Tonight’s recipe is Fisherman’s Burger – basically a breaded cod fillet in a bun with homemade tartare sauce. I’m not kidding – I’m not a massive fan of fish, but this was just tremendous! And so easy to make, give it a go. Here’s a recipe card:
ingredients: cod fillets, skinless and boneless, lettuce, gherkins, two small wholemeal buns, four small slices of wholemeal bread, extra light mayo, fat free fromage frais, dill, parsley, salt and pepper, garlic, onion and gherkins.
recipe: easy! blitz the sliced bread, garlic, parsley and dill to make crumbs, dip the fish in egg, then into the crumbs. Pop it in the oven for fifteen minutes until crunchy. Whack it into a bun with crunchy lettuce and tartare sauce as made above. Serve with chips, mushy peas and lemon.
extra-easy:it’s three and a half syns per burger, and you’ll need to use your healthy extra B for the bun. If you’re having two, syn the second bun for 6.5 syns. It’s worth it though! You could make a salad to go with the bun to up your superfree though. I think (and I may be wrong) that the syns come from the crumbs, but most of that stays in the tray so I’d actually say it was 1.5 syn per burger. Bloody go for it! Fish is an excellent food – if it swims, it slims.
I appreciate it might look like Paul and I exist on tomatoes, corn and courgettes, but it’s sheer happenstance that we’ve had this type of meal a few nights on the trot. I’m growing courgettes in my back garden, which sounds like I’ve got piles, but no, real courgettes, so we’ve got to use them up. Just a quick post tonight, because we’ve spent the entire day playing Forza Horizon 2 on the Xbox One (to the point where Paul’s finger has swollen up – he keeps pointing it at me like Alan Sugar does in The Apprentice).
OK, the recipe!
ingredients:four good quality pork chops – the meat is the star of the show, so don’t be a cheapskate – but here’s a tip. Pork is nearly always the one meat that gets reduced the most, so if you scrabble around in the bargain bins at the supermarket, you might find a perfect cut. We buy all of our meat from the butchers in Dobbies of Ponteland, and he’s fantastic. You’ll need a piri piri mix, lovies, onion, passata, chopped tomatoes, sweetcorn and sliced peppers. We chose black rice for this recipe but you could serve it with any old tosh. You can buy black rice from Sainsburys – it tastes a lot more nutty and chewy than normal rice, and doesn’t look great, but give it a go
recipe: dietise your pork – get all the fat cut off, and put it in the bin. Don’t give it to your cat, it’ll make them poorly. Seal it on a high heat, chuck it in a roasting tray. Slice up all your veg, olives and peppers, layer that on the top. Mix up the tomatoes, stock cubes, spices, water and passata in a jug, layer it over the top. Stick it in the oven for 30 mins. After 10 mins, get your rice away, and 5 mins before the pork is done, drain and let your rice steam a little. I tip it into a sieve and sit that over the drained water so it steams lightly. 2 cups of water/1 cup of rice ratio. Jamie Oliver taught me that via his book.
extra-easy:yes – very much so. As long as you’ve trimmed off the fat, nearly everything in this recipe (bar the rice) is a super-free food, so it’ll be great as a boost. It’s also a piece of piss to make, just chucking everything in a roasting tray and setting it away.
As a final note before we go back to gaming, I apologise for the photography. I’m a decent writer, Paul is a great cook, but no matter what we do, our food looks like shite when we take a photo! Trust me, it normally tastes so much better than it looks…
First of all, I’ve learned more today about vaginal pessaries today than I ever thought possible. Decency forbids me saying more but jaysus.
You know, it must be so easy to make a Gordon Ramsey cookery show. He turns up, you get a few shots of his face looking like an unmade bed, he huffs and puffs, they paint the eatery a shade of cream and chuck a few linen tablecloths around, and you’re done. His new show has to be the cheapest programme yet but still quite watchable, if only to laugh at posh people falling on their arse.
Anyway, that’s not why we are here, is it? Just a quick one from me today, as yet again I have been working late so it’s a quick supper. This is a perfect quick meal because you’re essentially just roasting veg, boiling pasta and adding a creamy sauce. You can beef it out with the usual superfree heroes – peppers, onions, most veg, peas, any old shite you can in the vegetable drawer. Recipe…
to make syn free ratatouille, you’ll need:
Paul and I are going to have a ban on chips next week, but they’re so easy with an Actifry!
Not going to lie, I’m not expecting to lose next week, I have done nothing but pick at sweets all day because my desk is surrounded by them and, working late, means I get so hungry! There’s no reason of course to pick at sweets, so next week I’m going to cover a few snacks.
Anyway. I’ve got to go to bed early as I need to be up again at 7am to take the car for a new tyre. I know what you’re thinking, it surprises me too that I’m so fat with this rock and roll lifestyle! Hey, do me a favour though if you’re enjoying this blog, and share share share! My readership is creeping up sons aim thankful to each of you for that! Sleep well.
A minor catastrophe this morning. Having been asked to go into work early, I find that my wonderful work colleague has kindly left me a pain au chocolat and croissant on my desk, still warm and freshly baked as compensation for the early start. Now, if I had wanted to be a rude arse, I would have declined and stuck to my banana (er, as in the fruit, not a euphemism for wanking) but because you ‘fit Slimming World into your life’ I took the pain au chocolat and enjoyed every last buttery morsel. My colleagues are used to me spraying crumbs everywhere when I talk so that was no great problem. 12 syns! But worth it. I did give my croissant away, and spent the next twenty minutes crying curled up in a foetal positions in the gents. Generosity doesn’t come easy to me! Anyway, today’s recipe.
BTW, I think Paul got sick of me shouting SAAAAAGALOOOOO like Olivia Newton-John’s Xanadu about four minutes into cooking. He should be grateful I didn’t come wheeling into the kitchen dressed in Bacofoil and wearing skates.
I apologise for the standard of photos in this recipe card. It’s quite hard to make a curry look appetising when you’re using fromage frais rather than oil! It does, unfortunately, look like someone has been sick into my Le Creuset pot. Let me tell you now, if that happened they’d find themselves detesticled quicker than you can say boiled eggs. Both the saag aloo and the korma are completely syn-free on extra easy and I’ve included the spice mixes after the recipe as they’re quite comprehensive. My favourite spice? Ginger. Wrecked the fucking group when she left, mind – Holler was NOTHING.
to make syn free chicken korma
The full recipe can be found in Slimming World’s fakeaways recipe book, which is genuinely really good. Both the korma and saag aloo are a case of preparing the meat or potatoes, adding spices, adding stock, boiling down and for the korma, a couple of dollops of fromage frais (let the sauce cool before adding or it’ll curdle and look like a pavement pizza).
It’s worth getting yourself a good range of spices if you haven’t already. They’re a great way to add flavour without adding syns to a meal, and a small amount goes a long, long way.
warning: take heed of the warning about the fromage frais, because it looks bloody rotten if it curdles. You can still eat it but there’s no guarantee your body won’t think it’s already tried it and chucked it. Nothing else to say here, you can’t go too wrong with a curry as long as you’re not pouring bloody Gold Top into it.
extra-easy: completely syn-free. chuck it full of peppers, onion, tomatoes and chilli to boost your superfree.
double warning:Paul accidentally used red-hot chilli peppers instead of the milder version, so that’ll be me on the toilet firing a chocolate laser out of my nipsy tomorrow. Cheers love!
eight syns for the lot, but it’s worth noting that you can make this meal entirely syn-free by only having one burger and forgoing the condiments, but remember, you have syns – and what is life if you can’t syn it on a meal? I hardly drink anymore since turning a fetching yellow in college (a gentle mustard is how I’d describe myself) so I choose to use the syns on pepping up a meal every now and then.
Here’s the recipe, then:
these burgers are the shizzle though. We call them Geordie Boorgahs, because Paul finds my geordie accent hilarious, even though I’ve barely got one. Before he moved to Newcastle he thought everyone up here spoke like Byker Grove (pronounced By-ka Gruurve). I think he thinks I’m Burger Barry, as evidenced here on Harry Hill.
ingredients: lean mince, onion powder, salt and pepper, mixed herbs, garlic powder – you can chuck any old shite in really (really channeling that Nigella lexicography now) but that works for us, for the coleslaw it’s half a red cabbage, two carrots and a red onion, mixed with as much FAT-FREE fromage frais and lemon juice as you dare, and for the wedges just throw some sweet potato wedges into the Actifry of Wonder.
recipe for burgers:add meat mince to bowl with seasonings, blend by hand, mince by nature, shape into little burgers and stick them under the grill until they’re brown. open your buns, slap the meat in, add mustard and ketchup, we add tomato, onions, gherkins and rocket to ours and stick a wooden skewer through the lot to hold it together.
recipe for coleslaw: painstakingly shred your cabbage, carrot, onion and fingertips into a bowl, or cheat and use the grating function on your fancypants Magimix whilst mopping your brow and having a fit of the vapours. Add your wet ingredients, season to taste.
recipe for wedges: now come on.
extra-easy:yes – but be careful. We use our Healthy Extra A choice for the cheese (28g) across the two burgers and our healthy extra B for ONE breadbun. If you’re greedy like us, you’ll have two burgers, so you’ll need to syn your second bun – 6.5 syns. Add two syns for your condiments as long as you’re not someone who is common enough to drown your food in ketchup, and that comes to 8.5 syns for the meal. You could very easily have one bun, not bother with condiments and forgo the cheese, but I mean, haway. You could pull up the carpet and chew on that, but it doesn’t mean you should!
warning:careful with the mince. 5% fat or under is syn-free. You’ll find that extra lean mince has been phased out thanks to the Illuminati or something, so double check the fat content, because anything higher and the syn bounces right up!
top tips:you can really go to town with gussying these burgers up – why not add an egg (syn-free, fried in Frylight), or bacon (fat cut off, grilled), or a big old mushroom, or sliced peppers? In fact, the more you put onto the burger, the fuller you’ll be, so you might not NEED two burgers…
We’ve been weighed – I’m going to post the results when my new copy of Photoshop arrives and I can fanny about for an hour making a little picture. As you do.
Paul’s tomato pasta, of course, which is bursting at the seams with enough cherry tomatoes to pebbledash a small house with. an easy two syn recipe this – here’s the card:
ingredients:pack of bacon medallions (unsmoked), a veritable United Colours of Benetton range of tomatoes, two sweet peppers, sliced olives, two onions, oxo cube, any scratty bits of pasta you have left over, spinach and reduced fat feta to serve.
recipe: finely chop the onion, chilli, bacon and peppers and chuck them in a heavy pot with a lid to sweat down, then chop the various tomatoes to different sizes and add them to the mix. Simmer for a few minutes and add two tablespoons of tomato puree and 250ml of chicken stock. leave to simmer on a reasonable heat for twenty minutes or so. Cook and drain your pasta, and do it well for goodness sake as nobody likes watery pasta. tip into the tomato mix, shake it like a Polaroid picture and serve on a bed of spinach (another superfree) and top with reduced fat feta. Paul adds anchovies to his because he’s a sick, sick man.
extra-easy: perfect extra-easy meal, given the amount of tomatoes, peppers and onions in the pot which all count as superfree foods – you could always chuck in some peas or shredded leek.
warning: we used frylight, but if you use oil to fry, make sure you syn it. one teaspoon of olive oil is 2 syns – blimey. If you decide to use bacon as we have done, buy the medallions without fat or trim everything off. finally, olives – eight black olives are one syn altogether.
top tips:although Paul doesn’t trust me enough to do this yet, after eight years of marriage, you can just chuck your pasta straight into the sauce and cook it in the sauce rather than water. It’ll make the sauce thicker and it works a lot better with decent pasta, but it’s brilliant. Try it with spaghetti when you next make spaghetti bolognese.
goodness me, that was a fancy title. I do apologise. This is what is for supper tonight.
After all that curry loaf and beans, Paul was worried that any more spice and excitement would result in us dutchovening ourselves to death tonight, so he made a simple salad for supper. By the way, we don’t normally call it supper, we’re not that posh, but I enjoyed the alliteration. The salad contains:
beetroot shavings;
pea shoots;
rocket;
cucumber;
tomatoes;
a grilled chicken breast;
reduced fat feta cheese (actually the ASDA knock off ‘Greek cheese’ haha)
an egg;
pickled onions;
sweetcorn; and
red onions.
Doesn’t it look inviting? Nice simple presentation and a good mix of flavours. Completely syn free as we are using the feta cheese as our healthy extra choice, of which we are allowed 45g of reduced fat feta.
top tip: add even more superfree foods in the form of shredded cabbage, gherkins, sliced peppers or mushrooms. Fill your plate!
warning: keep an eye on dressings. They can add a lot of syns, especially if they are creamy as opposed to vinegar dressings. It’s simple to remember, when tossing your salad, get to the vinegar strokes and stop right there. We used Hellman’s balsamic dressing at 0.5 syns per level tablespoon.
well – here’s the first recipe, a recipe for a curry loaf which rocks in at 2 syns for the lot, but serves 4. Or two fat sods, like us. Hope you like the recipe card idea, seems a bit better than reading another boring recipe. So..
to make slimming world curry loaf:
extra-easy: no syns to be found (sweet potato wedges are done in the actifry with a bit of frylight), and meet your superfree target by bulking out the curry loaf with two giant leeks instead of onion and adding tomatoes and peppers if you like them, all of which are superfree foods!
warning:make sure the chickpea dahl you select is syn-free – usually ASDA’s own brand and this natty number from Morrisons fit the bill, but a quick google search will tell you. Also, you can switch the rice out for some of those Batchelors rices, but again, check the syns – the Ainsley Harriott rice above is 1 and a 1/2 syns. The extra half syn comes from the tiny bit of olive oil I used to grease my loaf tin. And that’s not a euphemism.
top tips: you can turn the heating down in your home after this meal, as you’ll be farting like a brewery horse and the smell of said flatus will be so ripe it’ll put you off snacking, or indeed breathing, for several hours. A big loaf like this means you can take some for lunch the day after, and combined with a healthy green salad means an ultra-low syn option!
