OK, if the first thing that comes to mind when you hear cabbage is the tasteless, rubbery mush that you used to get served at school by someone with nicotine teeth and varicose veins like an AA road-map, then you really need to give this a go. Creating crunchy cabbage discs is as easy as slicing a cabbage into 1″ slices, basting it with a vinegar and thyme solution, and roasting in the oven. Roasting does wonders for everything – potatoes, peppers, drunken lays in a Premier Inn bedroom, all sorts. It creates a crunchy, sweet tasting vegetable that is miles apart from what you’re used to! Recipe card…

to make stuffed chicken breast, you’ll need:

I did have a close-up picture of the chicken oozing cheese, but it looked like something you’d get shown on Embarrassing Bodies when that doctor with the nose goes poking around in someone’s blurter.

ingredients: two decent chicken breasts, no skimping. better to buy two great quality chicken breasts from a butcher than two slabs of pink water from ASDA, parma ham (1/2 syn a slice, I use three per breast), sundried tomatoes in oil (3 syns for 28g but I only use one tomato chopped very finely), low low mature cheese spread, sweet potatoes, cabbage, frylight, balsamic vinegar (bog standard stuff), salt and pepper.

recipe: couldn’t be easier! Oven on to 180 degrees. Cut open chicken, stuff with tomato and cheese (57g for HEA). Wrap it in the ham and put ‘seal’ side down on a tray. Whack it in the oven. Same time, cut your cabbage into discs, baste them with the vinegar, thyme and salt and pepper mix. Put everything in together, after 10 or so minutes, stick another coating onto the cabbage. After 25 mins or so, take everything out and serve with sweet potato chips.

extra-easy: yes – very much so, but this is a synned recipe – the syns come from the tomato and the ham – you could skip the tomatoes, but they do add a richness to the stuffing. You could put slivers of fresh garlic in there instead though, and you’d be cooking on gas. You’d have a tough time replacing the parma ham, though I suppose you could use wafer thin ham, but again, haway, Spend those syns!

top tips: cabbage is a superfree food, so a couple of those tasty discs will really help you along. But you could make a nice coleslaw to go with the chicken, or a decent salad.

warning (crass): for gods sake, make sure you cook your chicken until there isn’t a hint of pink. I made myself very ill taking a chance with undercooked chicken and I was shitting like a lawn sprinkler for a good three days. Lost a tonne of weight but I can’t see Margaret Miles-Bramwell putting quote that on the front cover of the next magazine.

As an aside, how annoying are students these days? I know that makes me sound like an old fart but I had to get some cash from a cashpoint last night and I was stuck behind eight or so braying rah-rah students. I’m quite a calm person, but I’d have happily seen them put in a woodchipper and made into syn-free sausages.

Finally, anyone know at what point a beard is classed as ‘unkempt’? I haven’t shaved for two weeks and I’m beginning to look like one of those people who live in a library and have dried egg on their jumper and hair growing out their ears. I want to keep growing it though…