Category Archives: vegetarian

Vegetarian recipes

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January 21, 2015

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american, fakeaways, italian, low syn, lunch, pasta, recipe card, taster ideas, vegetarian

butternut squash macaroni cheese

It’s lucky I don’t have a gambling problem. Well no, it’s lucky I’m Geordie enough to be so tight I wouldn’t DARE have a gambling problem. TV is absolutely awash with ads for online gambling sites, and they’re such utter, utter bollocks. Invariably, they’ll have some drooling slab of beef watching some whizzy virtual reality site flash by, gambling with hilarity and a big shit-eating smile on his face, all the while chucking a few £1 bets on and watching the money roll in.

Well let me tell you this isn’t the case. I make quite a bit of pin money on the side by gambling for ‘free’. and I’ll come to that later, but a good part of that comes from having to play online bingo. Online bingo is the antithesis of fun. Put simply, you’re paying good money to watch a pen automatically dab off your numbers in the hope of winning a crap jackpot against thousands of others. However, there’s more – in the adverts you’ll see sprightly young ladies giggling away and typing supportive messages to one another in the chatrooms, whereas all I’ve ever seen is punters with one good set of teeth between them and usernames like ~~!!!PIXIE_DUST_ROFL~~!!! and TISHMAM4LIFE desperately trying to outdo each other’s bad spelling. Even the photos of the winners are invariably harsh – all slack-jawed, light-bendingly dense landmasses with terraced chins and poor taste in acrylic outerwear holding their cheques for £667 like they’ve won La Primitiva. Bleurgh. When even I can’t eke a little fun from reading people’s chatter, you know there’s a bad job.

BORING SENSIBLE BIT HERE

Anyway, the free gambling thing. I use Quidco, which is a cashback site, so if you’re doing online shopping you would go through Quidco, it tracks your purchase and offers you a small amount of cashback which gets deposited back into your bank account at the end of the month. You pay £5 a year and it’s very safe. There seems to be a intrinsic distrust of these sort of websites, which is fair enough, but this is a massive site used by thousands and I’ve never had a problem with it. Even old motormouth Martin Lewis recommends in. So – on Quidco are lots of offers for new customers on gambling sites, and they normally have a higher return than investment. Looking on there right now, William Hill Bingo is offering £30 back for new customers who spend £10. Obviously they want you to spend more than £10 but don’t. If you go for the offer and only spend £10, you’ll eventually get £30 back from Quidco, and you’ve made £20 right there. It takes a few weeks for things to track but there you go.

Of course, if when you spend the £10 on William Hill, you actually manage to win some money, that’s even more profit right there, but DON’T accept any of the introductory bonuses or little catches – just play with your own money, and stop the very second you’ve gambled whatever it is they ask you to gamble on Quidco. Remember, this only works if you:

  • you are controlled and never bet more than the minimum requirement set by Quidco
  • you ensure the cashback is more than the amount spent
  • you meet all the requirements set by Quidco, though they’re never especially onerous
  • stop, especially if you lose your money – remember to spend only what you have to!

If you want to join Quidco, feel free to go via my referral link!

BORING SENSIBLE BIT ENDS HERE

ANYWAY enough about that shite. Here’s tonight’s recipe – bloody lovely macaroni cheese!

macaroni cheese

to make butternut squash macaroni cheese, you’ll need:

ingredients: 1300g butternut squash, 300ml chicken stock, 250ml almond milk (1 syn or HEA). 200g macaroni, 
2 teaspoons garlic salt, 1 teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce, 115g grated cheddar cheese (4.5 syns or HEA – remember this serves four). 

to make butternut squash macaroni cheese, you should:

recipe: cut up the butternut squash into cubes, add the stock and almond milk into a nice big pan, and chuck the squash in. Bring it to a boil and then reduce to a simmer under the squash is tender (about fifteen minutes). Blend this mixture in a decent processor or use a stick blender and really go at it – the smoother the better. Add the garlic salt and Worcestershire sauce. Add the cheese to the sauce and put it back onto the heat on a medium heat. Now you have a choice – you can cook the macaroni in a separate pan, drain and add to the sauce, or just chuck the macaroni into the sauce and cook it all in the same pan – this will help thicken the sauce because of all that tasty starch! Once the sauce is thickened, serve hot!

extra-easy: yep! here, you’re either using your cheese or your milk as your HEA on your serving. All that butternut squash makes this VERY high in superfree food and it just tastes wonderful, trust me. You can use up the rest of your HEA allowance (if you chose milk) throughout the day, you can have a fair bit on EE!

TASTY.

J

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January 18, 2015

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budget, classics, lunch, recipe card, savoury snacks, snacks, syn free, taster ideas, vegetarian

rainbow quiche and octogenarian shenanigans

Well, that was an exciting afternoon. The parents have decided to spend a bit more of my inheritance and have buggered off to the Gambia for a week or two, leaving Nana Dearest in the care of me and my sister. She’s very independent but it’s good to check in on her every day just to make sure she hasn’t rolled a seven and shuffled off the mortal coil. So, fatty and I piled into the car today at half one and drove the thirty miles over to her house – in the ice and snow – to see that she was up and about and dutifully forgetting to take her tablets. Got there to find her curtains still shut in the bedroom and the door locked. At 2pm, and us without a key. The dog was scratching on the other side of the door. No amount of knocking and shouting got a reply. Naturally, we raised the alarm buggered off to do our weekly shop at Tesco with a view to coming back and trying again at half three. Still no reply. I had no key, remember. How do you attract the attentions of an eighty eight year old woman whose hearing aid would merely register a muffled bump if a plane crashed in her garden?

Well, here’s how – you get a clothes prop from the garden. For those of you who aren’t living in the 1940s, a clothes prop is a very long, very thin bit of wood that Geordies use to hoist their clothes line high up in the air so that villagers in another parish altogether can cast disdainful looks at the skidders on your knickers. It looks like this:

clothes prop

Of course, it would be altogether too easy for my gran’s prop to be a strong, metal affair like the one pictures – no, hers was a manky old bit of wood that had been sitting in the snowy mud since the Battle of the Somme and was dangerously rotten. Nevertheless I pressed on and hoisting the bendy, rotten, 14ft prop into the air like a fucking pole vaulter and standing on the tops of my boots, I rapped it smartly against her window, tap tap tap, whilst Paul brayed on the front door, with each ‘tap’ of the stick leading another muddy print against her window. After ten bloody minutes, a wispy bit of white hair appears followed by a bemused face, then the window opens and she tells me off for leaving mud all over her window frame. Turns out she had gone to bed the night before and only just woken up at 4pm, which frankly sounds like my idea of heaven. Pills dispensed and a cup of tea later, she turns to me sagely and says ‘You could have just rang the doorbell, you know’. I almost turned the one hobnob (well, Aldi equivalent of a hobnob – a notnob?) (3.5syns) I’d allowed myself to dust in my balled up fists. She’s a dear, an absolute dear, but unless I had rung the doorbell with the front of my fucking car she really, really wouldn’t have heard.

Still, how Paul and I laughed as we made our way back home, our shopping defrosting merrily in the boot. I’d do it all again though.

The shopping I just mentioned will be turned into the following meals for the week ahead:

  • pulled pork, leek and mature cheese pizza;
  • spinach, basil, broccoli and kale soup;
  • macaroni cheese – with a twist;
  • roast beef dinner;
  • beef and broccoli;
  • spaghetti and hotdogs; and
  • chicken, beans and rice.

All healthy, all tasty. All low syns. I’m going to make a bit more of an effort to create rollover recipes – recipes which use the leftovers from another one I’ve done in the week. I thought it might help those trying to keep costs down. So in that vein, tonight’s recipe is a very quick one using up the remainder of the veg that we didn’t use on our Judy Garland Special Pizza (thank you Ms Savage!). The joy of a slimming world quiche is that you can chuck any old shite in it and it’ll taste good. Here it is – I left it in the oven ten minutes too long because I was too busy outside scratching my foot on the brick wall of my herb garden. It’s so satisfying!

slimming world rainbow quiche

No need for a full recipe for this rainbow quiche – this really is just all the leftover veg we chopped up, combined with four eggs and 300g of cottage cheese, lots of salt and pepper and chucked in the oven. Syn free of course and absolutely stuffed with superfree food, so it would be perfect for a work snack. Well, a slice or two – you don’t need to eat the whole bloody thing at once for goodness sake.

Finally, as a special treat, here’s a picture of Bowser a split second before he yawns. He looks so…speshul.

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Goodnight!

J

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January 17, 2015

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fakeaways, low syn, lunch, pizza, recipe card, taster ideas, vegetarian

rainbow pizza: well, I promised you something camp!

Anyone heard of Nightowls, the local radio talk show in the North East?

I’ve listened to it on and off for the last eighteen years, thinking I was dead hard staying up to midnight listening on my tiny radio when I was twelve and using it as a sleeping aid even now at 29. Alan remains great, but the show itself has turned to arse because it’s filled with simpletons ringing in. There’s still a couple of regular callers worth listening out for but the rest is bobbins – mainly people calling in because they’ve had their photos developed, seen blue cigarette smoke wisping around from under the camera and declaring they’ve seen a ghost. If it’s not that, it’s people ringing up singing in one key only or octogenerians discussing their various health maladies ‘EEE ALAN IT WER POURIN’ OUT LIKE OXTAIL SOUP EEE ALAN YES ALAN’ and the like.

Weirdly though, he really did used to be must-listen radio, and he’d spend a good fifteen minutes with each caller chatting through proper issues to do with the North East and politics and the like. Even I called up a few times, and he gave me the nickname Jittery James because I stuttered the first time I was on. Bastard. He was that ‘big’ in the local area that he used to hold roadshows during the day – a few of us back in the day went along to a local one to see what free stuff we could get and he threw a signed Toploader CD at me which stotted off the middle of my forehead. I mean, I fucking hate Toploader at the best of time, but that sealed the deal. Luckily, no scar, because if I’d had Dancing in the Moonlight scarred onto my face I’d have topped myself.

Anyway, I had no trouble getting off to sleep last night, and that’s possibly because I was knackered making this…!

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Yup – the campest pizza in the world (which totally needs a better name). Depending on where you sit with veggies, it might not look too appetising, but it was bloody lovely – the dough makes a pizza big enough for eight slices, and weighs in at a very reasonable 3 syns a slice. Plus, look at all that superfree…

to make a rainbow pizza, you’ll need:

ingredients: for the dough – 125g strong white bread flour, 7g sachet of yeast, 75ml of warm water and a teaspoon of salt. Sauce is tomato puree with mixed herbs added in. 65g of reduced fat grated mozzarella cheese (HEA). For the topping:

  • red – sliced cooked red peppers from a jar (in brine) or just cut up a red pepper;
  • orange – rapture cherry tomatoes from Tesco, but you can find orange tomatoes all over – cut into quarters;
  • yellow – yellow pepper, cut into cubes;
  • green – brocolli florets cut tiny and boiled for a minute to soften – don’t overboil though, they’ll lose their colour;
  • purple – pickled red cabbage (syn-free) drained and shook to dry it out
  • black – olives – eight black olives is a syn, but you’ll use that on the entire pizza

You could easily add ham as the red layer if you wanted meat but actually, the mix of veg works so, so well you don’t need to bother!

to make a rainbow pizza, you should:

recipe: dough – if you’re using a stand mixer with a dough hook like us,  this bit is really easy. Put the flour into the middle, yeast on one side, salt on the other, make a well in the middle and add the water. Mix on medium until it all comes together in a ball and starts slapping the sides. Remove the bowl, cover in cling film and leave to prove in the bowl somewhere warm for an hour or so. If you don’t have a mixer, do the mixing by hand, and feel good about yourself because that’s pure body magic right there.

Spend the hour prepping your veg and then once the dough has doubled (although if it doesn’t double, don’t worry, ours didn’t and still tasted good) roll it out on the side (you might want to flour your worktop or use polenta – top tip) (but count the syns – 4 and a half syns for the polenta if you use 25g, but you won’t, so maybe add one an extra syn for the entire pizza), spread with the puree, chuck the cheese on top (if there is two of you, double up the cheese, you get 65g each!) and then layer the veg on. Don’t worry about how it looks but, like most of us, the prettier the better! Cook for twenty minutes (check after fifteen) on 180degrees and when cooked and crunchy, serve up! We served ours with actifry chips. Tasty!

extra-easy: yep! The base is 22 syns – but makes a pizza big enough for eight slices, which by the time you’ve added on the olives and a tiny bit of polenta, I reckon comes to 24 syns – three syns a slice, and it’s absolutely worth it. Don’t be put off by having to spend your syns, this looks amazing and tastes great. If your kids won’t eat vegetables and caning their arse hasn’t worked, try this! Remember – if the food looks good, it’s half the battle.

Enjoy – I’m off to walk dogs!

Note: this recipe originally said 175g of flour thanks to a slip of my fat fingers – it should, of course, read 125g. Amended! Thanks to Gavin for the tip!

J

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January 14, 2015

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budget, fakeaways, italian, lunch, pasta, recipe card, syn free, vegetarian

garlic, lemon and parmesan linguine

Argh! My well-meaning neighbour has inadvertently vexed me, at the end of a rubbish day. Our general waste bin was missed by the council so we put it outside today and arranged for them to come and empty it. Great! Got home today to find the bin neatly stood next to the back door and a note saying ‘It’s not bin day so I brought your bin in’ – bah. He’s the nicest guy in the world though, so I can’t get too vexed.

I was told today that I have a lovely telephone voice, which was pleasant – although I was always under the impression that as soon as I pick up a phone, my voice actually deepens and goes a bit more Geordie than I’d like. Paul tells me that I have no discernible accent – which is lucky, as a strong Geordie accent (to an outsider) sounds like Brian Blessed yelling nuclear launch codes into a Toblerone tube. All went well when Paul first met my parents, aside from afterwards when he turned to me in the car, ashen-faced, and confessed that he’d spent the last two hours nodding politely at my dad and being completely unable to decipher the accent. My dad has a mild Geordie accent but the state of Paul’s confused face would suggest he sounded like a water-damaged cassette recording of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.

Actually, I’ve enjoyed good luck with my voice throughout my life. I certainly didn’t go through the mandatory six months of sounding like failing car brakes when I was a teenager – I seemed to go to bed sounding like a Snowman-era Aled Jones and woke up again sounding like Madge out of Neighbours. In fact, puberty was great fun for me – whilst a lot of my peers were awash with spots and ‘taches like they’d stuck a few errant pubes on their top lip, I could grow a pretty manly beard right from the get-go. Clearly such high levels of testosterone (and it helped that my levels were kept regularly topped up, EH, AM I RIGHT, NUDGE NUDGE WINK WINK) didn’t lead to any especially manly pursuits, though I was fairly decent at rugby, presumably because I looked like someone had driven a minibus onto the pitch and stretched a Matalan jersey over the top of it. Ah well.

Tonight’s recipe is simplicity itself. but bloody impossible to take an interesting photo of…

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to make garlic, lemon and parmesan linguine, you’ll need:

PLEASE don’t dismiss this because it looks boring or if you don’t like mushrooms – it tastes fantastic and you can leave out the mushrooms and still enjoy (Paul did). Plus, it takes 5 minutes to make (as long as the linguine takes to cook) and uses only four ingredients (five if you add mushrooms). Give it a whirl!

ingredients: two/three cloves of garlic, one lemon (you’ll need three tablespoons of juice), packet of linguine (we used half a standard pack for two large servings) and a good parmesan (30g as a HEA per person but it’s only a syn per level tbsp if you want more) (i.e. you’re a greedy fucker like me). If you like mushrooms, buy a pack of nice mushrooms rather than button, fry them gently and add on the top at the end. But let’s presume you don’t like mushrooms and crack on, shall we? If I can stress one thing – buy good ingredients here. Decent linguine is better than spaghetti and costs next to nothing. A large, unwaxed lemon will yield plenty of juice. Better to have less parmesan than more cheddar, and a little goes a long way (plus you can save whatever is left in the freezer and blitz it into soups). A garlic clove will taste better than any powder! I’m not one to normally nag about ingredients but really, when there is so little on the go, make it count!

to make garlic, lemon and parmesan linguine, you should:

recipe: fill the biggest, meanest pan you’ve got about two thirds full with water, and chuck in salt with gay abandon. Get the linguine boiling. Whilst that’s cooking, you’ll want to get your lemon juice – so pop the lemon in the microwave first for fifteen seconds, then squeeze it out – three tablespoons worth. Microwaving will allow you to get a lot more juice from any citrus fruit, trust me! Next, grate your garlic and your parmesan. Now, you can do this with a bog standard grater but it won’t be quite fine enough. I use one of these microplane graters (click the link to be taken to Amazon) and it’s a godsend, not least because it’s sharp and makes it fine enough to mix in with the pasta. I use it for plenty of other things but mainly grating parmesan or chocolate. Drain your pasta, keeping half a cup of the cooking water to one side. Make sure it’s drained well, then chuck into a bowl and mix with the parmesan, lemon juice, garlic and keep adding enough of the cooking water to make it easy to mix. Stir together well, stir it a bit more, and when you’ve lost feeling in your left arm, man up and use the right one.

Serve hot and fresh, with a bit more parmesan on the top and plenty of black pepper. If you like mushrooms, chuck them on! And that’s it!

extra easy: yes, easily. Aside from the cheese that you can use a HEA for, it’s all good! Perhaps a note of caution – it doesn’t contain your third superfree that you’re supposed to have, but have a wee fruit salad on the side for after if you’re that keen!

Please give this one a go. Adjust the lemon, garlic or cheese to your liking but trust me, it’s a simple quick recipe that actually tastes decent.

Enjoy…

J

PS: who knew David Guetta looked like a down-on-her-luck Jennifer Aniston? Not me until just now…

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January 10, 2015

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beef, beef mince, burgers, chinese, classics, fakeaways, low syn, recipe card, syn free, taster ideas, vegetarian

slimming world spring rolls

Firstly, a big hello and welcome to all our new readers!

We’re spring-cleaning this weekend (hence the savings article is taking a while to write) and amongst other things, a good amount of time has been spent hoovering the cats, both of whom really quite enjoy having the nozzle from the hoover ran over them. When we first got them they were typical cats who reacted to us having the temerity to hoover by exploding into giant cat-form, clawing off our faces and shitting on the carpet, but two years of having a roomba trundling around during the day has desensitised them both to the point where they enjoy a good vacuum. Sola has picked up an annoying habit though – every time you go into the bathroom to use the netty, she climbs onto the sink and meows until you turn the tap on for her to drink from. Clearly the fact she has her own filtered water dispenser isn’t quite good enough, she’s got to ruin my ten minutes a day doing the puzzles in Take a Break surrounded by my own miasma.

Speaking of Take a Break – here’s a promise. I’m going to get a really naff tip published in Take a Break or one of the other housewife-bothering shitrags. I love those magazines – Chat, Pick Me Up, That’s Life – it’s like I’ve parked outside the smoking section at Mecca Bingo and I’m listening to all the gossip. I’m sure they used to be decent though – I quite enjoyed reading my mother’s Take a Break in the bath on a Thursday evening. I’m not sure of the tip I’m going to use, but it’ll have to work hard to beat my favourite scene where someone whose name on facebook invariably had ‘MUMMYOFTHREE’ sandwiched in the middle of it took an old beer fridge and affixed to it her bathroom wall. A fridge! In the fucking bathroom, acting as a medicine/toiletries cabinet! Because nothing says class like getting your tampons out of a glass cupboard with STELLA ARTOIS emblazoned on the front.

Whilst we’re on the subject of trashy literature (that’s two smooth segues in my writing today, I’m rather proud), I’m knocking together a food diary and plan to have it bound in February. I see all those food diaries people have where they dutifully write down everything they don’t mind the consultant seeing and they’re always the same, very cutesy-poo with inspirational quotes and fucking cupcakes (fucking not used as a verb, mind, I’d probably buy that book…) so I’m trying to build an antithesis of those. Let’s see how we get on. They’ll be nicely bound and printed mind, I don’t do half measures!

Now, we were going to have baked cod for tea tonight but frankly, we wanted something a bit more substantial, so we’re having burgers instead.

fatabstard

RETRO RECIPE TIME. Click here – it’s one of our very first recipes, way back when…

Oh young James! You were so innocent, so young those many, many…weeks ago. Actually give those burgers a try, they’re delicious. We added a fried egg with a soft yolk onto this burger and a bacon medallion under the burger. Heart attack in a bun but as long as you HEA your cheese and HEB your bread, it’ll be syn free apart from any sauces you add!

But in the spirit of a) being fat and b) being generous, here’s a second recipe for you lot. Syn free spring rolls!

SPRINGROLLS

to make slimming world spring rolls, you’ll need:

ingredients: eight lasagne sheets, one pack of Sainbury’s red pepper stir fry mix (or any other stir fry veg mix, but I like the crunchy peppers!), soy sauce plus any old bobbins that you have left over – in my case, I added a couple of cut up rashers of bacon and some mushrooms.

to make slimming world spring rolls, you should:

recipe: do your stir fry first – biggest pan you have, plus a tiny bit of oil (or boo hiss, Frylight) and a few drops of soy sauce. Get that pan hot! Chuck in your veg, meat if you have any, mushrooms and stir stir stir. Cook fast and cook hot. Once cooked through, put in a bowl by the side. Now, boil up a big pan of water, and when boiling excitedly, chuck in your lasagne sheets. Space them out by dropping them in one at a time otherwise I find they clump. After five minutes, they should be soft.

Work quickly here. Take one sheet out at a time, otherwise the others will harden up whilst you roll your first roll. Pop the first sheet on a flat surface, add a bit of the stir fry, roll up and place ‘join’ down on a baking tray. Repeat seven more times. Little spritz of olive oil/Frylight over the top, stick in the oven for 20 mins on 180degrees or until they look cooked through.

Serve with soy sauce for dipping!

extra-easy: yep! and perfectly cheap too – just some old sheets and any old gubbins you have in the veg drawer. They actually taste decent too, as opposed to most ‘snacks’ based on tasty things turned into Slimming World joys…

Enjoy!

J

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January 7, 2015

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lunch, recipe card, savoury snacks, snacks, soup, syn free, taster ideas, vegetarian

tomato, fennel and feta soup

I got asked for five pounds by a tramp today.

Five pounds! Gone are the days when someone would come up to you and shakily ask for 25p because they were just shy on the metro fare home. When did it make the jump to a fiver? If it goes any higher it’ll be cheaper for me to jump in the car and nip over to Gateshead to buy the smack myself. Oooh think of the weight loss. Actually, I’d be a shite smack addict, I start shaking like a shitting dog the day before I have bloods taken. I’m not averse to giving to the homeless and unfortunate, but his sheer cheek put me right off – I didn’t even get to do my ‘pretend to pat my pockets for non-existent change’ dance, which never works anyway because I’m forever sticking all my change into one pocket so I’m jingling and jangling down the street like a friggin’ pearly queen. Plus, to cap it all off, what I thought was a little lip piercing from a distance was a howking great pus-filled sore on his upper lip which made me gag. I can’t BEAR anything like that, it really upsets me. I know that’s an incredibly superficial and shallow attitude but I don’t care who you are, everyone has a physical attribute that they can’t stand in others – mine is pus spots. I hardly think that’s irrational.

Newcastle has some great tramps as well as the usual chancers, mind. Paul and I actually managed to make an enemy out of one of Newcastle’s less fortunate citizens when we lived down on the Quayside, who we christened Rory just because that’s what he always did – roared. There was a little yellow bus which would take you into town from the Quayside and because he was mad, he used to spend all day travelling up and down along the route – it was only ten minutes long and never varied but nevertheless. He used to have eye-wateringly bad BO first thing in the morning and by the time he’d spent all day cooped up on a bus on a hot day, well, it was the only bus I knew where the driver lit a match when old Rory got off. Anyway, whenever Paul and I got on the bus, he’d roar (hence the name) TEAPOTS at us and stare at us with his googly-eyes and spittle-flecked beard. All the way into Newcastle. Occasionally blowing kisses. And we never, ever knew why – until we happened across him outside of the bus. He did his usual trick of shouting teapots, but this time bent over in his shit-crusted coat and made a spout motion with his arm and a handle motion with the other – then it clicked, he was taking the piss out of us for being gay and the teapot thing was his way of saying we were camp, like this:

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Well, we thought it was bloody hilarious. I mean honestly, I might be a friend of Dorothy but at least I can have a hot bath of the evening. Sadly, we moved away and we only see him now and again, although he still gives us the old swivel-eye if it clicks who we are.

Anyway, speaking of ripe old fruits, here’s tonight’s recipe – tomato, fennel and feta soup. Enjoy!

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to make tomato, fennel and feta soup, you’ll need:

Oh – you might be wondering where the old comic strip style recipes are. They’ll be coming back, but I’m a bit pushed for time in the evening at the moment and I’d sooner spend it writing rather than fussing about with layouts. I’ll use them when the recipe is more complicated…this one isn’t, so here goes.

ingredients: one bulb of fennel, reasonably large, one medium red onion, a whole bunch of cherry tomatoes (400g), a small potato, white wine vinegar (tablespoon), garlic clove chopped up, tomato puree. 50g of feta.

to make tomato, fennel and feta soup, you should:

recipe: cut your tomatoes in half and pack them together, cut side up, in a tray – drop a bit of salt on there and stick them in the oven to roast for forty minutes on a lowish heat. Then, chop up the onion and thinly slice the fennel, keeping aside a few fronds for decoration. Dice the potato. Pop a tiny bit of oil (or bloody Frylight) into a heavy-bottom pan, add the onion, 40g of fennel, crushed garlic and a tablespoon of tomato puree. I add a tiny bit of water just to keep things steamy, cover, and let the onion and fennel cook gently for ten minutes or so, being careful not to let it catch. Add the roasted tomatoes, rest of the fennel, bit of salt and 500ml of water. Leave to cook gently for 40 minutes, and then blend. Add 50g of diced feta, and blend again. Dish it up into bowls (sieve it through a fine sieve if you don’t like lumps – but really, that’s the best bit!) and serve with a bread roll if you fancy synning it. Easy!

extra-easy: yep! Plus you’re only using 25g of feta per serving when you’re allowed 45g, so you could add a little bit extra cheese and be cooking on gas. Tomato and fennel are both speed foods, as is the onion, so there’s really nothing much in here that isn’t fantastic on EE. In fact, looking at it, you could easily adapt it for EE:SP by leaving out the bread and using the cheese as your HEA choice. Delicious!

Enjoy!

J

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January 6, 2015

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fakeaways, indian, lunch, one-pot, recipe card, savoury snacks, slow cooker, snacks, syn free, vegan, vegetarian

flicked bean overnight chilli

I find parking an inherently stressful experience. How I envy those who can smoothly glide into a bay like a well-oiled plop round a u-bend. I’m a very confident driver, and I’ll always have a go, but I’m always left wracked with anxiety that someone is either going to scratch my car or judge me remorselessly for being slightly bent – story of my life. Paul will sit and tut and do asthmatic sighs as I back out of the bay, move back in, reverse, slightly to the left, slightly to the right – but I like to be dead centre, damn it. I can reverse into a bay like an old pro but as soon as I’m in there, I’m fidgeting and fussing. If anyone has somewhere I can park in the centre of Newcastle for free or at least £5, and won’t put a picture of my car on those awful parking blogs, get in touch. Only a quick blog entry tonight because we didn’t get to sleep until 2am last night and I’m dead on my feet. So without further delay – tonight’s tea was flicked bean chilli with cauliflower rice.

cauliflower

to make flicked bean overnight chilli, you’ll need:

Firstly, I apologise for the awful colour filter. I use a bit of software called Layout and it creates awful auto-corrections on my images. Hence it looks like every other food picture that every tit with a beard and sperm-strangling skinny trousers might have.

ingredients: for the cauliflower rice – one big cauliflower and some frozen peas. For the flicked bean chilli, I just tipped two tins of barlotti beans, one tin of black eyed peas, one tin of baked beans, one tin of tomatoes, bunch of dried chilli, chopped garlic, kidney beans, two oxo cubes and half a cup of boiling water. For the meat, you could use mince (brown it off in a pan first) or, in this case, use Quorn mince – it’s perfect for EE:SP but will also boost the weight loss.

to make flicked bean overnight chilli you should:

recipe: this is what makes it so easy – chuck all the chilli bits into a slow cooker and leave it on overnight, where it’ll thicken and simmer nicely. For the cauliflower rice, just blitz the whole cauliflower in a food processor, chuck in some frozen peas – and then pop it in a frying pan without oil and cook it through. Near the end, I chuck an egg in just to bind it a little. Lots of salt and pepper. Tasty and very, very low in calories. Add a sprinkling of cheese from your HEA allowance if you like.

extra-easy: definitely, and I think it’s decent for an EE:SP day but don’t take me at my word. It’s certainly syn free and all those beans will really get your bum working!

Enjoy. So easy to make…in the meantime, I’m going to go to bed early. LIVING THE DREAM.

J

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November 24, 2014

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breakfast, budget, classics, desserts, overnight oats, recipe card, snacks, sweet snacks, syn free, taster ideas, vegetarian

sowing my overnight oats

christ, that’s a revolting image!

Weigh in post coming tomorrow because my photoshop isn’t working for some reason and I can’t make a banner, but because I’m all about the bass style I want to do it properly. I was going to have a night off tonight but Paul, being a darling husband, has just nipped to ASDA to get me some milk and to make me a hot chocolate, so, I feel I should return the goodwill by posting a quick recipe on here. Remember: this post was never meant to be, hence being short! It’s overnight oats time!

how to make overnight oats:

overnight

Put simply – measure out the oats, place in the bottom of the jar, top up with yoghurt and then lots of syn free berries. The oats absorb the yoghurt and the fruit juices and creates a lovely little porridge. You can mix it up with other fruits and yoghurt, just make sure you’re choosing syn-free options or synning accordingly!

Handy thing to make before bed to save time in the morning.

One last thing – Paul actually farted me awake last night. How classy is that – it wasn’t the pitch or volume, just the sheer overwhelming stench. He’s the only one who can take a fragrant thai green curry and make it smell like a cat shit drying in the sun.

Isn’t life a joy…

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November 20, 2014

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budget, dressings, fakeaways, low syn, persian, pulses and grains, recipe card, savoury snacks, snacks, taster ideas, vegetarian

spicy couscous balls with tzatziki

I feel better! Thankfully. My ears are still full but don’t feel sloshy anymore, which is a good sign. Shitting bricks about an upcoming flight though, worried my head will explode Scanners-style as soon as the change in pressure hits. Well don’t worry – I’ve got a month’s worth of archived posts to activate in my absence. Paul often jokes about death (me less so, as I used to suffer from health anxiety and all it takes is a gentle nudge sometimes and I’m away worrying), and says that when I die he’ll keep me on ice until he shuffles off, and then have us entombed together, with his leg over the top of mine, forever making me too hot in the sweet embrace of death.

Speaking of death, I finished Stephen King’s newest book, Revival. Blimey. Worth a read but what an ending. I do think there’s an odd stigma about Stephen King – people perceive his books as a bit trashy or low-brow, but he’s a genuinely skilled writer with a fantastic imagination. Well, except for The Tommyknockers, that was bobbins.

Here’s a snack idea. I made it last Saturday and was going to stick it online, but then Sudafed took me away.

couscousballs

to make spicy couscous balls with tzatziki:

Not worth making a full recipe breakdown for this, because it’s so, so easy. I use two packets of Ainsley Harriott’s spicy sensations couscous, which come in at 1.5 syns per pack made up with water (so don’t be adding butter, you cheeky buggers). Add the appropriate level of water (whatever it says on the pack) and leave to absorb. Fluff with a fork. Beat an egg and mix it into the couscous, then squeeze as many balls as you can out of the mixture. Pop onto a tray and stick it in the oven on 150 degrees for an hour or so – you want to ‘dry’ them out. Cooked low and slow, you’ll be laughing. For a dip, make tzatziki – greek yoghurt (I use Tesco Finest 0% fat – no syns) mixed with cucumber cut into tiny cubes and mint. Stir, chill, eat.

These are perfect little snacks – they’re very filling and by using the flavoured couscous, they actually taste good. And so easy to make! You could easily double up the ingredients, make a giant batch and take some to work – or even serve with a side salad for a light lunch.

Hey, you know, I spend a fair bit of time trying to make the food look presentable and putting it into the twochubbycubs’ style before it comes online. Well, there was no saving this. It’s the Slimming World pork pie. I found the recipe – basically, take a tin of Pek Gold, wrap it in bread (healthy extra), brush with egg, put it in the oven. Voila. That’s a pork pie. Well no, it isn’t, it’s an eggy ham sandwich, but by god I wanted it.

I got this far:

porkpie

Eee, haway. At this point, I was so taken by the ridiculousness of it that I stopped taking pictures, but when it came out of the oven, it all fell apart and tasted exactly like hot pek with a bit of mustard on it. Even the cat turned his nose up, and he spends hours of the day licking his arsehole like he’s trying to put out a fire.

Someone more skilled made this – it doesn’t look too bad.

10726658_10152303486262693_1807117462_n

Ah well, can’t win them all!

J