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May 7, 2015

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breakfast, budget, recipe card, savoury snacks, snacks, syn free, vegetarian

COMPETITION: ten faces, one prize! win a fancy new SW book!

Oh now isn’t this exciting?

There’s no post tonight – not because I’m being lazy – but because Paul is out talking about politics and I’ve only just got home – too late to cook and write! Day three will be tomorrow and if you’re especially good, I might even throw day four on on the same day. But not tonight.

I have voted, though. This isn’t a political blog because I’m just not clever enough, but I do think everyone should be forced to vote. You can’t moan about your situation if you don’t do your bit to change it, however pointless it may seem. So yes, in I wandered into the church for the second time this year (I haven’t been filled with ‘holy spirit’ this often since Sunday school, but it’s alright, that priest is behind bars now so I got the last laugh) ready to cast my vote. At first glance I thought someone had parked their people carrier behind the desk but it was actually an exceptionally large gentleman who was incredibly terse and needlessly rude with me. He tutted when I gave him my name (in fact, he tutted twice as I have a double-barreled surname), he tutted when I gave him my address, and he tutted as I walked across the wooden floor with my massive Dr Marten’s on. I think he was tutting – it was probably just air escaping from under his chins. One thing I did spot was that he had filled out the crossword in his Chat magazine incorrectly, but I didn’t want him trying to eat my ballot paper so I kept schtum. But next time, you officious sweaty beast, keep your tongue out of the top of your mouth and learn that the capital of Portugal isn’t fucking Madrid. I probably would have got away with pointing it out because by the time he’d levered himself up out of the chair it would have been time for the next election.

So – in lieu of a post and because I want to watch all the election habnabs on the telly, I’m launching our competition! Now we’re not made of money, so the prize is only a brand new SW book, but nevertheless, it’ll be posted out to you and everything. See, I’ve been being a tinker and popping random faces into my food pictures every now and then – there’s been at least 5 since I came back from Ireland, and there will be five more in the next few days.

All you have to do is spot them – and, to make it trickier, you’ll need to tell me who they are! Some are hidden in plain sight, others are far more tricky…but those with keen eyes can be rewarded!

Let me get you started – did no-one notice the mystery guest appearing for breakfast on Tuesday? For this face only, feel free to comment once you’ve seen him!

TO WIN: see here!

I know this is a plea for deaf ears, but if you’re a comper and not a normal reader, that’s alright – but I’d really prefer this to go to someone who needs it / wants it / regular reader! Think on.

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

May 6, 2015

Posted under

breakfast, breast, desserts, low syn, lunch, poultry, quark, recipe card, salad, snacks, speciality ingredients, sweet snacks, syn free, taster ideas, vegan, vegetarian

chicken fattoush

Before we launch into day two, I’ve found a brilliant little feature hidden away in the background of my blog – I’ve got the ability to see what people search for to find my blog. It’s so I can tailor the pages in such a fashion to pick up google searches for SW recipes and the like. All very exciting to a data-nerd like me. But I thought I’d share some of the more…obscure searches that people have used to come across (literally, in some cases) my blog..

‘carrot cake overnight oats slimming world’

Excellent! One of my favourite recipes. Nice choice, google.

‘dont trust slimming world’

Oh no! What do they know that we don’t? Maybe it’s all a cult – that would explain all the fucking clapping, for sure. Maybe Mags herself is plotting to take over the world one watery curry at a time?

‘look at my chunky pussy’

Good lord. I like the fact that someone typed that into google too, like it was an instruction rather than a question…

‘1000 heartbeats shit’

I couldn’t agree more. Vernon tries his best, god love him, but you’re still essentially watching someone solve wordsearches during an echocardiogram.

‘miniature brown teapot with teapot and bread on’

I bet they were absolutely gutted when this appeared. For the record, I prefer my “teapots” colossal and without a “lid”, if you know what I mean. If you don’t, I’m talking about cocks again.

‘chocolate in rainbow world’

God knows.

‘stocky hairy men washing each other’

They’d be disappointed. I wash Paul with the extendable hose from outside. However if watching two fat blokes grappling over the ped-egg and yelling nonsense at the TV melts your butter, get in touch.

‘can dogs have baked cod’

Yes, but only if it’s their birthday.

‘is semen classed as a syn on slimming world’

No, it isn’t – but remember, only sluts gargle.

‘young chubby has two at once and loves it’

No denying this one. It was the best night I’ve had in a while. Four fingers at once. But that’s a Kitkat for you (11.5 syns).

And my personal favourite:

‘wat syns.cn u see wen sum is busy with evil’

Words fail me. Seems like a good time to start then…

BREAKFAST

Red berry fruit salad with sweetened Quark

Nothing to this other than it’s a medley of different red berries and, because it’s SP week and you’re not allowed a yoghurt if you’re sticking to it 100% otherwise your consultant will be around to fling a dog-turd off your window, we mixed quark with a little bit of milk and some sweetener. I fail to see the point or the logic to it but we’re fully invested. I can’t imagine my body is going to shut down like Titanic’s furnace the very second a Muller passes my lips but nevertheless. The Quark (P) tasted alright, but…we used frozen mixed berries (all of them (S) foods)on the bottom of the glass that had been allowed to thaw (but not cooked, because christ I can’t handle two moans about bloody tweaking in one post) and chopped strawberries (S) on the top. That masked the taste. Pomegranates aren’t speed though, surprisingly, but you could swap them out for raspberries if you were desperate.

LUNCH

Chicken fattoush salad

Note: this can easily be syn-free – just omit the olive oil. But I like a bit of oil on my dressing. Up to you…OH and in our haste this morning to make this before work, we forgot to take a picture. But it looked like the one above, trust me.

to make chicken fattoush you will need:

½ cucumber (S), 1 green pepper (S), 3 medium tomatoes (S), 6 spring onions (S), 1-2 chicken breasts grilled and cut into strips (P), handful of chopped coriander, handful of chopped parsley, as much leafy salad as you like, 1 tbsp finely chopped mint, 40ml lemon juice, salt and pepper, 1 tbsp sumac.

to make chicken fattoush you should:

chop the cucumber in half lengthways and scoop out the seeds (you don’t have to do this, but it stops it getting soggy)
chop the pepper, tomatoes and spring onions into chunks
mix all of the above with the salad leaves, herbs and chopped mint and chicken
in a separate small bowl, whisk together the sumac and lemon juice until well mixed. Add salt and pepper to taste.
pour the dressing over the salad, and eat!

For heaven’s sake though, have a mint after. All that onion!

DETOX WATER

Mint and cucumber

Someone posted a comment on a Facebook group I use about a ‘Sassy Water’ where, if you drink it, the nutrients and wonderful vitamins swimming around in your body would make you lose A POUND AN HOUR. Ridiculous right, and not least because Sassy Water sounds like a particularly ghetto-fabulous drag queen. But what made me more aghast – and I am a man who spends a good two hours of my day with my hand clasped theatrically to my lips with a ‘well fuck me’ expression – PEOPLE BELIEVED IT. People honest to God without theatrics believed it. How?! How do these people remember to breathe in AND breathe out? Imagine if losing weight was as easy as drinking a few glasses of water with the Tesco Reduced Items basket bobbing around in it like a turd in a pier? For goodness sake. Tell you what, maybe that searcher above was right and Slimming World is a big con after all, keeping us fat so we can keeps Mags in Bentleys and Montecristos.

Just kidding, I love SW really. In the water today then:

mint from the garden, chopped up fine; and
enough cucumber to make a nun purse her lips.

Cucumber is good for the skin and mint is champion if your breath bleaches people’s hair as you talk. Still tasted like I was drinking a face-mask mind.

BODY MAGIC IDEA – WALKING

daytwobody

Today’s body magic was walking – into work and back again. I’ve mentioned before that walking into work is a chore (opens in a new window that one, so don’t worry, give it a read) but today was especially tiresome. At 5.00pm, I looked across Newcastle from my office and saw the sun bright in the sky, children playing happily and I could almost hear tinkly laughter from the street below. I got in the lift, travelled seven floors to the bottom, and went outside. It was like The Day After Tomorrow, with horizontal rain and hail. It felt like my face was being powersanded by God himself. Of course, I had a hoodie on, so I was fine, but Paul was immediately caught out by his cheap-o Tesco work shirt turning see-through so everyone could see his dirtypillows. It was an uncomfortable swim home. To top it off, the cows on the town moor thought it would be a jolly jape to start running together over the path with their shitclad tails swishing about, meaning we had to powermince to avoid them, slipping in the cowpats they’d skilfully and carefully left on the path whilst the rain and wind blew all around us. At one point I almost collapsed onto a bench and told Paul to go on without me. It was like Threads, and that shit’s real.

Of course, the rain, wind and bad weather stopped the very second I pressed the door-release on my car keys.

God, if you’re up there, why do you hate me so? Is it the blasphemy? The sodomy? The fact I look better with a beard? Bah!

Anyway, in total, I walked 7.64 miles throughout the day (including a schlep around Tesco and my many walks to the photocopier) and burned 1308 calories. Paul managed a respectful 3.4 mile walk (into work and back – he forgot to leave his pedometer on). We definitely earned our dinner.

OH WHAT A SEGUE.

DINNER

Well, this is embarrassing. It’s still in the oven! We’re having oven-baked meatballs but didn’t realise that they took over two hours to slowly cook. Great! I’ll post a picture tomorrow. Promise. Honest. But the recipe…:

ingredients: 2 large onions (S), 500g lean beef mince (P) (or pork, or turkey!), 2tsp dried oregano, 2 garlic cloves (crushed) (S), salt and pepper, 400g tin of chopped tomatoes (S), 400ml passata, 150ml vegetable stock, 2 medium courgettes (S), 1 medium aubergine (S).

recipe:

finely chop the two onions and put into a bowl with the mince, garlic, oregano, and salt and pepper
combine the mixture by hand and roll into twenty or so equal balls
titter at the word balls
place the meatballs into the fridge to chill, perhaps pipe a bit of Michael Buble in for them
trim and chop the courgettes and aubergine into chunks and mix together in a large roasting dish with the tomatoes, passata and vegetable stock
cover the dish with foil and cook for 50 minutes at 200 degrees celsius
add the meatballs to the dish, recover (the dish, not your dignity) and cook for another 40 minutes
serve!

We’re having ours with turnip and green beans because that’s the only thing left after we made sassy water.

DAY TWO DONE.

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

May 5, 2015

Posted under

bacon, breakfast, breast, classics, fakeaways, indian, lunch, pork, poultry, recipe card, savoury snacks, snacks, syn free, vegan, vegetarian

leek, samphire, pea, mushroom and bacon frittata

Right, so remember we’re structuring the posts a little different this week – it’s pure diet. No sass. Oh fuck off, this is me, I can’t sign my name without a 500 word critique of someone’s hairy top lip and an anecdote about peas. I heard something I haven’t heard in years today: ‘Oh, you’ll know him, he’s gay too’. I mean, it’s a harmless enough comment and it was certainly meant with no malice, but it does tickle me. I like the idea of there being a gay psychic link that becomes activated the very second you turn to someone who shares the same approximate genitals as you (so to speak) and say, oh we’ll give it a go. A yellow pages but in lavender. I suppose it works on the same idea as ‘having a gaydar’ which I DO think there’s a grain of truth in. Paul and I can normally spot the other gay couples wandering around the garden centre or fingering the strawberries in Waitrose, but it never extends to anything more than a tiny smirk and a colossal leer at the cucumber in their trolley. Half the time I walk around like I’ve had a stroke because I’m trying not to wink at them.

In fact, this is what happens when you’re not looking.

Anyway, hush. So how are we going to do this? Easy! I’m going to mark speed foods with a S and protein-rich foods with a P.

BREAKFAST

Poached eggs on marmite toast with baked beans

Now come on, you don’t really need me to talk you through this, but it’s a HE of wholemeal bread (the small loaf, don’t be putting two eggs on a doorstep of bread and come crying to me next week) slathered with marmite, baked beans (P) and eggs (P). I can poach an egg properly no problem but time is always a factor, especially now I have to contend with the worry of not getting a reflection of my knob in the pictures (we’re always naked during breakfast, saves showering twice when I invariably spill my cornflakes into my chest hair). So we bought one of these egg-poachers – It’s the easy and lazy way to cook poached eggs in the microwave. £4.99 on Amazon, steal. You half fill each compartment, microwave for forty seconds, crack your egg in, microwave for another 30 seconds and you are done. Normally you get the runny yolk but I was sidetracked scratching Paul’s back this morning so forgot to take them out. Anyway, done!

Oh, be careful – whilst I’ve never experienced this, it can be slightly dangerous to microwave an egg. Perhaps prick the yolk. Up to you. If you happen to like goo blasting across your face in the morning, well then you’re my type of reader.

LUNCH

This makes enough for six servings, or if we’re being realistic about the type of people that we are, two servings and a bit leftover to pick at in tears whilst you hang that too-skinny pair of jeans back into the wardrobe. WE’LL GET THERE.

to make leek, samphire, pea, mushroom and bacon frittata you will need:

: one big bugger leek (sliced) (S), a handful of samphire (S), handful of sugarsnap peas (S), mushrooms (sliced) (S), salt and pepper, garlic, 30g of parmesan (optional – HEA choice but don’t forget this serves two/three) eight eggs and a frying pan that is a) non-stick and b) capable of going in the oven.

to make leek, samphire, pea, mushroom and bacon frittata you should:

slice and prepare your veg and chuck it all into a frying pan
cook off the bacon medallions under the grill (or normal bacon, but chuck away that fat) then chop and add
beat all the eggs into submission in a jug, adding a good sprinkle of salt, pepper and garlic (grated)
pour egg into the bacon and veg mix and give it a good shake and mix to let the egg soak through
pop onto a medium heat for around ten minutes or so until things start to firm up – the top will be runny though
add the grated parmesan here if you’re using it
whack it into the oven for ten minutes or so on around 180 degrees – you want it firm but not overcooked
leave to cool and then slice and serve with salad – it transports well so it’s good for lunch

top tip: you really can chuck any old shite into a frittata, it’s really very forgiving. Any flimflam you have sitting in the bottom of the fridge will easily taste delicious in a frittata. Get it done!

DETOX WATER

Full disclosure – I really think detox waters are a load of piss. Well, not immediately, but they’ll get there. Your body is a detoxing machine! However, that said, drinking water is always a wonderful thing. Click here for the Kilner water dispenser. You don’t need one. You really don’t. But it’s summer soon. Cheaper alternatives are available, by the way. This water contains:

two sliced limes (S) (can help prevent kidney stones)
one sliced lemon (S) (because you don’t want scurvy, your legs will bend when you get on the scales)
half a sliced grapefruit (S) (strengthens the immune system)
pineapple sage leaf.

Pineapple sage leaf? Totally unnecessary. But it’s amazing. You may recall I started a herb garden a few posts ago and this little bugger is growing merrily away – the leaves taste like sweet pineapple and smell amazing. You could brew it in a tea, if you’re the type of arty-farty person who thinks such a thing is a sensible idea.

The water was refreshing and ‘clean’. But then what do you expect, we have plumbed in filtered water and an ice-dispenser. FAT MEN LIVING THE DREAM. Of course, I needed it after my body magic…

BODY MAGIC – GARDENING

I had timetabled four miles of walking for the body magic today, but when we got up it was absolutely chucking it down. I would have been drier had I swam to work down the Tyne. Plus the cows are back on the Town Moor, and they terrify me with their cold, dead eyes and shitty tails. So instead, we spent a good hour or so gardening – from top to bottom:

repotted our baby leeks
potted out our tomatoes into their automatic watering beds
trimmed back our lettuce monster
FINALLY planted all the early potatoes!

Google tells me that gardening comes in at around 300 calories for an hour of medium graft. Personally, I reckon 295 of that calorie spend comes from me constantly yanking up my trousers to stop the neighbours over the road being able to see my bumhole everytime I planted a potato. I live in perpetual and unending fear of my top of my arse-crack being exposed.

Never gardened before? You’re missing out. I’m no Charlie Dimmock, despite having her tits and then some. Even if you’ve only got a tiny bit of land to potter in, you can grow your lettuce and herbs easy enough. Tomatoes are more of a fart-on but worth the effort. But start small. Nothing tastes better than something you’ve grown yourself.

Finally…

Does anyone have Margaret’s number? Seriously, I feel like ringing up and congratulating her. I’ve FINALLY found a Slimming World curry recipe that doesn’t taste like someone’s sneezed a curry stock cube onto some chicken and wrung a dishcloth over it. It was tasty, though I made some adjustments! And SP friendly. So without a moment of hesitation…

to make easy chicken curry with spicy broccoli you will need:

one red onion (chopped) (S), 2 garlic cloves (grated) (S), one chicken breast (makes enough for two) (P), 1 tbsp of korma powder, 6tbsp of tomato puree, 200g of passata, a half teaspoon of turmeric, 400ml of chicken stock, chopped red pepper (S), spinach (S), bit of coriander so you can pretend you’re out somewhere dead fancy. For the broccoli you’ll need some tenderstem broccoli (S) and a 1tbsp of tandoori curry powder

to make easy chicken curry with spicy broccoli you should:

gently cook the onion, chopped red pepper and garlic in a drop of oil or a few squirts of everyone’s favourite pan-ruiner, Frylight
chuck in the diced chicken and cook hard and fast until there’s not a squeak of pink chicken
add everything else – powder, puree, stock and passata, bring to the boil and then reduce to a low heat and cook for twenty minutes or so until the sauce has thickened, throwing in the spinach for five minutes near the end;
whilst that’s happening, throw your broccoli into boiling water and cook the very life out of it for 3 minutes or so – you still want it firm, if you have to gum it to enjoy it you’ve gone too far;
drain the broccoli and whilst it is still damp, sprinkle that tandoori powder all over it
heat up a griddle pan – again, tiny bit of oil or frylight, and griddle the hell out of that broccoli for a couple of minutes
serve up – add a dainty bit of coriander that’ll sit mournfully on the side of your plate until the cat eats it.

Phew! Enjoy that did we? I hope so!

SPEED FOODS USED TODAY: red pepper, spinach, leeks, broccoli, grapefruit, lime, lemon, garlic, onion, mushrooms, samphire, sugarsnap peas (12).

Before I go, there’s a competition running this week. I’ll announce it tomorrow (if I remember) but it’ll reward those with keen eyes…

Please do share this blog as far and as wide as you can.

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

May 4, 2015

Posted under

recipe card

weigh in time – bugger the WI – and SP week

Well blow me. Hasn’t it been a while? That’s the thing with us fickle gays, we’re here one minute and then ooh, something shiny. Well no not quite – last Friday was the day we put dear old Nana into the oven on gas mark infinity and sent her back to her husband, like some hard-of-hearing Emmett Brown. It was a lovely service, and I didn’t laugh once – which amazed me, as I have a nervous laugh. A teacher once told me her husband had hung himself over the summer and I had to excuse myself into the corridor to slap my knees and laugh into my blazer like she’d told me the filthiest knock knock joke ever. I have backwards emotions – it’s not that I’m not sympathetic, I’m just emotionally incapable. Isn’t that awful?

Of course, the service wasn’t without humour – there I was at the front of the church, with the coffin in front of me like the world’s most macabre coffee table – and I swear when everyone shut their eyes to pray I could STILL hear her hearing aid whistling away like a 56k modem. Plus doesn’t All Things Bright and Beautiful have a lot of verses? Good heavens – even the charming lady playing the organ took a swig of Lucozade (think of the syns, woman!). Thank Christ she didn’t pull a Paula Radcliffe and piddle on the floor. Oh and I like to think my nana chose All Things Bright and Beautiful simply for the line ‘The purple headed mountain’, which I’m sure made everyone under seventy bite the inside of their cheek. It was a happy, cheerful affair and the vicar did her a great send-off, which is exactly what we (and she) wanted. The cremation was oddly impersonal though – I wouldn’t have been surprised if we had been asked to collect a ticket and await our turn, ala Cashier Number 7, please. Ashes Number 7, more like.

The wake was in the village where she grew up and grew old, and the lovely ladies of the WI catered the event, which meant cakes, biscuits, scones you could prop a barn door open with, clotted cream, sandwiches, meringue, tea and fine china. It was delicious and a wonderful gesture which again, my nana would have loved. Of course I was all gung-ho and ‘bugger the syns’ so that leads me to the inevitable weigh-in results…

james – 3lb on

paul – 0.5lb off

Now in my defence, I haven’t really been on the plan at all. Takeaway and sweets and wake buffets. Plus, I’m wearing jeans today. How on Earth Paul managed half off I don’t know, but he charmingly leaned over in the car and informed me that ‘he hasn’t had a solid poo for a good few days’. Charming. My bowels are like one of those car crushing machines that you see in gritty crime dramas – you can throw anything you like at it, but come 8.30am you’ll get a smart little parcel and that’s your lot.

Anyway, time to buck up. We’ve been coasting a little and thanks to Nana finally singing with the choir invisible, we haven’t been 100% focused. This week, that changes. It’s our 7777 week. Now I know 777 week is a thing but frankly, we’re just that little bit more special, so it’s our first attempt at an SP week PLUS, this week only, you’ll be getting at least fourteen new recipes! Gosh. It’s taken us a while to get our heads round but thanks to Mags just being a phone-call away, we’ve got it sorted. So let’s break down our 7777.

7 EE:SP days

EE:SP still looks and sounds like someone has sneezed into a bag of scrabble tiles, but it’s really SW’s way of boosting your weight loss. My understanding of it is to ram the speed and protein foods home. So that’s what we’ll be doing. I’ll discuss more what you can and can’t have during the week.

7 Body Magic Bursts

Exactly what you’d expect. You don’t need to exercise to lose weight with SW and we’re very much a recipe blog, but we’re going to try and incorporate some exercise into our week that extends beyond shuffling to the kitchen for condiments and honey-I’m-too-tired sex. Remember this is OPTIONAL. Optional! So stop clutching your chest and getting a sweat on if the only time you move is if you drop your chips.

7 Detox Waters

Look, detoxing is a load of piss, it really is. Your body detoxes all the damn time. But we’re chucking in seven detox recipes for water for good measure, partly because we’ve got a fancy chilled water dispenser and partly because it seems to get a lot of gussets moist.

7 Speed Foods a Day

And that’s a bloody minimum, too. Again, I’ll post a list (hopefully tomorrow) of what you can have and can’t have. Each recipe will point out where the speed foods come from.

At the end of the seven days I’ll post a big full spreadsheet with links and photos (well, when I can be arsed) and you can take it from there, or, if you like, stay a day behind and follow us!

Either way, we hope you enjoy!

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

April 28, 2015

Posted under

breakfast, low syn, recipe card, savoury snacks, snacks, syn free, vegetarian

cheese and asparagus french toast dippers with soft boiled eggs

Firstly, let’s get this out of the way: what’s green and empty? Orville’s bumhole. Oh you. Paul’s going to write tonight’s entry, and I’ll butt in wherever my big sassy ass can fit. You’ll be able to spot my parts, they’re in italics. How decadent!

Technology really is marvellous, in’t it? I’m happy to say that in a little over seven months we’ve managed to attract (at the time of writing) 2209 subscribers to the website and 2704 to the Facebook group! And thank you to each and every one of you.

I absolutely love technology – any kind. I’m a complete geek when it comes to anything like that. I once dragged James around an old nuclear bunker from the Cold War just so I could crane my neck to have a look at what their printer was like (very beige, if you were wondering). His latest thing is Twitter – I can’t use the bloody thing, too complex for my liking (it just reminds me of someone mouthing off in the middle of a bus station hoping someone screams back – gah) and I recoil whenever I see a bloody hashtag so he’s looking after that side of things. I’ll stick with Facebook, thank you very much. It’s where all the drama happens.

A thought entered my mind today as I sat at my desk at work trying not to think about Galaxy Ripples. I remember the feeling of amazement and wonder I had when I was just a little lad whenever I saw computers. Back then they were just these little boxes whirring away in the corner of the classroom (but only if you were good for that week) that didn’t really do very much but were still fantastic and quite mystical. I also remember the excitement whenever I saw anything even vaguely computerish on the telly (I sat through an entire series of Bugs once. It was crap but it looked cool). I was always lucky enough to have a computer in the house. It started off with the Commodore 64 which unfortunately ended its life at the hands of an errant Lambert and Butler from mother. She used to be fixated with a game called ‘Split Personalities’ where you had to slide bits of a puzzle around to make a picture of a famous personality – mother, in the grips of a panic that only rearranging Elivs Costello’s face in 16-bit can create, must’ve clamped her thin lips down a little too harshly on that tab of hers because the tip fell off and burnt its way through the keyboard. Turns out you can’t load a tape without the use of the space bar.

Our first PC was smashing – a Packard Bell that we had to have the bedroom floor reinforced to stop it crashing through the ceiling. Well not quite, but you get the gist. I’ve never known a computer where you had to shovel coal in the back just to get Encarta 96 running at full speed. No internet at the time – just Solitaire, Rodent’s Revenge and then completely knacking everything up by installing After Dark screensavers (flying toasters!) and setting a boot-up password, then promptly forgetting it. We had to call someone who ‘knew computers’ to come and fix it whilst we stood slack-jawed at the Windows 95 splash screen. He also installed Quake on it but that was far too manly for me so I just spent my time playing Hover and Theme Hospital. No internet at that point see, so there were no long summer evenings spent flogging the dolphin. Anyway. Back to Paul.

From there we eventually moved up to a PC – we got some ‘glorious’ reconditioned box of crap from an iffy looking warehouse that disappeared the next week and where the workers had far too many gold earrings not to be up to something shifty. The only problem was that I used to love tinkering with it. As a curious twelve year old I loved nothing more than taking the case off and pulling wires out to see if I could remember where it went, or delete key files to see if I could fix it (I never could). I was able to get away with it by blaming the Millennium Bug until some smartarse actually pointed to the problems most likely being the massive amounts of smut I had hidden away on it. Eeh what am I like.

I soon got my comeuppance, though. Whilst fannying on too much I accidentally deleted the display driver meaning that it could only ever from that point on do things in sixteen colours. SIXTEEN. You’ve never seen complicated porn until you’ve watched it in only sixteen bloody colours. I didn’t realise a bumhole wasn’t an aurbergine colour until I saw one winking at me for real. Anyway, after a few weeks of aborted, frustrated attempts at having a wank I finally managed to sulk my way into getting another, nicer, newer one. It was still rubbish, mind, but at least I could finally crack one off in a few million different colours. It makes all the difference, believe me. The problem from then on though was that mother started to get her hands on it. No, not that (I know I’m from East Anglia, but come on) I mean the computer, and that’s when it all went terribly wrong. You wouldn’t trust a hamster with a bandsaw so whoever it was that decided a middle-aged woman that had only managed to figure out how to click a biro should be allowed access to a computer deserves a good kicking. There was no time for smut when I had to spend all my days uninstalling toolbars and iffy Bingo diallers and running up and down the stairs with a list of words to run through a thesaurus for her latest Puzzler. And when Bejewelled came along that really was the final straw and I decided to move out. I couldn’t bear another question about a bloody Java installer.

I want to interject here and continue my bit and agree that, for my formative teenager years, technology was amazing – in that technology could get me any amount of debauched filth at the click of a mouse and an installation of Realplayer. Truly, it was a wondrous time to be a teenage boy. When I finally managed to get the computer put in my bedroom rather than downstairs I don’t think I reappeared for a good two weeks, and even then I came out of my bedroom with a right arm like a Russian shot-putter and skin the colour of milk. You know when you were young and you used to slick your arm with PVA glue so that you could peel it off? That’s what my bedroom looked like – like a giant spider had made a nest. My parents were responsible enough to put parental controls on, but nothing stops a teenage boy getting at pornography, and if you’re sitting there reading this thinking little Oliver and Danrobért aren’t bypassing every restriction you’ve put on there, you’re so wrong. It’s a wonder I got any GSCE coursework done.

Hush, you. Fancy lowering the tone like that. Speaking of cheese, though:

I know right?

to make cheese and asparagus french toast dippers with soft boiled eggs you will need:

two slices of wholemeal bread – now this is where it gets tricky, syn wise. You could use a couple of slices of wholemeal bread (from a small loaf) as your healthy extra and look, that’s fine. It really is. Or, you could splash out a little and get this nice seeded bread, which I work out as 6.5 syns a slice – but see now you’re allowed 60g of wholemeal bread so I’m going to call it and say that it’s 3.5 syns for the bread. It might be a bit more, it might be less. I had it and lost 7lb on that week so either way it didn’t derail me. You’ll also need your healthy extra allowance of cheese – choose a good strong cheese, that way you can use less – 30g of gruyere is what I used), six eggs (two for each of you and two for the bread), a good bunch of asparagus and a strong coffee. Oh, and some spray oil – I use Filipo Berio. Or however you spell it.

to make cheese and asparagus french toast dippers with soft boiled eggs you should:

set four eggs away boiling merrily in boiling water – seven minutes is normally enough for a good dippy egg
cook your asparagus – little squirt of oil and just cook them in a griddle pan until they’re nicely browned – then chop into pieces, keeping the griddle pan hot
whisk the remaining two eggs, a dash of milk and some salt and pepper in a bowl
take your slices of bread and make a ‘sandwich’ – cheese and chopped asparagus
carefully dip your sandwich into the egg mixture and drop onto the griddle pan so it can toast and the cheese melts
serve sliced with the top of the egg removed and dip away!

I can’t tell you how nice this was. Something different for breakfast too! Yes, it involves using syns, but that’s what they are there for!

P and J

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

April 26, 2015

Posted under

lunch, pork, pork mince, recipe card, rice, syn free

cabbage rolls

First of all, today’s recipe is cabbage rolls, which couldn’t sound less appetising if they tried. Plus, I tried to take a decent photo of them, but they invariably look like something you’d see hanging off a tramp’s foot in the summer. They tasted wonderful though and, well, it’s something different! And here, it’s a Romanian recipe so that gives us an excuse to dust off the old flagmaker, rattle off this banner and declare twochubbycubs’ European Tour back on. OK so it may not be weekly but we’re only two men.

But first, today. We’re mulling over whether or not to move house. I know, the people in the street would be bereft not seeing my knob hanging out of the front of my boxers as I absent-mindedly put the bins out on a Monday, but since we had some strange lads in our back passage a few days ago (not invited through Grindr, either, unusually) it’s made us a bit unsettled. We don’t think they were trying to break in, because there was an open window into our bedroom (though admittedly the flashing neon red light was turned off at the time) and they didn’t do anything…but still. It makes you feel uneasy. Though saying that, had they climbed in through the bedroom window, they would have fallen onto our bed – and all I’m saying is I wouldn’t have needed Tony Martin’s shotgun to make them bleed from behind. The little smackrats. This is a nice part of the world!

So yes, we bundled into the car and decided to go have a look at some of the new estates that are being build, and to take the opportunity to view the showhomes. Well, they were awful. It didn’t help that the chap on the front desk took one look at us – physically looked us up and down, mind you, taking in our dog-walking trainers, shaved heads and George jeans – and clearly decided we were there to steal the copper wiring and good silver. His opening gambit was that ‘these houses are very difficult to get’ and that we’d need excellent credit to get an appropriate mortgage. The cheeky, oily little oik – we own our house outright with no mortgage and I’ve got better credit than the Queen. Paul hasn’t, because he bought a stereo from Kays catalogue on tick and then forgot all about it over ten years ago, but there you go. Always trust a Geordie with money. We spent ten minutes looking around and then left with a disdainful look at Captain Acne behind the desk and told him it was far too small and there were altogether too many Audis on the estate.

We didn’t manage to leave quietly though as I managed to back the car over a child’s football that had been discarded in the middle of the road, resulting in an surprisingly loud bang echoing around the estate which probably sounded like the car backfiring, which I suppose didn’t help our image. We trundled over to The Parents and spent half an hour oohing and aahing at how well my nephew is coming along (I make him sound like a tomato plant) – without so much as a cup of tea mind, mother – and the highlight of that being when he pointed at Paul and called him Uncle Fatty. The kid has style!

After my parents came IKEA, and good lord IKEA is stressful at the best of times but even more so when you’re breaking the rules and going anti-clockwise with seemingly all of Gateshead’s unwashed masses bearing down on you, it’s hell on Earth. Especially because when the weather is warm enough not to leave an icicle on your tit, everyone decides to throw on a scraggy t-shirt exposing their Neapolitan-ice-cream skin to the sun – blistered red from being out under a SKOL umbrella all afternoon, yellow from nicotine and jaundice, streaky brown wherever the Poundstretcher Fake-Bake took hold.

And the stopping! I know everyone needs a moment to sniff their eighty-dozen orange-scented KLIT tea-lights but for goodness sake, do it to the side. I genuinely think there should be two lanes in places like this – one of those who can glide with purpose and one for those dolts who walk like they have a ball-bearing stuck in their socks. I’m being glib, I appreciate that people have disabilities and of course, they’re exempt, but if you can’t move quickly simply because you’re too much of a clot to remember to put one foot in front of the other in a reasonably rhythmic pattern, then just do everyone a favour and stay at home and have someone else pick up your ÖRGI bookshelf. Bastards. I didn’t even get a bloody hot-dog at the end because I couldn’t bear the thought of having my face stripped by someone’s eye-watering B.O for ten minutes in the queue whilst I had nothing to do than count the skin tags on their neck.

Hark listen to me, you’d think I was Adonis. But Paul says I am, so there.

Costco next – and if you think IKEA is bad, then Costco is even worse. Here the aforementioned numpties are armed with a trolley big enough to fit a hot-tub and enough baked beans to keep a Toby Carvery going for a financial quarter. Oh and it gets worse – it was bloody tasting day, which meant crowds of people all pushing and pulling at one another with their 4×4 trolleys in a nugatory attempt to get their cracked hands on a postage stamp of lasagne or a bit of brioche you could start a fire with. We bought our usual forty tins of tomato puree, sack of pasta and catering jar of gherkins, which were crashed through the till by the cashier with all the care and panache you’d expect from someone who had tattooed her eyelashes on, and we were on our way to the final test – Tesco at 3.40pm on a Sunday afternoon.

Which, remarkably, was a fairly sedate experience, despite me shrieking at Paul ‘STOP PLAYING WITH YOURSELF THERE ARE KIDS ABOUT’ when he was adjusting his belt in the reductions aisle. I’m surprised he had room, the usual ballaches were waiting to tackle the poor Tesco lackey to the floor for their 35p breadbuns. I genuinely can’t stand greed of this sort – but I’ve rambled on about these shitgibbons before who fill their trolley because they can, not because they need to. Nobody needs fifteen discount cauliflowers at 4pm on a Sunday. Take one, and fuck off.

So that was today. Goodness me.

Today’s recipe then: cabbage rolls!

to make cabbage rolls you will need:

1 medium white cabbage, 160g cooked rice, 1 egg (beaten), 60ml skimmed milk, half an onion (chopped), 500g pork mince, ½ tsp pepper, 4 cloves of garlic, 500ml passata, 1 tin of chopped tomatoes, 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce, 1 tbsp lemon juice, ½ tsp black pepper, a good dollop of sauerkraut (optional but delicious but by gaw it’ll make your bum windy)

to make cabbage rolls you should:

preheat the oven to 180 degrees celsius (gas mark 4)
remove the core from the head of the cabbage
boil the whole head of cabbage for ten minutes
drain the cabbage and leave to cool
in a large bowl mix together the cooked rice, mince egg, milk, chopped onion, crushed garlic and pepper
peel away 12 or so leaves from the cabbage – they need to be a good size but the smaller ones will still be okay, just use less for the next step. Shake off any excess water, nobody loves a moist cabbage
scoop roughly two-tablespoons worth of the mince and rice mixture and plop into the centre of a cabbage leaf
fold the bottom ends up and the sides to make a small parcel
place roll seam-side down into a baking dish that has been sprayed with a little FryLight if you’re a tasteless buffoon or a drop of oil if you’re sensible
in a separate bowl mix together the passata, tinned tomatoes, lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce. Pour over the cabbage rolls
cover the dish with tin foil and bake for an hour
serve with anything you like, but we had new potatoes because they were the easiest thing to grab

Enjoy!

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

April 24, 2015

Posted under

lunch, mince, pasta, poultry, recipe card, syn free

turkey stroganoff

That has to be the most tortuous way ever of getting the recipe title into a pun. The recipe today will be a turkey stroganoff – cheap to make, difficult to pronounce and syn-free. Oh yes!

Someone lovely responded to one of our posts today saying they’d love us in book form. Let me tell you, I’d love to write a book (and indeed, I have – my Honeymoon Diary is on Amazon) and my head is full of ideas, but I’m the world’s worst procrastinator. If I can find a way of putting something off to do later, I will, even if it’s something I enjoy doing like writing. Hell, a book about a wizard made JK Rowling insanely rich, even if she does walk around with a face like a franked stamp. Like she’s seen her arse and doesn’t like the colour of it, as my dad would say. Like she’d lost a fiver and found a pound, if you will. Like an abandoned sofa. I’m only jealous.

To give you a few examples, I painted our bedroom a charming slate grey last summer (Paul wouldn’t let me put a slab of wipe-clean Perspex on the wall behind the bed, which I think was a mistake) and I had every intention of going around with a little scrubby cloth and getting all the paint of the windowsills, lest our gardener looks in and thinks I’m a cack-handed slattern. I am, but I don’t want him judging me. But I’ve put it off and put it off to the point where I’d rather repaint the room than go at it with a cloth. For a year and a half in our old flat we had a bed that dipped in the middle almost to the floor because three of the slats snapped (sadly not through passionate love-making, but because I plucked one of Paul’s bum-hairs as he walked past naked and he fell onto the bed in fright). Did we go to IKEA and get some new slats? No, we propped it up with a few DVDs and spent 18 months walking around with spines like question marks.

If I take a day off, it’s always done with good intentions that I’ll go shopping, get some nice food in, do tasks around the house, practice writing, have a walk. What invariably happens is that I’ll spend three hours pressing the snooze button and the rest of the day watching Come Dine With Me on Channel 4 catch-up in my ‘house boxers’ – i.e. the ones I can’t wear outside of the house because my knackers tumble out of a hole in the gusset. We’ve got several pairs of these, super comfy, but god knows what we do to our boxers to make them fall apart like that. Paul puts it down to friction, I put it down to his rancid farts burning through like when you toast the top of a crème brûlée. Nevertheless, they’re handy for dossing around the house, though I do think my neighbours over the road have seen my balls swinging around more times than they would care to admit.

Here, have some stroganoff – it doesn’t look all that in the picture but it tasted lahverley! And it’s something new, so get on it.

to make turkey stroganoff you will need:

1 tbsp olive oil (or Frylight if you’re that way inclined), 500g turkey mince, 1 brown onion (diced), 225g sliced mushrooms, 170g passata, 1 tin of chopped tomatoes, 1 tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, 1 teaspoon garlic powder, 1 tablespoon chilli sauce (we used Cholula, which to me sounds like something you’d rub onto an irritated foof, but for goodness sake DON’T), 500ml chicken stock, 200g fusili pasta, 250g fat-free greek yoghurt, parsley

to make turkey stroganoff you should:

in a bowl, mix together the chopped tomatoes, worcestershire sauce, garlic power and chilli sauce. Keep to one side whilst you make the magic happen
in a large stockpot or even better one of these babies, heat the olive oil (or Frylight, pussy) over a medium-high heat.
add the minced turkey and onion and stir frequently for about two minutes. Make sure to keep breaking up the clumps of mince as you go
add the mushrooms to the pan and cook for about 5 minutes until the mushrooms are tender. Don’t worry if it starts to look a bit watery – that’s what you want
add salt and pepper and anything else you might fancy. We won’t judge
stir in the passata and the delicious tomatoey sauce you made earlier and mix well
add the stock and bring the whole lot to a boil. Don’t be shy – if you keep stirring, it won’t stick
once it’s bubbling away add the pasta and reduce the heat to a nice simmer
cook for about 15 minutes or until the pasta is cooked as you like it. Stir occasionally, but not too often
add anything else you might fancy (lots of pepper is nice), remove from the heat and let it cool for about 5 minutes or so. If you do this next step whilst it’s still really hot it’ll look like you’ve spewed in it
add the yoghurt and mix well
serve, worship us and then share the recipe with your friends!

Remember – we’re on Twitter! If you enjoy us, SHARE – @twochubbycubs

Whoo!

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

April 23, 2015

Posted under

airfryer, burgers, fakeaways, recipe card, syn free

kangaroo burger with fries

Only a teensy tiny post tonight as Paul is out gallivanting and I’m stuck at work – so I’m activating a saved post! Enjoy!

Actually, not much to say about this recipe aside from the burger – we bought it from www.musclefood.com where we previously got a big old box of chicken. Delivery was quick and the meat really has been second to none. The kangaroo burger has languished at the back of the freezer and we thought, well why not? Let me tell you – it was very tasty! You could hoy a beefburger in here just as easy. It’s syn free, very lean meat and chucked in a bun with tomato, onion, rocket and a slice of cheese it made for a good tea. Cook it under the grill for around fifteen minutes until the juices run clear. If Musclefood float your boat, order using this link and you’ll get four free chicken breasts. Goodness! Remember, HEB for the bun, HEA for the cheese.

The fries were easier still – just cut them thin, drop of oil, a bit of salt and into the Actifry. Same effect could be made from doing them in the oven!

Finally, if you’re a fan of the snazzy little (wanky) chip pan, you can pick up a pack of four here. All you need to complete the gastropub experience is a giant plate with a tiny bit of crackling and a tiny period of cranberry sauce on it. Yum!

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

April 22, 2015

Posted under

fakeaways, indian, lamb, lamb mince, one-pot, recipe card, syn free

spiced lamb mince and potato aloo kheema

Firstly, a massive and genuinely heartfelt thank you to everyone for the lovely comments yesterday in response to my article about my nana. I can’t reply to them all but please know that they were read and enjoyed greatly. She’d have hated (but secretly loved) all the fuss. She was one of those people who would say she didn’t want anything for Christmas and then sit there with a face like a slapped arse until you got her present out. I’ll miss her at Christmas – we used to joke on amongst ourselves that she was like Dr Who – always regenerating at Christmas despite us saying for a good ten years that ‘we’d better not go away this year, it’ll be her last’. Ah well. Your comments were delightful, inspired and so very kind, and it made me feel better that I was able to encapsulate even the smallest bit of what she meant to me. That said, if she wasn’t currently on ice down at the morgue, she’d be tunneling halfway to China now spinning in her grave at what I’m about to show you.

I have literally become the thing I hate most. Just look.

I’m drinking a mixed drink from a fucking jamjar, like some pretentious rah-yah in one of those bars where they take a perfectly affable building, cover it in veneers and turn off all the lights so you have to read the menu by the cherry of a liquorice-papered, prison-thin American Spirit roll-up. You’ll note however that the jamjar is a proper Kilner licenced jar and I even doubled down and got the awful paper straws to go with it. Paper straws though, really – the liquid equivalent of trying to dry yourself with a cloud. Five minutes in and it’s already collapsed, so I end up sucking like I’m giving the world’s worst blowjob to both parties concerned. Don’t worry, it’ll be back to George pint glasses soon enough and we’ll only wheel out the posh stuff when it’s going on Twitter, like the Christmas china.

That’s the next point – we’re now on Twitter. The observant amongst you will doubtless have spotted the little widget there on the right displaying pictures and other such nonsense. The aim is to get you lot sharing these recipes wherever you can, plus, it gives me an outlet for my bile for when I can’t be bothered sitting at the computer trying to type with a particularly needy cat clawing away at my genitals. Follow us by adding @twochubbycubs and share share share share!

Along similar lines, I’ve just noticed that we’ve sailed clean past 2000 members, which when you think I was only bleating on about having 1000 members back in January (and take a look at that page, I shit you not when I say it’s one of our best recipes), is pretty incredible. Like we always say – Paul loves cooking (he’s learnt to, Little Mo has nothing on him) and I love writing, so this is the perfect outlet for us. The fact that so many of you like hearing our nonsense and swearing only gives us a reason to try harder! With that in mind, know that we are going to be back to full speed pretty soon – recent events have knocked us a little, but we’re still doing a new recipe a day, and you’ll get the benefit of that. We’ve got breakfast ideas, themed weeks and oops – we forgot about Europe. What are we like. So bear with us, and until then, enjoy this:

Tasty. And check out the presentation, I felt like I was in a Newcastle Wetherspoons. I mean, I knew I wasn’t because I have a full set of teeth and a career, but still*.

to make the spiced lamb mince you will need:

500g of lean lamb or pork mince (or beef, for that matter – hey listen, I’m not judging you), 500g of potatoes (use new potatoes if you can get them) cut into thumb sized chunks, 1 red onion finely chopped, 2 big juicy red tomatoes (i.e. don’t be buying a pack of cheap tomatoes, God is watching and he despairs of your watery orange balls of nowt), and then the spices:

to make spiced lamb mince you should:

2 tsp of garam masala
1 tsp of cumin seeds
a cinnamon stick
1 tsp of turmeric
2 tsp of coriander powder
1 tsp of chilli powder
1 green chilli
1 tbsp of garlic and 1 tbsp of ginger paste (DON’T buy it, just get a microplane grater and grate your own ginger and garlic – much cheaper because you can chuck the ginger bulb in the freezer for next time – and oh look, a handy link – and only £9 – cheap at half the price and you can even use it on your feet which I totally don’t do)
a bay leaf

You’ll also need a drop of oil for the onions. If you prefer, use Frylight, but like I always say: don’t.

This recipe only took us about 30 minutes to make and most of that was the pot sitting on the hob. So what’s your excuse, eh?

ingredients for the sides: a pitta bread each (HEB if you use a wholemeal Weight Watchers pitta, which has all the taste and wonder of a side of Artex), an onion, tomato, cucumber and red chilli for the onion salad and fat free natural yoghurt, cucumber and fresh mint (or mint sauce if you’re common) for the raita.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I don’t know if this is extra-lean lamb mince. See, it was at the back of our freezer and we did buy a load of extra-lean mince from our butcher back in the day. I think it is. If it is, then the dish is syn free. If not, use extra lean beef or pork or even turkey. OH THE EXCITEMENT.

OK, so the recipe:

make up your side dishes
- add yoghurt, mint and grated cucumber together and chill
- toast pitta bread
- chop up onion, tomato, cucumber and finely chop chilli – combine and add a pinch of salt
- set aside
get your best pan out of the cupboard – heavy bottomed (that’s the pan, not you, cheeky)
add the cinnamon stick, bay leaf and cumin seeds and get it on a medium high heat until they sizzle
add the chopped onions, cook until golden, add the ginger and garlic paste
add the turmeric, chilli and coriander powder and let it sweat for a moment or two before chucking in the mince and potato
allow to brown for a few minutes and then add the chopped tomatoes – two big tomatoes should produce more than enough water once you put the lid on and turn the heat down to a medium
cook until the meat is cooked and the potatoes tender – chuck in the garam masala and cook down for a moment or two more
serve.

Enjoy!

* I actually like Wetherspoons and don’t have a problem with them. Creative licence, alright?

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

April 21, 2015

Posted under

recipe card

the life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living

So, where have we been? Well, if you’re following us on Facebook, you’ll know that we posted a post to say we’d be away for a few days as we had received some bad news. My nana was taken into hospital on Friday morning, ostensibly with a bit of constipation (I had the first few numbers of Dynorod’s number already dialled on my phone for once we got the news of a ‘delivery’). I then got a text on Friday evening to say things were so much worse than we had imagined, and in the early hours of Saturday morning, she rolled a seven and shuffled off the mortal coil. My parents were by her side and she died peacefully, painlessly in her sleep, tripping the light fantastic on all the good strong drugs the NHS could muster. It’s the way we all wished for her to go. She’d been diagnosed with bladder cancer a few weeks before and had decided not to undergo any treatment – she was knocking on ninety, had most definitely had a good few innings, and couldn’t be chewed with the idea of being ill or a burden, which she never would have been. Anyway, there were Take a Break crosswords that needed filling in with all sorts of incorrect nonsense:

31 down. Auctioneer’s hammer (5): G-A-B-L-E

A good friend of mine messaged me and summed it up nicely – when someone dies, you expect the world to stop, people to be wailing in the street in their widow’s weeds, everyone to be so inconsolable that counting syns isn’t right and the only thing worth doing is eating Ben and Jerry’s Peanut Butter cup by the tubful with watery eyes. It’s what my nana would have wanted. But it’s not how it works – the world keeps turning, everyone still keeps going and a mortal love becomes a cherished memory, alive only in our minds rather than a slightly inconvenient thirty mile drive away. I never minded really, it gave me an opportunity to do 90mph on the military road. I’m slingshotting between being upbeat and chipper to being despondent and melancholy, which is probably why I’m up this morning at 4am writing this. This post may be incredibly self-indulgent – I’m aware of my wiffly-waffly prose, and any other time I’d be leaning on that delete key until the arrow wore off – but I express myself best through writing and it’s strangely cathartic.

See now, I grew up in the same village as my nana and saw her every day until I moved away – and even then, I was clearly a glutton for punishment and paper-thin pastry because we’d make the pilgrimage (first by three separate bus journeys and then finally, by car – she was the catalyst for me eventually learning to drive) to see her nearly every Sunday. My parents looked in on her every day, she had plenty of friends and she lived with my uncle, so she was well-liked, much-loved and well looked after. We were very close – I’d often spend an afternoon with her doing a jigsaw (her key tactic for completing a jigsaw seemed to be attaching random pieces to one another and then smashing them flat with her fist, so you’d end up with a charming vista of the River Avon only with one of the tiny picnickers on the bank of the river having the exhaust pipe of a Nissan Sunny for a head). We would chat about nonsense, she’d tell me the story of when she had to jump off the bus into a six foot snowdrift for the 376^th time, my sister and I would wrap her Christmas presents for her as her approach was to use more sellotape than wrapping paper. All sorts.

Oh, it was definitely Nana, mind. It was never grandma, she said that aged her horribly, though at 89 I don’t think she was going to be fooling the Grim Reaper for especially long. She was an incredibly proud and wonderfully loyal person, with keen eyes and a sharp tongue. Her ears were fucked though – there could have been one of those gas explosions that rip a street asunder in the next room and she’d only think the phone was ringing. She never quite got on with her hearing aids, treating them as optional accessories the way one might keep a particularly ungainly set of beige earrings for best. We used to kid that she was receiving a fax when she had them in as they’d be whirring and whistling away. She couldn’t hear that, but by god she’d hear if you so much as mouthed a swear word. I use to mouth the word ‘VACUUM’ (which looks like FUCK YOU if you’re lipreading) at Paul across the room and she’d be up remonstrating at me for swearing at ‘Poor Paul’ and ‘Eeee Paul how you put up with him’.

She never had much – she was widowed young with three children and received very little in the way of support, so she had to balance working with raising children (long before it became socially acceptable to become a ‘STAY AT HOME MUVVA’ and let Jeremy Kyle and Quavers raise your son whilst you adorn yourself in rancid copperplate writing tattooes of your latest ballsack lover – sorry) and she did it with aplomb. And even then she’d turn that aplomb into aplomb jam. Haha, bit of wordplay for you there. What she did have she shared – you couldn’t escape the house without running the gauntlet of:

“have a slice of this cake, it’ll not get eaten”
“I’ve just baked this hundredweight of scones, but there’s no-one here to eat them”
“have a sandwich (a risk in itself, she remains the only person I’ve ever known to put her butter on with a plasterer’s trowel and apply salt like one might apply gravy)”
“I know you’re on a diet but I’ve made you an apple and blackberry pie and it seems a shame to chuck it out”
“Take this Breville sandwich toaster, last used for Queen Elizabeth’s Accession, works just fine as long as you change the plug and the wiring and prise off the half slice of National Loaf stuck to the plates”.

Ah it’s no wonder I’m fat. Of course, one of the very best things about my nana was her tolerance – I can’t remember how she found out I’m a mud-valve engineer but she welcomed Paul with open arms. How many people in their eighties can say they attended a civil partnership? To be fair she probably thought she was at a particularly low-budget version of Judge Rinder but she seems entertained enough. She’d talk of Paul as my husband or partner, none of this ‘good friends’ business. She did once ask me ‘who was the woman’ in our relationship but before I drew her a blisteringly hardcore and frank representation, Paul twigged on that she meant who did the cleaning and ironing (remember her age, now, before anyone goes all Millie Tant on me) and explained that heaven’s no, we had a cleaner.

So yes, I love my nana, with every part of me, and I can’t imagine her not being around. I’d swap anything to have her back for another few years of bellowing at me like she was hailing a taxi from across the Irish sea and trying to sneak an entire bag of Aldi Mint Imperials (Mint Industrials) into Paul’s pocket because “he doesn’t get his fair share”. If only she knew! But there’s no merit in wishing for the unobtainable, so, I’ll suck it up and on we go.

Tomorrow, back to normality. Rest in peace, Dorothy B.