Category Archives: noodles

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February 2, 2017

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breast, chinese, fakeaways, noodles, poultry, recipe card, rice, syn free

zingy basil chicken – a perfect Slimming World fakeaway dish!

Here for the zingy basil chicken? Hold please.

Do you ever have that moment of horror that you absolutely shouldn’t have done something the very second that you’ve just done it? I’m experiencing that now. We had Chinese takeaway for tea last night and there was some leftover egg foo yung. We like to kid ourselves that we’re being healthy by ordering what is essentially an omelette, as if that cancels out the shredded beef and duck pancakes and chicken balls that we gorge on. Anyway, I only realised there was leftover egg foo yung when I was clearing the kitchen down from last night (I know, that’s terrible, leaving a mess all day, but we were tired) and spotted we hadn’t opened one of the containers – the one that had the egg foo yung in. So I’ve been nibbling away at that this evening whilst I fart about clearing up and just as I took the final swallow, I realised that I was eating an omelette that has been sat on the side of our warm kitchen all day after its perilous journey in an overheated car last night from a takeaway who I genuinely can’t bear to check their hygiene star rating because they’re so cheap and quick. On top of that, I can’t be entirely sure that the cats won’t have had a good lick at it too.

In short, I’m fucked, aren’t I? My belly is already doing a cancan of revolt and I have waves of nausea rolling over me like a sulphuric tsunami. I don’t know who is in for a rougher night: my nipsy, Paul’s nose or our toilet. Wish me/him/the good folk at Armitage Shanks good luck.

To be fair, I didn’t have a very good start to the week either, given I spent most of it filing my tax return. Who would have thought that the Little Blog That Could would require me to declare my income? I did ask an accounting friend if I could write off gin as an expense for anaesthetising me to deal with all the nonsense but apparently not. Still, it felt good submitting my taxes like a Good Citizen and knowing that I’m keeping Theresa May in leather. Brrr. I’ll say this though: the entire process, once I’d got my unique number, my special log-in, my paper treasure map, stool sample of eight wise men and temporary membership of the Freemasons, it was all very simple and easy to follow. If any blogs out there need some advice on submitting their tax returns, I’m happy to answer questions…

We’ve solved another mystery, by the way. For a good two weeks our cat has been steadfastly refusing to use his cat-flap. We thought he was just being stubborn – he’d sit by the front door looking strained and fractious and keen to be outside but completely blanked the cat-flap. Paul, soft as shite as he is, would always hasten to the door to let him out. I, however, refused to be a bloody bellboy to my own cat. It’s bad enough that Paul made me drive thirty miles back home the other week because he had forgotten to put the cat’s water fountain on, I’ll be damned if I’m going to be a bouncer too. Anyway, no amount of cajoling or puss-pussing or gentle toeing of his rump with my boot (I’m kidding) could get him near that cat-flap and tonight, finally, we know why. I was busy reading the post in the kitchen and waiting for The Archers to come like the old-before-my-time-fart that I am when suddenly there was an explosion of hissing, clattering and yelping. I didn’t immediately react – I’m used to such noises from Paul if I eat the strawberry creams from the Quality Street tin – but then my attention was demanded by Cat 2 who, startled as she was, had leapt claws-out up my leg. It was a proper farce. Turns out Cat 1 was engaged in a fierce and swift battle with a random cat who had poked his head through the cat-flap, presumably to try and sneak food, only to be met with Bowser Balboa going at his face like Sweeney Todd. You’ve never seen a more clumsy fight than two cats fighting through a cat-flap – one face would disappear only to be followed by a unsheathed paw, then half a cat would appear again only to get smacked, all the while Cat 2 is trying to get at the bone marrow in my leg through sheer fright.

The whole debacle only lasted moments but my ears are still ringing and I have no feeling below the knee on my right leg. It came to a halt when I, in that very manly way you’d expect from me, threw a leaflet for Sky television at Cat 1 with a shriek. What do I do here? I can’t shoo the other cat away, it might be starving, but I can’t have a cat who refuses to go outside. Thoughts on a postcard, please. Also, if anyone has an industrial sized drum of Savlon and enough plasters to wrap an Egyptian king up, I’d be most grateful.

Finally, before we get to the recipe, drum-roll please (don’t worry: you can just slap your gunt against your lap, though I imagine that’ll be more of a squelch than a rat-a-tat-tat sound)…

Artboard 1

How pretty, right? That took me four months in Illustrator. Well, no, it felt like it. I wish I was one of those stylish people who can fart about designing on a Mac for a living like those achingly hipster bellends you always see looking bored on The Apprentice whilst five suited arseholes bellow at each other about Pantone colours. But I’m not. I can write but design is beyond me. Anyway, the plan is to squeeze in twelve holidays in one year – short breaks doing different things, all in the name of funny blog stories and seeing a bit more of the world. People seem to enjoy our travels and you know what, why the hell shouldn’t we? Life’s too short. We have no vices so we need to spend our money on something. It’s worth noting that we’ve set a budget for each of the twelve trips and anything we don’t spend will be going onto the next holiday! Mind, it won’t trouble the normal running of the blog, we’re still going to be posting our nonsense and recipes as we go along – just with a bit more travel stuff before the recipes as and when we remember! Once I can be arsed, I’ll create a proper travel section of the blog where our recent trips to Cornwall, New York, Corsica, Switzerland, Peterborough, Berlin, Glasgow and Scotland will be in one handy place! Eee I know, we spoil you. We’ve set some targets and rules too:

  • find a geocache at each venue, preferably in an unusual place
  • try the regional dish of the place we’re staying
  • make a Slimming World friendly version of that dish for the blog
  • diet like hell between the holidays but eat and drink what we like when we’re away
  • buy a tacky bit of nonsense for our Room of Tat
  • buy a second tacky bit of nonsense for our Box of Tat which we’ll give away at the end
  • aim for places we haven’t done before and types of holiday that don’t automatically appeal
  • save as many Avios points as we can to pay for the flights of the 12th holiday – we will go as far as our Avios can take us (in business class, we’re too fat for long-haul cattle unless they strap us to the underbelly of the plane)

It isn’t going to all be abroad either – if you can think of somewhere unusual or lovely in the UK, or indeed, if you think of anywhere or any type of holiday that could be fun, let us know!

I do want to stress, because I know there’s going to be a lot of you picking fretfully at your pinnies and thinking we’re giving up the blog to do this – we aren’t! It’ll just give us more excuses to write! Let’s get to the recipe then, eh?

zingy basil chicken

It’s worth noting that we served ours with boring old white rice – you could flesh it out a bit by adding some speed veg or having it with noodles, but for a very quick, easy dinner, this can’t be beaten.

to make zingy basil chicken you will need

  • 4 chicken breasts, cut into chunks
  • 1 shallot, diced
  • 3 garlic cloves, minced (use a microplane grater, save your fingers and don’t bother taking the skin off – here’s a cheap one!)
  • 2 tsp soy sauce
  • 1¼ tsp sriracha
  • ½ tbsp fish sauce
  • 1 tsp cornflour (½ syn)
  • 1 tsp chilli flakes
  • handful of basil leaves, chopped

Now, it’s been a while since we mentioned it, but you may know that we have a fabulous range of deals with Musclefood, including a couple where you get twenty four (or so) big breasts as part of the deal. That’s a lot of chicken! We genuinely love Musclefood chicken – it’s big, it doesn’t leak water like a sieve and it actually tastes of chicken as opposed to ennui and regret. You can view all of our Musclefood deals here, and don’t worry, it’ll open in a new page.

Don’t worry, the fish sauce doesn’t taste fishy. It doesn’t even smell like a tramp’s foot, which is what I had always assumed. It just adds a nice note to the dinner, if you’ll forgive me such a froufrou term.

Oh and I know there’s half a syn in the entire dish. But that’s an eighth of a syn per serving – it serves four. If you want to syn it, have a good hard look at your life and ask yourself if you’re living it to the full.

to make zingy basil chicken you should:

  • in a small bowl, mix together soy sauce, sriracha, fish sauce, cornflour and chilli flakes along with 1tsp water
  • heat a large pan over medium-high heat, add a couple of squirts of spray oil and cook the diced shallot and garlic for about thirty seconds
  • add the chicken and keep stirring frequently until cooked
  • when the chicken is cooked, add the sauce to the pan and cook for a further minute, making sure the chicken is well coated
  • remove from the heat and stir in the basil
  • serve

Eee, now how easy was that? More recipes you say? Fuck me, you’re keen:

poultrysmallbeefsmallporksmalllambsmallfakeawayssmall

Cheers!

J

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January 2, 2017

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breast, chinese, fakeaways, low syn, noodles, poultry, recipe card

marinated duck salad and james’ new year’s resolutions

Marinated duck salad, if you don’t mind! I know, in these times of tight purse-strings and even tighter gusset-elastic, duck may seem like an extravagant choice. And it is. If you want to swap it out for chicken, I’ll never tell. If you want to swap it out for that chicken they sell in Iceland that looks like those polystyrene packing noodles that your parcels from Amazon get shipped in, you go right ahead. What price dignity? Anyway, we’re only having duck because our friend thoughtfully gave us a load of freshly killed meat from when he’s been out hunting. Listen, I’m not a hunter myself, but I don’t want to upset anyone who turns up on my doorstep covered in blood shouting about THE BOOORDS. He asked if I liked duck – I replied that actually, I prefer a cockatoo – and I bet he’s still chuckling now at my lightning wit and horrendously dated jokes. Either that or he’s shot himself in the face.

Now I touched yesterday on New Year’s Resolutions, didn’t I? Here’s an odd thing – I could have sworn I typed up our resolutions last year and I was going to update you on how they went, but look, if it is easier, I’ll just print out our Jacamo order history – another X has managed to sneak onto our clothes labels. Our order forms look like a Spot the Ball competition in a busy bookies. Pretty soon we’ll need to buy two 2XL shirts and just stitch them together round the back. Still, we haven’t taken up smoking or hard drugs, so at least we’ve got that going for us, eh? Without a moment more of hesitation, here’s my resolutions:

To be more sociable

This is such a hard one for me. I’m not agorophobic or enochlophobic (I’m trypophobic and hydrostructuraphobic at best) but see I just hate everyone. Perhaps that’s a smidge too far. Hate is a strong word. Dislike, maybe. Yes, everyone starts out being disliked by me but once they reveal themselves as warm, lovely humans, I’m alright with them. As a result, I struggle with being social. I like staying at home with Paul, sitting in my comfiest underwear, cock and balls sticking to the leather on the settee, eating crisps and watching TV. I’m happy in my own company. Whenever I do force myself out I always have a great time but it’s just getting there. My saying no is as much of a reflex action as my knee kicking out when tapped with a hammer or me ignoring the pains in my left arm as I shovel more food into my gob. But yes: will try harder.

Who knows? Maybe a twochubbycubs meet-up could be on the cards?!

It isn’t, by the way. You’d all be so disappointed. You’d spend all night wondering who had let two cows into the pub only to realise it was us, waspishly drinking our ale and looking furious. We were once stopped in ASDA (the glamour!) by someone asking if we were the chubby cubs (probably assumed we were by the giant marrow and bottle of Astroglide in our shopping basket) to which we stuttered, went red and just said ‘yes but we’re just here for some hummus’ – eee, they’ll be talking about that for years to come I’m sure.

To be less fat

Goes without saying, doesn’t it? I’m tired of all my clothes only-just fitting. I’m tired of the cats looking at me with ‘don’t you think you’ve had enough’ eyes every time we crack open a new tub of Ben and Jerry’s. They’re a fine pair to judge my eating habits, given they both spend a good half-hour licking away at their bumholes of a morning. I don’t know what’s in Whiskas Bite and Chew but they should make a bloody lip-gloss out of it. I know we’ve said so many times before that we need to lose weight but hell, we both feel so old and immobile – and we’re only in our early thirties for goodness sake. I’m not kidding when I say Paul has taken to having a nap before he goes to bed.

How to do it? I do think if we stuck at Slimming World 100% we’d get there, because the diet works. But see, I have strong reservations (which I’ve often voiced) about stuff like avocados being synned, and as a result, I’m going to have to tweak my own take on the diet to get by. Don’t worry though: our recipes will still be 100% Slimming World friendly, nothing is changing on that side. The main thing for us is to get moving: there are days when I get up, drive to work, sit at my desk, drive home and sit on the settee and don’t move a bloody muscle. That’s not good! I can’t pretend we’re going to end up at the gym every night or lifting weights (unless 1kg of chocolate counts) but I’m at least going to try and get my step count into four-figures.

To take up a bad habit

You know that bit in Grease when Rizzo does that impression of Sandy, saying how she doesn’t drink, or swear, or rat her hair, and that she gets ill from one cigarette (cough cough cough)? God, that’s me at the moment. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to undergo a transformation like Sandy does at the end – not least because if I clad my body in skin-tight leather I’d look like part of the DFS sale – but I need a bad habit. I don’t class drinking as a bad habit, more a necessary evil. Drugs fuck with my dicky-ticker and I gave up smoking (for the most part) many years ago thanks to Allen Carr and the shocking site of a year’s worth of cigarette ends billowing up from the drains outside. Oops. Paul bought me membership to a cigar lounge in Newcastle so perhaps that can be it – I think I’ve tipped into the age-appropriate level to carry off the look.

Now, in the interests of keeping the blog entries slightly more manageable and a bit shorter for folks, we’ll cut it there – we can talk about Paul’s resolutions tomorrow, once he has had them cleared and approved by me. HA. Let’s get to the marinated duck salad!

Final thought: don’t forget we have a new book out. It’s huge, it’s meaty, and it’ll leave you satisfied and smiling. There’s quite a bit of unblogged writing in there too – full travel tales for New York and Cornwall, a white wedding (including a mixture of Eurovision and sex) and a whole chapter about my penis. I mean, come on. If that doesn’t lure you in, perhaps the fact that it’s only £4.99 for over 110,000 nicely-chaptered words might tempt you. £4.99! JK Rowling must be shitting the bed with fear. Anyway, if you want a piece of us in your bed at night, click here and fall in love all over again!

marinated duck salad

to make marinated duck salad you will need:

  • 1 tsp cider vinegar
  • 1 tsp honey (1 syn)
  • 1 tsp soy sauce
  • 2 duck breasts (skin removed)
  • 400g noodles (we used somen but any will do)
  • 5 spring onions, sliced lengthways
  • 1 cucumber, deseeded and julienned
  • 2 carrots, peeled julienned
  • 3 tbsp hoisin sauce (3 syns)
  • pinch of sesame seeds (optional – 25g is 8 syns, but we used such a tiny amount we counted it as only 1 syn) (what are we like?)

Can’t be arsed clitting about julienning the carrots and cucumber? Do you think life is too short to be standing over a carrot making it into tiny matchsticks with a knife? With YOUR reputation? Please. Get yourself a £5 julienne peeler and be done with it. It makes your food look pretty!

to make marinated duck salad you should:

  • in a small saucepan, mix together the cider vinegar, honey and soy sauce and add 100ml of cold water
  • bring to the boil, stirring continuously, and then remove from the heat
  • allow the marinade to cool
  • meanwhile, slice the duck breasts diagonally and pour over the marinade, and leave for at least an hour (but overnight is best)
  • prepare the cucumber, carrots and spring onions and set aside in a large bowl
  • cook the noodles according to the instructions, refresh under cold water and set aside
  • heat a little oil over a high heat in a large frying pan, take the duck out of marinade (use a slotted spoon) and pour away the marinade that’s left over
  • cook the duck for about five minutes in the pan, stirring frequently
  • mix together the noodles and vegetables along with the hoisin sauce and serve, topping with the duck slices
  • sprinkle over a few sesame seeds (if using them) and enjoy!

If you love anything stir-fry, give some of these a go!

and don’t forget, there’s over 400 recipes on here for you to choose from! Click one of the buttons below to find another! Remember, if life gives you duck, make a marinated duck salad!

poultrysmallfakeawayssmallvegetariansmall    soupsmall

Cheers thanks babe. Eee, hopefully this will silence our one critic who scolded us yesterday for having the cheek and temerity to post a burger on New Year’s Day because ‘people are struggling’. Pfft. Struggling not to put the whole thing in their gob at once. If anyone else would like to provide feedback, my arse is just waiting to be kissed. Mwah!

J

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December 19, 2016

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breast, chinese, fakeaways, low syn, noodles, poultry, recipe card, rice, travel

the best chicken stir-fry and noodles that we’ve ever done

Before we begin, I warn you that this is going to be a long entry. But I say that to all the boys. The recipe for our best ever chicken stir-fry and noodles is right at the bottom but, you know, do have a read, it’s worth it.

Firstly: a huge, colossal, massive thank you to everyone who has sent us cards, gifts, notes (we do read each one, Norah!), kind words, homemade cards, pure filth and even cat treats and butter. We expected a few cards and were grateful to receive them – but we’ve come back from a week away to over 150 new cards, each one with a thank you and a charming story about how we’ve made you laugh or helped you with your weight loss. Neither of us anticipated such a response and I genuinely can’t thank you all enough – you truly have made us happy. It seems insufficient and galling not to thank you personally and it is only the volume that is stopping us doing that, but please, if you have sent us a card, know that we have read it, loved it, laughed at it and are immensely pleased by it. Even our cats got several mentions and treats – they’d thank you but you know how cats are, they’d still hate you even if you put them out whilst they were on fire.

Yikes, that all got a bit saccharine didn’t it? I expect I’ll get told by some frothing-at-the-mouth shirtfiller that I need to syn my own opening paragraph now. But yes: thank you! If you want to send us a card and haven’t managed to get around to it yet, don’t be alarmed, there’s still time (and we have just a tiny space left on our living room wall) – send a card to twochubbycubs, PO Box 217, Bedlington, NE63 3FA. Come on, how often is it you get to satisfy two men at once? EH?

Let’s crack on before my teeth turn black and Jeremy Kyle calls me up for a DNA test.

Oh my. We told you a lie. Well, not really a lie, more an omission – see, we’ve been away on holiday, but we didn’t want to announce it on here before we go because I’ve read enough tragic stories in Take a Break in which Wotsit-coloured thugs come back from glassing people in Benidorm only to find their house broken into. How did the burglars know they were away? Because the vacationers been posting ‘~*~*~ OMGUD 1799 DAIS UNTIL HOLIBOBS U FUKIN JELUS COW ~*~*~’ on Faceache since the moment their gunt crossed the threshold at Thomas Cook. I didn’t fancy returning home to an upturned Christmas tree (I’d just jab myself in the cock putting it right) and a freshly cleaved dump on my living room rug (we have enough of those concertinaing from our angry cat’s bumhole, thank you), so we didn’t mention it.

So where have we been? Switzerland! I had a nice fancy banner all designed ready to go but then I forgot to save it amidst all the excitement of packing, so you’ll need to make do with this shit joke instead:

What’s an advantage to living in Switzerland?

The flag’s a big plus!

Boom! Do let me know if you need me and my first aid box of out-of-date plasters to stitch up those split sides, you filthy bitches.

EDIT EDIT EDIT! I do have a banner after all! Here we go.

swissone

Why Switzerland though? If I’m honest, I have no idea. A few weeks ago Paul and I decided to have a cheap holiday away at Christmas after Iceland and Germany previously. We did a cursory glance on skyscanner and found that easyJet not only fly there but do so from our local airport AND relatively inexpensively. We booked there and then thinking it would be a cheap holiday only to realise that it’s actually the most expensive place to visit in not just Europe but the whole fucking world. That’s not typical Geordie hyperbole (pronounced: HY-PURR-BURR-LEE in my native tongue) but an actual fact: see? Worth noting that the second most expensive country in the world to visit is the United Kingdom, but see that’s because it costs £87,455 to park the car at Lands End for two hours. Near the top of that list is Iceland (been), Denmark (booked) and Norway (also booked).

I’m going to have to put Paul on the game at this rate. If any of you ladies fancies paying him £10 to get him to ring the Devil’s Doorbell for five minutes or so, let me know. He’ll be brilliant at it, he’s got a slight tremor now from eating too much Swiss chocolate.

Our research into Switzerland, once Paul had brought me round with a sniff of poppers and a jumpstart of my heart, was scant indeed. We decided to take a full week, taking a couple of days in Geneva then taking a scenic train over to Bern. Our hotels were markedly different in what they offered but I’ll get to that. Even after a bit of reading, we knew very little about Switzerland save for two interesting, related facts. In the event of war being declared all the residents of Switzerland can easily fit into the various fallout shelters dotted around the country – in their mountains, under their barns. I could almost hear the sound of twenty thousand metre-thick steel doors being slammed shut forever as Paul and I lumbered our fat arses up the steps of our Geneva-bound easyJet plane. Even their underground car-parks, so clean and pristine and icily efficient, can be sealed off at a moment’s notice to provide shelter for the quivering populace.

Second – perhaps a shade more sinister – if that aforementioned war was ever declared then the bridges, tunnels, railway lines and main motorways into the country can be destroyed by way of explosives that are already wired into the infrastructure, sealing the country off from possible invaders (or at least making it far more difficult). I find that terrifying – I can barely be relied upon to operate a hole-punch without a trip to A&E and a full page in the accident book – imagine having the button to blow up a motorway bridge just sitting on your desk. It would be less than two weeks before I’d knocked over my cup of tea with a stray moob and short-circuited the detonation board for the eastern railways. Brr.

The day before we were due to fly I suddenly remembered that we needed to sort out health insurance. You can imagine how complex that is given my health anxiety – I have to declare everything I’ve ever fretted about with the doctor. There’s a team of crack actuaries working at American Express insurance working full-time on calculating my risk. I let Paul take care of that – and remember that for later. I also, with the hilarious optimism of the unprepared, exchanged £200 into Swiss francs at our local Bureau de Change, served cheerily as I was by a handsome grandad who all but reached over the counter and gave me a reacharound whilst he deposited Switzerland’s exceptionally colourful money into my hands. I have this animal magnetism – it scares me sometimes. We dug out our passports (still in our suitcases from last time, what-are-we-like) and set about packing our new tiny cabin-friendly luggage.

Here’s what normally happens on our holiday: we pack six pairs of jeans and wear one. Eight shirts and only two get worn (though we wash them). We take enough underwear to cover ourselves four times over and more shoes than is entirely decent. No more! In our drive to save money we weren’t going to take luggage that needed to be put in the hold and therefore it was tiny suitcases from Amazon for us. Well, readers, we managed it – I’m not sure if it has been our many, many years of being committed gayboys but we’ve got skills when it comes to cramming lots into a very small space. You get to a point where you think you can’t get any more in, but then if you get a stocky bloke to come and sit on it, you can always get a bit more in. Try it, you might like it.

Normally at this point in our holiday stories we’d have a couple of paragraphs about the two of us driving up to Edinburgh or taking the train to Heathrow and staying in some awful airport hotel but no! This time I can say this: we popped out of bed at 4.45am, had a shower, a dump and a shave, then made our way smartly to Paul’s demi-car for a quick drive to the airport. This is true, save for the fact that I made him turn the car around so we could unplug the Christmas tree lights (on a timer) and then again because I’d forgotten to set the alarm the second time around. Oops. Listen, I know my Christmas tree is just waiting to burst into flames, I don’t want to give it any encouragement.

We paid for a week’s worth of parking at Newcastle Airport and the cost of putting Paul’s car on a scabby bit of tarmac to be scratched, shat on and probably driven around by someone more acne than man was actually more than the cost of safely flying one of us 1,800 miles to Geneva and back in a metal cylinder full of fuel. There’s something wrong with that, isn’t there, especially as you could actually park Paul’s car in the glove box of a normal car. Surely we ought to get half-rates at least. Nevermind.

We didn’t need to check in as being the techno-savvy couple that we are we’d already done so and had mobile boarding passes, meaning our phones were a lurid easyJet orange for a good couple of hours. With no bags to drop off we minced over and through security into the departures lounge. It’s worth noting that the lass who was watching the x-rays of our bags had the haunted look of someone who had absolutely given up on her job. I got the impression I could have smuggled seventy thousand Regal King Size (known in our family as ‘Mother’s December’) and a pair of nail clippers through and she wouldn’t have batted an eye.

Paul did get stopped, actually – I only noticed when I turned around to ask him if he’d ever seen so many bottles of Cheryl Cole’s perfume in one place only to find he wasn’t there and was in fact getting patted down. Apparently his bag sets off the ‘explosive’ check. Knowing Paul he’s probably stitched a load of those bang-strips from cheap Christmas crackers into his rucksack just in the hope of getting roughly touched up by someone with a beard and a hangover. The slut.

meaty-mix-up-01

Newcastle Airport is awful. There, I’ve said it. The staff are lovely – each and all – but the actual airport is a shitpit. You know how Heathrow has Gucci, Harrods and a champagne bar? Newcastle Airport has a branch of JD fucking Sports. Why? Who feels the need to dress like they’re stumbling out of a magistrates court just before they get on a flight? There’s also a Greggs in the departures lounge just in case you don’t feel like your holiday is complete without grease on your fingers and pastry crumbs billowing out from under your chins. It’s awful. You’re shepherded through the giant duty free shop with no chance of escape or quiet solitude and everywhere was full of tomato-faced bawling children getting ready to be flown to Lapland, sadly on return flights. Well, it is Christmas, I suppose.

We schlepped into the only bar that looked faintly promising and ordered a strong coffee. We were given a cup of what looked like watered down dishwater and pointed to a jug of milk that was gently heating on the end of the bar. For this we were charged almost £8. I checked fitfully out of the window to see whether we’d already landed in Switzerland at this point and thus the rip-off prices made sense but no, I could see the luminescent giant ‘M’ of Newcastle’s Metro station and realised that it was just another example of shitty-price Britain. No wonder we’re number two! Along those lines we had to pay £1 to get a sandwich bag to put our toiletries in prior to security. I know we fly enough to know better but a bloody quid! I buy a roll of the fuckers from Costco for £2. They must be bloody raking it in.

After enjoying our coffee (enjoying pouring it away, that is) and having a quick crap because well, you’ve got to do something to fill the time, we were called to our gate. It was full, of course, and when the young lass at the front announced boarding was starting, everyone rushed forward as if they thought the plane was going to fuck off without them. Why? Every single flight: why? The captain’s not going to have a fit of the vapours and decide to power up and away early just for shits and giggles. This isn’t a Black Friday sale, you’ve got a seat, calm the fuck down. We let everyone else puff and bluster their way to the front and then boarded behind them, casual in the knowledge that we had no-one sitting next to us and indeed, the plane was only half-full.

The captain came on after we’d all settled and informed us that, due to freezing fog in Geneva, we’d be delayed in taking off in Newcastle. I did think that was some fog indeed but I suppose we couldn’t circle Geneva indefinitely like we’re in The Langoliers. Paul immediately fell asleep leaving me to entertain myself by picking at his ears and looking mournfully out of the window like Sandra Bullock in Gravity. The captain then came back on the tannoy to let us know we would be free to move around and sit in the empty seats if we so desired but we weren’t to do it until we were in the air lest it upset the take-off balance. I noticed that the stewardess gave me a somewhat pointed look at this point, as if the sheer act of me leaning forward to open my bottle of water would send us helplessly into a nosedive. Mean. Paul snored on.

Eventually, after much polite tutting and shared looks of well-I-never we set off, thundering down the runway at a rate of knots. As you know, I’m fine with flying save for that thirty seconds or so when you lift off. I like it, don’t get me wrong, but I also like a margin of error, and if anything was to go wrong with the plane I’d like it to happen so the pilot has enough time to zip himself back up and wrest control back from the autopilot. I distracted myself by seeing if I could spot our house – probably ablaze like a bonfire thanks to the B&M Christmas lights, but couldn’t. We were soon into the clouds and Geneva-bound, and Paul slept on.

The flight itself was wonderfully uneventful. I watched a bit of Rick Stein, drank my water and looked out of the window. As you may expect at this point, Paul dozed all the way, only opening his eyes when he heard me trying desperately to eat a Crunchie without him waking up and thus having to share. They weren’t kidding about the fog mind – we went around and around in the holding pattern. I waited as long as I could but then I had to dash to the toilet for a quick wee – only no sooner as I had started my flow that I found myself canted at a severe angle, causing me to piddle on the floor and then have to scrabble around with the tissues trying to soak it all up. Where does all this piss on the toilet floor come from? Do the cleaners slosh some on the floor before take-off? Goodness me. I emerged from that toilet flustered and damp, so invariably everyone on the plane probably thought I was joining the Mile High Club: Solo Aviator Division. Brilliant.

Finally the plane descended through the clouds. The fog never seemed to stop and I kid you not, it was about two seconds from the moment we emerged from the fog to when we were on the ground. Flying never ceases to amaze me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m never going to be idiotic enough to clap hysterically when we land, but I always genuinely thank the pilot and humbly apologise to the stewardess for making such a frightful mess of my seat-pocket as I disembark.

That seems like a good place to leave it for now, given that, as per usual, I’ve managed to get to almost 3000 words and we’ve only just stepped off the plane. Sorry, folks.

I do just want to say one more thing, actually. As I’m typing this the news is coming in that there’s been another terrorist attack, this time in a Christmas market in Berlin. People are dead, it’s fucking terrible. But you mustn’t let fear stop you from holidaying and visiting these wonderful places. I’ve never felt at risk anywhere and the way I look at it, if someone wants to be a c*nt and stop my clock to prove a shitty, misguided and utterly wrong point, at least I’d be going out somewhere beautiful without any regrets. Berlin is a beautiful, electric city and so worth a visit. so is Paris. So is Nice. So is Zurich. So is Brussels. That last one isn’t strictly true, I almost actually died in Brussels from terminal boredom, but you get my drift. Don’t let terrorism win. Just tell it to fuck right off and live your life.

I’d love your feedback on tonight’s post, by the way!

Let’s get to the best chicken stir-fry and noodles that we’ve ever done, then, shall we? It’s sort of Rick Stein’s recipe only he uses pork belly. Naturally, we can’t do that without some SW official kicking down our door and torching our computer desk, so we’re using chicken. We got the idea from Hello Fresh and adapted it slightly for SW. Because why not? This makes enough for two.

chicken stir-fry

to make the best chicken stir-fry we’ve ever done, you’re going to need:

As usual with our stuff, feel free to swap stuff out, mix up ingredients, add your own twist. We won’t tell. For your garlic and ginger, get them minced using one of these fancy things. You know we recommend them all the time but that’s because they bloody well work.

to make the best chicken stir-fry we’ve ever done, you should:

  • get a pan of hot water bubbling away
  • chop your chicken breast up into thumb sized chunks and put them into a bowl with the chinese five spice, rubbing it into the meat as best as you can, then put to one side
  • slice your red pepper and red onion and then chop the spring onion nice and fine
  • mince your garlic and ginger
  • drop the egg noodles into the water and cook for as long as they recommend – once that’s done though, drain away the water and run them under cold water so they stop cooking
  • whilst they’re cooking away you can get your wok or large frying pan ready with a few spritzes of decent olive oil or, god forbid, bleurgh, frylight – but why do that to yourself?
  • cook off the chicken strips until nice and well, cooked, then remove them and throw the pepper and onion into the pan and let them cook for a few minutes until softened
  • add the chicken back in, together with the ginger and garlic, and cook for a minute or two – then add the noodles, soy sauce and hoisin sauce and cook everything through until it’s lovely and hot
  • serve on a plate with chopped coriander and spring onions on the top.

Done! I want this right now. Want more chicken recipes? But of course you do. Click the buttons below for even more inspiration.

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Enjoy!

J

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December 6, 2016

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kung pao chicken meatballs with dressed spaghetti

Hello! Here for the kung pao chicken meatballs? Well you’re in luck – there’s no time for a long ramble today as lots to do but you know, I think you deserve a treat. So we have the kung pao chicken meatballs recipe coming up in a moment but first, look at our tree!

tree

Isn’t that a beauty? But let me tell you: blood was almost shed. Let me paint you a picture. There’s me, in the bath, luxuriating / basking in a sea of Molton Brown bubbles and The Archers omnibus playing in the background. Paul was in the living room fussing about the tree like a make-up artist at a wedding. I could hear the occasional shout and strop but hey, the bath was lovely. After an hour or so a plaintive cry came from the living room for me to come and help – his tiny Nick-Nack legs didn’t quite afford him the height needed to pop our furry star on top of the tree. Fair enough – the tree is 7ft and Paul drives a Smart-car.

I clamber out, the bubbles caressing my every curve. It was exactly like the bit in Casino Royale when Daniel Craig emerges from the sea in his little blue knickers, only with far more heart disease and loud straining. I mince into the living room and exclaim at how pretty the tree is before immediately fretting as to whether our Dyson Digital can cope with the quarter-tonne of pine needles that already litter the floor. Completely nude, I lean into the tree to make the final adjustment, to adorn it with the shiny star of Christmas, and how was I rewarded?

With a fucking pine needle right down my hog’s eye. My beef bullet was speared by the cold fingers of Christmas present. I know that a lot of you ladies out there will have been through child birth but honestly, that would have been like ripping off a wet plaster compared to this. I don’t like to exaggerate but it was literally the worst pain in the world. There’s places that nothing should ever venture and a gentleman’s scrotum-totem is one of these. I since looked it up on the internet only to find it’s an actual fetish, with people putting all sorts of things down there. Internet: what is wrong with you?

Anyway, you’ll be relieved to know that he’s fine and still in working order. Phew, right? Let’s get straight to the meatballs, apropos of nothing. This makes enough for four and yeah, it looks like a bit of a ballache to make, but it’s worth it – something different to that boring old SW meatballs in the freezer! Plus you could make the balls and freeze for later.

kung pao chicken meatballs

to make kung pao chicken meatballs you will need:

for the spaghetti

  • 500g spaghetti (or noodles!)
  • 4 cloves of garlic, minced
  • 3 spring onions, sliced
  • 160ml soy sauce
  • 150ml chicken stock
  • 75ml shoaxing rice wine (4 syns)
  • 2 tbsp red chilli paste
  • 2 tbsp rice vinegar
  • 2 tbsp cornflour (2 syns)
  • 1 tbsp sesame oil (6 syns)

for the meatballs

  • 500g minced chicken (or turkey)
  • 1 onion, finely diced
  • 1 egg
  • 35g porridge oats (1x HeB)
  • 1 tbsp sriracha sauce (1/2 syn)
  • 1/2 tsp ground ginger
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 1/4 tsp pepper
  • 2 garlic cloves, minced

You know when we say mince ginger or garlic? Use a microplane grater. It’ll stop your fingers smelling, as long as you stop picking your bum. But seriously, don’t fart about peeling ginger or garlic, just grate it as it is – it’ll be perfect. Click here for our recommended mincer! 

for the sauce

  • 4 tbsp soy sauce
  • 1 tbsp sriracha (1/2 syn)
  • 1 tbsp red chilli paste
  • 1 tbsp honey (3 syns)

to make kung pao chicken meatballs you should:

bit of a fuck on this, but I promise it’s worth it.

  • firstly, preheat the oven to 200 degrees
  • then, make the meatballs – spray a non-stick baking sheet with a little oil
  • mix together all of the meatball ingredients, roll into about twenty meatballs, plop onto the baking sheet and cook for twenty five minutes, and whilst that’s going on, do the other bits
  • next, bring a large pan of water to the boil and cook the spaghetti (or noodles) according to the instructions – try and time this so that the spaghetti will be finished at the same time as the meatballs
  • meanwhile, in a bowl whisk together all the other ingredients for the spaghetti, except for the garlic, and keep to one side
  • add a little oil to a large frying pan and heat over a medium-high heat
  • add the minced garlic and cook for about thirty seconds
  • pour in the reserved sauce, bring to the boil and then reduce to a simmer for a few minutes, until slightly thickened
  • add the cooked and drained spaghetti (or noodles), toss well until nicely coated with the sauce
  • in another bowl, whisk together the sauce ingredients
  • when the meatballs are cooked, toss them gently in the sauce
  • serve the spaghetti onto plates, and top with the meatballs
  • sprinkle over the spring onions
  • we added a few chopped peanuts as well for a bit of crunch (if you’re doing the same, remember to syn them)

Serve! The oats really bulk the balls out. Mahaha!

Want more fakeaway or chicken recipes? Just click the buttons below!

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Enjoy!

J

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September 12, 2016

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beef, chinese, diced beef, fakeaways, low syn, noodles, one-pot, recipe card, rice, steak, travel

one pot chinese braised beef

We’ve done many quick beef recipes before, but this one-pot Chinese braised beef really hits the spot. The G-Spot. Put down some plastic sheeting and let’s get cooking! Oh wait, no, no, we have to finish our Peterborough report, don’t we? It haunts me now like a Vietnam flashback. So many soiled mattresses. I’ll bust out the old graphic…

peterborough

…and kindly advise you that part one can be found here and part two can be found here. If you’re a fan of our travel tales and writing, you can find our previous trips to Corsica, Ireland, Iceland and Berlin, along with many other articles, in our big compendium book! It’s been a while since I mentioned it – you can find it on Amazon right here!

When you left us we were just finishing up Bletchley Park and steeling ourselves for the journey back to the hotel. Despite the sat-nav’s attempts to make our head explode scanner style by repeating roundabout over and over, it was a pleasant enough journey and we were back at the hotel in no time at all. True to their word, they had switched our rooms to an altogether more charming one (although Paul’s face was ashen when he realised it was up a flight of stairs, the poor lamb). They told us to nip back to the old room and pack our things, which we promptly did.

On our thigh-chaffing walk to the old room, Paul pushed me out of the way and hurtled ahead. Turns out that his ashen-face was more down to the immediate and pressing need to dispose of the World’s Shittiest Italian Meal from the day before. I, being a thoughtful chap, told him that he’d need to hold it in because the housekeepers would be waiting for us to leave so they could clean the room and there was no way I was adding ‘walking into a deathcloud of barely digested pancetta’ onto their list of reasons to hate life. So began the quickest debate you’ve ever seen, with Paul dancing back and forth on his feet and me being firm and telling him he had to hold it. I only relented when he said it was either the toilet of the old room or the hood on my hoodie in the corridor.

Well, you can’t argue with that. I stepped aside. There was a lot of noise and motion.

Of course, it smelt like someone had died, meaning we had to stay in the room for twenty minutes frantically wafting the curtains and flapping the duvet to try and get the stench to dissipate. I don’t want a mark on my Premier Inn record that states we leave the room smelling like someone has burnt a tyre full of human hair. Having done the best we could, with me liberally sprinkling Rive D’Ambre everywhere (and that stuff is £170 a bottle, just saying: we’re fat, it’s the only designer thing we can wear), we switched rooms.

Why is it, no matter what time of the day or night it is, you can turn E4 or More4 or 4Skin or 4goodnesssakepickaname on, there’s always a Come Dine with Me quintet to watch? At the very last there’s a Four in the Bed chain to work through. Having realised that there was absolutely bot-all-else to do on a Sunday in fair Peterborough, we settled down with vending machine snacks and a tiny cup of Barely Grey and made the best of it. Naturally, we fell asleep. Say what you want about Premier Inn, they do make a damn comfy bed. I should know, we’ve got one installed.

We woke up at 7, full of piss and vinegar for falling asleep and wasting our evening, only to realise that there was nowhere in Peterborough that caught our eye. Paul did suggest a visit to a floating boat which served Chinese food but then we bought realised we didn’t fancy stopping every ten minutes on the way home to revisit our dinner. Casting our net a little wider we eventually spotted somewhere that did take our fancy – Stilton, just over the roundabout. Lovely. I made to make a reservation at a lovely looking place that I can’t remember the name of (Bell Inn?) but Paul reminded me of something.

See, my lovely, confident husband frets something chronic about going to ‘nice places’ to eat. He has an inferiority complex – he absolutely shouldn’t, he’s wonderful, but he thinks he is going to make an arse of himself. I reassured him that he amazing in every way and so we made a reservation and set off.

Well, honestly. It was a gorgeous little pub and the menu sounded great. We were given a seat on a tiny table by the fire (not a criticism mind) and ordered our food. Paul was a little on edge but we got through the starters without any difficulties. The mains arrived and we got stuck in. Everything was going just so until Paul illustrated a particularly bold point with an expansive sweep of his arm, which pushed his pint of Pepsi off the table and down the wall. Nobody noticed, thankfully, despite the pool of Pepsi around my feet. Fair enough, everyone’s allowed one. I went to take a bite of my burger – one of those overly stuffed, towering piles of meat that are the style these days – only to have the cheese covered meat slide out and cascade down my pink shirt. Great! All equal.

Naturally, Paul had to one-up me. He’d ordered pork belly which came with a smashing bit of crackling which, try as he might, Paul couldn’t crack into small enough bits of eat. He couldn’t very well pick it up and eat it with his hands so he tried many different ways to get into it. No joy. I suggested using the knife as a chisel and to tap it from the top with his hands, like hammering a nail. I thought he’d be careful. Of course not. The ham-fisted dolt hit his knife so hard that it not only shot through the crackling but also cleaved his dinner plate in two. He very much won that round. We finished our meal, polished off a cheese-board, paid the bill and left a hearty tip before we were asked to leave. It was a gorgeous meal and a lovely place, mind.

We stopped at the hotel ‘bar’ for a gin and tonic – me resisting the urge to ask if he’d gone to press the juniper berries himself he was gone that long. We won £7 from the Itbox and made for bed, safe and snug in the knowledge that we’d be home in the morning.

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We woke at eight, peeling ourselves apart once more like two flip-flops in the sun due to the room being the temperature of lava. I walked around in the shower for ten minutes until I was wet enough to clean myself and then we made for the car. It was here we made a rash decision. You need to understand we were motivated purely by hunger at this point.

We went to a Toby Carvery for our breakfast.

I know, we’re monsters. I’d seen an advert somewhere and it seemed like a filthy proposition – and as I’ve mentioned before, we do love a buffet breakfast.

I barely need to tell you how awful it was. It was foul. I could talk about the fact we were having breakfast on an industrial estate. I could describe the food: baked beans cooked last November, bacon you could reupholster a settee with, sausages with less meat content than a butcher’s pencil, eggs that I’m still working through my teeth now. Hell, I could go on about the fact that they advertise the fact they have ‘special breakfast Yorkshire puddings’ (i.e. the Yorkshire puddings they didn’t sell in the roast dinner the day before that were so hard I could have used them to stop a runaway train) or the ‘cheese and potato hash’ (i.e. the roast potatoes that didn’t get used the day before with a bit of Primula added) or even the ‘special breakfast gravy’ which was yesterday’s gravy with some tomato ketchup in it. This gravy didn’t so much have a skin as a coat of fucking armour. I’ve never had to slice gravy before, I can tell you.

No, what put me off (after all that, shocking!) was the sheer, unadulterated, naked greed from the person sitting a couple of tables away. Everyone makes a pig of themselves at a buffet, yes, but this guy deserved a gold medal. Three plates of breakfast, each heaped like a mini cowpat of excess. He ate and he ate and he ate without barely drawing breath – which was in itself not such a bad thing because when he did breathe it sounded like someone hoovering up a pile of rubber gloves. When he did stop he burped, and it wasn’t a polite wee burp into a hand like decent folk, but a really resounding baaaarp like he was clearing out just another pocket to cram breakfast into. Bleurgh.

I must be clear: I adore a buffet, I’m capable of great amounts of eatings, but have a bit of fucking decorum. When your chin is more bacon fat than skin, stop. This is why we don’t do those all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets in town – you always get someone who treats it as though it’s their last meal and I’m sorry, it makes me feel queasy.

We drove home, ashamed of ourselves for the breakfast and full of regrets that we’d spent as much money as we did on an awful weekend. It was lovely meeting Paul’s brother and Paul’s dad and his partner, but those were the only high points in an otherwise dismal 72 hours. Paul chastised me constantly for driving at 90mph all the way home but in my defence, it was the fear of breaking down and the car having to be towed back to Peterborough that kept my foot firmly on the accelerator. Never again.

We nipped back home to pick up my car and then made our way back to the car rental. Paul, naturally, forgot to have the windows down on the drive over so when the rental guy bent down to check the interior of the car for cleanliness, he visibly paled. I’m surprised he didn’t charge us for making vegetable soup in the boot. Paul also helpfully forgot to un-sync his phone from the car’s entertainment system so when the guy started the car back up, it reconnected with Paul’s phone and started blasting the chorus from Big Girls Don’t Cry by Lolly. A fitting end.

Naturally, upon our return, the cats paid entirely no attention to us and carried on licking their bottoms. We did have a moment of hilarity when we realised we’d accidentally packed the little purple Premier Inn branded bed-runner into our suitcase. I confessed our accidental theft on Twitter and they kindly told us to keep it. I put it on the bed for ten minutes, Paul chortled, then we both realised exactly how many different accountants and salesmen must have wiped their cocks on it. We’ve packed it away in the cupboard for when his mother comes over.

And that’s that. I was disappointed but Paul even more so – he remembered growing up in a place with lots to do. Heraclitus wrote that ‘it is impossible to step into the same river twice‘, and no more so is that true then when you go ‘home’. Bah.

Right then, let’s do the recipe. This serves two fatties or three or four healthy appetites. The main dish cooks all in one pot and we just microwaved some noodles rather than cooking fresh because we’re super lazy. Remember to syn that. As usual, you can use frylight if you prefer for frying, but proper spray olive oil is 7 sprays for half a syn or something, and has the advantage of not tasting like a sweaty arse.

one pot chinese braised beef

to make one pot chinese braised beef you will need:

to make one pot chinese braised beef you should:

  • preheat the oven to 150°C
  • heat a casserole dish on the hob over a medium-high heat and add a little oil
  • fry the garlic, spring onions, ginger and chilli for about 1 minute
  • toss the beef in the flour and add to the pan, and stir until browned all over
  • add the five-spice and honey and stir until combined
  • add the rice wine vinegar to the pan, scraping up the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon or spatula
  • pour in the stock and the soy sauce, mix, cover with the lid and cook in the oven for an hour
  • pull the pak choi apart and place on top of the stew for the last fifteen minutes so it wilts down
  • serve!

We thought this was amazing, no kidding. It’s quite like our Mongolian beef but a lot more saucy.

If you want more beef or fakeaway recipes, hit the buttons below! Oh and we’ve finally added the one-pot section, so click that for more one-pot ideas! PHEW

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I’d love some comments and feedback!

J

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June 27, 2016

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

beef in a black bean sauce

I bet you’re here for the beef in a black bean sauce, aren’t you? Well, before we get to the main event, let me tease you with some words. Thoughtplay, if you prefer. Nah, it’s not that posh. The bits in my blog before the recipes are the equivalent of a chav spitting on his fingers beforehand. Before I do, though…

Our Musclefood deal runs for another couple of days only – 10% off our already amazing value freezer box! It’s a delivered chilled box of wonder – with 24/26 big fat chicken breasts, 800g of extra lean beef chunks, 2kg of extra lean beef mince and lots and lots of bacon. It’s usually £50 – which is cheap when compared to what you’d pay in the shop – but we’ve knocked off 10% for ONE WEEK ONLY. This brings it down to £45 – the cheapest it has ever been. Remember you can choose the date of delivery and payment doesn’t come out until your chosen date, so you can order in advance. To order, just click this link, add to basket, add the code TCCFREEZER and choose standard delivery – £45! Easy! But this is for ONE WEEK ONLY.

Sorry, we’re not normally so heavy with the advert, but well, it only runs for a little bit longer, and you’ll be twisting your gob if you try and buy it and it’s full-price, so buy it now. Hell, you can use the beef chunks to make the recipe below!

We’ve been swimming. Good god I know. Normally we confine getting our tits out to times when we’re at least two large water masses away from the UK, but balls to that – literally buoyed up with goodwill from the gym, we thought we’d dip our toe in the water, not least before all the swimming pools in the United Kingdom get filled up with cement and turned into posh hat shops. Anyway, look at the state of us – at least you know we’re going to float with all the blubber.

I love the thought of swimming – I enjoy thinking about getting up early, getting myself a nice fresh towel, driving myself to the baths and doing a few luxurious lengths of the pool before laughing gaily in the changing rooms and talking of times past with some accountant with a verruca. It never happens though. It’s probably the early morning – we have four alarms in the morning and it’s only the fourth, an exceptionally loud chorus of Peter Andre’s Mysterious Girl playing through every speaker in the house, that gets us up. There’s a lot to be said for having a fancy connected house sound-system but having that tangerine-faced little shit-tickler caterwauling throughout until you get to the iPad and turn him off isn’t one of them.

I did used to swim with my old flatmate, Mary, but she stopped going when she thought the chlorinated water was giving her cystitis. Not the regular parade of blokes you understand, but the mild waters of Hexham baths. She’d put on a coach over the weekend. I’ve always fancied having a pop at wild swimming, which, from what I understand from the Guardian, is where lots of people whose first name ends in a -reh or a -rah sound get together, show off their varicose veins, swim in a river and then stop for an elderflower press on the way home. That’s fine but my closest river is the Wansbeck and I don’t fancy swimming using someone else’s recently passed stool as earplugs. Plus, remember, I’m scared of dams and sluices and grates and weirs. I’d wind up having a panic attack in the water near a sewage pipe and end up with Michael Buerk narrating my dramatic rescue, with candid overhead shots of me being winched into the helicopter on a slab of tarpauline like the time that poor whale got stuck in the Thames. Fuck that.

Now, the last time we did venture into a swimming pool that we hadn’t rented all to ourselves was at David Lloyd, where the pool comes with a steam room that makes you smell like oranges. Which is great, given a lot of the ladies (and indeed most of the men) had the skin colour of a bottle of Tropicana as it was. We didn’t enjoy it because there were so many beady eyes watching us attempt to swim, so we sat in the jacuzzi farting just as hard as we could. If you’re going to be snooty with me, Madam, you can enjoy the smell of pizza stuffed meatloaf dispersed through so many jets of bubbles.

So anyway, it was at 8am on Saturday morning that found us pouring into Paul’s Smart car, destined for the salubrious wonderland that is Morpeth Riverside Leisure Centre. See, Morpeth is canny posh and we thought most of the residents would be too busy making soufflé or beating their help to be bearing witness to our attempts. The morning hadn’t started well – the swimming shorts that I had previously worn in Corsica had somehow shrunk in the wash (yes, that was it) meaning the netting inside pressed right up against my clockweights, giving them the impression of an overstuffed tangerine bag. Paul was fine, his elephant’s elbow were tucked away neatly. I cut out the netting, thinking at least I’d be able to use him like a rudder if the water was warm.

It wasn’t, by the way.

But I will say this – it was very enjoyable! Yes, you’ve got to get changed in front of everyone else, and yes, there’s always one man see-sawing a towel in his arse-crack like he’s rubbing out an error in an exam, and yes, everything jiggles, but once you’re in the water and swimming, it’s actually very pleasant. Burns about 500 calories an hour if you swim slowly, though let’s be realistic. Unless you’re committed, you’ll do one length and then fart about in the shallow end for an hour before it’s a reasonable time to get out and get a Mars bar from the vending machine. Paul likes me to go underwater and swim between his legs, but I’ve stopped doing that since he left a racing stripe on my freshly-shaved head. We will definitely be talking about going back.

In the meantime, if you fancy giving wild swimming a go, have a look here!

By the way, not going to make a fuss, but we lost 10lb between us this week 🙂

beef in a black bean sauce

This makes 4 VERY generous portions!

to make beef in a black bean sauce you will need:

  • 800g beef strips (two packs from our Musclefood deal!)
  • 2 large onions, sliced
  • 4 garlic cloves, minced
  • 1″ knob of fresh ginger, minced (for the garlic and ginger, use a mincer, you’ll have it done in a doddle – click here for ours!)
  • 1 red pepper, sliced
  • 3 tbsp black beans, mashed up a little bit (this is optional – they’re a bugger to find!) (though we found ours in our local Chinese supermarket, fermented – tasty!)
  • 2 red chilli peppers, sliced thinly
  • 4 spring onions, sliced
  • 1 tbsp rice vinegar

for the marinade:

  • 1 tsp sesame oil (2 syns)
  • 2 tsp light soy sauce
  • 2 tsp dark soy sauce
  • ½ tsp salt
  • ½ tsp pepper

for the sauce

  • 160ml beef stock
  • 1 tbsp oyster sauce
  • 2 tsp light soy sauce
  • 1 tsp dark soy sauce

Don’t worry if you don’t have dark and light soy sauce just make do with one of the other!

to make beef in a black bean sauce you should:

  • firstly, mix together all of the marinade ingredients in a bowl
  • place the diced beef into a freezer bag or bowl, drizzle over the marinade, shake it up and marinade for at least 20 minutes but ideally overnight, though I know, you’ll be cooking it the very second the minute hand sweeps past thirty
  • when ready to cook, mix all of the sauce ingredients together and set aside
  • heat a large pan over a high heat and add a little oil or a few squirts of Frylight
  • lob in the beef and cook until browned
  • remove the beef from the pan, add a little bit more oil/Frylight and throw in the onions, garlic and ginger and stir fry for a few minutes
  • chuck in the red peppers and black beans (if using) and cook for a bit longer until the peppers have softened
  • next, add in the red chilli, rice vinegar and spring onions and return the beef to the pan
  • stir for a minute, add the sauce, cook for another thirty seconds and serve with rice!

You can actually cheerfully leave out the black beans, though they do add something to the dish. Try and use low salt soy sauce if you can. Enjoy!

For more fakeaway recipe ideas or beef ideas, click the icons below!

beefsmall  fakeawayssmall

J

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June 10, 2016

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chinese, fakeaways, low syn, noodles, pork, pork joints, recipe card, rice

spicy korean pork

Spicy Korean pork, just below all this guff and nonsense. I remember making a mistake when I posted a recipe for Mongolian beef and captioning it with a picture of a lovely little dog I’d been walking. Some simpleton with a face like she’s been flossing her minge with barbed wire sent me a big stroppy email suggesting that I was insinuating that Mongols eat dogs and that I was a horrendous racist on a par with Hitler. Which is silly, because I’d look dreadful with a toothbrush moustache. At least a messy beard hides the stretchmarks, that’s what I say. So just to be clear, this spicy Korean pork is made with pork. You know, like the name suggests. Now, before we go further, the next post contains lewd scenes and blue language. If you’re of the sort who already has angry person letterhead on the desk, just scroll on by. It’s simple!

Anyway, Paul and I are out and about tonight, so I’m going to bring in a guest writer for tonight’s post, who is going to talk to us all about online dating. This isn’t an area I’ve had much experience in – see when I was growing up, it was just a case of logging into gay.com, putting 14/m/newc in and twenty minutes later I was being bundled into a transit van for puppies and sweets. I’m kidding, I was legal age and too fat to bundle anyway. Roll, perhaps. I had an awkward date with someone who bought me a necklace from Argos and then didn’t say a bloody word as we tortured ourselves through a Pizza Hut buffet. Paul had someone give him a £20 Argos gift-card with £4.98 left on it. Still, both of our gentleman suitors received anal in exchange. We don’t fuck about at twochubbycubs! Over to our guest writer, then. As usual, because I’m a big egotistical horror, I’ll be butting in, and also, please remember that these guest writer articles give someone a chance to tell a story – don’t be mean! Lots of feedback please! All those who have submitted articles, we’re aiming for one a week and I’m drawing randomly. If you’ve sent in stuff and haven’t made it online, don’t cut yourself, you’ll be cubbed up soon enough. Anyone else who wants a go leave it in the comments below. I’ll be the only one to see it, don’t worry!

Our guest writer tonight is Helen “Whistling Canyon” G. I asked her what her party trick was and she replied something incoherent about a Premier Inn and a hockey team, so who knows…?

clicking – by Helen “Whistlin’ Canyon” G

I ventured into the world of online dating for six months a few years ago, This was before the days of Tinder mind, so I have no idea about this swiping left or right stuff. I’d only swipe left and right when I was alone in the bath. Like rubbing ink off a hand. Back when I was doing online dating you simply messaged someone and hoped they replied, and then didn’t turn out to be a weirdo / murderer. Sadly, they often do, but ah well, needs must.

My first date was only a couple of days after I joined, and I was surprised. I had thought nobody would message a fatty like me! The guy seemed OK, we had a couple of coffee dates, and a couple of nights out for drinks at country pubs. All seemed OK. Then he asked me did I want to come to his house and he would cook for me – and I could stay over. I figured, yeah go on then – I had only been single a couple of months after a long term relationship and I had no idea what was the decent amount of time these days before someone gets a look at your bits. (James: it’s usually about fifteen seconds, just enough to shake the drips off)

He picked me up and said we would call at the supermarket on the way to his for the ingredients and some wine. Perfect – though it would mean a lot of ‘no no, put it back, I don’t eat chocolate’ and fakery. Plus what if he took me down the lube and condoms aisle and spent ten minutes giving me knowing winks and leers? As long as he didn’t pick up a box of Trim, I didn’t care. Hell, if he picked up a box of Magnum XXL I’d have let him ravish me amongst the frozen peas. Anyway, off we went, with me full of excitement for what treats awaited me…and he proceeded to buy reduced chicken breast – you know the ones with the yellow stickers on that need to go now before they go off in the next few hours? Yep, them. The ones that cause fights amongst the blue-haired, yellow-chinned folk. And then we went to the wine aisle and he told me to choose anything from the three for a tenner deal. Charming. I’m not a snob but surely the first time you cook for someone new you would at least let them feel they are worth full price chicken? Or if you really want to buy a bargain, don’t take them with you? Swap them out into a Waitrose bag and make your date feel like a queen? He also bought two apples for pudding. Hmm. (James: to be fair, I used to buy oranges before a hot date. Keeps them quiet if you jam one in their gob. If you’ve got a fat date, make it a chocolate orange. It’s like poppers for us chunkers)

We got to his house and I soon noticed none of the door frames had doors attached. I mentioned this and he said he didn’t like doors and he liked his cat to have free run of the house. Fine, but this included  the toilet. No door on the toilet – fuck that! I’m all for being open but no-one needs to see me grunting away like Mel Smith solving a wordsearch as I have a crap. Plus, he was always kissing his cat and then trying to kiss me with an inch of cat hair stuck to his stubble. I’m not going to lie, I did envision to start with that he might end up with hairs from a pussy caught in his stubble, but not this way. NOT THIS WAY. No offence to cat owners by the way. I would feel the same if it was dogs, horses, sheep – anything. Needless to say that didn’t really go anywhere.

My next date was with a guy who spent two weeks asking me to go on a date with him, then not being able to make it, so rearranging – when we finally went out we had an alright night but he didn’t look at all like his photos and his craic was shit! Then he told me he was moving to France so wasn’t looking for anything serious but he would very much like to see the inside of my flat. He claimed it wasn’t a euphemism but I’ve seen a barely disguised stiffy before. No thanks pal.

Next up was a fellow divorcee. Nice guy, had a great time both times we went out then the third time let him stay over and then discovered he had thought my first name was something completely different to what it is, and I just thought, if you can’t even be arsed to learn my name, you can do one as well mate!

Then was the guy who smoked a joint on our first (and only) date on a Saturday afternoon in a beer garden. Of a family pub. See ya!

Then the penultimate guy was someone I knew from years ago and used to have a crush on. I was so looking forward to the date, as he was the guy EVERYONE fancied back in the day. Well, I don’t know what happened in the 15 years in between but he was not that guy. He lectured me all the way through our food about being a vegetarian and how bad I was for eating meat. I still ate all my chicken like. He was wasting his breath. He also told me he didn’t have a TV as he believes that aliens can spy on us through the aerials so he only has it hooked up to a PlayStation to watch Blu-Rays on. He was writing a conspiracy play and was hoping to take it to LA and become famous. Honestly was expecting him to whip out a tin foil hat at any moment. There were a few awkward silences which he proceeded to fill by asking me more about what I eat in a typical day and criticising me for having jacket potato several times a week. But he lived on veggie pizzas. So, ya know – he knows all about good nutrition clearly. Bell-end. Incidentally, he text me a month later after complete silence and said “how about that second date?” Hahaha as if! Then THREE YEARS later he text me asking for another chance. I didn’t even know who it was! Who does that?

James edit: I remember! I did have ONE bad date. We went back to his after a movie and I went to the bathroom to prepare myself and managed to completely block his toilet. He didn’t have a brush or anything to swoosh it away with so I had to break it up with the bottom of a bottle of Radox. The smell was unbearable and, with the mood killed (at least for me, he was ‘waiting’) I walked right past his bedroom and out of the door into the night. To be fair, I had a lucky escape, as I heard from another acquaintance that he was very much a one-spurt-Burt.

It’s not all bad though. I was just about to delete my profile forever when a guy I had approached replied to me apologising for the delayed response but he had been working away and hadn’t had access to the Internet. I had messaged him as a long shot as he was a fair bit younger than me and had not expected him to reply. We chatted a bit, exchanged numbers and then after a couple of weeks of texting while he was working away again we eventually managed to squeeze in a last minute date one Sunday afternoon. I was so unprepared, I had been visiting my mam in hospital and it was a boiling hot day and you know hospitals are the hottest places on Earth at the best of times, so I was a right sweaty mess but I went anyway. The rest is history, as they say. We now have a beautiful 2 year old daughter and live together. So, he was kinda worth wading through all that shit for. And he still fancies me even though I am fat. So, yay!

Aaah, I do love a happy ending, and seemingly the fragrant Helen likes dishing them out. Speaking of happy finishes, you’ll feel happy when you finish this dish. Sorry, that was a dreadful segue, but see it’s been a long day. This recipe serves four if you dish it up with rice. You can just as easy use pork chunks for this, but we used a joint from Musclefood. Because, you know, it’s us, and we love Musclefood! Plus it’s £6 per 1kg and had hardly any fat! Click here for that. I’m synning this at 1.5 syns – it’s actually 1.25 syns but I can’t bear any cross words.

spicy korean pork

to make spicy korean pork you will need

for the meat

500g boneless pork shoulder, all visible fat removed

for the marinade: 

  • 1 pear, grated (up to you if you syn it – 2 syns per 100g if cooked apparently, but that’s a load of bollocks)
  • 1 small onion, grated
  • ½ tsp fresh ginger, minced (remember, save yourself so much bother by grating it using one of these and putting the rest of the ginger back in the freezer
  • 1 garlic clove, minced (yep)
  • 1 tbsp soy sauce
  • 1 tsp of red chilli flakes
  • 1 tsp sesame oil (2 syns)
  • 3 tbsp thai massaman curry paste (3 syns) (before you ask: you buy it from Tesco and it’s a paste of shallots, onion, garlic, spices, sugar, lime leaves and various other funny things

for everything else:

  • 1 onion, sliced
  • 1 garlic clove, minced
  • 2 spring onions, sliced

for the lady who loves: 

  • Cadbury’s Milk Tray

for he’s a:

  • jolly good fellow

fore:

  • skin

OK that’s enough. Grow up, tsk.

to make spicy korean pork you should:

  • cut the pork into slices of about 1.5cm thick – you don’t need to be careful or exact, you’re not performing a circumcision on a moving train, just get it roughly the same
  • in a large bowl, combine and mix together all of the marinade ingredients
  • add the pork and mix well, and leave to marinade for at least 30 minutes or as long as you dare
  • heat a large heavy bottomed pan over a high heat and add a little oil (syn if you want, or use Fillipo Berio spray for 7 sprays at 0.5 syn each), then just chill your own heavy bottom whilst it heats up
  • add the minced garlic and sliced onion and stir fry for a few minutes, until the onion turns translucent
  • add the pork and cook for about 6-7 minutes, stirring frequently until cooked through and caramelised
  • serve, and sprinkle with the spring onions
  • easy – we served ours with rice

This dish takes no time to make, but the longer you leave the meat to marinate the better.

If you want more takeaway style dishes or pork treats, click the buttons below!

porksmall fakeawayssmall

Cheers!

J

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May 23, 2016

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breast, chinese, cured meats, dips, fakeaways, low syn, lunch, noodles, pork, poultry, recipe card, salad, sauces, savoury snacks, snacks, taster ideas

fresh spring rolls and dipping sauce

Was it my fresh spring rolls and dipping sauce that caught your eye? Well scroll on down, you filthy buggers. Fair warning, tonight’s entry is a little saucy.

Before we get to the recipe, I’m going to do something unusual. See, in the facebook group that accompanies this blog are a load of funny buggers, each more crass and hilarious than the last. I can rattle off a blue joke and a knob gag no worries, but well, I struggle to get women’s problems correct. It’s all so complicated, and well, if you get it wrong, you’re liable to end up with a clit around the ear and a flap in the face. Wah-wah.

Anyway, I decided it would be a gas to ask people if they wanted to write an ‘article’ for the blog – no catches, write what you want, and if I have a recipe but can’t be buggered to type up one of my usual why-use-one-word-when-forty-paragraphs will do, I can post one up! If you’re interested in having a go, let me know in the comments. Readers, please remember that these articles are people wanting to try their hand at writing a blog post but don’t have the confidence to set up a full blog. Be kind. If you’re thinking negative comments, keep them ssh. If you enjoy the article, let’s hear from you!

Tonight’s entry is by the charming Clarabell, who lists the ability to say the alphabet backwards and having a creepy double-jointed hand as her party trick. Don’t believe me? Take a look!

20160522_174459

Goodness. Least she never struggles to get the last Pringle out of the tube, eh? I’d better make sure that isn’t the image that shows up when you post this to facebook. Over to Clarabell…

sweatbox: a tale by Clarabell

Now, we’re all used to the candid craic from James and Paul about douche bulbs, all things in the downstairs department, and of course the post that mentioned bukkake…which I had to google. On a work laptop. Upon which I forgot to delete the history. Cheers guys! So I figured that with a gaggle of MAINLY female readers that my post would have to be about some nether region tale of the female variety. Something we’ve probably all experienced at one point. Perhaps not James and Paul. (James edit: NOT TRUE! I’ve been there and it was all very charming, but not for me. That’s what keeps the world interesting, different opinions, apropos of nothing I don’t like potted ox tongue either).

I’ve been fed up lately, I’ve been getting bouts of cystitis, antibiotics, thrush, cystitis….repeat. I’ve had a scan and there’s nothing wrong with me other than I don’t drink enough water, and have self-created this cycle of misery.

Resigned to buying the thrush cream, after the standard tactic of ‘ignore it and it might not be there’ stopped working, off I went to the local shopping centre, my purse hovering on the thick air in front of me. I’m in Asda but I can’t see what I want on the shelves, and I’m quickly narked that the chemist is the other side of the centre, only because when your regions are on fire, that’s a long walk to do, simultaneously avoiding the urge for a scratch, and walking like there’s stones in your shoes. But! In a flash of delight, I remember that they took out half of the checkouts, to make an optician that no-one goes in, and…. a PHARMACY! Whoop! There’s nothing like the delight of knowing you can get minge cream at the same time as your linguine.

“I’d like some Canesten Oral Duo” I say bravely– pointing to the bottom shelf. Worryingly, he looks like he doesn’t have a clue what I’m asking for. He follows my finger to the bottom shelf, and picks up some Sea Legs, examines box, puts it back and repeats – he does this a few times with a box of Rennie, and some headlice solution, and eventually comes across the thrush ‘range’ glowing on the shelf like a barber’s pole in full red and white glory. I’m wondering at this point if he is the pharmacist, or whether he’s mugged the rightful medicine man of his Asda badge and strolled behind the desk in the manner of an imposter, hoping to get first nab of the nearby ‘Whoops’ range, but he comes across the requested item at last. Not literally, you’d really struggle to pick the box up if he did that.

“Is it for you?” he asks. Christ on a bike…look mate, it’s fifteen flaming quid…I am not about to raffle it off in the Slimmer of the Week basket I don’t say this, instead I go with “yes” and 100% resting bitch face. Oh but he isn’t finished, “have you used it before?”…panic! What’s the correct answer to this? ‘Yes’ and appear like some serial offender, someone who can’t control their rancid ways and lifting minnie?! Or ‘no’ and risk a declined purchase, or worse, some sort of lecture on best application practice and/or side effects?! I go with “yes” quickly followed up with “a while ago…” He gives a small nod. He knows I’m baking bread. Phew, home and dry, which is good because another customer has joined me and she has the smug privacy of a prescription, which is her ticket to a no question transaction.  What is it with these useless questions?

However, there can be none more useless than the question I once got asked buying antihistamines for hayfever, “drowsy or non-drowsy” I was asked! Really?! Erm..let me check my diary…nope, nothing on the afternoon, drowsy for me please, I’m fine to lounge around spaced out and sleepy, I was not planning on driving and the only ‘machinery’ I’ll be operating will be the telly, so yup, drowsy will do just do fine…ah wait, no consuming alcohol? Poop.

Anyway, Ahmed walks to the till, and promptly stops and stands above it doing jazz hands, and of course he just remembered he doesn’t know how to use it. Suddenly, “Doreen!” he shouts WAVING THE CANESTEN BOX IN THE AIR! “Doreen, can you ring this in for me please”! I swear the smug-prescription-holder does the smirking shimmy, that tiny little wobble that comes only with an inner titter.  I throw her some side-ways shade, which is code for ‘look lady, we’ve all been there, and you will one day (maybe soon after that prescription for antibiotics teehee!) also have to stand here and deal with this lovely bloke, showing the world his arm pit sweat patch whilst at the same time holding aloft the solution to your itchy snatch’.

Goodness me! I once had a flatmate who had perpetual thrush, brought on by the fact her extra-endowed boyfriend  seemed hellbent on hammering her cervix over her back-teeth. Not even kidding there, she showed me a photo he’d sent and what I thought was his arm holding the camera definitely wasn’t. At one point our fridge was more cranberry juice than anything else. I still can’t have a cranberry sour without thinking of her undercarriage. I remember we once had a full stand-up row over the fact I refused to boil tea-towels in a saucepan on the hob to sterilise them. Awfully judgemental for someone with a little too much glue on their envelope.

Now listen, before anyone starts writing their ‘ANGRY OF TUNBRIDGE WELLS’ letters and getting themselves in a tizz, don’t. I know it’s perfectly natural and I know people get all sorts of things but do you know, if we can’t laugh at ourselves, what can we do? Let’s not live in a joyless vacuum.

Right, to the food!

 fresh spring rolls

These are one of those tasty little dishes that look complicated to make, but they’re really not. We used Blue Dragon Rice Pancakes for these which SW say are one syn each (ridiculous) – you can buy rice pancakes from any Asian supermarket too. The joy with these is that you can ram them absolutely chock-full of speed vegetables and lovely free things. 

to make fresh spring rolls, you’ll need:

to make fresh spring rolls, you should:

  • get a plate and fill it with warm water, you’ll obviously not need a lot
  • chop all your veg up – this is where a mandolin will save you so much time and make everything neat and wonderful – click here to buy one of those
  • get everything ready to hand
  • take one pancake, push it into the water, allow to rehydrate a little
  • take out, shake off the water and lay it on a tea-towel or better, a nice clean worktop
  • if you imagine it in thirds, you want to place a big amount of filling at the top of the bottom third – or really, just below the middle of the pancake
  • fold in the sides
  • fold in the bottom
  • roll – keep it nice and tight with your hands (fnar fnar)
  • place on a chopping board and cut with a very sharp knife

You’re done! We served ours with a dipping sauce where we took low sodium soy sauce (6 tbsp), a couple of tablespoons of hoisin (4 syns), a few chilli flakes, a drop of honey (1 syn) and some passata. Stir and serve!

Although these are a syn each, these fresh spring rolls are very, very filling and a brilliant way of getting fresh veg into you. I’m a big fat pig and only managed four! If you wanted to keep it vegetarian, swap out the meat for cooked egg or mushrooms.

Enjoy.

J

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May 11, 2016

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

chicken and cabbage stir fry

Chicken and cabbage stir fry? Just scroll on down. Or have a read of my nonsense…

Now, the last blog entry was bloody miserable, wasn’t it? It all went a bit hello darkness, my old friend, did it not? Well come on, settle back in your chair and let me tell you some good things about Cornwall. It wasn’t all bad, I promise. Look, we had a nice cottage. In fact, I even made a wee video of how it looks. Forgive the crap film style, but see this was originally just intended as a Whatsapp to a mate. Don’t be mean.

It was charming – a small, hidden away little building nestled on a back lane in a small, charming village. It was decorated in that style that normally makes my eyes roll back into my brain but when I’m on holiday, I can overlook and admire. Lots of Orla Kiely, whose name still looks and sounds to me like a Countdown Conundrum, including a few feature walls clad in that distinctive colourful wallpaper which has the unique double effect of making me ooh and wince at the same time. A whoo, perhaps, only not so exuberant. The kitchen was well-appointed, which makes a bloody change, with lots of secret little gadgets that we enjoyed like a hidden plug socket that rose from the unit like a robot’s knob and an extractor fan in the ceiling that opened up like a robot’s arsehole. It really did! Don’t get me wrong, I mean I’ve seen a bloody extractor fan before, but not a sphincter-edition that opens and shuts on command. Terribly exciting. The house was absolutely littered with the kind of living magazines you’ll often find in private hospitals – look at this table made from walnut and disdain, yours for only £16,000. I would love to be in a financial position where I could open one of those magazines and not pass out from sucking too much air in over my teeth. Actually, that’s a fib, I could a billionaire and I’d still shop at IKEA, because all my shopping experiences should end in the consumption of a hot-dog.

Everything you needed was there, including a decent TV, a wine cooler, smart outdoor furnishings, fresh flowers, a little hamper welcoming us as guests, dressing gowns…ah yes, the dressing gowns. Obviously meant for people who eat wheatgrass for breakfast and think nothing of a twenty mile run before work, these barely managed to get around us. It was like trying to hide a sofa behind a tea-towel.We persevered though, and naturally this lead to embarrassment. See, we had received a text from either the owners or the people looking after the cottage to say they’d pop around in the morning. We forgot, of course, and set about on the first morning making a nice breakfast and a mess when someone knocked on the door. Paul, barely clad in his gown, answered the door, taking a moment to ensure the dressing gown met in the middle and covered him up. 

It did – but, unbeknown to him, bless, he was so busy trying to cover his belly up and make small talk about fishing towns with the person at the door that he completely neglected to cover up his nether regions, meaning Little Paul was experiencing some Cornish air of his own. I was just out of sight frantically trying to mime ‘COVER UP’ to him but whenever he looked at me he assumed I mean cover up his belly, and he tightened his gown further at the top which meant the bottom opened up more. Paul, of course, has previous when it comes to flashing his willy – sometimes with my involvement as in Ireland, and sometimes completely on his own steam as in Corsica with the holiday rep. I’m beginning to feel he may have a problem – I reckon we shouldn’t go back to New York, for instance, because he’ll probably end up tripping over one of the live cameras and having a blisteringly highly-detailed, 80ft representation of his spam dagger projected across Times Square. Whoever was at the door had the good grace not to mention his accidental nudity and to their credit, we didn’t hear them start retching until they had climbed back into their own car. Anyway, the police only kept him in for a few hours and then let him go. Kidding. Though they could have done me for handling swollen goods afterwards, kaboom-tish.

Speaking of nudity, the cottage also came with a very odd quirk – an outside bath in the yard. The yard itself wasn’t overlooked and there was a large, wooden fence bordering you from the place next door, so there was no chance of anyone glancing over at me getting undressed and calling the police to report a runaway cow frolicking in the garden. I imagine that (and indeed, the write-up hints at it) when they designed the place they imagined lithe, hunky young couples sliding into the bath together under the stars and laughing tinkly at times past. No chance for Paul and I. If we had somehow managed to both get into the bath there wouldn’t have been any room for so much as a cup of hot water and hell, no amount of Radox Muscle Relaxant would have got us out of there. Imagine two pickled eggs squashed together at the bottom of a jar and you have a faint idea. Paul’s a complete jessie anyway when it comes to being cold so there was no chance of him joining me, though he did come to my aid when my tasteful piles of Love It, Take A Break, Hiya and Fuck Me No Way spilled out of reach across the decking. I don’t know what it is about holidays that make me reach for these magazines, full as they are with medical woes, true crime and children’s names that look like someone has had a half-hearted stab at spelling a normal name and added a hyphen and a ‘Mae’ onto it. I can’t get enough. We took two books each to read – mine being a story about a man who travelled around Britain on a bus (I know how to live) and Paul brought along The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. Again. That book has travelled the world with us to the point where I’m beginning to think I need to put Frank Owen on my bloody passport. I wouldn’t care but it’s quite a weighty book and takes up a lot of space in our suitcase, especially as it remains exactly there until it’s time for the flight home again. 

There is something a smidge unnerving about bathing outside, not least because whenever a light aircraft passed overhead it must have looked like the Hindenburg crash site. Worse was climbing out because, paranoia or no, there was a crunch of gravel on the other side of the fence. I can’t imagine anyone was enjoying the sight of my hairy arse clad in Radox bubbles but hey, whatever floats your boat. Admittedly the gravel crunching was more likely to be subsistence or the ground shaking from me pouring out onto the decking, but I digress. There was also a log-burner which I can say, rather proudly, that I managed to light on the first go. Paul was giving it the whole ‘put some more fuel on it’ and ‘throw more logs on it’ like his knowledge of fire extends to anything other than clicking on his mother’s gas fire. Pfft. I grew up with coal, damn it – if it has, at some point, stood upon this Earth, I can make it burn. 

It did have an indoor bathroom, of course, we weren’t having to shit in the yard, and this included a fancy double shower with a rainfall shower and one of those tiny little showers which people say is for washing your hair but I know that secretly it’s for washing your minnie-Moo. Listen ladies, I know what goes on. The dials for the shower had no clue on them as to what made it go hot and what made it go cold, nor what shower they operated, so the half-awake morning shower became more like a scene from Saw as you dodged scalding jets on the back of your leg and an icy cascade from above. I half-expected a little doll on a tricycle to wheel around the corner, although if he was bringing me a fresh bar of coal-tar soap I’d be happy.

If we had only one complaint, it would be the bed. See, we’re spoilt up here because we have an absolutely giant bed that we can tumble around in and lose each other in the heat of night, but this bed was your bog-standard, plain Jane affair. Comfortable yes, but Paul’s both a snorer and a feeler (in that, if I’m not lying next to him, he’ll be reaching out with whatever he can extend until he finds me) and, without space to escape, it made for a long, noisy, sleepless few nights. The pillows weren’t the rock-hard type that we like (honestly, I reckon Paul would be more content if I had someone come and concrete a step onto the bed instead of pillows) and so we both managed to crick our necks. Me especially so, given I’m already carrying a weird neck injury at the moment. The upshot of this was that I couldn’t turn my head right and Paul couldn’t turn his head left, which made driving in Cornwall, with its labyrinthine roads and many, many junctions, a very fractious event. Many moments of calm and tranquility in the Cornish countryside were ruined by the over-revving of my engine, me shouting at Paul to check my way rather than his way and him shouting at me saying he couldn’t and then us both shouting at each other for confirmation and then finally shouting at some poor fart in the car in front for not pulling away sharp enough and thus forcing us to repeat the whole dance again. BAH.

That is the only complaint though. We had a remarkable stay and it’s a place that, despite my crass and crude review, I can’t recommend strongly enough. It was tastefully decorated, ideally situated, had everything you could need and, for once, it was made for couples rather than smelly children. We booked with www.uniquehomestays.com and the cottage was called Two Bare Feet. We’d go back in a heartbeat. Well, no, maybe if they moved it onto the Northumberland coast…

…right, let’s get to the recipe, shall we? This recipe serves 4.

chicken and cabbage stir fry

to make chicken and cabbage stir fry you will need:

  • 300g dried noodles
  • 2 chicken breasts, cut into chunks (you don’t need to use four breasts here, despite this being for four people – two big Musclefood chicken breasts will do. I know I bang on about them a lot but two of these breasts is more than enough meat, especially compared to the tiny ones you get from the supermarket – just have a look at our deal and you’ll never look back!)
  • 2 tbsp cornflour (2 syns)
  • 2 tbsp lemon juice
  • 2 tbsp low sodium soy sauce
  • 1 tsp root ginger, grated
  • 500ml chicken stock
  • 1 onion, finely chopped
  • 2 peppers, cut into strips
  • 2 carrots, cut into matchsticks
  • 1 cabbage, chopped
  • 300g frozen peas, thawed
  • 3 spring onions, sliced
  • 2 tsp sesame seeds (optional – roughly 2 syns)

Don’t forget, use your mincer for the ginger and then just put your ginger knob right in the freezer. It’ll be fine! A microplane mincer is one of the best things you can buy for the kitchen and it’s so cheap!

to make chicken and cabbage stir fry you should:

  • cook the noodles according to the instructions, drain and rinse with cold water, and then set aside
  • in a large bowl whisk together the chicken stock, soy sauce, lemon juice, ginger and cornflour – make sure there are no lumps
  • allow the stock mixture to cool slightly if it is hot (such as if you’ve made it using a stock cube and boiling water) and then add the chicken, and leave to marinade for about 20 minutes
  • using a slotted spoon, remove the chicken from the bowl and shake off the excess, but keep the marinade – you’ll need that later
  • heat a large pan or a wok over a medium-high heat and add a little oil
  • cook the chicken, stirring frequently so it doesn’t catch
  • remove the chicken from the pan and set aside
  • in the same pan, add a little more oil and fry the onions until softened
  • add the peppers and carrots to the pan and continue to stir fry
  • add the cabbage and keep stirring, for about 6 minutes until the cabbage starts to wilt
  • add the peas to the pan along with the rest of the marinade and the chicken, and stir until the sauce has thickened
  • add the noodles to the pan and stir until warmed through
  • serve the mixture and add the spring onions to garnish

It’s as easy as that, see?

J

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March 17, 2016

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beef, lunch, noodles, recipe card, salad, savoury snacks, steak, syn free, taster ideas, vegan, vegetarian

sizzling rainbow salad, roasted garlic chickpeas and weigh in

Yes yes, the sizzling rainbow salad will follow.

Long title for what will be a very quick post because damnit, my tea is ready, I have two recipes to post and a weigh-in to report. So let’s wheel out the old knob and see how we’ve done this week…

twochubbycubs

Oh how cosmopolitan! Classy Paul sent me a text to say ‘Only lost half a pound, but got three pounds of last night’s tea pulling out of the depot as we speak’. It’s always a joy living in this house. We weighed in separately tonight as Paul had to dash home (as much as someone the approximate shape of Saturn can dash) and let the electrician in to fit an outside light in our back garden. See (barely), our local council has taken it upon themselves to tear down the old orange streetlights in our street and replace them with these AWFUL little white LED lamps, which, given how faint and pointless they are, must all be running off the same watch battery. It’s so dark I can look out of the window and see when next door’s TV goes off standby. Actually, that’s a fib, we don’t have immediate neighbours…

…which is lucky, because fuck me is the new light bright. He flicked it on and I half expected Paul to be standing at the fence shaking and bursting into flame like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. Even the cat put a layer of Piz-Buin on before nipping out to shit in the flowerbed – that wasn’t steam coming off her turd, it was smoke. He advised me that we could adjust it if we wanted to but nah, I like to know that if I stumbled home in the dark and lost a contact lens amongst my tomatoes, I could find it in quite literally the blink of an eye. We’ve also had a couple of outdoor sockets fitted, which will just the thing for us to look at occasionally and think about pressure washing the paving stones. 

Anyway, the recipes. Let’s start with sizzling rainbow salad, which is really just a colourful salad but with all the goodness and virtue of eating greens taken out and replaced with juicy, delicious cow. If you want to keep it vegetarian that’s fine, but please ask someone to chop for you least your cockle-esque muscles give out. I’m kidding I’m kidding. Please don’t write to me, I won’t read it. I’ll be too busy wiping the cow juice off my chin and cackling wildly. Until I get CJD and Paul has to take me around the back of the house, my legs disco-dancing independently of each other, and push me into a burning pit with a tractor.

IMG_2579

to make sizzling rainbow salad, you’ll need:

  • any steak you like – fillet steak, frying steak, rib-eye steak, miss-steak, Mis-Teeq or Stakeford, I don’t care, as long as it mooed and had children (ouch)
  • any syn-free noodles
  • a cucumber, one that if it was a penis, you’d perhaps reach for a dab more Durex Play than you’re used to
  • a carrot, see above
  • a few radishes
  • if you can get them, a candy beetroot and a golden beetroot, if not, regular beetroot
  • two red chilli peppers
  • a lime
  • spring onions
  • crunchy lettuce of any sort you like
  • chickpeas from the below recipe

to make sizzling rainbow salad, you should:

  • cook your noodles
  • peel and slice the cucumber and carrots into thin ribbons using a potato peeler
  • very thinly slice the beetroot – I eat it raw, I like the crunch – and I use one of these mandolins for perfect uniform slices (plus it protects your fingers, you don’t want your piano career ruined by circumcised fingers)
  • do the same with the radishes
  • chop the spring onion and chillis
  • cook your steak however you like and slice it into thin strips – we just used bog-standard steak like this – remember you can add stuff like this on if you buy our freezer-filler-wonder-offer from Musclefood, just add whatever you want as extras into the basket – we cook our steak by getting a pan roaring hot, using worcestershire sauce and pepper instead of oil, quickly cooking it off and serving
  • assemble in a bowl – noodles, crunchy lettuce, sliced veg, steak, squirt a bit of lime juice over for taste
  • if you’re making the chickpeas below, scatter them on too for extra crunch
  • very healthy, I’m sure you will agree

OK, onwards. BEFORE WE START.

TWEAK

We explain what tweaking is right here. Our policy is that it’s better to eat something like this than it is to eat a tube of Pringles. Well no, it’s not better, but it’ll keep the scales happy. Hopefully. Up to you to decide what you want to do. To me, chickpeas are syn free, garlic is syn free, you don’t use enough sprays of the oil to be worth synning it, so I’ll be damned if I’m going to be told off for it. GO.

to make roasted garlic chickpeas, you’ll need:

  • a bulb of garlic
  • two big tins of chickpeas
  • a few squirts of olive oil (which might add up to a syn if you’re lucky, plus I’d hope you’re not going to eat them all)

 chickpeas 

to make roasted garlic chickpeas, you’ll need:

  • cut the garlic bulb right through the middle (horizontally left to right rather than straight down the middle) – don’t worry about peeling
  • sprinkle with a touch of salt
  • put in a low temperature oven for around half an hour, just to soften the garlic flesh, then scoop out (I just scrunch up the bulb with my hand)
  • rinse your chickpeas
  • put them into a bowl with a few squirts of oil, salt, pepper and the softened sticky flesh of the garlic
  • roll those chickpeas around each other – gently, you’re not panning for bloody gold – but enough to get them coated in some garlic, seasoning and oil
  • tip out onto a baking tray and bake in a medium oven for around 30-45 minutes, but do keep checking, they can catch quite quickly
  • eat as a snack or tumbled into salad. Tumbled?! Oh behave James.

Enjoy!

J