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January 28, 2015

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beef, beef mince, lunch, pasta, recipe card, savoury snacks, snacks, syn free, taster ideas

mini lasagne cups

Just a quick post tonight as I’ve been out for the evening to see Ex Machina – the latest film from Danny Boyle. Decent film, very sci-fi, but with an unexpected amount of muff on show. And I’m sorry, but there’s nothing more surprising than an unexpected muff. A muff you can plan for, fine, but no-one wants to be presented with a muff when you’ve got your guard down. To be honest, I just like typing that word. Muff. Ah.

I was going to be good and be one of those bores who go out for dinner and just order lettuce leaves dressed in the tears of a fat man, with a side order of smugness, but instead we went to Nandos. Now see I don’t see the fascination with Nandos – to me, it’s KFC but with wooden furniture and hipster beards. They do pleasant enough food and all, but raving over it? No! I did make a mistake of choosing a table right near the toilets mind – I’m such a classy guy. They have those awful open back chairs too – I (and I imagine a lot of other larger framed folks share this fear) spend an inordinate amount of time worrying that my shirt had ridden up, my trousers have sank down and that the crack of my arse was busy winking at the rest of the diners in the restaurant. The last thing I want is for someone to post a business card in there thinking they’d win a half chicken and chips. BAH. Anyway, I had the caesar salad followed by an oil-drum of popcorn in the cinema later, and I don’t care – syns are there to be used, after all. Remember, I’m all about maintaining this week. So, tonight’s recipe….

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Now, some people will probably consider the above to be a ‘tweak’ – tweaking is when you use something not for its ‘original use’ – i.e. grinding up couscous into flour to make a cake. The science being that you’ll stuff your face with a whole cake which might contain 500g of couscous, whereas if you tried to sit and eat that much couscous in one go you’d go pop. Well, balls to that. In the example below, I’m using lasagne sheets or ham to create a cup, but you’d eat the same amount if you were to have lasagne. So shut your hole.

This is a ‘use up your leftovers’ recipe – this time, you’re using up any old bolognese (and you can find our recipe for bolognese with sluts spaghetti here) or chilli. Serve with a side salad or some sweet potato wedges for an easy win.

to make mini lasagne cups, you’ll need:

ingredients: your old bolognese, a few cherry tomatoes, either 12 lasagne sheets or some wafer thin ham and some light philadelphia (75g HEA) and some rocket

to make mini lasagne cups, you should:

recipe: easy! cook your lasagne sheets, cut them into squares and place one into the cup in a muffin tray, with another one rotated 45 degrees so you have a nice star. Stuff the bottom with rocket, spoon the bolognese into the middle, top with philadelphia and a tomato, and pop in the oven for 20 minutes! If you can’t be arsed fannying about with lasagne sheets, you can use ham – see the picture. Don’t cook it for so long though, ten minutes at most, or you’ll end up with a burnt rim – and no-one wants that!

extra-easy: of course – syn-free. Better if your bolognese is stuffed with superfree nonsense, but if not, have a wee salad on the side. Easy peasy.

Cheers!

J

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January 27, 2015

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

peanut butter chicken noodles

There was some discussion with colleagues today about babies and we often get asked the same thing – would we like to adopt? Well no, not there and then obviously, I don’t have a car seat – but could we be one of those gay couples who have a child?

The answer is an emphatic no. Or an astounding nope. Or a camp NOOOOOO-WAY-HUNAAAAAAAY. I genuinely can’t think of something I want less in my life than a baby. Paul is fine with them, cooing and marvelling over their ruddy cheeks, but I’m not – all I see is a red-faced, spewing, bawling bundle of energy that would leave me terrified and exhausted, the human equivalent of turning on the light in a gas-filled room. I seem to lack that warm, friendly gene that can look at a baby and think ‘aw how sweet’ – I just see about 1000 different ways that I’m going to accidentally damage the poor bugger – immediately drop it on the floor when I try to cuddle it, or rest my chin on their soft skull and make their skulls look like an ashtray, or suddenly develop a violent tremor and immediately end up in a Louise Woodward situation, or I’ll sneeze and deafen the poor bugger. It’s just awful, and to that end, I’ve spent my entire life avoiding babies – I’ll go sit in the toilet at work if someone brings their child in because I’m terrified that my lack of emotion will shine through. People must think I have a hair-trigger bladder the way I dash to the gents as soon as I hear a Mama and Papas hatchback pushchair being wrestled with in the lobby. I think babies sense this unease because they just start crying as soon as they see my face, the same way doctors, close friends, family, beggars and other men do. My nephew, who admittedly is a gorgeous, funny little tyke, cried his eyes out at me for almost eighteen months, finally thawing at Christmas when I had shaved off my sex-offender beard and brought gifts.

Plus, we’re entirely too selfish as a couple to even think about having a baby. We struggle to remember to wash and clean ourselves, let alone something pink and squashy and full of off-colour poo. At least the cats know enough to go outside for their craps and if they meow and rub along our feet often enough, the occasional pouch of Felix will be dropped in their bowls from on high. One of the many benefits of being gay, aside from all the cock and being able to wear each other’s clothes, is the fact you don’t have to spend money on anything but yourself. There’s no school uniform to buy, there’s no school trips to pay for – every penny can go on hobbies and fetishwear. It’s just great, and I know I’d immediately resent something that I had to pay out for on a regular basis – I still shoot mean looks at my car for taking all our money. BAH. Finally, there’s the biology of it all – the thought of having to yankee-doodle into a paper cup and mixing it with Paul’s like some sort of bleach-smelling watercolour set puts me right off.

So no – no children. Cubs Towers will remain forever more a two-man tent. And quite bloody right too.

Anyway, if I had a baby to look after, I wouldn’t have the time to type these recipes and Paul would be too tired to cook them, so you’d be fucked, too. So hooray for homosexuality, and onto tonight’s recipe, which is the delightful (and synned) chicken and vegetable peanut-dressed noodles.

peanut butter chicken noodles

You know what I’m going to say, don’t you? USE YOUR SYNS. Please, for the love of Slimming World, don’t see the syns and think you’re not going to bother. It’s your main meal of the day, spend the syns and bloody well enjoy it. This serves 2.

to make peanut butter chicken noodles, you’ll need:

ingredients: 2tbsp tesco reduced fat peanut butter (4 syns per tbsp), 300g dried noodles (we use the chilli ones from Sainsbury’s – 1 syn per 150g), 300g of frozen veg (or indeed, anything you want – peppers, fresh veg, sweetcorn, go nuts!), a diced onion, one minced garlic clove, 1/4tsp of ginger, 1/4tsp of salt, 1tbsp of water, 2tbsp of teriyaki marinade (you’ll find it in the world foods aisle, especially in the Japanese section – ours is by Kikkoman and is syn free).

to make peanut butter chicken noodles, you should:

recipe: make your sauce first by combining the teriyaki, peanut butter and water. Set aside. Then cook the noodles, drain and set aside. heat a large pan, fry off your onion in a smidge of oil and chuck in your veg, together with the ginger and garlic and salt and cook it through quickly. Add the noodles and the peanut sauce, stir fry for a moment longer until everything is hot and delicious and coated, then sit back and feel smug.

extra-easy: always. 5 syns a portion, but that’s fuck all in the grand scheme of things and all that superfree veg make it a perfect little dinner.

enjoy – I’m off to NOT feed, wipe, bathe or care for any little sprogs. Good job, right…

J

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January 26, 2015

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recipe card

weigh in – week three – the results are in!

three weeks into our diet and we have our Monday results! Yet another weigh in:

james: 2.5lb off
paul: 2.5lb off
total: 25.5lb off

25lb is the average weight of a two year old boy, so we’re actually shedding years as well as weight! Very happy with this loss – we’ve eaten a few more ‘high-syn’ meals this week – still within the syns limit but a bit more here and there, and very nice it has been too. By the point in the diet I’m normally found jonesing in the toilet at work, heating up a spoonful of rolos with a belt wrapped round my arm, but this time I’m really quite enjoying it – as is Paul! Plus, our target has always been 2lb a week, slow and steady, to lose 104lb in a year – well, fact fans, that’s one eighth of the way there! Going to be a tough week ahead though – I’m out on Wednesday (cinema), Thursday (family) and Friday (work) so god knows what’ll happen. Aiming to maintain!

I know I wax lyrical about this every week but I think this blog shows that with Slimming World, you can eat proper, interesting meals – not just the same boring old spag bol every week or quorn mixed with sweetener and done in a cup, or whatever it was I read yesterday. Good, wholesome food keeps things interesting and we have had a new recipe almost every single night. Our food shopping bill remains around £50 a week – but the meat we buy is all good quality, so that bumps the price up. We plan to do an article some time down the line with our weekly shop and also a full list of ingredients for the week ahead, but I need some time to plan that out.

As there is no recipe to enjoy tonight (remember, Monday is our night off from typing and all that excitement), here’s a picture of my colourful stickers. I know the stickers are a bit of a gimmick, but I’d punch someone right on the tit just to get a six stone sticker at the end of all of this.

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And yes, the fact my half stone sticker overlaps my stone sticker upsets me too – but my class was out of half stone stickers a couple of weeks ago so I only got that tonight! Still great though.

Dinner is ready now – peanut chicken and vegetable noodles. Recipe tomorrow, if you behave yourself.

J

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January 25, 2015

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classics, desserts, low syn, quark, recipe card, snacks, speciality ingredients, sweet snacks, taster ideas

chocolate orange cheesecake

Do you know, I post these recipes every day in a Facebook group full of lovely ladies and get plenty of nice comments – but today I posted a comment asking how many syns were in man-jam and it’s like my phone has turned into a rampant rabbit – it’s never stopped buzzing. Negligible amount of syns, if you were wondering. Some say it’s great for a diet and it is in my case, my jaw hurts so much I can barely eat a grape for an hour afterwards. Haha.

So, today’s ‘thing’ was geocaching, combined with taking another rescue dog out for a walk from Bryson’s Cat and Dog Shelter. Geocaching is one of those activities which is incredibly hard to explain and sounds terminally dull until you get out there and try it yourself. Put succinctly, it’s a treasure hunt where no-one wins, but everyone has a good time trying. It’s completely free to play and is an interesting way of seeing new sights in your local area or injecting some fun into a routine walk. I can almost guarantee there will be a fair few caches near you right now.

What is a cache, then? Members of the public from around the world hide containers – some of them tiny little tubes, some proper Tupperware boxes, some massive chests – all over the place. The idea is that you’d never find them unless you were looking for them, but by searching for them you’ll often be taken to interesting places you didn’t know, or pretty views, or just cool spots. The containers will hold a log-book and you sign your name to say you’ve found it – and that’s it! There’s no prize, although some of the containers will hold little trinkets like bouncing balls. How do you find them? Using the GPS on your phone, which most smartphones these days will have. Log onto geocaching.com, see if there are any nearby. Download the geocaching app onto your phone (£6.99 for the full version, but there’s a free ‘intro’ app which does the same thing). Then go out to your chosen place, and follow the compass and clues to your cache! Done!

Or, to explain in it an overly twee but rather nice way, here is the official video:

[youtube=http://youtu.be/1YTqitVK-Ts]

Urgh, do your teeth hurt like mine do? But no – it’s genuinely really fun!

So, we looked online, and there was a lovely trail of eight geocaches near the cat and dog shelter. We immediately acquired number one, which was a tiny magnetic cache stuck behind one of the exchange boxes in the street. Then we picked up this little beauty:

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She was a staffie cross, and boy was she strong – the path was icy and I swear to God, I skated half the way around the walk. Like the other week though, she was so excited to be out and about! How people can just ditch these dogs is beyond me. We were warned that she was nervous around dogs so when someone approached me on the path with a big fuck-off Alsatian, I went and hid in the bushes to the side of the path. Only the stupid old duffer then stood directly in front of my way out with the dog, checking his phone, oblivious to the fact I was ankle-deep in freezing mud. Mind he sharp shifted when I shouted ‘I’M NOT BLOODY STANDING HERE HOPING TO GROW ROOTS, FOR FUCK’S SAKE’. Oops.

It was a lovely two hour walk, with a good mix of caches – one stuck under an old deserted railway platform, one under a postbox, one disguised as a branch of a tree and my personal favourite, a camouflaged lunchbox hidden in a rotten tree-trunk covered in hay with the only clue being ‘Part My Hair’. We found five of the eight and some pics are below:

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You can see in the top pictures the little magnetic cache with just enough room to hide a logbook and pencil, the second set of pictures shows the ‘wig’ cache and the third was the hardest, just a tiny bit of wood hidden in an old tree.

Geocaching is great fun, free and perfect for body magic. Give it a go. More on this next week.

Finally, a recipe for you:

chocolate orange cheesecake

This makes four cheesecakes or two big ones for us fatties.

to make chocolate orange cheesecake, you’ll need:

ingredients: two chocolate orange options (1.5 syns each), 500g quark and four lighter lemon alpen bars, little sugar stars to decorate (optional, one syn per tsp I reckon).

to make chocolate orange cheesecake, you should:

recipe: microwave your alpen bar for five seconds just to loosen it up, chop it up and press to the bottom of a glass. Mix together the quark and options and place on top. Chill for a couple of hours and decorate with stars.

extra easy: it’s a dessert, so it’s all about syns, but really, not much at all. Two light alpen bars is your HEB, and you only need one each here so you can have another one another time. Let’s call the options one syn and the stars another, so in total – two syns each, but if you swap the stars out for tangerine pieces, it’ll be a syn each. Delicious and simple!

J

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January 24, 2015

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airfryer, beef, budget, cured meats, low syn, lunch, pork, poultry, recipe card, savoury snacks, snacks, taster ideas

square egg, snacks and injuries

Previous readers may recall that a few months ago, I had to go for an MRI scan on my heart. Exciting. I described it at the time like being sucked into a Polo-coloured sphincter. Well, after weeks and weeks of fitfully looking at the letterbox waiting for news, I finally got a letter from my doctor yesterday which said everything was OK, heart was beating as it should be and I had nothing to worry about, bar being too handsome for most people to deal with. Typical NHS restraint. I’ve actually (touching wood) been remarkably lucky with my health so far – found a lump in my boob a year or so ago but it turned out to be nothing exciting (I’m surprised it wasn’t an M&M, to be honest) and a couple of bouts of anxiety throughout the last few years. I don’t want to dwell on anxiety, but it’s a very funny thing – people who wouldn’t take the piss out of you if you had a broken leg or lost the sight on one eye feel quite chipper making snide comments about anxiety behind your back. I don’t see a mental illness as less important than a physical one, but the world has a long way to go before that status is reconciled.

Ah well.

The only injuries I’ve ever had of note both have typically me causes – I’ve got a scar on my forehead from a killing curse launched at me by the greatest Dark Wizard who ever lived cartwheeling into the side of a door. I remember going downstairs (the cartwheel having been done in my bedroom, which was surprising because it remains the only bedroom I’ve ever been in where I had to back out onto the landing to turn around) with a cartoon egg-shaped lump on my head only for my mum to hoy a big bag of peas on it and sat me down in front of Countdown until I stopped trying to make an 18 letter conundrum. The second time I tore my lip open and bent (but didn’t break) (I don’t think) my nose to the left by using my face as an impromptu braking device on my bike – forgot that my brakes didn’t work as I thundered down a hill the only way a fat lad on an old bike can, hit the front brakes, bike stopped immediately and I sailed through the air like a clay pigeon. Only I landed on my face. This time, I think I was knocked out, as my only memory is my sister running home to get my mother who took me home, wrapped a tea-towel from the side in the kitchen around my face (I can still taste I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter and strawberry jam if I lick the scar) and left it to sort itself out. I’ve got a big scar on my bottom lip which I can see if I push my lips flat against my teeth, but other than that I’m fine. Actually, reading all this back, it makes it sounds as though I grew up in Mr Bumble’s workhouse, but that’s far from the truth. My mum just didn’t want the nurses to question all the other bruises and marks on my body.

And that’s a joke too, before anyone tries to respectively put us on the register. I always received medical aid where necessary and my parents were – and are – very loving!

Speaking of very loving, how about this for an evening meal? Up here in Geordieland, we call an evening meal made up of lots of different little things (normally sandwiches, cakes, pork pies etc) a tea-tea, but I know there’s lots of others. Paul informs me he used to call it a picnic tea but I find that hard to believe because it conjures up a charming spread served on gingham tableclothes and bone china, whereas I know from his many tales that he never tasted food that didn’t have 4% Lambert and Butler ash in it until he moved up here.

snacks on slimming world

Like yesterday, with this being more of an ensemble dish, there’s little point in doing a recipe, so instead let me break down the various bits:

pickled onions – you can have most pickles for nothing on SW, so fill up – and try sauerkraut, it’s bloody delicious, although too much pickled cabbage will leave you with veritable knicker-stainers later. Open a window.

tomatoes – buy a variety to add colour and keep them out of the fridge – they’ll taste so much nicer.

pitta chips – you’re allowed one wholemeal pitta as a healthy extra – toast one, cut it up and serve with…

…sweet potato houmous – blend one large cooked sweet potato with four tablespoons of fat free yoghurt, one garlic clove, two tablespoons of lemon juice, salt and a 200g tin of chickpeas. Don’t blend it too smooth, it’s better with a few chunks. Just like the best of us.

roast potatoes – cut up some new potatoes, put them in the Actifry with an Oxo cube to cover them. Delicious.

pastrami wraps – make a sauce of four finely chopped gherkins, four tablespoons of fat free fromage frais and half a teaspoon of mustard powder. Smear onto a slice of pastrami, stuff it full of rocket and roll it up.

chicken wraps – nowt more fancy than a gherkin wrapped up in a slice of chicken!

square egg – they taste so much better than a normal egg but I’ve heard it makes the chicken walk funny. WELCOME TO MY WORLD, COCK.

A perfect picky dinner. Now off to watch Before I Go To Sleep with Fattychops. 100th post coming soon!

I used this little gadget to make my egg cube, by the way!

J

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January 23, 2015

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airfryer, beef, beef joints, classics, lamb, lamb joints, low syn, pork, pork joints, poultry, recipe card, syn free, whole

the sunday roast

Right – a heads up, which may be a bad choice of words for the little bit of explaining that I’m going to be doing – this blog post might be a little saucy. Oh my! Skip the next lot of paragraphs if you’d rather just get to the good bit.

You have to be super careful typing our blog name into google. Why? Because it can bring up a lot of filthy results if it is incorrectly spelled, just like one slip of the keys can make a weekend in Scunthorpe altogether less palatable. Thanks to the traffic we receive to the blog, we’re number one if you search for ‘chubby cubs’ but if you look down, there’s a fair few blogs that aren’t quite for vanilla eyes!

So let me explain the name of the blog – the two and the chubby bit is obvious, we’re a couple of gentleman of generous scale. But the cubs bit might be less obvious. See, in the gay world, aside from all the rainbows, magic dust and blistering fisting sessions, there’s a tendency to group male types by an animal name. Breaking them down, very very loosely, and tongue completely in (bum)cheek:

bear: a bear is a more masculine looking bloke – bearded, hairy, generally stocky or fat, normally has a wardrobe full of plaid shirts, fan of Kate Bush;

cub: a younger version of a bear, generally equally hairy, more stereotypically masculine in traits, might order a Guinness in a pub rather than a blue WKD and a fingering;

otter: more difficult – because not all bears are fat, stocky and of course you get people in all different shades, a thin hairy bear might be described as an otter. Presumably because he is generally ‘otter than most people under all that hirsuteness;

chicken – which became twink, I think – a young, attractive, usually slender or physically fit slip of a man. Again, very generally speaking, perhaps camper than most, more effeminate.

Of course, all boundaries are meaningless and it’s also a rather outdated way of looking at things – being able to grow a beard and light a cigar without coughing your lungs up doesn’t make you more masculine, whereas knowing the lyrics to every Alcazar song in Swedish and English doesn’t necessarily make you less of a man. Well…

Our problem is – we’re almost at the tipping point where we’d probably be classed as ‘bears’ rather than ‘cubs’ because we’re getting on, but frankly two chubby bears doesn’t scan right. Two Busomesque Bears? Two Beefy Butterballs? Actually, I quite like that one, but fuck me our porn warnings would skyrocket.

Oh, as an aside, those girls who seem to only have gay men as friends? Like my ex-flatmate who exclaimed we could go shopping together and sort each other’s hair out? She got short shrift. But they have many sarcastic terms too – fruit flies, fag hags, queer dears…

That’s enough of that, anyway. Speaking of beef, here’s dinner this evening – a proper roast dinner!

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to make the sunday roast, you should…

I don’t really need to break down a recipe, because it’s all a sum of its parts, but this is more to show you can have a big bloody dinner on SW and not lose out. Broken down:

  • roast beef – syn free joint from Tesco’s reduced bin – reduced from £9 to £2, and bloody lovely!
  • broccoli – steamed
  • peas – tinned
  • carrots and parsnips – done in the Actifry with a tiny tiny bit of oil
  • mash – sweet potato and normal potato mashed together
  • turnip – it’s the singing turnip from this recipe
  • roasties – we tried to do the Oxo roasties that everyone bangs on about and got it wrong, so we’re going to do them another time and post a recipe!

Now you could have gravy – 100ml is 1.5syns, which is bugger all, but don’t drown your dinner in gravy, it’s terribly common. Paul puts mint sauce on his beef and I end up wincing my way through the meal. But he cooked tonight’s tea so he’s let off with love.

J

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January 22, 2015

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low syn, lunch, recipe card, savoury snacks, snacks, soup, taster ideas

kale, spinach, broccoli and pesto soup

Just a very quick post tonight as I’ve spent the evening trying to find the ‘right’ tie for Paul and being on Grannywatch. Parents away so someone needs to go over and make sure she’s not face-down in her knitting, bless her.

slimming world spinach kale soup

to make low syn kale, spinach, broccoli and pesto soup, you’ll need:

ingredients: a chopped onion, one large broccoli, one medium bag of chopped kale, one medium bag of spinach, one small potato, 600ml vegetable stock made from one stock cube and a jar of reduced fat pesto

to make low syn kale, spinach, broccoli and pesto soup, you should:

recipe: it’s soup. Fry the onion, cut everything else into medium pieces, chuck into pan, simmer until soft, chuck in three tablespoons of pesto and blend. Serve!

extra-easy: completely. Reduced fat pesto is 1.5 syns per tbsp – and this recipe made three big portions, so I went for 1.5 syns a portion. You could leave it out but it does add a nice note. Otherwise, a very healthy, superfree packed soup.

That’s all folks – I’m really very tired!

J

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January 21, 2015

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

butternut squash macaroni cheese

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

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

BORING SENSIBLE BIT HERE

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

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

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

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

BORING SENSIBLE BIT ENDS HERE

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

macaroni cheese

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

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

to make butternut squash macaroni cheese, you should:

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

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

TASTY.

J

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January 20, 2015

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

pulled pork, sauteed leeks and mature cheese pizza

It’s time for my weekly hello and welcome to our new readers (and old) (well not old, various ages) (shush) – hope you enjoy the blog! Comments always take a while to be approved as I have the age-old problem of working during the day but I’ll always get to them in the end. Anyway, as welcoming as I’m being, I’m in a foul mood. Why? Well…

I know I’ve twittered on about driving a lot lately but it does cause ever so much of the rage I have swirling around in me like violent, piss-coloured clouds. For example, every day I join the A1, and every single day I conscientiously allow someone in front of me at the congested slip-road at Seaton Burn, exactly like you’re supposed to. Almost every bloody day the driver in front never acknowledges the fact I’ve slowed to let them in, and most of the time, you can see their oily face illuminated by their phone as they merge whilst checking Facebook. I wish they’d amend the Highway Code to make it legal to carry cement blocks in the passenger seat, and for me to launch said brick through their back window and stot it off the back of their heads. It really makes me fizz!

Mind, there’s one thing worse than that and that’s arseholes who don’t indicate, which I know everyone moans about, but it makes me grind my teeth into an enamel mist. If I’m tootling along merrily overtaking people and some barely functioning addlepate – almost exclusively in a spotlessly clean white Range Rover, company-paid-for Vauxhall Insignia or a spunk coloured Seat Mii driven recklessly – pulls in front of me, I can actually feel my eyes push my glasses down my nose as they’re bulging so much. Of course I immediately spend 10 minutes doing highly theatrical hand gestures like I’m guiding a plane to an airport gate in the pitch black, but it never soothes me. Someone actually shrugged their shoulders and did a ‘BUT WHAT CAN I DO’ expression with their hands. At a time like that, the only rational thing would be to accelerate my car through their back window, but sadly, the law is against me.

I feel better for typing that, actually – even though I had to restart halfway through as Sola climbed onto my keyboard to show me her teats and hit the backspace key, moving my page back. Bitch – I reckon it’s another one of her classic passive-aggressive moves, like licking my face in the morning until I wake up and then immediately turning around and showing me her pencil-sharpener blinking in the dawn sunlight.

Anyway, enough talk about my cat’s bumhole. Here is the true star of the show – pulled pork, leek and cheese pizza. You know you want it, you filthy bugger.

cheese, pulled pork and leek pizza

leftovers recipe! oh how exciting, I’ve never used that tag before. Remember me waffling on about rollover meals – where you can make another meal from the leftovers of another? Well this little beauty can be made from any leftover pulled pork from this recipe and any leftover dough from this recipe. In fact, that’s something you could get in the habit of doing – making double the amount of dough and freezing half, and keeping some pork frozen in the freezer for just this occasion!

to make pulled pork, sauteed leeks and mature cheese pizza, you’ll need:

ingredients: assuming you have the dough and the pork, you only need your healthy extra portion of mature cheese and a leek! Oh and tomato puree. Obviously.

to make pulled pork, sauteed leeks and mature cheese pizza, you should:

recipe: slice up your leeks. I use this mandolin slicer (Amazon) which stops my poor fingers getting shredded (and you can use it for other things too, and it’s reduced to under a tenner). Put in a pan, tiny bit of water and salt, put lid on, and steam them until they’re softer than your first stool. Yum, right? Slap that dough down on the work surface, stretch it, add the puree, add the pulled pork, add the leeks, add the cheese and then add heat for fifteen minutes. Serve with chips and that smug feeling that you’ve saved some money.

I’m not kidding when I say this has to be one of the nicest fucking pizzas I’ve ever made. To hell with the syns. The picture doesn’t do it justice but if I zoomed in any more it looks like a scabby knee.

extra-easy: yep! The base is 22 syns. Don’t be put off by having to spend your syns, this looks amazing and tastes great. Remember – if the food looks good, it’s half the battle. I know I always say it but listen damnit.

J

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January 19, 2015

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recipe card

weigh in – week two – the results are in!

two weeks into our diet and we have our Monday results!

james: 5.5lb off
paul: 1.5lb off
total: 20.5lb off

Wahey! I got my stone award and Paul is but a whisker away from his half stone! Remember: we’re trying to lose this weight slowly and steadily, although I seem to be running away with it, but then I’m over half a foot taller than Paul and a lot heavier. Plus I could totally take him in a fight.

We’re celebrating with popcorn and Air Crash Investigation. Well no, we’ll watch the crash bit of Air Crash Investigation and then switch over to Celebrity Big Brother, for shame. It’s the same thing – one is the tragic end of so many promising lives, and the other is Air Crash Investigation. Paul pretends not to like it, but then moans when I flick the telly over, so that’s conflicting.

We truly have got some great recipes coming up this week – all new, all delicious. I’ll end the way I always do on a weigh-in night – you can see our recipes are working for us, so share share share! If you have a private slimming world facebook group, drop a link to the blog in there! We’re always delighted to read the comments because well, as I said last week, we’re hussies for attention.

Goodnight then – I’m off to find why a vessel full of men went down in the bush – but that’s Katie Price for you…