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June 22, 2015

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chicken stuffed with spinach, sundried tomato and cheese

We’ve bought a new bed on a whim! That’s two incredibly impulsive things we’ve done in so many days – a big deal when you’re like us and the idea of being cute and spontaneous is buying a different scented candle at the garden centre, and even then only if it’s included in the BOGOF offer.

I woke up this morning full of piss and vinegar about the state of our pillows – I’d get more neck support if I rested my head on the jet of air from a hairdyer. I have a neck like a fucking Tetris piece and I’m forever clicking and cracking it, much to the chagrin of Paul. If I shake my head furiously I sound like one of those clacker toys. Plus our bed is awful. We bought it from ASDA or somewhere because we got a ‘great deal’ but a) it’s too small (we had a Caesar bed previously, that’s 8ft by 7ft) and b) the mattress is awful. It provides all the orthopaedic comfort of being mugged for your mobile in a backalley. We’re fat lads and every time we turn over the springs pop and ‘boing’ with increasing malice – I know at some point I’m going to turn over to snooze the alarm clock and be impaled right up my hoop. Imagine that – cause of death: ‘anal trauma caused by cheapskate John Lewis mattress’. I’d certainly be a wailing ghost.

Not only that, but because the bed is one of those awful ones with the drawers underneath, we spend the night being tormented by our cat constantly pulling at it, trying to get inside. That’s vexing enough, hearing the drawer roll forward an inch and roll back over and over again, but when she does get inside, you’re so highly-tuned to the slightest noise that you’re treated to ten minutes of her tongue rasping over her mary for ten minutes before she goes to sleep. Bag.

So we did what any normal couple would do, and rang the Premier Inn to find out how to buy one of the beds they use in their hotel rooms. We ❤ Premier Inn and we just don’t care. We sleep so well in a Premier Inn bed, and now we get to enjoy the experience at home without worrying about how many pockets of Gentleman’s Hot Vanilla has soaked into the mattress. Our new bed arrives in four weeks and it’s exactly the same beds they use in the hotel. Mind, I hope we don’t wake up with Lenny Henry in the bed…though he is a fan of the larger form…so who know. I might book into one of their rooms and steal the purple Premier Inn comforter just to complete the look, together with a menu of fried breakfast items to sit on my bedside table.

We did have an amazing period last year where we had a bed which was comprised of two superking sized beds pushed together. It took up the entire bedroom and was necessary because I needed to sleep apart from Paul for a few weeks whilst I recovered from an operation. Of course, being lazy, we just kept it for almost a year and with two quilts, eight pillows and enough room to literally somersault* (which I’d do if I didn’t think my neck would be turned to dust thanks to my corpulence), it was brilliant. It was a sad day indeed in Cubs Towers when we dismantled poor old Megabed and Paul dragged the mattress – which resembled a Jackson Pollock painting at this point – into the garage. Sniff.

But let’s cheer up, and look forward to the new bed. Tonight’s recipe is simple, elegant and tasty. Give it a whirl!

you’ll need these:

two good chicken breasts – not the water-filled cheap ones
sundried tomatoes in oil – six syns for 100g but you’ll be lucky to use 10g in each breast, hence the one syn on the recipe
your HEA of whatever cheese you like – a good strong cheddar works best, so 40g of light mature cheddar is tasty
make up a side salad of whatever you want – here I used rocket, spinach, tomatoes and spiralised cucumber, and served that with a dressing of yoghurt and fresh mint

and it’s as easy as this:

cut the side of your chicken – you’ll need a fairly small gash
you might think at first that you’ll never get everything in there and it’ll be too tight, but just do your best – try using your fingers to loosen it up
the cheesy bit goes in first, because you don’t want that oozing when things heat up
cram it full of spinach and a couple of tomatoes – really pack it in
now things get steamy – get a griddle pan and heat it up – you might want to rub a little oil on it if it’s a dry old thing, because you don’t want to have to peel your meat off the sides
sear the chicken on both sides
you’ll want to finish it off by putting it in the oven for ten or fifteen minutes – you want clear juices dribbling out when you prick it
serve with a bit on the side

Eee, get me a job at The Sun.

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chubbycubs

Posted on

May 26, 2015

Posted under

breast, poultry, recipe card, syn free

german potato salad and paprika chicken

I’m officially running on fumes – I haven’t been to sleep since Sunday night, and god knows why – I’m not suffering with insomnia or anything exciting, just didn’t feel tired last night. Which meant I was up typing up some new stuff for the book at 3am in the morning and driving into work at 6am. Actually, that’s a bit of a fib and in the spirit of being open and honest, I was actually kept awake by my body thoroughly rejecting the remnants of our bank holiday blowout – a Dominos pizza. I told Paul to order something nice and he ordered a bloody pizza with onion bhajis on it. Is it any wonder I spent most of the night dancing the sour-apple quickstep and bemoaning the fact I hadn’t put the baby wipes in the fridge to cool my nipsy?

I’m not surprised we both got ill, frankly. I mean, for a kick off, a Dominos pizza is like a zillion syns – I’m surprised Margaret herself didn’t kick my door in like a drug enforcement officer and snatch the Slimmer of the Month certificate off the fridge. Plus, it was almost two hours late thanks to the delivery driver getting lost. To put that in perspective, the Dominos we order from is probably around 5 miles away down a straight road. You couldn’t get lost if you tried. I mean admittedly the driver was as thick as a donkey’s cock and could barely string a sentence together, but even so, it’s not that taxing. I should sue.

Book is coming along nicely mind (but combined with our workloads being all over the place, means I’m not having the same amount of time to write for the blog – but don’t worry!) – here’s a couple of small excerpts:

On sparrows:

Paul was being terribly polite and British about the whole thing but I immediately weighed in on the argument to point out that ‘the Sparrow Ambulance was tied up attending to a coal tit with hurt feelings’ and that I lamented the fact I hadn’t had the foresight to fashion the poor bugger a tiny sling from a spent match and a postage stamp’.

On hotels:

Instead we showered, shrieked a bit, use the tiny hairdryer to attempt to dry my back hair despite said hairdryer being so weak it barely shifted the top off my free cappuccino, and unpacked our suits.

On flatulence:

Remember we were in a stable block too with other guests in adjoining rooms – it probably sounded like we were mixing cement all night.

On Paul:

I don’t know what Paul does to the crotch of trousers and boxer shorts but you’d think he had a sack of iron filings instead of a scrotum, because they’re always torn to shreds within a few days worth of use so every time he crosses his leg a bollock drops out like the last tangerine in the fruit basket.

Ah yes! How about a recipe? This was actually my favourite meal in a long time and really could not have been simpler to make. Serves two mouth-breathing fatties.

to make german potato salad and paprika chicken, you’ll need:

ingredients for chicken: two decent sized chicken breasts – you don’t want one of those nasty supermarket breasts that look like the sole of a built-up shoe, treat yourself and get decent meat, plus garlic powder (1/2tsp), 1 tbsp of smoked paprika, pinch of black pepper and 1.5tbsp tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce

ingredients for german potato salad: three large potatoes, 4 bacon medallions cooked and cut into strips, 40ml of rice vinegar, 65ml of chicken stock, 1tbsp of dijon mustard (technically I think this is a syn, but split between two…well I won’t tell if you don’t), half a decent sized red onion cut nice and fine (or use red spring onions if you can get them, which we can, because we’re geet posh as owt), tablespoon of fat free greek yoghurt, 20ml of white wine vinegar, some chives for the top if you have them kicking about but don’t shit your pants if you haven’t got them in.

to make german potato salad and paprika chicken, you should:

recipe for chicken:

combine all the spices with the Worcestershire sauce to make a rub and rub that rub (great writing there, would recommend) into the chicken, getting your fingers deep into every moist crack and really ensuring your meat is slick and covered
pop into the fridge to marinade – longer you leave it, the better, but you can hoy it under the grill for around ten minutes a side and cook until the juices run clear when you finger it (the chicken that is, not you)
serve with your salad, but oh no, you’ll need to make the salad, so here we go..

recipe for german potato salad:

boil the potato for 25 minutes (you want them firm but a bit soft around the edges, like a middle-aged man in a Luton brothel) and then cut into thumb sized chunks (normal thumb, we’re not using Jeremy Beadle as a comparative);
NOTE: don’t bloody skin the potatoes, the skin is the best bit
as soon as the chunks are cut up, tip in the rice vinegar, mix and let them soak for a moment or two
add the chicken stock
in a little bowl mix the white wine vinegar, yoghurt and mustard together (whisk quickly, it’ll start to split if you so much as blink) and tip over the potatoes – mix again – don’t be shy about mixing, it’ll rough up the potatoes as you mix
add the onion and bacon
when you’re ready to serve, chop some chives over the top
the longer you leave this dish to sit, the better it’ll be

As ever, enjoy!

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chubbycubs

Posted on

May 21, 2015

Posted under

breast, chinese, fakeaways, fast food restaurants, kebab shop, low syn, panko, poultry, recipe card, savoury snacks, snacks, speciality ingredients, taster ideas

asian chicken nuggets

Both out and about tonight but could we let you down and not give you a recipe? NO. Here’s a failsafe recipe for Asian chicken nuggets. They’re Asian because of the marinade, naturally. I’m in a terrible mood at the moment, not helped by the fact I pulled FUCKING SPAIN out of my OWN Eurovision sweepstake. However: it’s Eurovision this Saturday and I absolutely can’t wait. I love it! My leather cheerio is already relaxing from the fug of amyl nitrate billowing across from Austria. Anyway:

3 syns is nowt, but you can make it completely syn-free (the nuggets anyway) by just blending your HEB bread allowance. But balls to that, use panko breadcrumbs instead and live like a king!

to make asian chicken nuggets, you’ll need:

two chicken breasts chopped into nugget sized bits, soy sauce, rice wine (1 syn for two tablespoons, but you only need one, so I’m not counting the syns), 1tsp five spice powder, 1 tbsp of soy sauce, pinch of salt, panko breadcrumbs (Tesco sell these and they come in at 4.5 syns for 25g – you’ll need 50g, so that’s 4.5 syns but as most of it falls off you’d be hard pushed to be anywhere near 4.5 syns, so I’ve said three)

to make asian chicken nuggets, you should:

well this is tricky – combine all the wet ingredients and spices with the chicken and leave to marinate – the longer the better, as the actress said to the bishop
put your breadcrumbs into a bowl and crunch some black pepper in amongst it all
drop each nugget into the breadcrumb, get them covered and pop onto a tray that’s been lined with greaseproof paper
bake in the oven on 180 degrees for around twenty minutes, turning them if you can be arsed – we don’t, but we’ve got a fancy tray with little holes in it which bakes from underneath too
serve with chips (make your own or just cheat like we do when you can’t be arsed and have McCains Rustic – they’re 1 syn for 100g) and beans

There’s no superfree on this meal but hey, you know what, have yourself a fruit salad and a good pump afterwards. You’ll be OK!

Before anyone asks, I got the basket from Amazon. It looks lovely! Click here for the link.

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chubbycubs

Posted on

May 14, 2015

Posted under

bacon, breast, pork, poultry, recipe card, salad

rocket, pea and mint salad

Want to know something embarrassing?

The first MP3 I ever downloaded was The Boy Is Mine by Brandy and Monica. Good lord! I was a country boy growing up in a council house in BHS adult-sized trousers, I don’t think I was ready for all that ghettofabulousness. I’m surprised the download made it past all the porn, mind, though I don’t doubt it took twenty minutes to download. Kids these day don’t know how lucky they are. Could have been worse – one of the first CDs I owned by Doesn’t Really Matter by Janet Jackson. Argh, I really had a thing for a marimba and sass.

The reason I am rambling on about music is because it’s an integral part of writing this blog – I can’t write unless I have music playing and no distractions, and even then I’ll spend forty minutes trying to find something I want to listen to on Spotify. It’s very distressing – a whole world of music and I always end up coming back to the same twenty or so songs. Paul hates it, because I always end up singing along and my voice sounds like a cat being pushed through a mangle, plus I add new notes and words into the lyrics, so a simple beautiful verse becomes peppered with falling scales and swearwords.

Anyway. I’m a bit pushed for time tonight so instead of words, I’m going to show you something. Something AWFUL. You may remember from my About Me page that it’s always been a hope and a dream of mine to get into the newspapers holding out my fat-bloke trousers after I’d lost so much weight? Well…when I was 18…

That hair though, seriously. I told you I used to have hair like Enya in her Orinocco Flow video. I’d give anything for a chance at that long hair again, though I wouldn’t have it quite such a sex-offender colour. Plus those trousers! 46″. Christ. Plus, white jeans. Never give a fat bloke white jeans, they’ll always have chocolate in their pockets and it’ll look like they’ve shit themselves when they stand up. What I didn’t mention in that article is how seething I was about losing out at the Slimmer of the Year finals to some black-footed leviathan who was too fat to get on an operating table. I didn’t have a sob story.

Ah well. It’s not like the haircuts ever got worse. Well, save for the Myra Hindley…

And of course, the Bjorn Again:

Aaah. Oh young James. You poor bastard.

Anyway, enough of all that. Tonight’s recipe is a simple salad full of fresh tastes. Just like my hair, am I right?

to make rocket, pea and mint salad you will need:

two chicken breasts, big old handful of rocket, couple of rashers of fat-free bacon, 200g frozen peas, small bag of new potatoes, mint, 0% fat-free natural yoghurt (make sure you pick up a syn-free version), lemon, fresh mint, four spring onions and rockets

to make rocket, pea and mint salad you should:

make the dressing: a few tablespoons of yoghurt, plus the juice of half a lemon and a few leaves mint chopped nice and fine – and set aside
grill the chicken breasts nice and plain and set it aside, and grill the bacon off and when cooked, cut into tiny slices
chop up your new potatoes into small chunks and boil them for a few minutes until they’re tender, adding the frozen peas into the boiling water for a couple of minutes too, then sieve the lot
chop up the spring onions into nice small slices
put a drop of oil into a frying pan, add the onion, potato, bacon and peas – I like to splash some lemon juice in;
after a few minutes, take it off the heat and add the rocket and a few sprigs of mint, and stir everything through
serve with the dressing and chicken, with some slices of radishes to garnish.

A simple, elegant evening meal. Yum!

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chubbycubs

Posted on

May 13, 2015

Posted under

breast, low syn, lunch, poultry, recipe card, rice

cheesy chicken broccoli rice bake

I’m writing in a bit of a huff.

See, I’m going to have to go to the dentist. A year or so ago I cracked my back tooth chewing on a hairbrush, which sounds fabulously fun but it hurt like hell. My dentist took one look, took it out and sent me on my way, with only a stiff jaw and a modest NHS bill to accompany me. All good. However, one of my wisdom teeth has clearly seen the gap left by my departed tooth and thought to himself that he would really rather like to move in. And it hurts. Not the tooth but rather a tiny bit of gum that I keep catching with my teeth as I shut my mouth. How can it heal if I keep biting into the bloody thing? It’s bad enough that I have to sit with my mouth slightly open at all times like a pensioner stuck on her Sudoku, but now I have to go to the dentist to fix it? Bah.

It’s not that I’m scared of dentists…well, no, that’s a fib. I am, but who isn’t, you can’t get a kick out of a man pumping a tool in and out of your gob and finishing it off with a squirt of something acidic to set your teeth on edge. OR CAN YOU. No. Oddly, the drill I can deal with because it doesn’t hurt, but when they use that little air-sprayer thingy I just want to bite his nipple off as he hangs over me in his dainty tunic. My skin is crawling up my back as we speak. I know where the unease about my dentist comes from – I had to have a tooth out when I was little after I (again!) cracked one eating nuts. I swear my teeth are made of glass. Anyway, the dentist I had back then clearly hated life, children and smiles, so set about me with all the care and precision one might elect to us knocking down a brick wall. I remember even now his pock-marked face being within kissing distance from mine, his bloodshot eyes darting around and spittle-flecked lips pursed as he yanked the tooth out. It wouldn’t come, so naturally he decided to put his entire bodyweight onto me, using his elbow in my chest as leverage. Fair enough, he got the tooth in the end, but he had to stop after forty minutes to have his brow mopped with a towel and Lucozade brought in and I had a collapsed lung and internal bleeding. No wonder I’m scared, though I’m not scared of much else. Rollercoasters? High as you like. Water? Chuck me in. Enclosed spaces? Pfft. As long as I don’t get stuck and have to be ‘popped out’ of the tight space by a team of firemen, I’ll be fine. That said…

Spiders bother us both, though Paul more than me. We once ran screaming from our Quayside flat when a spider the size of a small motorcar came trundling out from under the fridge. We were on the cusp of checking into a hotel when we realised our wallets were still in the flat, and without those, we’d be screwed. So we dutifully went back in only to see it, bold as brass, sitting in the middle of the laminate flooring. I swear if my vision had been good enough I would have been able to see his tiny little finger sticking up at me in defiance. Action was needed, so, screaming all the while, Paul ran to the balcony doors and flung them open as I dashed (I was skinny back then, I could dash) into the little office, got the giant (expensive) John Lewis waste-paper bin, emptied the contents on the floor, ran back into the living room (still screaming), trapped the little fucker and promptly ran to the balcony and threw him, the bin and almost myself over the bloody edge. I was surprised the little bastard didn’t have a parachute and a distress flare he was that big. Good times. The bin disappeared down onto a road somewhere and when we picked it up the next morning, an electric bus had run over it. Serves me right eh.

Paul’s also scared of all the boring things like being buried alive, and he doesn’t like the idea of drowning or burning, which seems an altogether reasonable way to live, whereas all my fears are quite silly. For one, I’m scared of dams. Terrified. Even looking at the word makes my teeth jitter a bit (which doesn’t help my sore gum). It’s not the fear of them breaking – oh no – it’s just how alien and unsettling they look. They have no business being there. Having a parent who works for the local water company means I have an unflinching and comprehensive knowledge of all the creepy things and secret pipes hidden just below the ground, ready to suck you away into oblivion. He once told me that a family crashed their car into a reservoir and the suction on an intake pipe held all the doors shut so they couldn’t get out. Yikes. Sewers too. Pennywise I could handle, but the sluice gate at the end would have me sucking on Kalms like there was no tomorrow.

I’m also genuinely frightened of irregular holes. Har-de-har not bumholes, no, but irregular clusters of holes sets me on edge. If I have a crumpet, I have to have it upside down otherwise I can’t eat it, and sponges make me feel uneasy if I look at them. I feel like I could have myself a story in Chat magazine surrounded by sponges, biting my nails, but alas I saw someone has beaten me to it. Things like sieves are alright because the holes are organised and clean, but I reckon I’m probably the only person ever to almost faint looking at Swiss cheese. Ah, aren’t phobias daft.

Tell you what’s not daft though – tonight’s evening meal idea, which uses up all the scraggly old broccoli you have lying around.

chicken, broccoli and rice bake

REMEMBER: this serves eight! It uses four HEAs and half a HEB. But the meal freezes nicely and will do for lunches and makes a good whack. The recipes doesn’t make a gloopy dish, it actually cooks right down and is more sticky than anything else. tasty!

to make cheesy chicken broccoli rice bake you will need:

370g uncooked long grain rice, 500ml chicken stock, 500ml skimmed milk, 250ml water, 1 bay leaf, sage rosemary and thyme leaves (or dried), 1 chopped onion, 2 cloves of garlic, 25g plain flour (4.5 syns), 250g fat free greek yoghurt, ½ tsp chili powder, 2 chicken breasts (cooked and chopped), 90g Gruyere cheese (or cheddar) (3 x HEA), 40g light feta cheese, salt and pepper, one head of broccoli, half of a wholemeal roll (as breadcrumbs) (half a HEB), handful of cheddar (HEA).

to make cheesy chicken broccoli rice bake you should:

measure out and rinse the rice. set aside
cook the chicken breasts and shred like they’re incriminating documents
pour the chicken stock, milk, water, bay leaf and sprigs of herbs into a saucepan over a medium heat for a few minutes then put to one side
spray a large frying pan with Frylight and cook the onions for a few minutes until softened
add the flour and coat the onions well
add the liquid mixture to the frying pan and stir well until there are no lumps
reduce the heat to low and add the yoghurt, chicken, chili powder and cheese and stir continuously until well mixed and the cheese has melted
transfer the mixture into a large casserole dish with a tight lid (or cover with foil) and bake at 180 degrees for 20 minutes
meanwhile, chop the broccoli into small florets – the smaller the better
stir the broccoli into the casserole dish along with the rice and mix well
re-cover, and bake for another 15 minutes
sprinkle the top with breadcrumbs and a little leftover cheese and place under a medium grill for just a few minutes until golden brown, texture like sun

ENJOY ENJOY.

By the way, I know we have the last two days of 7777 week to publish – that’ll probably be this weekend!

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chubbycubs

Posted on

April 13, 2015

Posted under

breast, fakeaways, italian, low syn, lunch, one-pot, pasta, poultry, recipe card, rice, syn free

chicken, orzo and tomato risnotto

Not a typo. The dish is a bit like a risotto but tastes a bit more substantial – tasty though and only uses one pot. Hooray.

But weigh-in tonight, and it’s VERY good news. You may remember that in between getting caught noshing in the hot-tub by a farmer and running caravans off the road, we managed to put on a total of 13lb between us last week? Well, we knuckled down a bit but as you can see from the recipes, still ate like pigs…and we’ve lost:

james – 7.5lb

paul – 5.5lb

Haha! A total weight of 13lb – or, for those who might be a bit touched in the head, we’ve managed to lose exactly what we put on (Paul losing .5lb more than what he put on and me losing .5lb less)! Brilliant, not least because I can’t be bothered to change the ‘total’ image on the right of the blog.

Hey I tell you what though – and this is in no way a disparaging comment against other classes I’ve visited, but what a difference a consultant makes. We’ve worked our way back to our very first consultant and she’s a genuine laugh – we were in that church hall digging those bloody awful church chairs out of our back-fat for a good two hours but it flew by. Reason? It wasn’t just ‘weight loss – well done – weight loss – well done – weight loss – well done’ which holds no allure for us. It felt like a proper class! If you get the right class, you stay, and if you stay, you learn. SIMPLE AS.

Now listen, weigh-in nights are normally a chance for us not to post a recipe but instead spend the evening ped-egging each others feet and tormenting the cat.

Well, we’ve been doing that, see?

But lo, in the spirit of giving, here’s a recipe! Gosh!

Firstly, the recipe uses sundried tomatoes normally, and feel free to substitute them for the moonblush tomatoes I’ve used in the recipe (sundried tomatoes are around 2 syns for 25g), but moonblush tomatoes are very easy to make and syn free. Perhaps half a syn at most per serving, anyway. I nicked the idea from Nigella Lawson and what that woman doesn’t know about cooking you could write on the side of a rolled-up twenty quid note. To make moonblush tomatoes, first whack your oven up to its highest possible temperature. You want it glowing like an Englishman’s shoulders in Benidorm. Next, cut a load of cherry tomatoes in half and chuck them in a bowl. Add a tiny drop or two of olive oil, a good glug of balsamic vinegar, salt, dried oregano, bit of thyme, pepper. Mix gently so the tomatoes are covered but try not to squash the tomatoes. Next, tip them onto a baking tray with the cut side facing up – pack them in tightly. Once the oven is at the highest temperature and you could light a fag off the vapours, turn it off, open the door, quickly throw the tray in and leave it overnight. The hot air will dry your tomatoes out – not completely, but that’s fine – you want them a bit squishy. Syn-free and full of taste! Make it even more interesting by using a range of tomatoes of all shapes and colours. If you DO insist on using sundried tomatoes in oil like a filthy slattern, hoy them in a sieve and pour boiling water on them – gets rid of the oil, see.

OK, so you’ve got tomatoes – either moonblush (overnight) or sundried (jarred – philistine). So…

to make chicken, orzo and tomato risnotto, you’ll need:

two chicken breasts cut into chunks, 200g tomatoes, tiny drop of oil, 1 large onion sliced finely, three garlic gloves, 400g of orzo pasta (or rice), 3 dollops of tomato puree, 900ml of chicken stock, 1/2tsp of oregano, 1/4tsp of thyme, 1/4tsp of lemon zest and 1/2tsp of balsamic vinegar. Basil leaves, black pepper and parmesan to serve.

to make chicken, orzo and tomato risnotto, you should:

fry the chicken off in a tiny bit of oil or a squirt of frylight (bleurgh!) – chuck in a bit of salt and pepper to swoosh it along – once cooked through, set aside
chuck the onions into the pan now and saute gently until they go transparent and sticky – add the garlic for a moment or two
add the rice and fry along with the onion for a minute or two
add the tomato puree, tomatoes (chopped if particularly big, otherwise just tip in), all the herbs and the balsamic vinegar, plus the chicken
now cook gently, on a medium heat, adding stock one ladle at a time and stirring – don’t leave it to stick, and eventually, it’ll go nice and gloopy and thick – tasty!
serve in a big bowl with a smashing cheesy grin on your face.

Just a note – buying a whole lemon just for the zest is a bit silly. So use whatever you need to, then pop the lemon in the freezer – you can use it next time you need zest! Failing that, cut it in half, put it in a tiny bowl of water and microwave for thirty seconds or so, then use it like a sponge to clean your microwave. Gosh we really ARE the gift that keeps on giving tonight.

Cheers all!

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

April 12, 2015

Posted under

breast, chinese, fakeaways, noodles, poultry, recipe card, rice, syn free

slimming world classics – salt and pepper chicken

I tell you what, you’re doing rather well out of us this week, bearing in mind we were aiming to only post five times a week, and one of them would be a quickpost! But, like the caring, big-hearted, lovely chaps that we are, we couldn’t let you down, so here’s an extra recipe – salt and pepper chicken.

Syn-free, mind.

I can’t tell you how long I agonised over putting that ‘n’ in the title. I’m someone whose teeth actually itch if I happen across a ROFL. Anyway, recipe:

to make salt and pepper chicken, you’ll need:

two chicken breasts (one per person) cut into chunks, 5 tbsp Smash, ½ tsp salt, ½ tsp pepper, ½ tsp powdered garlic, one egg, a good slug of soy sauce, one green pepper, one onion, one chilli pepper, 2 tsp granulated sweetener, 2 tbsp white wine vinegar, noodles.

to make salt and pepper chicken, you should:

mix together the Smash, garlic powder, salt and pepper in a bowl and spread out onto a plate
dip the chicken chunks into beaten egg with a good slug of soy sauce and roll in the dry smash mixture until well coated
place the crumbed chicken chunks onto a baking sheet that has been sprayed with Frylight
add another couple of sprays of Frylight over the top and bake in the oven (200°C or Gas Mark 6) for around 25-30 minutes or until golden
get your noodles cooking
meanwhile, chop an onion, green pepper and chilli pepper and mix together in a pan
cover and let it sweat over a medium-low heat
add another slug of soy sauce after about ten minutes and mix well
in another bowl, mix together the granulated sweetener and white wine vinegar and stir until dissolved
when it’s all ready, add the vinegar mixture to the vegetables, mix well, and serve with the chicken on top of the noodles

Mwah! Easy-peasy. I know I’m dancing with the devil using frylight and sweetener but if I tell you to use 1tsp of honey and a dab of oil, you might have a fit. Using honey instead of sweetener and a drop of oil instead of frylight makes things better, but up to you…!

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

April 9, 2015

Posted under

breast, chinese, classics, fakeaways, one-pot, poultry, recipe card, rice, syn free

diet coke chicken

Just a quick post tonight as very tired – so here’s the picture and a recipe. It’s another Slimming World classic, may god have mercy on our souls.

This is a recipe from SW’s own website – and well, if you follow their recipe, you’ll end up with that old favourite of SW, watery sauce and no taste at all. How do they do that so consistently – take decent food and add water and sweetener? The mind boggles. So I’ve modified it just slightly (increase the cooking time, reduce the heat) and what comes out isn’t actually half bad.

to make diet coke chicken, you’ll need:

ingredients: touch of oil, one onion, red and green pepper, 2 garlic cloves, 2 chicken breasts, 2tsp of Worcestershire sauce, 4tbsp of tomato puree, half a carton of passata, 1tbsp of dark soy sauce, 1tsp of dried mixed herbs,, 330ml can of diet coke, 200ml of chicken stock and 200g of sugar snap peas.

and to make diet coke chicken, you should:

recipe: chop up the onion, pepper, chicken and garlic. Fry gently, add the liquid and spices, and cook low and slow. The original recipe says to cook it quick for fifteen minutes but you just end up with too much liquid. Serve with rice.

Is it nice? Meh! It was alright, but it just tastes so…Slimming World-y!

Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

April 8, 2015

Posted under

american, breast, classics, fakeaways, fast food restaurants, poultry, recipe card, savoury snacks, snacks, syn free, taster ideas, travel

KFC-style chicken

Classics Week continues with a recipe for KFC chicken – I’m not a fan of KFC, something about sticking my bone in a greasy box doesn’t appeal. But, nevertheless, it’s a recipe that seems to be doing the rounds on the various SW facebook sites so we thought we should give it a go. Recipe near the bottom, but first, MORE CHUNTERING ABOUT IRELAND.

You left us yesterday as we pulled up outside the cottage, and going forward, I’m not going to talk day to day as a lot of the days were the same (pootle about in the car, eat, eat some more, pootle a bit further, eat, stock up on ice-cream and nip back to the cottage in time for Tipping Point) – instead, I’ll just rattle off some incidents, high points and thoughts.

First, we managed to cause major offence within twenty four hours. Frankly, if you’re of a nervous disposition or candid talk of sex makes you green, just skip ahead a couple of paragraphs.

See, the cottage came with a hot-tub, and we decided to enjoy dusk in the hot-tub completely nude – pity the poor filters having to work overtime to drain out our back-hair and toenails. But, it was incredibly romantic and we were incredibly isolated, with not a soul around us (to the point where, at night, we could look across the valley and see only one solitary light for miles around), and being young, virile young men, we immediately got up to dickens. Well, it was my birthday after all.

Picture the scene – the bubbling of the steamy water, music playing through the iPad, the rhymthic sound of the jets, the twilit light bouncing off Paul’s wobbling buttocks (it would look like the Mitchell brothers were hiding just under the water), me playing a mean tune on the old ham trumpet – perfectly romantic for a married couple. Well yes, until a honking big tractor appeared at the end of the garden less than thirty foot away. How we had missed it was understandable – Paul was facing the other way and I was always told not to talk with my mouth full – but how the hell the farmer didn’t see until he was parked up I have no clue. Looking back, there would have been a hedge blocking his view until about 40 foot away, and then he probably just thought he was committed.

Good lord. You’ve never seen two people spring back as quick as we did – it was like someone had dropped a toaster in the water. Half the water in the hot-tub sloshed over the side exposing even more of our milky-white frames. Mind, he was no better – he looked like your very personification of a hard-bitten farmer – tattered cloth cap, wax jacket from the eighties, face like a drained field, and he ambled over with his hand pulling the brow of his cap over his eyes like he was Icarus approaching the sun. When really, it was the FULL MOON he should have been worried about. He spluttered something about the oil heating and asked if everything was alright – I assume, anyway, because we couldn’t hear or understand a word of what he said and I certainly wasn’t going to engage him in any chatter whilst my boobs blew around in the hot-tub jets. He sharp got back in his tractor and almost did a donut on the gravel drive way trying to get away.

So that killed the mood. To be honest, I’m not a massive fan of the hot-tub, it’s what people with bad taste buy when they win the lottery. What might look glamorous on the deck of a gorgeous chalet in the Alps doesn’t look quite so alluring pressed up beside a mouldy shed and the frame of a B&Q value trampoline in a shitpit in Southend. Nothing quite says class like drinking Bellabrusco from a plastic beaker as multi-coloured LEDs illuminate your bumhole. Anyway, that didn’t stop us, and despite it being a proper fan-on, we used that hot-tub several more times throughout the holiday.

However, I’m not convinced the filter was working correctly, because towards the end of the holiday, the water became murkier and murkier and started to smell. Not that such trifling matter stopped us – here, we’re Geordie, divven’t ya knaa – but I don’t think you should have to crack the top of the water like a crème brûlée before you get in.

Actually, that’s not even the end of the hot-tub tale, and nor was it the only time we were surprised by an unwelcome visitor. See, on one of the nights that we spent in the hot-tub under the stars, the local horse made an appearance, looming out of the dark about 5 foot away from Paul’s head and promptly did that noise that horses make when they blow air through their noses. Paul shit himself – no wonder the filters didn’t work – but soon calmed down when he realised what it was. All was well until the horse bit him on the head – at that point we called it a night. Ah, nature.

Well now look at that – see this is why I couldn’t write for a living, I’ve spent eight paragraphs talking about hot-tubs! So let’s put Ireland to bed for an evening whilst I mull over whether to categorise this post as x-rated or not.

KFC chicken!

Now, we used one wholemeal bun and it made more than enough ‘crumb’ for the two of us – one wholemeal breadbun being one person’s healthy extra. If you want to syn it, you’ll need 6 syns – 3 syns each. You can use smash and make it syn free but ew.

to make KFC style chicken, you’ll need:

ingredients: two chicken breasts (cut into strips), one breadbun, 1tsp of dried oregano, 1tsp of garlic salt, 3tsp of paprika, black pepper, a bit of salt, a tiny pinch of ground ginger and one big old bugger of an egg.

to make KFC style chicken, you should:

recipe:

honestly, if you struggle making this, you need to pop yourself into a nursing home now
blitz the breadcrumbs and the various powders together in a food processor – you don’t want it like dust, but just fine crumbs
beat your egg in a little bowl
take a strip of chicken, drop it in the egg, make sure it is covered, put it into the bread/spice mix, cover well, and place on a baking sheet. If you have cheap trays that stick, either grease them a smidge or use non-stick lining
into the oven they go – twenty minutes on one side, turn them, and fifteen minutes on the other on a 200degree heat
take them out if they burn, obviously
serve with BBQ beans (we added a drop of chipotle rub into our beans before cooking), fries (We use this little potato chipper to make decent shaped fries in a jiffy! Only £7), corn if you want and coleslaw if you can be bothered to make your own (syn-free coleslaw recipe here)

Enjoy!

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Posted by

chubbycubs

Posted on

April 7, 2015

Posted under

breast, budget, classics, one-pot, poultry, recipe card, rice, syn free, travel

mushy pea curry

Where to start? Firstly, if you’re here for the recipe, have a good scroll down and you’ll find a recipe for good old mushy pea curry, which although it does look like someone’s already eaten it for you, is tasty, cheap and slimming. Trust me. If you’re here for the long haul, enjoy the first part of my rambling about our recent few days away in Ireland…

You may remember me mentioning that we had no plans and were planning a last-minute holiday away wherever we could find a cheap deal to a decent place? Well let me tell you – don’t bother. The only available flights were to places which you just know will be full of bald English men with red shoulders reading The Sun and eating full English breakfasts at 4pm. Bleugh. I don’t like flying – the thought of flying somewhere with such little reward just ruled going abroad at last-minute completely out. So, the night before we set off, we booked a holiday cottage in the absolute middle of nowhere in the Ring of Kerry, Ireland, and at 5pm the next day our car was packed, Paul had been picked up and we were on our way in no time at all. I normally hide away the sat-nav for reasons below but intrigue got the better of me as to how far I had to drive and the sat-nav was plugged in and on the dash within ten minutes.

Sat-navs are great in principle but I always end up putting mine sulkily away in the glove box after approximately five minutes. We bought a proper fancydan version in the sales but see, I hate being told what to do when I’m driving and struggle with the authority it commands in the car. I always have good intentions of listening to it and indeed, it’s never failed to guide us where we need to go, but I still have an inherent distrust and because Paul always sides with the sat-nav, it causes arguments. Plus, it only has two male voices, Daniel and Kevin. Kevin is a sarcastic knobhead so he immediately gets turned off but Daniel has been upgraded to this weird breathy version who almost whispers the commands at us like some robotic milk-tray man. I don’t know how appropriate it is to have a semi whilst clumsily navigating around the Bangor ring-road but there you have it.

We arrived in Bangor at around ten and, due to being full of wine gums and other sweets, went straight to bed. We’d elected to stay at a Premier Inn but this is always a mistake – not because they’re uncomfortable, quite the opposite actually – I’ve always had a great night’s sleep at a Premier Inn – but rather I spend all night scheming and plotting about how I might make my money back under their ‘Guaranteed Good Night’s Sleep’ promise. The problem with that is, I’ve always found the staff so nice and disarming that I immediately become charming and submissive and don’t dare mention any perceived problem with the room. Bah. We sped down towards Holyhead in the morning and we were at the dock in plenty of good time to sit and wait in the gales and mist before it was time to board the ferry.

Oh! Before I carry on with the tale, let me mention Paul’s idea of breakfast. As we didn’t have time to hoover up an all-you-can-eat-breakfast at the Premier Inn, I bustled him into Holyhead ASDA with the direction of getting a breakfast snack for us. This is what he came back with.

Haway. In case you can’t make it out, it was a little packet which contained a cheesestring, a wrap so dry I could have shaved my three-day-stubble with it, a sachet of knock-off tomato ketchup and (unlike in the picture above, which I’ve nicked from somewhere to illustrate my post) some sliced rolled chicken. It was unspeakably vile. I opened the packet and I swear it hissed when I pulled the lid back. The car smelt like someone had shit out a corpse on the back seat. We got fifty yards down the road before I pulled over and Paul, now with a considerable flea in his ear, had to dispose of the ‘meal’ in the nearest bin. Honestly Holyhead, get your act together. I had tears in my eyes as we drove past McDonalds to the ferry port, let me tell you. Anyway…

You know what I love about the English? The very second they perceive anyone to be at any sort of advantage to them, they start bitching – and this is compounded if they’ve paid extra. Let me explain. Paul and I paid an extra £10 each way on the ferry to be given priority boarding, disembarkation (is that a needlessly clumsy word or what) and access to the Stena lounge. It is the ferry equivalent of first class and we only bought it because the seats in the lounge looked moderately comfortable and there was promise of free snacks. Accordingly, when we drove into the port, we were asked to drive into one of two ‘Premium’ lanes. We parked up and had the windows down only to hear the whisker-faced woman, putting the Tena in Stena Line, in the Audi (shock! horror!) to my right immediately start bitching to her husband that ‘they had paid extra’ and ‘why where we in the second premium lane and they weren’t’ blah blah. He looked amazingly henpecked. She went on and on and on about the perceived injustice of people boarding ahead of her and only stopped when I put my window back up and we both started laughing at her. I think her mood soured further when we did indeed board first – a whole lane ahead of her – and I gave her and her watery-eyed husband a dainty handwave as we drove past. Stupid old mare that she was – it’s not as if those in Premium were going to sailing over on the fucking QE2 and the rest of the passengers were sailing on a floating door.

Once we were loaded onto the ferry, we dashed up the stairs to be the first couple into the ‘Stena Plus’ lounge. Part of the ‘premium’ booking is access to this lounge which is controlled by a surly miss and a set of glass doors. We had to give our surname and were ushered in to avail ourselves of the free snacks, which consisted of those little packet of shortbread that you get in cheap hotels and a few cans of Diet Coke. There were some bottles of wine available for those who were already shaking and slurring at 9am in the morning, plus tea and coffee. Once they had allowed all of the steerage passengers onboard and shut them behind the metal gates, we were on our way.

And good lord, what a crossing. We were warned by the captain (via the ship’s loudspeaker, not personally – I mean we’d only paid an extra tenner and that had to cover the forty cans of Pepsi that I’d secreted away into my rucksack) that the crossing was going to be rough due to the strong winds and turbulent seas, and he wasn’t kidding. The Stena Plus lounge is situated at the front of the ferry and the waves were cresting over the top of the prow as it bobbed up and down. It was awful – it was all I could do to eat my cooked breakfast and fret about whether I’d put the handbrake on, envisioning my car rolling around on the car deck and the weight of our car-snacks causing a frightful Herald of Free Enterprise incident. It was a long four hours – I spent most of it snaffling snacks and gambling in the arcades. Oh and another moan! If you have kids, you don’t automatically have the right to use any machine you want or to have people who are altogether more sensible than you to get out of the way just so your crusty-faced little shitmachine can ‘have a go at driving’. I know, awful, but some pompous little knobhead with a bristly-little tache and his child took a look into the arcade, saw Paul and I playing Mario Kart Arcade Edition and said to his child ‘DON’T WORRY DARLING, YOU’LL BE ABLE TO HAVE A TURN ON THESE KIDS MACHINES WHEN THESE FULLY GROWN MEN HAVE FINISHED’. Honest to God, fully grown men. It was all I could do not to pick up his child and toss him into the Irish sea. I wouldn’t mind but we all know that children don’t actually play the machines, they just sit making silly noises and taking up space. Frankly, parents should be made to lock their children in the car and they can spend the ferry crossing on the car-deck, well out of the way. The ferry journey passed, eventually.

Now we managed to get all the way to the Ring of Kerry via Holyhead, a ferry and seemingly eight years of twisty roads absolutely fine and without incident, and we were a mile away from our cottage when it all went wrong. We arrived at the right ‘area’ and that’s where we were told to switch off the sat-nag (typo intended) and open up the owner’s own directions which would guide us merrily to our cottage in enough time to get the hot-tub going and allow us an hour to flick disdainfully through her CD collection and make snide comments about her glassware.

Well, did they fuck. For a start, she had worded the directions as though as we were in Lord of the Rings, all ‘go over the brow of the hill and make a turn (which direction? which hill?)’ and ‘drive on until you feel a chill’. They were crap. You need to understand how remote the area was – imagine in the pitch black trying to find a remote cottage with not so much as a blinking light anywhere to be seen. It took us three hours – THREE HOURS – of steaming around the countryside along farm tracks screaming and swearing at the perceived injustice of it all. I like to think what the poor horse in the field nearby thought of it all when he saw our car appearing over the crest of a hill for the eightieth time and the last few syllables of a swearing tirade against the Irish, Tom Tom, cottages, Citroen, Enya and Guinness as we sped past. No wonder he got his revenge later in the holiday (that’ll be in part 2).

Completely lost and on the verge of driving the car into a peat bog and setting it on fire, we found an isolated little cottage with a light on and knocked on the door. Now imagine that. You’re a lady, alone, cooking your evening meal, when two burly bald blokes come mincing up your track and braying on the door asking for directions to ‘Cum Bag’ (which was our approximate pronunciation of the name of the cottage, which was in Gaelic). The poor lass probably thought she was starring in her own Vera adventure. She took an age to find directions but eventually, helpfully, she sent us on our way. Buoyed with confidence, we shot off and within five minutes we’d taken another wrong turn, driven the car up a forty-five degree incline into a farmer’s field and were left spinning the car around in the mud in the pitch black, with Paul outside of the car bellowing directions on where I should reverse and me unable to hear him as I was revving the engine so hard out of sheer, unadulterated anger. Haha. Just to add a cherry on top of this my reverse sensors were blaring away making out there was an obstacle behind me until we realised it was mud on the sensor.

Aaah. We headed back to the road, sulked for a good fifteen minutes and then decided to go back to the start and try following her directions one final time. We were at the cottage, parked up and steaming, within ten minutes. God knows how, why or what we were doing wrong, but we managed it without a hitch. I was fizzing and it seems like a good point to stop the tale and move onto the recipe…

Mushy pea curry. Yes, I know, it sounds revolting, but most people will eat a chickpea dahl and this is quite like that. I’ve added chicken, somewhat unnecessarily, but that’s me all over. It’s syn free and you’ll be able to get a good few chapters of my book completed as you sit on the thunderbox firing this out for the next two weeks.

Delicious.

to make mushy pea curry, you’ll need:

two tins of mushy peas, one tin of baked beans, a few mushrooms, a tin of chopped tomatoes, two onions, three garlic gloves (minced), a chicken breast, a red pepper, 1tsp of hot chilli powder and two tbsp of curry powder, as hot as you like. You’ll also need a decent pan. You’ll also need a drop of oil and some salt.

For the rice, you’ll need long-grain white rice. Duh.

to make mushy pea curry, you should:

slice the onions nice and thin – use a mandolin! My mandolin has dropped again in price – now only £10, and it’ll save you hours. Plus, who needs the end of their fingers anyway? EH?
do the same with the pepper
cut the chicken up into small pieces and the mushrooms into slices
put the tiny drop of oil into the pan and chuck the onion, mushroom and peppers in there with a bit of salt, and on a medium heat, leave them to sweat down a little
after ten minutes or so, pull maybe a quarter of the onion/pepper out and set it aside in a dish – you’ll use this for your rice;
throw the chicken into the hot pan and cook it hard and fast on a high heat;
now throw in everything else (bar the rice and the quarter of the onion mix, obviously) and mix well – leave it to simmer for half an hour or so
for the rice, add a cup full of rice (literally a cup full – take a cup out of the cupboard, fill it with rice, tip that into a pan with the onion/pepper you set aside, using the same cup add two cups of water into the pan, bring to the boil, turn it down to simmer and leave it for around fourteen minutes – covered with a tight-fitting lid – on a gentle simmer. Tasty, fluffy rice
serve when thickened and tasty!

Enjoy!

twochubbycubs

slimming, sassy recipes

Tag Archives: chicken

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