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April 6, 2015

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weigh in, we’re back, and it’s time for classics week!

So, we’re back, having had a lovely ten days away filling our bodies full of Irish stout, rich food and service station Ginsters pasties. I’m going to be prattling on about Ireland for a couple of entries starting tomorrow (I’ve got handwritten notes – old school, me) but before that, let me introduce classics week, starting tomorrow.

The idea behind classics week is simple – we’re going to make seven recipes that are synonymous with Slimming World – the recipes you always hear new people asking for, or posted all over Instagram like some other nonsense. Tomorrow’s recipe, for instance, is mushy pea curry, or as I like to call it, the colon-cleanser. We’re also going to have a bash at making that bloody half-syn cake that I keep seeing bandied about all over Facebook like the second coming of Jesus.

Now, before we start all of that, let me say this – we’ve been for our weigh in! We were originally going to wait until Saturday to get weighed but frankly, we had to nip all of the over-eating and snacks in the bud before the axles on the car snapped. If we had left it until Saturday, we’d be at serious risk of derailing completely. How did we do…?

james – 8lb on

paul – 5lb on

Now I feel I should add caveats to this. So, put succinctly:

the last time we were weighed was a Saturday morning;
we’re both wearing jeans and a hoodie as opposed to the normal work trousers and light shirt;
normally we don’t eat on a weigh-day – today we’ve both had an all-you-can-eat breakfast and a pub lunch (my bad);
our cottage was a ten minute drive from an ice-cream factory;
oh, and a chocolate factory;
we’ve been on holiday;
neither of us had been for a poo and I had a pot of tea sloshing around;
this arrived when we were away and was waiting for our return:
like I said, we’ve been on holiday – we’ve eaten out every other night, plus driving 600 miles means that the car is knee-deep in travel sweets, opal fruit wrappers, coke bottles and sour pastilles; and
it was Ireland! How could we not drink? Honestly.

A little explanation on those sweets – Paul and I are part of the Reddit Gift Swap movement, where you select a ‘category’ (in our case this month it was sweets – it can be other things, like pens, buttons, gadgets…) and you’re randomly assigned both someone that you send a ‘package’ to and someone else who sends a parcel to you. It’s like a giant secret santa, only every month, and you invariably get something amazing – our package this month came with a wonderful handwritten note and loads of thought put into it – we were both chuffed to bits, not least because we had to eat everything quickly before class! Haha. Brilliant though!

So, now we are back, we’re back on it, and I want to lose seven pounds by next week. I reckon most of my ‘gain’ is poo, water and food from today so we’ll be OK. Off to sleep now, but tomorrow, a post about driving, service stations and our ferry trip, plus that mushy pea curry I’ve been threatening you with. I bet you can’t wait…

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chubbycubs

Posted on

March 25, 2015

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recipe card

I’ve gone and updated the FAQ page

The FAQ has been updated. But perhaps you’ve already seen it? If not, the new content is below and the link to the full page is here. Share the whole page with your slimming cohorts and make us proud!

Oh, I’ve also added random graphs to the page, because why not? Here they are!

correctplate

day

sauce

Can I detox? My mate swears by a detox programme where she drinks nothing but horse piss and vinegar and she’s lost weight!

I’m not a scientist, not least because I’m too fat for a lovely white lab coat – I’d look like someone had parked a caravan in the corridor. Plus my interest in science extended to melting pens in the Bunsen burner and retching during the birth video we were made to watch during Sex Education week. Sex education in our school was a bust – all the boys were taken away and shown how to roll a condom onto a cucumber (no wonder men have such self-esteem problems when it comes to their cocks – to make it realistic they should have given out cucumbers, gherkins and those tiny pickle slices you get in burgers) and all the girls were taught how to best plug up their minnie-moo. Then we were shown a particularly gruesome video of someone popping a baby out and that was that. There was no mention of gay sex, despite me staying behind late and dropping my pencil case on the floor in front of the teacher with a leer on my face and a wink in my eye. That last bit wasn’t true. I never had a pencil case!

Anyway how the fuck did I get there? Ah yes. I’m not a scientist. But you don’t need to be to know detoxing is a load of shite, especially when you have to buy something in order to facilitate getting rid of the ‘bad toxins’. They always follow the same pattern – spend an obscene amount of money to buy some weird gel, powder or mix, restrict your calorie intake to something like 500 calories a day, and then sit there slack-jawed as the weight falls off. Well, the weight isn’t coming off because of the gel, is it? It’s coming off because you’re not eating enough calories to keep your body going, and as soon as you get back onto normal eating, all that lovely fat is going to rush back on. But at least your lips won’t be blue.

Put succinctly, don’t get suckered in by all the talk of dramatic weight loss and ‘I’VE NEVER FELT BETTER’. People are out to make money from slimming but the only way to do it is to eat healthily, exercise more and maintain that lifestyle going forward. No amount of gels, potions and nonsense will speed that up – because, think about it, if that were the case, none of us would need Slimming World, would we? To that end, that’s the joy of Slimming World – there’s no fancy chemical or procedure, just good honest food and plenty of support.

What are the basics?

You need to understand that I’m not a consultant and all of this is based on my own experience with Slimming World. You should consult your book, ring a class, check online if you have any queries or questions. I’m not your keeper!

So – most of your food will come from what they optimistically call ‘Free Foods’. You can eat as much of this stuff as your little tummy will hold – though stop when you feel full. There’s no weighing or measuring with this, just eat eat eat. Common sense applies – a potato is free, that family pack of Walkers Sensations that you’ve already ate in the back of your car isn’t.

Then, choose a Healthy Extra A and a Healthy Extra B. These are measured ‘extras’ that you should have during the day – to put it bluntly, your Healthy Extra B (fibre) will make sure you’re going for a shit whereas the Healthy Extra A ensures the bones in your ankles won’t snap on the way.

Finally, you get to use your syns. Syns, on top of being a spelling pedant’s worst nightmare, are Slimming World’s way of keeping you in control whilst still obliging your fatty-boom-boom tendencies. Any food that isn’t free or part of your Healthy Extra will have a syn value, and as a general rule, you’re encouraged to spend between 5 and 15 a day. So if you fancy a bar of chocolate, you can have one (a Kitkat Chunky is 12.5 syns, so you could have one a day!) and if you’re heading for a night out, you can still drink. Thank Christ eh, imagine meeting your friends whilst sober.

Finally, you’re supposed to make sure a third of your meal is made up from speed foods. We’re talking most vegetables (most, but check your books) and fruit, so put some berries in your yoghurt or serve your evening meal with a lovely salad.

Confession time: I don’t always bother with this, and I haven’t burst into flame just yet. I get the odd drunken phone call from an ex-consultant telling me that because I failed to stick 100% to plan she’d had to remortgage the house and sell her children into slavery, but well, tough tit.

What then is a S Food? Or a P Food? And F? And C?

Slimming World like letters of the alphabet, that’s for sure. Some free food have these various labels added on to denote they’re:

(S) Speedy food (they’ll fill you up with far fewer calories)

(P) Protein-rich (they’ll keep you fuller for longer)

(F) Fibre-full (they’ll keep things moving)

What’s happened to Red and Green?

Well, can you hear me back there in the DISTANT PAST? Shall I call you on your Nokia 3310 after Series 1 of Big Brother? EH? Red and green days were the old ways, grandma – mainly meat on a red day, mainly carbs and veg on a green day. I lost seven stone this way but when I came back to Slimming World, with both sets of cheeks burning (one through embarrassment at putting the weight on and the other through general chaffing), everything had changed. It had gone to Extra Easy – one unified plan. It then changed slightly again with the introduction with Extra Easy: SP. But that nonsense is for another entry.

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

March 23, 2015

Posted under

airfryer, british, budget, classics, low syn, recipe card, sausages

slimming world sausages and mash

One thing I want to get off my chest is this weird habit people seem to have of serving up their Slimming World slops in those awful three part plates. I’m not talking about the plates where it looks like someone fresh off the ‘Special Ward’ has been let loose with a bag of Poundland felt-tips, I’m talking about these:

They’re bloody awful and they’re not a plate – they’re a bloody serving platter! The middle bit is for dip and the sides are for the Sprinters crisps and KP Nots. Plus it looks like the imprint that would be left in wet cement if Jordan did the splits above it. If you’re eating one main meal out of this, why not go the whole hog and get yourself a trough? Argh! It really annoys me.

I’ve had a genuinely quite lovely today at work – great fun. You remember that part of my job is being on a committee whose job it is to plan fun events and little surprises for everyone? When a colleague and I had to parcel up 160 pick-and-mixes for people? Well, I came up with the idea of a giant Easter Egg hunt, so naturally, Paul and I were in my office last night at midnight hiding 200 caramel, Lindt and créme eggs all over the place. Yes, I’ve had 200 or so eggs rolling around in the back of my car for almost two weeks. They were originally in the house but, no kidding, we had to put the eggs into the boot of the car and then put the car in the bloody garage to remove the temptation. So weakwilled and even then, we did a fair few mad dashes to the garage in our tatty boxers to grab a handful. I actually had to top up the eggs out of my own pocket. GASP. So yeah, imagine this greeting you every time you opened the boot:

Seriously, we hid them all over. We had them buried in people’s muesli, parcel-taped under desks, hidden down the tube of a roll of wrapping paper, in vending machines…there were even gold and silver eggs hidden for an extra bonus. The silver egg I managed to hide in the peel of a tangerine which I then wrapped up and put back in the communal fruit bowl. The lucky finder won the booby prize of a jar of pickled eggs. The golden eggs – individually wrapped Lindt eggs in gold foil – were hidden in especially difficult places, including sellotaped to the blind mechanism so it would only appear when the blind was pulled down, another in a carrier bag dispenser, one hidden in our rolling rack system with the clue ‘I’ve hidden it in Baghdad’ (In Iraq, see?) and my favourite, a gold egg in the form of a gold helium star, attached to the balcony on the sixth floor with a 40m piece of garish pink parcel ribbon. The idea being it would float serenely above the building (“Find an egg with a view”) but no, no it sank and smeared along the side of the client meeting rooms. Oops, what-am-I-like. Had to cut the ribbon and pull it back a bit.

The golden eggs were swapped for fancy-pants Easter eggs, see, hence the difficulty! Finally, we had nipped to Poundland (I still can’t get the smell of chip-pan out of my coat) on the Sunday and bought five ‘nests’ which we filled with several little eggs and they were stuck all over the place too. Aaah it was great fun! It’s genuinely one of the best parts about my job because I love shit like this, and being able to indulge it does cheer my soul.

Actually, I love treasure hunts full stop. For our first anniversary, I set up a massive treasure hunt all across Newcastle which started off in our flat – the first clue being frozen in a block of ice that could have sunk the Titanic. The second clue was hidden on the living room wall in giant letters – only I’d done it with UV paint, so it only showed up when Paul used the UV light on his keyring. Once we’d done the treasure hunt, we took great delight in writing all over the wall in the windowless hallway with UV paint – if the new tenants in Ouseburn Wharf somehow decide to rig up a UV light, they’re going to be mortified at what they find. I mean, swearing is so much more fun when no-one can see it…

…mind, that’s not the worst thing I’ve splashed on a wall. Not sure why me and my flatmate thought this was a good idea to do when we’d been on the pop one New Years Eve…

The worst part about this was that, although we painted over it several times with Wilko’s own brand shitty beige paint, it was like painting with milk, and we could never quite get rid of his evil staring eyes. Probably why we lost our deposit. That and the iron-print burn in the kitchen lino when someone tried to straighten my then-long hair with an iron. Oops.

Anyway, this was only supposed to be a quick post but I’ve ended up chuntering on, so here’s a recipe. Well not really a recipe, given it’s pretty self-explanatory…

Mushy peas are free, as is mashed potato (with added cauliflower just in case the peas don’t turn your arse into a mustard-gas factory) and indeed, so are the Slimming World sausages from Iceland. How are they? Alright. They look like someone’s pooed into a condom in some people’s photos but we seem to have cooking them down exactly right – chuck them in the Actifry and watch Judge Rinder for fifteen minutes. By the time you’ve heard him bitching and sassing and flouncing around his pretend courtroom in his black cape like a haunted toilet-roll cover, the sausages are just right. Gravy is synned at 1 syn per 50ml made up gravy and unless you’re one of those people who drown your food in gravy, that’ll be way more than enough.

Anyway christ, this was only meant to be a quick post…!

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chubbycubs

Posted on

March 22, 2015

Posted under

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

spicy pork in a citrus sauce

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

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

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

So how did we do? Well, badly!

james – 2lb on; and

paul – 1lb on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TASTY.

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chubbycubs

Posted on

March 21, 2015

Posted under

budget, lunch, one-pot, recipe card, savoury snacks, snacks, soup, syn free, vegan, vegetarian

carrot, swede and potato soup

Because that’s when good neighbours become good friends!

I can’t quite believe Neighbours is still going, let alone celebrating 30 years on the air. I was always a Home and Away man myself, partly because as a fat child I couldn’t be bothered getting up to turn the channel over after Fun House. I remember the great disasters like it was yesterday – the big flood, the earthquake, Evil Ailsa, telling my mum she looked like Irene who used to run the diner. Good times! I spotted the 30th anniversary trailer for Neighbours before on TV and I’m happy to confirm that yes, I DO still look like Harold. Mind, that would make Paul Madge, so that really quite tickles me.

Oh, speaking of being tickled, I’ve had a great ten minutes. See, we use something called Spotify which allows you to listen to thousands and thousands of different music tracks. All very exciting. We’ve got Premium which means you can access your playlists on the move and Paul’s phone syncs his music through his car. However, I’ve learned that I can log in from home and change the music playing in his car whilst he’s out and about. Anyway, he’s out driving people to a young Marxist meeting, and I’ve been making all sorts play in the car (Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel by Tavares, Lovin’ You by Minnie Ripperton and my personal favourite, Can You Feel The Love Tonight from The Lion King). His response was a smidge curt:

Eee, I hope he doesn’t kiss his mother with that mouth. Although that would explain his stubble burn.

Anyway, yes, Neighbours – or indeed neighbours, was what has been on my mind.

When Paul and I first started ~~shagging~~ ‘going steady’, we moved into a flat on Newcastle’s Quayside, seduced by the fabulous views of a concrete factory and the Millennium bridge. It was lovely but the entire block of flats were taken up by the kind of pretentious, rah-rah-rah knobheads who we both loathe with a passion. We had a homeless man living in the bin store, shitting everywhere, and someone set up a ‘collection point’ for him. Now, I’m a liberal guy, I really am, but I don’t want to tread in human shit every time I put my bins out. It’s not a lot to ask. Our neighbour downstairs used to have cracking arguments with his girlfriend mind which provided much hilarity until we thought he had belted her and so we called the police. They never talked to us again after that. Well, briefly – Paul had been drying some boxer shorts on the balcony when the wind caught a particularly well-worn pair and blew them over the edge and sadly, because the girlfriend of the lad downstairs was out smoking on her balcony, they landed right on the top of her head. She thought we had done it deliberately and launched an absolute torrent of abuse, we probably didn’t help by shutting the balcony door and screaming with laughter. Oh dear. We only lasted two years there before moving out, with the prevalent memory of the place being the black suede headboard in the master bedroom. Well, it wasn’t black when we left, let me tell you. It looked like a Jackson Pollock painting – what can I say, we were young and keen in those days, and who the fuck chooses black suede as a headboard? Frankly, we needed something laminated.

We then moved to Gosforth into a Tyneside flat, which was slightly less salubrious but a lot more homely. The only problem was our neighbour upstairs, who came down for a vodka when we moved in and then turned completely mad. She was the type who’d happily clatter around on her cheap lino in her best Primarni heels when she rolled in at 3am with that night’s bus-stop encounter gelling on her thigh, but would hammer on the floor and yell about the noise if I so much as yawned. For a good few weeks we crept about underneath like the fucking Borrowers, which was incredibly difficult for two twenty stone blokes to do, before realising that we weren’t being unreasonably noisy, she was, and that we should really get our revenge. Lucky, that was fairly easy.

In our bedroom was a grand, open fireplace which had been somewhat shoddily sealed off by someone putting a slab of stone just above the grate. Her bedroom, immediately above ours, shared the same chimney. Sound was usually muffled thanks to the stone but, after we moved it slightly, we were able to get up to all sorts of mischief. We’d wait until we knew she was in bed, move the stone a tiny bit, and fart up the chimney. As I said before, we are big blokes, and frankly, we fart like bulls at the best of times, but we used to store them up to the point of stomach pains just so we could blow them up the chimney. It must have sounded like someone was practicising the tuba in the chimney stack, especially given how the sound would amplify. We’d also make off-putting sex noises if she had anyone round and, in what I think was the most inspired move, we played a load of Roy Walker sound-clips (like Chris Moyles’ Car Park Catchphrase) when she had her mother around. She moved out about a month afterwards and silence fell. When she left, we felt able to tidy up the patch outside the house, and planted lots of nice flowers which was grand until the snooty moo to the left of us came downstairs and criticised our cheap pots. Cheap! We were on a budget back then, and anyway, it was the rougher end of Gosforth, not bloody somewhere posh. Our retalliation was swift – we went to Poundland, bought all manner of garish gnomes, plastic frogs, tatty windmills and other such flimflam until our garden looks like a roadside memorial to a boy-racer. She never talked to us after that, although I drove past the flat the other day and there’s still a god-awful, sun-bleached frog in the front garden so whoever has the house now must have THE worst taste ever.

Finally, we moved to our current house, and it’s perfect – why? Because we’re a detached bungalow!

Speaking of perfect blends, here’s a soup recipe. YES! YES I DID A GOOD SEGUE FOR ONCE!

Look, there’s no way to make that look alluring or inviting, but it tasted good and couldn’t have been simpler to make. No really, it couldn’t. I bought a prepared soup veg mix from Tesco, where the carrot, swede, potato and onion were all cut up. I threw it all in my soup maker with 600ml of chicken (you could use vegetable) stock, some garlic, salt and pepper, pressed a button, came here to type out the bit above and I’d barely stopped chuckling and clutching my sides when it beeped ready. A quick blend – in the same machine – and we were done. Served! You can buy the same soupmaker as the one I use right here. Somewhat annoyingly, it’s reduced from £140 to £90. Worth getting? I think so. It took less than one minute to prepare the soup, 30 minutes to cook and a moment to blend. Plenty of superfree in there too. Very rare that I think a kitchen gadget is worth the money but I would actually recommend a soup maker. If you get one, why don’t you try tomato, fennel and feta soup, super speedy ‘just like Heinz’ tomato soup, super speed soup, cabbage, kidney bean and sausage soup, kale, spinach and broccoli and pesto soup or onion soup.

Enjoy all!

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

March 20, 2015

Posted under

pork, pork mince, recipe card, rice, syn free, taster ideas

cock, fights, pork chilli

We’ve been looking at holidays and have discovered that Thomson have a specialised ‘side business’ selling ‘gay holidays’, called Freedom Holidays. It seems like a load of patronising guff but they’re well-meaning so I’ll forgive them. Being gay is becoming less and less of an ‘issue’ now. Indeed, Newcastle is such a liberal, progressive city that I actually forget how lucky I am sometimes. I’d feel comfortable walking around holding hands with Paul, or buying rings together, or discussing frotting and cottaging over a frothy cappuccino on The Green. I don’t even think about it. I’m sure that’s partly because of the thriving and varied gay scene. which is littered with lots of different bars catering to all sorts of happy, cheerful people whose only common thread is that they enjoy a bit of cock. Or indeed, a bit of quim if they’re a lady. That said, we tend not to venture out on the scene – not least because we both feel old and our knees hurt and neither of us can dance. Camp shrieking is heavy on the ears and well, music isn’t what it used to be. That said, back in my youth (fucking hell you’d think I was 70, not coming up to thirty) I had some good times on there, dancing (well, more ‘fitting’ in tune to the music) and trying to hide my man-tits.

This sounds like stereotypical fiction but I can assure you, on the life of my poor old nana, that it’s true – I once got in a fight with a lesbian over whose turn it was to use the pool table. It gets better – there was previous bad blood between us because I interrupted her Anastasia marathon to put the Grease megamix on the ‘Choose Your Own Music’ jukebox. The whole situation couldn’t have been more stereotypical unless I had thrown my campari over her and she’d come at me with a powertool and dungarees before we settled it with a dance-off. Along very similar lines, my ex-boyfriend once had a chair thrown at him by a raging lady who (genuinely mistakenly) thought he was taking a picture of her across the pub. He was actually taking a picture of me trying to carry drinks whilst pissed, not her – he didn’t have his wide angle lens for one thing.

The Eagle is about the only bar where we’d be welcomed with something other than a pair of pursed lips and a snide comment about our attire, but it’s not really for us. Admittedly, we both go for the more ‘manly’ type (hence we found each other) (because I’m so masculine it hurts, naturally) and we’d be in our element in a bar like that, but of course, because it’s a manly bar, it’s instantly all about sex and it is incredibly seedy. There’s a gloryhole in the gents, for goodness sake. For those unfamiliar with what a gloryhole is, it’s essentially a hole drilled into the side of a cubicle wall where someone might pop their dingaling through in the vain hope of satisfaction. Well honestly. The only thing I want popping into my peripheral vision when I’m using the lavatory is a fresh, cooled roll of Quilted Velvet for my nipsy, not some angry looking willy with its owner hidden from sight. I’d be tempted to stick the toilet roll on it and use it as a dispenser. Still, each to their own. There was a tale that used to go round that some vengeful ex took a knife in there and sliced off his partner’s schlong as he popped it through. It all goes on!

Tell you what else goes on? This pork chilli! Onto your fork! Well that was a shit segue but you get the idea.

We used pork but there’s no reason you couldn’t be a decadent whore and go for chicken, turkey or beef mince.

This’ll serve 4.

to make pork chilli, you’ll need:

500g pork mince, two tins of chopped tomatoes, one tin of kidney beans, two tins of Pinto beans, 400ml chicken stock, one chopped onion, one diced yellow pepper, 4 cloves of garlic, ½ tsp salt, ½ tsp pepper, 1tsp paprika, 2 tbsp chilli powder, ½ tsp oregano, ½ tsp cumin

to make pork chilli, you should:

spray a large pan with Frylight (use Frylight if you must, but I always think it’s better to use a tiny drop of oil and syn it, unless you want your pans to look like Jodie Marsh’s cervix), and add the mince over a medium-high heat until nicely browned. Add the onion, diced pepper, salt, garlic and black pepper, and cook for a further five minutes. Then add the chilli powder, paprika, oregano and cumin, stir well and cook for another minute. To the same pot, add tomatoes and chicken stock with the tin of drained kidney beans and one can of drained Pinto beans. Bring the mixture to a boil, put the lid on and reduce it to a simmer. In a small bowl, drain the remaining tin of Pinto beans and mash with a fork – this can be done a bit sloppily if you like, it doesn’t have to be perfect. Add this to the chilli and stir well, and then re-cover. Cook for about thirty minutes or until it’s at the desired consistency. Remove from the heat, and serve! For a bit of ‘coolness’ you could add a blob of fromage frais or yoghurt to the top. We didn’t because we were so hungry the thought didn’t occur to us.

Enjoy!

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

March 18, 2015

Posted under

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

syn free cheesy garlic bread

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

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

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

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

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

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

This will make about eight breadsticks – enough for two.

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

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

to make syn free cheesy garlic bread you should:

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

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

On a final note…

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

Buon appetito or summat.

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

March 17, 2015

Posted under

recipe card

a serious post about anxiety

James here – posting yet again from work, activating a draft post because I’m stuck at work! This whole week has been an absolute bust diet wise – couldn’t get to class tonight either, so I can’t even assess how much damage I’ve done. Meh, a week off. Back on it tomorrow. Tell you what, I can’t even tell you all truthfully that it’s been wonderful eating lots of chocolate and nonsense because I actually feel bloated and oily! The problem is, when I’m working late, there’s nothing healthy to hand, and I do need to eat – so we end up getting in takeaway which sounds great in principle but eating Chinese at 11pm with a couple more hours of work ahead of you doesn’t do well for the diet. That said, I feel considerably less bloated now because in the middle of that sentence I had to excuse myself, nip to the gents and let rip a fart that I’m surprised didn’t tear the tiles off the wall. Good lord. Anyway: tomorrow something new and exciting comes onto the blog. And not in that way. We’re experimenting! Here’s this evening’s post…it’s actually a serious one for a change!

Serious post tonight, folks, though I’ll chuck in a few jokes because why the hell not. I received an email from wordpress (the guys who host my blog) saying happy anniversary – it’s been three years since you set up your blog. My first thought was that I had clearly stroked out for a few months because I was sure twochubbycubs had only been going for a few months, but then I twigged it was actually my first blog where I documented my ‘battle’ with health anxiety. I was so proud of that blog’s name – I called it shakerattleanddroll because of my obsession with my shaking (Parkinsons), rattling (tablets) and droll (the sparkling wit you all know and love). Mulling on it a moment or two, I thought it might be a decent thing to talk about anxiety to give some hope to anyone out there suffering with it.

I suffer from health anxiety – I’d go so far to say that it doesn’t affect me so much anymore and that I have a handle on it, but I’ll still have the occasional wobble (the wobble being a clear sign that I’ve got vertigo, or balance problems, or seasickness, or a brain tumour). Anxiety is an awful, awful thing and those who dismiss it as anything other than a serious illness can kiss my arse. I’m a strong-minded, confident bloke and I was brought to my knees through health anxiety – quite genuinely the worst three months of my life. I became hyper-sensitive to every little thing that my body did and what it meant – always the worst case scenario, and was completely unable to relax or think straight for months. Imagine always fearing you were about to die.

My obsession became multiple sclerosis – I became genuinely quite convinced that I had MS simply because my eyes were aching and I had perceived weakness in my right leg. I had, quite innocently, typed those symptoms into Dr Google and of course, the worst case scenario came up. I knew nothing about MS at the time (I could write a fucking book on it now) but everything ‘clicked’ in such a way that I started experiencing other common symptoms – balance problems, forgetfulness, more vision problems, which only reinforced my belief. I spoke to doctors who ruled it out but I knew that MS is an incredibly hard thing to actually diagnose because there isn’t a concrete test for it, so I ignored them. It’s actually a very common disease for those with health anxiety to latch onto for this very reason – plus a lot of the symptoms of anxiety and MS match up, and the more you worry about having MS, the more your anxiety grows, the worse the symptoms get…

Then, because I saw an article on Parkinsons, I became convinced that I was suffering from that purely because my hands were shaking a little. Just like that, MS was forgotten (and it seems ridiculous to me now) and Parkinsons became the focus. Pick up a piece of paper by the corner and hold it in front of you – watch the edges shake a little. It’s perfectly normal. But to me that was a sign I was going to spend my life unable to type and never eating peas again. Eventually, I pretty much snapped through all of the worry and went to talk to my doctor, who god bless her, went through each and every one of my ‘symptoms’ and told me it was anxiety.

I was put onto an anti-depressant called citalopram for six months – only a small dose, but enough to ‘take the edge off’ my worries. It worked to some extent because it dulled my senses and stopped me thinking about every little thing, but I was cynical about it working. Then it happened – a few peaceful hours became a full day, one day became two, two days became a week, and I just stopped worrying, and I stopped taking the tablets and felt fine. Paul was an absolute wonder through all of this, being my constant rock, as always, and I do try and tell him how thankful I am.

It’s not perfect – even now I catastrophise – if I have a headache, I’ll immediately start running through my mind the possibilities: brain tumour (unlikely, I’m not seeing blue flashes), mad cow disease (possibly, I grew up on cheap beef), stroke (touch each tooth with the tip of your tongue, if you can do that, you’re not having a stroke). Crazy. But, I know how to deal with it – I take solace in statistics. The same logic and rationale that gets me onto an aeroplane keeps me from flipping out over health worries. I’ve had a weird tic in my left eye for a good few weeks now but I don’t care, and that feels good.

I’m not posting all of this for attention or for people to say ‘Oooh, haven’t you done well’ – in fact, no comments wanted, I know I’ve got it licked. No, I’m posting this because if anyone is reading this and going through anxiety themselves – whether health anxiety, general anxiety or just a period of depression, know that it does, and will, get better. At my darkest I thought I’d suffer for the rest of my life and to be quite honest, it’s probably always going to be a small part of me, but I go weeks without thinking about it and I can’t, genuinely, remember the last time it was a problem. It might feel neverending or that there’s no hope, but there’s always something positive to cling to, and things always get better in the end. I did…!

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chubbycubs

Posted on

March 16, 2015

Posted under

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

to make tiramisu, you’ll need:

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

to make tiramisu, you should:

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

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

March 15, 2015

Posted under

budget, dips, fakeaways, lunch, persian, recipe card, savoury snacks, snacks, syn free, taster ideas, vegetarian

syn-free houmous four-ways

Only a small post today as it’s mother’s day (so I need to go visit Ripley) and I’m ‘on-call’ for work, with the expectation that I’ll be expected to work into the wee hours again. Fingers crossed this doesn’t happen but it’s not as if I could just turn my phone off…

I am very lucky to have a mum (and dad) like I do. They handled my being a back-door-deirdre with sensitivity and aplomb, which aren’t words you’d immediately associate with our family. I always felt incredibly supportive and they even put up with the various boyfriends that I brought up like a cat with a dying mouse without too much commentary. They even let my ‘friend’ stay for two weeks at a time during the summer holidays. Such a memorable summer. I know a few other gay lads who weren’t so lucky with their parents – I’ve mentioned on here before about the guy who, enthused about being gay since I broke him in, rushed home to tell his parents the good news only for his dad to throw him against a wall and hold a screwdriver to his throat. Good old religion! My parents came through then too – they let him stay at our house and ‘hid him away’ despite his parents turning up in the village where we lived and asking on doors if people had seen him! Crazy times. I think I’ve managed to grow up well-adjusted and happy in myself thanks to my parents and I love them very much for it.

Anyway, enough bloody treacle. In honour of dear old Mother, here’s a rare picture of me and the good lady on a night out. Don’t we look glam?

What a trooper. Still, better get in the car, nip to the graveyard to pick up a nice bunch of flowers for her, and be away. I can fudge away the ‘With Sympathies’ card easily enough, I’m sure.

Here’s a recipe to tide you over:

to make syn-free houmous four-ways:

I love how this looks in a photo, and all four varieties of houmous taste different and fresh in their own ways. All syn free too! They’re just variations of the same basic houmous recipe, below:

lemon and garlic (add an extra couple of garlic gloves, a squidge more lemon juice and decorate with finely grated lemon peel) (don’t take the pith, literally, as that is very bitter – just the top layer, please)
basil and parmesan (10 torn basil leaves, 10g of shaved parmesan, bit of salt) – up to you if you want to syn such a tiny portion of parmesan but bearing in mind you’ll be getting what, 2.5g of it, I wouldn’t bother)
pickled red cabbage (just a few chunks of pickled red cabbage and some of the pickling vinegar added to give it colour)
paprika and sun-dried tomato – I chucked in 1tbsp of sundried tomato paste (1.5 syns, but again, through the laws of dilution, it’s up to you if you syn it)

The basic houmous recipe is simple enough – for enough to fill one of those little square bowls above, you’ll want to use one small tin of cooked chick peas (syn free), a nice round tablespoon of fat free cottage cheese, a garlic clove, pinch of sea salt and some lemon juice. Blend it together, adding a little more lemon juice if you like it runny or keeping some back if you prefer it chunky. It’s up to you.

You may remember Delia Smith banging on about these when she wasn’t pissed off her nut. They’re genuinely amazing and it’ll make just the right amount of houmous to fill one of the bowls above. I use it all the time.

BUT OH NO:

Before the Tweak Police are on the phone to Margaret and she’s clambering into the back of a battered Ford Transit with a sock full of batteries to take me out, FAIR WARNING. This could technically be considered a tweak on the Slimming World diet. Is it? Is it bollocks. You’re not eating more chickpeas than you could reasonably eat, and this filled us up enough to skip our evening meal, so kiss it! I’ve done a whole article on tweaking which, if you’re new to this site, you’ll probably get a right good kick out of. It’s here.

Serve with pitta chips (one WW 50/50 pittas (branded as love fibre) is a HEB – toast it and cut it up) and all sorts of superfree slices – cucumber, red peppers, carrots, tomatoes. World is your oyster.

Happy mother’s day all.