Here for the pear prosciutto and gorgonzola rocket salad? You fancy bastard! It’s the short post tonight – but can I least offer up a few words of encouragement? Every now and then a meal is worth spending a few syns on. See in the picture below? There’s cheese and there’s fat on the ham but do you know, it’ll do you no harm. Have it, syn it and enjoy it. Life’s too short: remember our views on making gravy from mushy peas? Apply the same logic here! Of course, if you’re not a fan of cheese that smells like a bellend, pears that make your teeth itch or capers which serve no purpose, leave them out! To the recipe, then.
to make pear prosciutto and gorgonzola rocket salad you will need:
200g mixed salad leaves
200g rocket
2 pears, peeled cored and sliced (or 6 quartered figs, or 2 white peaches, sliced)
8 slices parma ham (4 syns)
60g parmesan shavings (2x HeA)
100g gorgonzola, cut into chunks (16 syns)
500g tomatoes, halved
1 tbsp capers
handful of basil
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
to make pear prosciutto and gorgonzola rocket salad you should:
mix it all together
no really, that’s all there is to it
We’ve had a glut of good salads recently – partly because we’re trying to eat lighter meals but also because I’m sick of eating boring lunches. Make a little box of this up the day before and you’ll be looking forward to it all day. You could even team it with the tomato salad we posted the other day and have a right posh night of it!
Classy, eh? Fancy slumming it for a bit? Click one of the buttons below to go straight to some of our other recipes!
Classy, eh? Fancy slumming it for a bit? Click one of the buttons below to go straight to some of our other recipes!
Here for the pork fillet and cheesy mash gratin? Good choice, it’s a bloody marvel. But here’s the thing – I can’t buy a pork tenderloin without blushing like I’ve had my first kiss. There’s something attractive about a long length of pink meat, just saying. But I do wish Paul would exercise the same level of shame and control when it comes to shopping because god help him, our house is absolutely awash with things we don’t need. Yesterday’s purchase was a cracker. Not literally, I’d have swallowed that before Mags could shine the Fat-Symbol into the skies to summon the consultants. Let me explain. But first, if you’re getting yourself clammy because I’m not getting to the recipe, then please, don’t fret: I’ve added a twochubbycubs shortcut. Just click on dried up slag and you’ll be taken straight there!
Last night I thought I was going mad. We’d come home from our various activities, had our tea (posted below) and then Paul had to go into work and drop off some papers. Listen, it’s fine, I know that sounds like the classic ‘he’s having an affair’ line but it’s Paul, the laziest man alive – it takes all of his energy and willpower just to open his bumhole to fart. So imagine me sitting at our computer typing up a recipe, looking to all the world like Angela Lansbury with a shaved head and bigger tits, when I become aware of this very faint crackle. It sounded like when you put an electrical cable into a socket but it’s not quite in there. I turned down my Archers omnibus and set about trying to identify the mystery sound, thinking we were minutes away from the dishwasher bursting into flame or the walls of the house crashing down. To give you more of an idea, imagine a tiny Geiger counter clicking in a corridor, or a family of mice putting up shelves in the skirting board.
Well, I was bloody demented. I went from room to room, barely able to hear it but it being just loud enough to get right on my tits. Actually, speaking of tits, I did think it might be my sunburnt chest peeling and cracking like a dry ploughed field, but no, the rack was all in order, though perhaps a little red. I unplugged the TV, the computer, the router, the Nest, the fridge, the lot. You may remember that I have health anxiety? Well in that long drawn out HOUR I’d diagnosed myself with an inner ear infection, schizophrenia, vertigo and obviously, something had crawled in my ear and was making itself a nice home on my brain-stem – and listen, I grew up on cheap burgers and mystery mince, I know I’m long overdue CJD. You’ll doubtless see me stumbling around a sluice grate with a shitty arse in a decade’s time.
Anyway, in walks Paul, full of fat and good cheer, and when I inform him of my lapse into insanity, he leads me into the corner of the living room and points out his latest purchase – a bloody Woodwick candle which ‘crackles like a real fire’. Does it shite! It sounds like someone furiously tapping out a reply to an argument on a Blackberry in a locked toilet. I mean, of all the things you’d think to check for odd noises, a bloody candle is never going to be high on the list, is it? To top it off, he’d replaced the lovely Seychelles White Company candle with this abomination that smells of – wait for it now – Rhubarb and Radish. Why the fuck would anyone want a room that smells like Rhubarb and Radish? Who am I, Tatty Bogle? Haway man. I wouldn’t have minded so much if it was a lovely, subtle flavour – when I get frustrated, or irritated or… angry, I come up here and I just smell all my candles and it just…goes away – but it smells like the air-freshener in an unlicensed taxi.
Then, for good measure, it bloody crackles! Why? At what development meeting did they decide they needed to add volume to a candle? It’s like putting a handle on a cat or wallpaper that loudly announces when a bus goes past. It hisses and splutters and futters and spits but by god, it doesn’t crackle. As the cherry on the radish and rhubarb cake, to make it work, the wick is wooden and in the shape of a cross and as a result, it creates a ridiculously bouncy, jittery flame – so not only do you go slowly insane because of the noise but you’re also risking a bloody seizure having it lit. You’ll be glad to know that this £22 candle has been banished into the cupboard, only to be taken out if the world ends and we need illumination.
Maybe I’m just sensitive to noise – misophonic, don’t you know – or perhaps my ears are just on high alert from going to the cinema on Friday and it feeling like they’d decided to put a live showing of the movie on my fucking eardrum. More on that later. The noise I especially hate is when common people scrape their knives and forks across the plate whilst they scrabble to get the last crumb. Just stop it. It cuts through me like a chilli-covered cock.
Honestly though, I can tolerate listening to my cat tonguing two layers of skin of its own arsehole in the night as I lay awake, I can listen to Joe Pasquale on the radio, hell, I can sit through two hours of people explaining they’ve put on weight because they’re either bunged up with faeces or sloughing. I’m tough. But there’s one sound I can’t stand, and, I’m sorry, but I’m now going to leave you with something that will change your life forever. It’s a sound that, once heard, you’ll hear over and over, in adverts, unimaginative TV, news reports, video games and soon, your nightmares. You’ll wake sweating at the birth of a new day with this ringing in your ears and murder on your mind. It is, I think, the most singularly annoying sound you can imagine:
Tell me I’m wrong, I dare you. I mean christ, even the video thumbnail looks like Pennywise the dancing clown. Now it’s all you’ll hear. Listen out for it on the TV and remember, it was the twochubbycubs who wrecked your ears for other men.
Now, one final bit of admin before we get to the pork fillet recipe – we’ve added sharing buttons back onto each recipe and page! You’ll see them – they look like this:
You can now pin, facebook like, share, message, all sorts of tut – just click the buttons! It helps us to spread, like a dose of the clap.
to make pork fillet and cheesy mash gratin you will need:
this recipe is from Jamie Oliver’s new book ‘5 Ingredients’, which you can buy from Amazon here – we love it, not least because you don’t need a lot of ingredients (who knew!) and the recipes are simple!
to make pork fillet and cheesy mash gratin you should:
preheat the grill to high
chop the potatoes into 3cm chunks (you don’t need to peel them) and chuck into a pan of boiling water, cook with the lid on for about 12 minutes or until they’re tender
meanwhile, heat a large frying pan over a high heat and add a little oil
sprinkle a little salt and pepper over the pork and add to the hot pan
sear on each side for a total of about 4 minutes, but turn it regularly
remove the pork from the pan and set aside
add the sage to the same pan and stir about for no more than ten seconds, then remove from the pan
drain the potatoes and mash well – a potato ricer does all the hard work for you and will leave your mash super-smooth!
add half of the cheese to the mash and crack in the egg and stir quickly until it’s mixed in
next, tip the mash into a large frying pan (or grill-safe dish) and push all the way to the edges
sprinkle over the rest of the cheese and plop the pork on top
cook under the grill for 15-20 minutes
remove from the heat and drop the prosciutto slices around the pork, it doesn’t need to look fancy, and then sprinkle over the sage leaves
pop under the grill for another two minutes or until the pork is fully cooked
eat!
How nice does that look?! We’ve got plenty more just waiting for you to try, all you have to do is click one of the buttons below to go straight to ’em!
Today has been an exhilarating day, given we slept in until twelve (at least we were silent at 11am, though Paul probably let one go in the silence as he did have roasted aubergine pasta last night) (we did pay our respects properly, later, privately) and then fannied about ironing and cleaning until we realised it was almost 3pm and we hadn’t planned our meals for the week ahead or done the big-shop. Seriously, inside our fridge at 3pm was a limp leek and a can of Tab, and no amount of fromage bloody frais was going to make that into an interesting meal. So, clothes hurtled on, recipes dug out and a list planned and we were in the car within 15 minutes. Good work.
I have to say, we stopped going to Tesco about a year ago because we found the produce to be poor and the prices to be high, but we’ve recently been pleasantly surprised – the Tesco in Kingston Park has been done out and seems a lot fresher, although who the fuck would eat at the newly opened Giraffe restaurant opened in the supermarket? Who, in this county of wonderful country pubs and fantastic eateries thinks that what they really need with their microwaved pasta dish is the soothing sounds of sunday shoppers, bellowing and mooing their way to the whoops aisle, red-faced shitty-arsed children bawling away in the trolleys and a Metro thundering past every ten minutes in a streak of electrical fire? EH? Answer me that.
Firstly, CRIME FRAICHE? For heaven’s sake. I apologise profusely. My iPad autocorrecting me into madness again.
I can’t actually remember where I found this recipe, only that it’s been in my notebook for a while to try out. I know it’s a Yotam Ottolenghi recipe and I could find the source if I looked, but I’m a lazy lazy man. This is part of our ongoing mission to not get bogged down in the ‘same old’ recipes – trying something new at least four times a week.
to make roasted aubergine Persian pasta you will need:
spaghetti, three big aubergines, 0% greek yoghurt, weight watchers creme fraiche, lemon juice, dried mint, saffron (optional), garlic, cumin, salt and pepper.
to make roasted aubergine Persian pasta you should:
first the aubergine – prick them all over and pop them into the oven for 1 hour. After this, take them out, leave to cool, scoop out the flesh inside and discard the skin. Pop the flesh into a colander and give it a push around with a spoon just to break it up and drain the liquid. Put to one side and leave to cool.
If you’re using the saffron, pop a couple of strands in a cup with two tablespoons of warm water to infuse.
Next, put your spaghetti on to cook – assuming it’ll take about fifteen minutes – but feel free to stagger these stages if you’re a little wary of doing too many things at once in the kitchen. I know I am. Pop the creme fraiche (I synned 2 syns for 50g) and the parmesan (50g of grated parmasan – again I synned two syns – based on using up my healthy extra on the cheese and then 4 syns for 25g extra, which is being strict) in and whisk on a medium heat until it is smooth. Allow to cool for a moment, and add the yoghurt, and keep on whisking but this time on a low heat – if the mixture is too hot and you’re not whisking, it’ll separate and that’s it, you’ll need to start again. Once smooth, set aside.
Next (or at the same time, if you’re quick at chopping onions like me), dice your onion into tiny pieces, and saute in a pan with the cumin seeds (say a teaspoon) – hot enough to get the oil out of the seeds, mind. Knock the heat down when the onions are golden, add the aubergine flesh, two tablespoons of lemon juice, a bit of garlic, plenty of salt and a few good twists of black pepper. Cook for ten minutes or so.
Once your spaghetti is cooked to your liking (and for gods sake, cook it properly, don’t cook it to death – you should be able to slurp the spaghetti, not sieve it through your teeth), chuck it back in the empty pan, pour some dried mint (or if you’re feeling decadent, a teaspoon of olive oil with dried mint infused in it – 6 syns) through it and plate up. Add the aubergine mixture on top, then the creamy sauce, then some more mint and salt on top. If you’ve made saffron water, put a few drops on the top – it adds a very discreet flavour but it’s worth it.
extra-easy:yup – easily one third of the dish is the roasted aubergine, so worry ye not. Syn free on green too, but not a red recipe. But let’s not overegg the pudding anyway, I’m definitely an extra easy guy.
top tips: you don’t have to do this, but I think it is worth the extra three syns to use olive oil in your spaghetti – especially with the mint infused within it. It just adds an extra layer, but I can understand why people are relunctant. But if you use a good oil, you’re laughing. Oh, and don’t buy the aubergines that are bagged up, you want to get the loose ones – much cheaper. Look for aubergines about as big as your hand, as the bigger the aubergine, the more bitter it’ll be (if that’s not a link to us fatties I don’t know what it is).
Please don’t be put off by the fact you have to use a few syns – I say this every single time, but this diet isn’t about being super-strict, it’s about enjoying your food and making more of an effort to find new things and eat well. This tastes delicious and has an unusual mix of flavours. Worth a go!
Haha! I really just wanted to outdo my last recipe title, hence the brassica. It’s really just the remainder of the sprouts from last week and sliced cauliflower. I can’t remember where I found the recipe for cooking pork in tea, but it works – and again, it’s something different!
to make pork seared in black tea you will need:
pork chops with all their fat cut off (remember, better to buy two good chops than four cheap ones), sweet potato, normal potatoes, cauliflower, sprouts, black tea, an apple, salt and balsamic vinegar. A griddle pan and the ricer will make it so much easier!
to make pork seared in black tea you should:
get the veg sorted first – cut the sprouts in half, pull the cauliflower apart and slice the florets (and the stalk) into good sized chunks. Coat with a good sprinkling of salt and balsamic vinegar and put them in the oven on 190 degrees for 30 mins, giving them a shake halfway through. For the mash, cut up the potato and sweet potato into chunks, don’t bother peeling, and after 25 mins boiling push them through the ricer (which will catch the skins and give you perfect, creamy mash) and put it to one side.
For the pork chops – add two strong tea-bags to about 100ml of water and leave to steep. After five minutes, take the bags out, add the apple (thinly sliced) and boil for ten minutes. Meanwhile, sear the pork in the griddle pan – 5 mins or so on each side should do it. Then tip the tea and apple into the griddle pan and cook on high for a good five minutes to reduce the glaze down and to coat the pork. Serve quickly. Tasty.
extra-easy: definitely – the addition of sprouts and cauliflower take care of your superfree third, but there’s also sweet potato in the mash. Some say you should syn the apple as you’re cooking it, but I don’t bother – it’s an apple, after all, and to me there’s no difference between cooking one apple or eating it. Fair enough if I was making apple sauce but…so – syn free all around!
top tips: this is another recipe with an unusual ingredient – tea. But it adds a lovely earthy flavour to the pork, and cooking it in the glaze keeps the meat moist, which can often be a problem. To me, this is the key to Slimming World – eat healthily and try new things. You’ll never be hungry, you’ll open your horizons and actually enjoy the food you’re eating.
LORD KNOWS why the recipe has come out all weird. I’ll fix that later.
I have made the fatal error of going to my car to type this recipe up on my lunch break, and it is absolutely chucking it down with rain. This means I need to dash, wobble and blunder my way back to the office upon which I will burst through the doors looking like a drowned fat cat. That’s the problem with being fat. Take a coat anywhere and you’ll end up too hot, but forget your coat and you end up looking like a harbour buoy that has washed in. Ah well.
Yesterday, with Paul away until late at a Young Marxist thing, I decided to fake it upon myself to make a fancy tea. See?
Swish! All this came about as I happened across a new recipe in the slimming world magazine, and thought I could give it a go. I went to Tesco with the intention of just buying some potatoes and ended up spending over £100 on vodka, pickled ginger, seaweed, shirts and a box of condoms. I’d love to know what the cashier thought I had planned for the evening. Nevertheless, this turned out to be one of the easiest recipes I’ve done so far, with very minimal skill needed bar some time management. So, without further delay….
I know that normally I break it down neatly in this section, but I am a bit pushed for time. The ingredients are simple enough:
to make gammon and egg potato rosti you will need:
two peeled potatoes, one onion, two gammon steaks, two eggs, spinach, asparagus, tomatoes and fry light.
to make gammon and egg potato rosti you should:
Grate the potatoes coarser and pop it into a tea towel and squeeze the moisture out. Really go at this, because the less liquid in your rosti, the tastier the end result. Mix with the grated onion and season well. Shape into circles and put on a roasting tray sprayed with a little frylight or olive oil. Cook for a good thirty minutes on 190 degrees until they are grown and crunchy. A little tip for you – you may remember me talking about a burger place that I bought from Lakeland a few recipes ago. You can use this to create perfectly round rosti too! Just squeeze, shape and press. After 20 minutes put your tomatoes in alongside the rostis to roast. Then, put your gammon onto the griddle pan and cook it to your satisfaction. Set aside to keep warm and using the same griddle pan place your asparagus onto the heat to char. The final thing to do is to put all of your spinach in a pan with a drop of water and steam until wilted down. Then press as much water as you can out of the spinach and set aside. Once you have everything ready it is just a case of assembling on the plate to your satisfaction and serving. If you feel the need to be a pretentious prick like me had a swell of balsamic vinegar as that makes everything look good…especially in the 90s…
This meal has no syns and if you spend a bit of time arranging on the plate to look nice you’ll enjoy all the more. I sometimes think that slimming world recipes can be a bit bland but this looks and tastes amazing. Hopefully there will not be too many errors in this post but I am dictating rather than typing so God knows what Apple make of my Geordie accent.
