Tag Archives: low syn

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February 12, 2015

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bacon, beef, diced beef, low syn, pork, recipe card, slow cooker

beef bourguignon

For week two, we’re going to…FRANCE!

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But before we get started, I come bearing good news. I’m sorry, that never normally happens, I’ve been under pressure, it’s that time of the month, I’m just keen etc. No, remember our bathroom problem where Paul and I were down to one tiny bulb in our bathroom, turning every trip to brush our teeth or wipe our bum into a perilous adventure fraught with tension that we’d be plunged into absolute darkness mid-pinch? Well worry no more! Our wonderful, marvellous and above all else hella-manly plumber/electrician has saved the day! But mind it took something else breaking before we called him in. Our extractor fan has clearly become so affronted and overworked trying to waft away the smell of so many rich Slimming World infused motions that it went into overdrive and refused to turn off – not even using the switch would stop it – we had to take out the fuse for the lights throughout the house before it finally shut off. Which wasn’t ideal. A plea was made to the chap who originally did our bathroom and he has been this morning and not only replaced the fan, he’s only gone and replaced all the lightbulbs! Best part is, I wasn’t even there when he did it so I didn’t need to feel all emasculated and embarrassed that we had let ourselves down so badly.

One thing I’m a smidge alarmed about is that we’ve gone from one 30w bulb in the bathroom to six 50w beauties – if I happen to find an interesting magazine article whilst I’m on the netty I’ll probably come out with a tan. It’ll make brushing my teeth like being on a mediocre game-show – I’ll just need Dale Winton mincing around behind me explaining my brushing technique to an imagined audience. Perhaps I’ve thought too much about this. Let’s move on.

It was only a short post yesterday as I was at the cinema seeing Kingsman: The Secret Service, with Phillipa who you may know from the poorly-spelled insults she occasionally leaves on the blog. Great film and heartily recommended – we laughed, we cried, she spilt her popcorn – the usual, and that was before we’d even sat down. Colin Firth plays an absolute blinder, really branching out from his upper-class-English-fop role that was all I associated him with. I admit to being distracted nearly all the way through by the girl in front of me and her shovel-faced boyfriend. She’d clearly come dressed for a bet but that’s by the by – it was her haircut which was distressing me. She’d tried to fashion it into a bun but instead ended up with this weird bowl, where, if I had been feeling bitchy enough, I could have easily have parked my 35-gallon-Diet Pepsi there to prove a point. It was upsetting purely because of my OCD – I hate things being messy. If I didn’t think I would have been either stabbed by a needle hidden in her hair or glassed by her dead-eyed lamp-post of a mate I would have reached over and tidied it up. To make things worse, the popcorn was disgusting – it tasted like they’d washed it alternately in Charlie Red and the North Sea. Didn’t stop either of us eating it though, though I had to stop once my lips started turning inside out like a slug. Luckily, Phillipa had her hunger satisfied by the ice-cream, pick and mix and salty popcorn and I wasn’t sent out to get a pig on a spit for afterwards. I do love going to the cinema and now that I can’t have my usual settee-cushion of popcorn and binbag of pick-and-mix, I don’t even need to fret about taking out a mortgage to cover it.

So: where are we on the Two Chubby Cubs European Tour, eh? Somewhere exotic, warm and unusual? No. We’re in France. I half-toyed with taking a picture of a crepe with a Gauloise stubbed out in the middle of it, but that’s not embracing our trip. It’s not like I don’t care for France, I’ve been many times and always enjoyed myself, but I once got ripped off outside the Eiffel Tower by a caricaturist and I’ve never quite forgiven the country for that. It wasn’t so much that I paid a ridiculous amount for the drawing, it was the fact that the drawing made me look like John Prescott examining his pores in a Christmas bauble. Nevertheless, here we go…

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This apparently serves four, but I’m not convinced. Admittedly we’re greedy fuckers, but there was barely enough to have seconds! Maybe factor that in when you cook…

to make beef bourguignon you will need:

100g of bacon medallions cut into strips, 400g small shallots, 700g stewing beef with all fat removed (although I used proper scrag-end beef that I found in the back of the freezer – beef you can pumice your feet with), three garlic cloves sliced thin and chopped finely, 150ml of red wine, 425ml beef stock, tomato puree, fresh rosemary and fresh thyme (use your herb garden or use dried, I’m not judging), 1 bay leaf, 50ml of vegetable stock, bit of nutmeg. I cooked this overnight in a slow cooker but you could easily do this in a casserole pot. Cook low and slow. I chucked in a few whole shallots and some pepper too because I’m just that random.

to make beef bourguignon you should:

fry off the shallots and bacon until they start going brown – chuck in the beef and get a bit of a seal on the meat. Add everything else bar the swede. Bring to the boil, then either tip it into a slow cooker and cook low and slow for eight hours or in a casserole pot in the oven for two hours. Really, the longer you leave it cooking, the more the flavours will develop and, especially if you use cheap meat, the more tender the meat will become. Mmm. Remove the bayleaf and serve with swede mash – use my singing swede method for that.

extra-easy: yes, if you serve it with the swede mash. Superfree and all that shite. Delicious!

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February 11, 2015

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breakfast, desserts, low syn, overnight oats, recipe card, snacks, sweet snacks, taster ideas, vegetarian

carrot cake overnight oats

A very quick post tonight as I have an electrician coming around and we have to go scour the house to make sure there aren’t errant bottles of lube on the bathroom shelving or other such nonsense. He’s going up in the loft and I’m not 100% sure I can say with certainty that there isn’t a box of condoms just out of reach near the loft hatch where we’ve had to hastily hide things when people come around. So that’s that. Tonight’s recipe is a delicious variation on the overnights oats recipe that seems to get so many slimmers moist at the gusset – this one combining all of the flavours of carrot cake without all of the fat – in fact, you could easily make it syn free if you want.

slimming world carrot cake overnight oats

to make carrot cake overnights you should:

tip a cup of oats (not being all American, it’s just easier to say cup because you need an equal amount of oats to almond milk – 35g is your healthy extra so match that with milk) You can use yoghurt I suppose, a toffee Muller would be nice, but I enjoy almond milk because you can have an absolute shit-ton on SW and still be within your HEA. So yeah, oats and milk into a jar. Grate a medium carrot in there and add a mashed up banana. Add half a teaspoon of cinnamon powder. Either use a tsp of brown sugar (two syns, if that) or some sweetener (bleurgh) and mix it all up. Add a few raisins if you want – 25g is 4 syns, but I added about 8 raisins so at the very most it’ll be half a syn, so I didn’t even count it. Make this syn free by using a syn-free yoghurt, sweetener and no raisins but goodness me, you might as well suck your thumb for all the taste that’ll have. Mix it all up, put it on the side if you don’t like it cold in the morning or fridge it if you prefer. Enjoy in the morning!

Some people will tell you adding a mashed banana means you have added a tweak, but I say bugger off to that. You’re eating the same amount of banana that you would if you just ate a banana normally, so there’s no extra sugar, syns or effort needed.

Enjoy! Share this recipe, it’s a really good breakfast variant and a sneaky way of getting some superfree in!

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February 10, 2015

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beef, beef mince, fakeaways, italian, low syn, quark, recipe card, speciality ingredients

saucy cheeseburger gnocchi bake

I can’t believe it – 1000 followers! Well fuck me! No don’t, actually, I don’t fancy Paul coming at me to cut my knob off for being a hussy and feeding it to the cats. But seriously, 1000 followers is pretty intense. I write this blog because I love nothing more than rambling on about nothing and sharing what we’re eating, so the fact that 1000 of you cared enough to actually follow and have me come in your inbox every day is really quite something. Oh you flirt. A big thank you for that, and to celebrate, I’m uploading a cheese and meat wonder. Be ready.

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Let me tell you what I’m not ready for though – idiots. I saw something today which almost made my heart explode, it was simultaneously so sad and so telling of the future to come that I could barely register it. On an online newspaper article, an argument broke out between someone with the inevitable -MAMMYOVLILANGEL’ following her first name and some other painted idiot about spelling. Her reply? What broke my heart? ‘WEL U DNT NEED GRAMAR THS ISN’T A BUK’

I might have slightly paraphrased there, I was that aghast I couldn’t let it sink in. Since when did it become socially acceptable to be thick and fucking proud of it? I’m not some snob who expects everyone to type like Mavis Beacon and never make an error, but it’s just become ‘alright’ to be dense and not make any strides to fix the problem. I appreciate there are plenty of people out there who struggle, and that’s fair enough, but everyone else, make an effort – don’t revel in your stupidity like a dog rolling in fox shit. If I don’t know something, I learn it. I don’t have a go at the people who do know the answer. It’s the equivalent of me going onto The Chase and if the Chaser got a question right and I didn’t, launching myself up the table and calling poor Anne a FAT SLAHG WIV A SHIT HAREKUT. I find it repellent, and I make no apologies for it.

Pardon me a moment.

Ah that’s better – our cat decided to be sick all over our living room carpet as a thank you for us letting her into the house and popping her bed near the fire to warm her up. Bitch. I wouldn’t care but she could have gone outside to be sick but decided that right in the middle of the living room was truly the best place. It doesn’t help that our living room carpet looks like a magic-eye drawing of a kaleidoscope pattern, so as soon as she was sick we immediately lost it amongst the pattern. It truly is a carpet that you’d expect an insane lorry driver to keep behind his cab to wrap his prostitute corpses in. Stare hard enough and you’ll not only see patterns, you’ll lose your fucking mind. We’re too tight to have it replaced though because it’s really quite decent carpet to walk on – easily the best shag this house ever had before us young bucks moved in, am I right?

OK, this recipe – the picture may not make it look like much, but it was delicious – combining cheese, meat, gnocchi and veg. Make it for a weigh-in night treat, although the syns are low low low anyway!

slimming world cheeseburger gnocchi

to make saucy cheeseburger gnocchi bake, you’ll need:

ingredients (this serves four): handful of button mushrooms (sliced), a thinly sliced red pepper and a thinly sliced green pepper, a small onion (diced), 400g of gnocchi (1.5 syns per 100g), 500g of lean mince, salt and pepper, 250g of quark, garlic, splash of worcestershire sauce, dijon mustard, a beef stock cube, 280g of light mozzarella, grated. (4 x HEA). Adjust accordingly if you want to make less but for gods sake INDULGE.

to make saucy cheeseburger gnocchi bake, you should:

recipe: cook your gnocchi, which is nothing more than throwing them in boiling water and letting them float to the top. Set aside. Chuck your onions and peppers and garlic into a heavy bottomed pan (suitable for SW) and sweat down, then add your mince and fry it off. You want it fairly dry, so go at it. Crumble a stock cube in for a bit of extra taste. In another bowl, combine the quark, mustard (1syn per tsp, I only added one), worcestershire sauce and salt. Mix it into the beef and veg, chuck in the gnocchi, even it out. Top with all that grated cheese. Into the oven for 15 minutes or so at 180 degrees, then under the grill until you get the top all golden and delicious. Serve. YUM.

extra-easy – well, you’d need to serve it with a salad, as it only has superfree peppers in it. But considering it is so full of goodness, it’s low in syns and tasty! Give it a go. You could up the stakes by using garlic philadelphia (20 syns per tub so only five syns each), but then you’d be a decadent tart.

Enjoy.

J

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February 4, 2015

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bacon, low syn, pork, recipe card

cheese and bacon soufflé

Tonight is the only night this week where both Paul and I are in the house together for the evening, so I’m going to dash off this recipe and be on my way. See readers, even when I’m on a promise, I’ll give you something…

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I have to say – it came out the oven like a air-filled cloud, but I spent that long fannying around trying to take a picture that it went ‘foooooooooootpth’ and deflated. Still tasted fine.

to make cheese and bacon soufflé, you’ll need:

ingredients: drop of olive oil, 100g lean bacon cut into chunks, chopped chilli, eight spring onions diced very finely, six eggs (separated into yolk and white), 6tbsp of chives and dill, 100g parmesan cheese, 1/2tsp mustard powder, lots of salt and pepper – and serve with wedges and salad.

tip: to seperate the eggs, you’ll need to crack them into your hand, let the white fall through your fingers and hope that the two don’t mix. Get one of these little buggers. You crack the egg into a bowl, pop this little rubber man over the yolk, squeeze him and he’ll suck the yolk into himself and drop it wherever you want it. It’s absolutely amazing. No yolk. Haha.

to make cheese and bacon soufflé, you should:

recipe: let’s do this quickly. You’ll need four ramekins. Heat the oven to 180 degrees. Prepare a bain-marie by filling a roasting pan a third full and put it into the oven. Oil the ramekins gently. Fry off the onion, bacon and chilli in a pan until cooked through and dry – and pay it dry. Then hairdryer it. YOU WANT IT DRY. Set aside. Hoy the egg whites into a mixer (or use a hand mixer but you’ll be absolutely buggered) and whisk whisk whisk until they’re stiff. In the other bowl, beat the egg yolks, add the bacon and onion and three quarters of the cheese. Then – tip the whisked egg white into the yolks and fold it gently with a metal spoon – nice and gently, keep the air in, until fully incorporated. Spoon into ramekins almost to the top, add the rest of the cheese and then cook for twenty minutes. Serve with chips and salad.

extra-easy: 3.5 syns a serving. Serve with superfree salad and you’re laughing.

Right, off to prepare. Anyone seen an industrial oil drum of KY jelly lying around?

J

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February 1, 2015

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chinese, diced pork, fakeaways, low syn, noodles, pork, recipe card, rice

one syn sweet and sour pork

Look, here’s the deal. Come hell or high water, by the end of today we are going to have new curtains installed in our bedroom. It needs to happen. See a while ago I took our blinds apart so that I could paint the little bit of wall behind them, then promptly lost the chain that holds them together so that now, every tiny gust of wind and they splay around in all directions, rattling and bumping into each other. That wouldn’t be so bad, except we have to leave our windows open in our bedroom at night – how else could the cats deliberately go outside, get wet and then get under our duvet at 3am and press their tiny wet noses against our bumcheeks? We can’t build a cat-flap into our doors as they’re the wrong type. So given how windy and cold it is, our bedroom at night is always a) freezing and b) like sleeping through a particularly budget production of Stomp. It’s lucky that we’re both the type of person who likes to be entangled up in each other when we’re asleep – I reckon one morning we’ll just wake up as one person, melded together like the wax in a lava lamp. Fuck me, that would make typing this blog difficult.

Plus, god knows what our neighbours must think – our windows being open all night and us being in a bungalow means every fart, mumble, snore and sleep-cough echoes around the street. No kidding, I once finished an overtime shift at work and upon getting out the car at 3am I couldn’t understand what the strange rattling noise coming from the engine was until I realised it was Paul’s snoring from over 100 yards away. Worse still is that I’m forever talking and laughing in my sleep – Paul’s recorded me merrily singing Cerys Matthew’s bits from The Ballad of Tom Jones whilst deep in slumber. Plus, we’re always talking incoherently to each other, normally burbling away merrily about being too hot, too cold or ‘don’t fart, the cat’s in the bed and you’ll gas the fucker’.

So, whilst the neighbours would still be treated to the cacophony of noise from our bedroom, we can solve the blinds rattling – and that’s today’s project. You may recall that we’re both equally shit at DIY (remember our current bathroom situation?) so I can only assume this will end up with one of us in A&E and our home left a burnt out shell. We have to be the only couple out there who has a £200 drill and exactly 0 clues about how to use it. Ah well, wish us luck.

Today’s recipe – posted nice and early because then you can go out and get the ingredients, is sweet and sour pork – and for once, this is a recipe we’ve dug out from a Slimming World book instead of either making up ourselves or adapting another recipe. So if it’s shit, blame Margaret. Ahaha no, it’s tasty, trust me.

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to make one syn sweet and sour pork, you’ll need:

ingredients: 500g of pork, fat off, cut into chunks. One large onion and one large red pepper, deseeded and cut into strips. Two large carrots, peeled and cut into matchsticks. Sugarsnap peas, just cut into chunks. Garlic cloves, finely chopped. You’ll also need 1/4tsp of chinese five-spice, 1 level tbsp of cornflour, 4tbsp of tomato puree, 1 tbsp of white wine vinegar, 4tbsp light soy sauce, 150ml of chicken stock and some dried egg noodles. You’ll also need a pineapple (RETCH), cut into smallish chunks.

I absolutely fucking detest pineapple (BOKE),  can I just make that clear. Whenever I’m prescribed anything at the doctors and the allergy notice comes up, mine actually says pineapple (OOH NASTY). Which is a bitch when it comes to my fruit-punch flavoured suppositories, I have to say.

I know that’s quite the list of ingredients, but you’ll use only a small amount of each of those, and the rest can be put away in the cupboard and used for different recipes, or to feed the weevils, whichever is more appropriate.

to make one syn sweet and sour pork, you should:

recipe: sear the pork in a hot pan. SW say spray it with Frylight, but urgh, don’t, use a bit of olive oil. You’ll not die. Hot pan, nice crust on the pork – chuck in a bit of salt and pepper. Take the pork out and replace it with all the chopped veg. Stir fry for a few minutes, chuck in the pork, and keep it all stirring. Hot and fast, just the way you like it. Meanwhile in a bowl mix 2 tbsp water with the chinese 5 spice, garlic, cornflour, tomato purée, white wine vinegar, soy sauce and stock. Add the mixture to the pan, stir and reduce the heat to low. Cook for 3-4 minutes until thickened. Whilst this is taking place, you’ll want to use your other two arms to cook and drain your noodles. Pop the pineapple (BLEURGH) into the pork and veg and stir. Serve.

top tip: as I always, always say on this blog – if you’re wanting uniform matchsticks, or you’re just too lazy to fanny about cutting up carrots with a knife, buy a julienne peeler. It’ll do the job in seconds. You can buy them from Lakeland or on Amazon – and here’s a handy link. You don’t need one, mind, a knife will do the same thing.

extra-easy – only one syn per serving, and that comes from the cornflour. You’ll need it to thicken the sauce off, but really, think how many syns this would be from the local takeaway. Best part? If you cook too many noodles, you can use them to make noodle cups to go with my cheese and meatballs recipe from yesterday? What, you don’t remember it? IT’S RIGHT HERE AND BLOODY DELICIOUS. Oh me oh my.

OK. I’m off to try and figure out the curtains. £20 that we’ll both give up after ten minutes of looking online and end up playing on the Wii U instead.

Don’t forget to share and tell everyone about this blog – it’s really growing!

J

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January 30, 2015

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low syn, lunch, one-pot, recipe card, sausages, savoury snacks, snacks, soup, taster ideas

cabbage, sausage and kidney bean soup

Can we get something right straight off the bat? Man-buns. There’s a simple test – if you are male, and you’ve tied up your locks like some weird hairy sphincter on top of your head, you’re a cock. And not a nice cock, mind – we’re talking a fishy old schlong. In fact no – if you had a sphincter in the middle of your head, that would actually make you an arse. I can’t bear it. It doesn’t so much as make my skin crawl as force it inside-out through cringing. Back when I had long hair, the only ‘style’ I succumbed to was brushing it, and that was only when I felt there might be a boiled sweet in amongst the tangles. There’s an advert on TV now for Trivago which ends with a supposedly-dreamy shot of a woman asleep in a man’s arms as he carries her down a hotel corridor to bed. He wouldn’t be bad looking, but because of the man bun, you know that night is going to end with her face-down on a pillow and him accidentally calling her Patrick at the height of climax. There’s no masculinity, no ruggedness – a weak, effete affectation which should only end up one way – in an acid bath. Too far? I say not far enough!

Tonight’s been a bit of a wash-out – I was originally supposed to be out for dinner with work colleagues to say goodbye, good luck and thanks for all the laughs to one of the partners I work for, but thanks to the incompetence of Northumberland Council and their inability to fit a bloody toilet correctly that didn’t happen, as I was summoned to my gran’s house. Water was leaking through the ceiling again where they incorrectly fitted the toilet. Well they didn’t fit the toilet on the ceiling, obviously. Anyway, it turns out it had been leaking since Wednesday and she had been patiently waiting for the council to come out, completely unable to use her upstairs loo, and having to totter down the stairs and to the outside loo (it’s a really old house, we’re not that Northern) every time she needed a tinkle in the dead of night. I mean for fucks sake, she’s a very slow mover – she can go upstairs with a fiver in her purse and by the time she’s made it back downstairs it’s only worth £4.50. So this was a crap situation, and after my sister and I spent a bit of time bellowing at the council, they remedied it. Bloody ridiculous. I had an image in my head of her sat on the outside toilet, Puzzler in hand, frozen in time like Jack Torrance at the end of The Shining. Thankfully that didn’t happen, although…

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Haha. We did get to spend some more time with my sister and lovely nephew though. I stand by everything I said earlier about children being red-faced poo-factories with all the charm of an ingrown toenail, but my nephew is the exception to prove the rule. Although, that said, the first thing he did when he heard we were on the way was immediately void his bowels – but then Paul does the same thing when I tell him we’re out of Muller Lights so isn’t life a rich tapestry.

Paul and I were chatting away in bed last night before sleep, discussing what we could do with the blog next. Our next idea that we’re going to build into the recipes is to have one recipe a week from a European country. Easy to begin with – we have Armenia first on the randomised list, but Kosovo is the third. Going to be a steep learning curve but well, our Slimming World journey is all about new flavours and learning to cook – so look forward to that!

Tonight’s recipe doesn’t look all that. In fact, if I’m being searingly honest, it sorta looks like something you might happen across in the pan of a public toilet after a heavy night. I know. But it tasted really good, and it’s our soup of the week – cabbage, kidney bean and sausage broth!

Mmm. How inviting! Look, you try making cabbage soup look appealing. If Roald fucking Dahl couldn’t manage it, I sure as hell can’t. So stop being so judgemental, sheesh.

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to make cabbage, sausage and kidney bean soup, you’ll need:

ingredients: 1.5l of chicken stock, half a big white cabbage sliced thinly (see tip below), eight grilled weight-watchers cumberland sausages (1/2 syn each) cut up into chunks, three tablespoons of tomato puree, two garlic cloves very finely grated, 1 shallot sliced, 1 teaspoon of dried basil, 1 teaspoon of celery seeds (or use fennel seeds) (or omit altogether, I’m not your keeper) and 1/2tsp of dried thyme – you’ll also need a tin of kidney beans.

tip: I bang on about this all the time, but if you’re a clumsy oaf like me in the kitchen, get yourself a decent mandolin. They’ll slice things perfectly for you, and you just need to be a bit careful not to slice off your fingertips. I bought mine for £10 from Amazon and the link is here – you’ll never look back. Honest, you’ll thank me for it. Along similar lines, I use a microplane grater for the garlic (and it can be used for parmesan too) and you can find that for less than a tenner on Amazon, here. You can do the job with a knife too, you don’t need fancy equipment for Slimming World – but they do make things easier!

to make cabbage, sausage and kidney bean soup, you should:

recipe: saute the garlic and the shallots for a few moments on a high heat – don’t burn it though. Then, tip everything in bar the sausage and beans, bring to the boil and then reduce to a simmer. Add a bit of salt, your ticker can handle it. Chuck in the sausage and beans, and cook until the cabbage is soft and cooked. Done!

It’s more of a brothy soup – lots of liquid, but tastes good. If you like your soup so thick you could artex a ceiling with it, you’re out of luck – but if that’s what you like, try my super-speedy soup.

extra-easy – yes, and only one syn! Cabbage is a superfree food and a much maligned vegetable – don’t rule it out! It serves four, and the sausages are the syns – but what’s one syn between friends?

Enjoy, enjoy.

J

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January 29, 2015

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american, budget, low syn, one-pot, pasta, recipe card, sausages, savoury snacks, snacks, taster ideas

hot dog threaded spaghetti

We briefly flirted with having a cleaner last year. See, we are both generally out of the house from 7am to 7pm, and by the time we’ve got home, found a recipe, cooked it and done a blog post, we’re knackered. The idea of pushing a hoover around (bad example, we’ve got a Roomba which makes sad little beep-boops every now and then – probably because it’s clogged up with three cats worth of cat hair) or cleaning the bath fills us with dismay. So, we tried to get a cleaner. The first two turned up once and then never came back, which was mysterious – we actually live in a very clean house – it was just the ‘bigger’ tasks that needed doing. It’s not a ‘wipe your feet as you leave’ sort of house – even the toilet is surprisingly free of skidders given two burly blokes live here. The third (and last) cleaner used to come, do a half-arsed job and go, but then charge us the full amount. We were too ‘nice’ to pull her up on it and she’s been texting every now and then asking when to come back. Frankly, it was terrifying – all I could imagine her doing was rummaging through our drawers and criticising my choice of underwear / spices / sex toys. Because that’s EXACTLY what I’d do.

I’m reminded of a friend who always liked to inspect the medicines cabinet of whoever she was visiting, until she managed to accidentally wrench the whole cabinet off the wall onto the floor after one particularly exciting snoop. How do you cover that up? Nonchalantly state you were looking for a tampon or diarrhoea relief? Or just admit to being nosy? You’d be disappointed if you looked in our bathroom cabinet, it’s full of old shaving foam, heartburn tablets and smart-price netty paper. So yes – every time I knew she was in the house, I’d spend my time panicking I’d be tagged in some off-colour facebook post with her holding up a bottle of lube or our bank statements for all the world to see. We have managed to get rid of her with lots of ‘Oh we can’t afford you anymore’ gubbins, but I bet she’s had a neb at our bank statements so she probably knows that isn’t true anyway. Not that we have a lot of money I hasten to add, we don’t, but we’re incredibly tight so she knows we don’t spend a lot.

We also used to have an ironing lady, because neither of us can iron worth a damn and good lord, I’d sooner iron my own face than work our way through our ironing pile – we both work in an office, so there’s ten formal shirts and six pairs of trousers just from work alone. Remember, we’re somewhat elephantine, so it takes the two of us standing at opposite ends of the garden just to fold our underwear. Plus, we’re both used to one another’s gentle musk – the last thing we need is some hairy-chinned old dear passing out from the fumes released from our boxers as she tries to press in a crease.

One concession we do have is a gardener – when we were given the house, we were completely new to the concept of looking after a garden – and there’s a massive lawn at the front and another big bugger at the back. Paul had a few valiant months of trying to mow the lawn before we accepted defeat and brought in a gardener. He’s smashing, but not too good at following instructions. For example, there’s a little flower bed in the middle of the lawn – tiny, but it holds a heather bush. That heather bush was planted by the mum of the guy who gave us the house (who himself lives up the street) and we always agreed we’d let it flower. Well, WE did. The gardener didn’t – he ran the bloody lawnmower right over the top of it, scattering memories and heather all over the lawn. He claimed he didn’t see it. We were too cowardly to ‘tell him off’ because he had a pair of shears in his hands when we noticed and he’s built like a brick shithouse. So, it was a quick trip to the garden centre to replace the bush. I just hope her ashes weren’t under there. If they are, they’d be in my green recycling bin. No wonder she haunts the house.

She’d certainly haunt this house if she saw what we had for dinner tonight – it was bloody lovely! Simple, only 3 syns, and fun to eat. It’s hot dog threaded spaghetti, see.

hot dog threaded spaghetti slimming world

Firstly, if you happen to have any leftover bolognese left over from the spaghetti bolognese from the other day, and the lasagne cups from yesterday, then serve it with this dish. If you don’t, knock up a quick sauce from celery, tomatoes, peppers, onion and carrot. This is the ultimate leftover meal – I’ve spread one core ingredient over three meals – this would do for a lunch!

to make hot dog threaded spaghetti, you’ll need:

ingredients: your leftover bolognese, spaghetti and a tin of giant Ye Olde Oak hot dogs. They’re 2 syns each and you get six in a tin, more than enough – I say three each. If you use another brand of hotdog, make sure you check the syns – minced up arseholes and eyelids can be surprisingly high in syns!

to make hot dog threaded spaghetti, you should:

recipe: there’s nothing more to this than slicing up the hot dog into little discs, pushing the uncooked spaghetti through it however you like, and cooking the spaghetti. Serve with the bolognese and your HEA cheese! As I said, perfect for a lunchbox. Easy!

extra-easy: as long as your bolognese is stuffed with superfree, you’ll be fine with this.

Haha – jesus. I told Paul I was going to do a quick blog post and that I’d be done in ten minutes. And here we are, forty minutes later. Oops. I just like the sound of my own typing, I guess!

Enjoy the recipe – remember to share!

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 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:

10928935_825360167537588_1653193362771439149_o

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:

10644368_825362580870680_8736658342342877349_o

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