever that skinny before the pizzas came along, heavens no, but I certainly didn’t learn how to eat anything remote healthy. Couple all of that along with some knock-off sweets (Twax, Bouncy, Sprinters…) and it was a recipe for juvenile diabetes and a future shopping for clothes in the ‘husky’ sections at out-of-town garden centres.

This sort of thing pretty much carried on into my late-teens and didn’t end even after I left home. I soon went off to University and my bad eating habits carried on there. This time, however, with even less cooking as I realised my mother’s ability to switch the oven past 180 degrees made her look like Raymond Blanc next to my paltry skills and inability to even know how to chop an onion. I also had to get by on a paltry budget – £400 a month was my bursary and a good £370 of that was earmarked for fags, Lambrini and the monthly mince along to the Dot Cotton club (a gem on an otherwise clap-riddled, drab East Anglian gay scene. RIP Dot!). I also had to buy all my shopping in one go (immediately after that payment went into my account) before I pissed it all up the wall at the on-site Burger King, so it almost entirely went on crisps, chocolate and Diet Coke (gotta watch that figure, after all!) and for some reason no end of sauces. I remember coming home with bags and bags but having nothing that I could throw together into a proper meal, but you could have an absolute fiesta if you came to Room 231 armed with a battalion of breadsticks. This carried on and on and on and eventually I reached the whopping weight of 28 stone. There’s a picture of me somewhere where I’m standing against a wall, but my head is miles away from the wall itself. It’s awful. A combination of bad food and bad habits meant that any sort of weight-loss was going to be impossible (not that I was even trying). I became responsible mostly too for preparing the meals at the place I worked (hospital) which meant easy access to an endless supply of biscuits and other tidbits. I once ate 12 individual cherry cheesecakes that were destined for the patients’ table in one shift (sorry about that) and I routinely had a pint of whole milk and a packet of chocolate bourbons stashed out the back to get me through the day. I was also drinking loads in the evenings which would have meant even more calories bunged on top of stolen NHS produce. No end was in sight, but, I was young and I didn’t really care and I never really felt that ‘fat’ so had no intention of stopping.

The rest of Paul’s story will come tomorrow! Don’t want to spoil you all, after all, it’s late and I want my hot chocolate. Tonight’s recipe:

To be fair, I think I’ve managed to bastardise two separate recipes here, but it stays fairly close to a Croatian staple – a stew from the Dalmatia area of Croatia. It’s normally served with gnocchi with parmesan, hence I’ve put them on above. It’s not the best picture, sorry.

A note on the horse. Horse is a very lean, very slimming meat and very good if you’re on a diet and don’t have any qualms about eating the poor buggers. I bought mine from www.musclefood.com but you can very easily swap it for beef, though try and get something nice and lean. I’ll say neigh more about it except to tell you it tasted like good lean meat!

The syns come from red wine (worked out at 2.5 syns per serving) and the gnocchi (1.5 syns). You could have it with mash and save the syns right there, and perhaps make a gravy with one of those red wine stock pots then I think it would be free. But honestly.

to make croatian horse stew with gnocchi, you’ll need:

ingredients: 750g of horse steak or beef with no fat, cut into chunks, two large red onions, rosemary, 1/2 cup of red wine vinegar, two cloves of garlic peeled, a drop or two of oil or if you must, Frylight, two carrots, a celeriac, a bay leaf, two cloves, salt, pepper and paprika. You’ll also need a beef stock cube and some water. Oh, and around 300ml of red wine. I know fuck all about wine, go for something decent but remember it’s going to just evaporate off so…

to make croatian horse stew with gnocchi, you should:

recipe: slice your onions (Remember, use a mandolin. Quick and easy, just like the author) and chuck them in a pan with a bit of oil and salt to saute down. Add your horse/beef and brown it off. Now, cut up your carrot and celeriac and chuck them in, just for a moment or two, and chuck the red wine after it, high heat, let it boil off a bit. Finally, put everything into the slow cooker with all the spices and bay and seasoning, put on low, and cook until you really want it. Cook gnocchi by hoying it into boiling water and when it floats, serve up with the stew. You can have 70g of light parmesan if you want, but you don’t need that much!

I actually did something a bit different – I cut the horse and onions up the night before and marinated them in the red wine overnight before the night they were slow-cooked. You could do this, but it’s not that necessary.

Enjoy!

J, and for one night only (and well, tomorrow), P!

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

March 3, 2015

Posted under

american, bacon, beef, beef mince, fakeaways, italian, low syn, pizza, pork, recipe card, taster ideas

bacon cheeseburger pizza

I very nearly became a Slimming World consultant, you know.

I say very nearly, it was as near as most of my other fleeting fancies, but I made the effort to make contact, drop in my details, attempt to find out more. I had plenty of cold hard cash ready to be handed over gladly to Magic Margaret and her Synning Sisters but alas, despite chasing three times, I got one phone call which was rearranged and then totally ignored. Ah well. Part of me remains disappointed because I think I’ve got the sassy people skills to really get a group moving. But most of me thinks that my money (well, our money) is better off in my pocket and that’s that.

I’ve been going to Slimming World classes on and off for over ten years now, and they’ve never changed. Which is clearly a good thing, because the results speak for themselves and I’ve been lucky – I’ve never been to a bad class. Actually, tell a fib, yes I have – I had to sit through twenty minutes where the class gave advice to someone with piles – what best to eat for soft poo. Plus, if you get a boring consultant, the class drags something chronic, although I haven’t had one of those in a long, long time. I did have some great ideas – Paul stepping in as my Debbie McGee in a glittery bikini on the payment counter, a wheel of fortune to win something decent other than a banana that fell off the side of the ark and a Mugshot, interactive recipes…the works. But it wasn’t to be.

The reason I’m bumbling on about classes is because of our recent decision to move to a different class – it’s primarily so that we can stay to class as I feel we get a lot more out of it, not least because I get to blabber on about recipes and make smutty jokes. When we get weighed and go out the door, we almost lose a sense of responsibility – that although we are following the diet, we’re only paying lip service to it. So, we needed to find a class that works for us in terms of times, and although ironically we have managed to miss tonight’s because of a late finish at work, Tuesday evening will be our new weigh-in.

Finally, as an aside, I made a post in a FB SW group about people not being able to say please or thank you. It’s always the same – some blurry, off-brand yoghurt thrust too far to the lens on their phone with a comment like ‘HOW MANI SINS’ and it does my nut in. I’ll personally help anyone if I have the time, but I can’t bear bad manners. Thankfully, and somewhat reassuringly, most people have weighed in with complete agreement, with only the odd little dolt kicking up a stink at someone having the temerity to ask for manners. Well. The day I take criticism who has Inside Soap listed as a ‘favourite book’ on their facebook page is the day I shut my bollocks in a car-door. MANNERS MAKETH THE MAN.

Tell you what else maketh the man? Meat. And pizza. And cheeseburger. Well, look at this for goodness sake. You might as well jog on if you’re one of those people who won’t use syns on their dinner, despite THAT BEING EXACTLY what they are for…!

so, to make bacon cheeseburger pizza:

This is six syns for a quarter, but it makes a big pizza, and served with chips will fill the hole nicely. Put it this way, if you were to have a big pizza from Dominos, you’d be racking up syns in the sixties and seventies. Treat this as a treat…

ingredients for the crust: 125g of strong white bread flour, a packet of yeast (7g), 75ml of lukewarm water and a pinch of salt

ingredients for the topping: use a HEA for each of you – so 65g of mozzarella is one HEA, and 40g of grated light cheddar is the other. You’ll also need lean mince (5% or under), gherkin slices and a few medallions of bacon. Hoy some chilli flakes on too.

recipe (which I’m going to split into bullet points from now on for this blog – step by step):

make the crust – put the flour into a mixing bowl or a stand mixer, add yeast on one side, salt on the other, water in the middle and knead it together using your hands (wash them first, I know where they’ve been) or a dough hook (infinitely easier). When you have a big lump, stop, cover the bowl in cling film and leave it to prove for an hour or so;
prepare the toppings – grate your cheese, fry off your mince in a tiny drop of oil and some onion powder, fry off your bacon and cut into strips, cut your gherkins, do a little dance, make a little love, get down tonight;
stretch your dough, hoy some tomato puree over it, add cheese, add mince, gherkins, tomatoes if you want them, bit more cheese, bacon;
cook in the oven for twenty minutes and serve with chips.

Tasty!

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

March 1, 2015

Posted under

budget, low syn, recipe card, savoury snacks, snacks, taster ideas, vegan, vegetarian

balsamic roasted sprouts

For week four, we’re going to…Belgium! Well, sort of. I’ll come to that later…

Admit it, you’ve missed us. I’ve got visions of people wailing and rocking, waiting for the update that just didn’t appear. Well, to be frank, I’m disappointed that there were no Princess Diana-esque walls of flowers created, or that no-one doused themselves in petrol and set themselves on fire on our front lawn. Honestly, people. No, the unglamourous truth was that we’ve both been a little under the weather – and I was out on the piss on Friday night – and needed yesterday to recover.

Now see here, I’m not a big drinker – I tend to be an all or nothing sort of guy, so if I start drinking, I’m on it until I’m bundled into a taxi / arrested for lewd behaviour / do a Winehouse and choke on my vomit. It was supposed to be a civilised night, actually, and it certainly started off that way, with champagne in Hotel Indigo. That civilised chatter lasted about fifteen minutes before talk about bumhole waxing, black fluff and ‘dripping’ got underway and then the night never really got the glamour back. Brilliant night though, even if my mate did end up telling some poor, haggard looking woman with eighties hair and a very cats-arse-mouth (she was tutting at our conversation and rolling her eyes) that she looked like Enya. Taxi!

I like to think I’m a pleasant enough drunk – I’m certainly not an angry drunk or – worse – the moaning, miserable sort – if anything I just become way too affectionate towards Paul. In the interest of full disclosure and to try and prove a point, here’s a screenshot of my texts to Paul on Friday. Bearing in mind I’m the type of person who will chew through his trousers with his own bumhole if someone so much as uses a LOL in a text message to me, I certainly let my standards slip after four bottles of champagne.

God he puts up with a lot, doesn’t he? Look at those times though, I was clearly hammered pretty quickly. In my defence, if there is one, my phone has a smashed glass screen so it’s hard to type properly. Yeah, that’ll be it. I can’t remember anything from after Paul bundled me into the Micra, though he tells me:

I kept falling asleep / passing out on the twenty minute drive home, intermittently burping and slouching over onto his shoulder, meaning he had to keep jerking the car to the left at high speed to tilt me the other way;
I spent a lot of time telling no-one in particular to fuck off; and
when I got home, he opened the car door and I went tearing out like my arse was on fire because I was about to have a technicolour yawn, went headfirst straight into the side of the shed – and then was sick all over our front lawn.

Tell you what mind, I felt right as bloody rain on Saturday after Paul cooked me a low-syn breakfast. Weigh in tomorrow and I think I’ll have put on, but hopefully Paul will have lost. But remember what I always say – we’re aiming to lose weight slowly, so if it goes up or down, it doesn’t matter. I’m certainly in credit. We spent today walking Lester from the cat and dog shelter, but he was clearly Hooch from Turner and Hooch!

Aw. OK, finally, tonight’s recipe. I’ll make a confession – we totally forgot to think of a European recipe this week, so this is a little last minute. It’s a snack idea using brussel sprouts, which to be fair were cultivated in Belgium. We may revisit this one but actually, the sprouts are delicious hot or cold as a snack!

to make balsamic roasted sprouts you will need:

a tablespoon of olive oil, a bag of brussel sprouts, balsamic vinegar, salt

to make balsamic roasted sprouts you should:

top and tail a bag of sprouts (take outer leaves off, cut the stem off the bottom). Get a tablespoon of decent olive oil (6 syns) and a good few glugs of balsamic vinegar. Mix them well and put onto a baking tray and sprinkle with some salt. Into the oven on 180degrees for twenty minutes, give them a shake and then cook for another twenty. Serve hot or cold and keep the windows open, because your bumhole is going to be backfiring like an old car. This easily served us twice over, so the two syns in the picture above could actually be lower (I decided that a serving was 1/3 of a bag of sprouts). Enjoy!

I’M BACK, BITCHES.

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

February 19, 2015

Posted under

lamb, lamb joints, low syn, recipe card

rosemary crusted lamb steaks

Just a wee post tonight as I’m itching to find out what happened to Lucy Beale, god help me. I’m ashamed of myself.

I heard Boy George on the radio driving back and it nudged a memory out of me – I once threw my sister’s Culture Club CD down a well (apparently I lived in Amish country)– frankly the best place for it, but I got a proper telling off for it. But see now she used to do the same thing that Paul does now – hears a song, likes it, plays it over and over and over and over again. Not too bad when it’s a decent ditty but Karma fucking Chameleon? Even now the opening chords of that song transport me right back to my teenage years in a bedroom that smelled slightly of bleach and Boy bloody George caterwauling through the floorboards.

I grew up in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, Northumberland – the type of village where a minority of the locals still pointed at planes in the sky, mouthing the word dragons with spittle on their lips. It didn’t have a corner shop (and still doesn’t) but it did have two pubs and a kitchen and bathroom centre. You couldn’t buy a pint of milk but you could buy a fabulous bespoke oak cabinet to store it in. It was a pleasant enough place to live but definitely somewhere you’d go to die rather than thrive.

My sister and I, and the other children of the village (or corn), spent most of our time building dens and treehouses. Well, I’d watch them build treehouses, I was always too fat to climb a tree and the one time I did I got stuck up there for several hours before promptly falling out, like a sleepy owl dressed in a knock-off Diadora tracksuit. Looking back, our dens were amazingly creative – a stack of pallets hidden up a tree, a stack of pallets hidden in the woods, a stack of pallets hidden amongst the pallets on the building site when they built the new houses. We lit a fire once inside one of these enclosed dens which has to be the height of stupidity, but filled with the childlike sense of invincibility we carried on, and mind it gets worse – we used a tyre as a make-shift fire-pit. How the hell we survived that I have no clue – nothing says good country living like breathing in smoke and the fumes from a singeing tyre. Perhaps we’ll be able to launch a criminal case against Dunlop in years to come for all of our defects but frankly, I don’t have Julia Robert’s three-cock-gob so I’d make a shite Erin Brockovitch.

Tell you what I can get in my gob though – tonight’s tea. Rosemary crusted lamb steaks with broccoli and pepper mash.

to make rosemary crusted lamb steaks you will need:

four decent lamb steaks, fat removed – better to buy two excellent chops than four scrag-end slippers, 50g of fresh parsley, 2tbsp of fresh rosemary leaves/sprigs/fingers, who knows, one clove of garlic, 2 tbsp of grated parmesan (between four is a tiny amount, but I’d be careful and say 2 syns), 4 tsp of olive oil (again, between four, so only 2 syns each, and if you want to reduce that further, use two tsp for the crust and use frylight to oil the pan), 60g of breadcrumbs (between four, but I just whizzed up a breadbun which is one person’s healthy extra), salt, pepper and a beaten egg. Serve with pepper mash (mashed potato + egg + lots of pepper) and broccoli.

to make rosemary crusted lamb steaks you should:

hopefully you’ll have a mini-chopper – something like this will do – less than £15 and you can make healthy pesto, hummous and finely chop breadcrumbs in it . We use it a lot, but you can make do with a food processor. Chuck the parsley, rosemary, garlic, parmesan, olive oil (saving a little for the frying pan later) and breadcrumbs in there and blitz to make a pesto. Add some more breadcrubs to get it nice and crumbly.

Pop your beaten egg into one bowl and your pesto in other. Swish your lamb chop around in the egg and then in the pesto. Get your pan up to heat, the olive oil or frylight hot, and drop the chops in – two minutes or more on each side depending on how rare you like your lamb – I like mine to still be connected to its mother and with a half-formed baa on its lips when it gets turned into my dinner. Let them rest for 3-5 minutes (plate up your mash and sides) and enjoy!

The pesto might come away from the lamb, but so what? Just put it back on. This was delicious and only 4 syns max per chop, and that’s being VERY careful. I’d personally give it only two syns but I can’t be fussed arguing with someone over two syns!

Right! ENJOY. Share!

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

February 17, 2015

Posted under

low syn, pork, pork joints, recipe card, slow cooker

guinness pulled pork with colcannon rosti

For week three, we’re going to…the Republic of Ireland!

Listen, I shit you not, that was the third country on the list – we’re not just doing easy recipes! Luxembourg is next week. Goodness. Our recipe is perhaps a bit obvious but, no word of a lie, one of the nicest I’ve ever done on Slimming World – Guinness Pulled Pork with a colcannon rosti and minted peas. But before we get there…

I don’t know if anyone watches The Middle but there’s a character called Sue who is permanently happy – the very antithesis of me. She conducts an experiment where she smiled at people to see if a smile was as contagious as a yawn. It WASN’T. But, you know, we don’t smile enough, so I thought I’d do the same thing – smile at random people as I trundled around M&S before work this morning. Well, fuck me, that whole stereotype of Geordies being a friendly bunch couldn’t be further off the mark – at least first thing on a rainy Tuesday morning. At best, most people reacted like they’d seen their own bumhole and didn’t care for the colour, at worst I felt like I was at considerable risk of being stabbed in the beck. It doesn’t help that I don’t have a natural smile, one of those egregious, winning grins that can melt the stoniest of hearts and set gussets aflutter – it’s more a lopsided leer that looks like I’m simultaneously dropping off my yoghurt and trying not to fart. No wonder no-one smiled back save for one lady, and she had a better beard than I did.

But isn’t that a shame? I love it when people smile heartily at me or engage me in idle chit-chat. Put me in a room where I’m supposed to socialise and I’ll stand there like the world’s gayest hat-stand, all mute and agog. Stick me next to an old biddy in a bus-stop and I’ll be waxing lyrical in no time, revelling in her bawdy tales of bus delays and the minutiae of her family tree. I can chat away to the checkout assistant in a supermarket until the cows come home, are milked, that milk sold for negative value and put back in my trolley for me to go ‘OOOH the price of milk’ at the cashier. Interestingly, I’ve had it pointed out that my accent changes depending on who I talk to – I got out of a taxi the other day and it took me about five minutes to stop talking like Jimmy Nail shouting a warning across a quarry. I find that if I’m in a situation where I’m not sure how someone is going to take my sexuality (up the arse, generally), I’ll ‘man up’ the voice a bit – not that I sound like some lisping Monroe-esque harlequin you understand, but because I don’t want to be found with my face caved in on an abandoned industrial park. You never know.

The problem with doing this is that it then invites some pretty bleak persiflage between me as a passenger and them as a driver. The last taxi driver I encountered asked me what car I drove – when I answered with ‘White, DS3’ he immediately dismissed it as a pussy car and told me to get a decent motor to ‘attract the lasses’. Because, you know, his Skoda Octavia in syphilis yellow was clearly a clit-magnet. Nothing says sex machine like a beaded seat cover, poorly-masked body odour and Smooth FM playing over the speakers. Moron. Not the worst taxi driver I ever had mind – I once got the offer to ‘pay my fare’ an alternative way with the altogether more direct result of the taxi driver pulling over two hundred yards from my front door and getting his knob out – I wouldn’t have been as offended if there had been miles on the clock but he’d only driven me around the town moor – two miles at best. I’m surprised he’d had time to turn his indicators off. I politely declined – well, as politely as you can when someone offers to effectively pay you £4.40 for oral sex – and threw a fistful of coins at him. Plus, on a purely shallow note, it looked like he had half a smoked cigarette sticking out of his zip. I mean make it worth my while, honestly. It looked like the whistle on an aeroplane lifejacket.

How the hell did we get onto that from smiling at people? Course correction needed! Have a recipe! Guinness pulled pork with Colcannon rosti!

It’s going to be easy for me to break this down into the colcannon and the pork one at a time. For the peas, you want a tin of peas and a bit of mint sauce. If you can’t figure out how to make those work, then god help us all.

to make the Guinness pulled pork you will need:

500ml bottle of guinness (9 syns), good hunk of pork (I use shoulder, but take the fat off it – normally enough to serve 6), one big red onion. Make a rub of 1tbsp paprika, 2tsp of salt, 1tsp of garlic powder and 1/2tsp of freshly cracked black pepper. Rub it all over the meat, slice the onion, put the onion into the slow cooker, followed by the Guinness, followed by the lid and cook for 10 hours on low. If, at the end of the cooking, you want to thicken the liquid a little, just sprinkle in an oxo cube and whack it on high for half an hour.

to make the colcannon rosti you will need:

half a bag of spring greens, 800g of potatoes (peeled, cooked and mashed), bacon with the fat cut off, 200ml of milk (use some of your healthy extra allowance but remember this serves 4 so you’re not using much at all), tsp of wholegrain mustard (1/2 syn, but again…between four), bit of oil. Cook the mash, push it through a ricer so it’s nice and smooth. Don’t have a ricer? Get one here and thank me later.Leave aside to cool. Boil the spring greens in the milk with some mustard mixed in. Drain when cooked and chop finely. Cook off the bacon in little chunks. Add the potato, cabbage and bacon into one mixing bowl and season very well. Shape into discs and put into a dry NON-STICK frying pan. Cook on both sides for 5 minutes to get a good crust. Serve!

This isn’t authentic colcannon – there isn’t lots of cream and butter, the creamy taste is achieved by using a ricer, but a good amount of mashing by hand will do the same thing!

There we have it. Not very authentic but fucking tasty and reasonably easy to make. If you can’t be arsed making the rostis, just chuck the lot into a pyrex dish and cook in the oven for a bit!

Enjoy, enjoy.

twochubbycubs

slimming, sassy recipes

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guinness pulled pork with colcannon rosti

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to make the colcannon rosti you will need: