retro recipe: chutney stuffed coconut chicken

A nice trickle of pre-orders at the moment ahead of launch of our new cookbook in May – having seen the final drafts and signed off on all the recipes a few days ago, we can promise you it is absolutely glorious. Very us. You can order it here – thank you! 

Today’s retrorecipe is something slightly different. I’ve realised that there’s a lot of sport to be had from looking at old recipes and mocking the fact that they put everything in jelly or use the word ‘puff’ far more than could ever be considered decent, but there’s actually a lot of very good recipes out there which have fallen out of favour that simply need rescuing and brought up to date. Plus there’s the small matter of us wasting food by cooking stuff only for Paul to shove it away and pronounce that he isn’t eating it, like he’s Newcastle’s answer to Violet Beauregarde. That’s my drag name right there incidentally: Violent Noregarde.

This coconut chicken is an absolute doddle to make and comes from Betty Crocker’s ‘Buffets’, which promises menus, recipes and planning tips for easy and successful home entertaining. Now my first confession: for years I have imagined Betty Crocker as some homely nana bustling around in her American kitchen, keeping an apple pie cooling on the window and swatting at her sticky-fingered grandchildren with a broom. Kind of like my nana but she doesn’t have Fifteen-to-One playing at a volume that brings the roof tiles clattering off when someone buzzes in. However, a quick bit of googling to see what she looks like reveals the whole thing to be a sham: she’s a made-up figurehead representing a massive conglomerate who just so happens to look like my husband in a nice dress. I confess myself seriously disappointed and to make matters worse, it turns out there was never an Aunt Bessie, despite all the cloying marketing and ‘just like my nana used to make’ advertising. Which, to loop around, wouldn’t be true anyway: my nana used to make Yorkshire puddings that you could climb inside and enjoy a hot bath of gravy – I’ve never had an Aunt Bessie Yorkshire pudding that wasn’t as flat as a witch’s tit.

I’m just amazed it’s taken me thirty-six years to realise the scale of corruption in the home baking world, I truly am. I know a lie takes the elevator whilst the truth takes the stairs but even so: madness.

Second confession: this book is absolutely glorious. A relic of its time absolutely (make sure there is one ashtray per every two guests is an especially timeless tip, with presumably a few tanks of oxygen kept to one side for after) and very much a ‘whilst your husband goes and works, you stay home at occupy yourself with doilies’ tome, but still glorious. By way of example, there’s four pages, including diagrams, detailing how best to set up your buffet to promote good flow. There’s a map if you’re having a circular buffet, those who fancy a three-sided buffet are literally catered for and, best of all, a double-line buffet plan. Not to be sniffed at.

We can’t very well talk about buffets if we don’t mention the one buffet that I absolutely do not miss: the taster nights. I know we have talked about this a lot over the years but good lord if we didn’t see the worst of humanity (maybe overegging the pudding a bit) at those events. Long time stalwarts will know it’s where everyone attending Slimming World is encouraged to bring a snack to place on the decorating table and everyone titters and chortles their way through eating watery quiche and plucking dog hair from their teeth. The type of meeting where you’re looking to see if those are sesame seeds on the prawn toast or nits. We were lucky – our class was on the outskirts of the posh part of Newcastle (Edinburgh) and so it was fairly civilised but I always remember a couple of weeks we spent attending a class in a flat-roof social club whilst on holiday. I’m not saying it was rough but when we got up to eat we took our chairs with us in case the scrap man swiped them. I’ve never seen, either before or since, such fervent desire for a Tupperware box of golden vegetable rice that had been sweating in someone’s handbag for the best part of eight hours. Possibly the only buffet I’ve attended where everyone brought their own knives without knowing the event was catered.

Thankfully, Betty Crocker’s buffets are a far more decadent affair – you can tell Betty has a bit of money because ‘she’ also recommends having one member of staff (hired or otherwise) per six guests to dispense drinks and to replenish snacks. Maybe this is where Fanny Cradock’s Sarah moonlights at night, when she’s not busy being scolded/scalded by Fanny during the day. You won’t need any staff to assist with this coconut chicken because it’s luckily very easy to make – handy, it’ll give you time to rearrange your ashtrays just so. Perhaps the best bit of the book is how bewilderingly comprehensive it is: she has thought of every buffet situation you can imagine. They start off obvious: ‘A Mother’s Day Buffet‘ opens the book, though if I served my mother a gooseberry tart and a ‘summer’ cocktail for Mother’s Day I’d be likely to get it thrown back in my face. My mother’s idea of a cocktail is putting her usual six Jack Daniels shots into a mist of diet coke and sticking a cigarette in it for decoration.

We then travel the world a little: ‘A Hungarian Style Dinner‘ gives us an apple strudel and some buttered noodles, a ‘Scandinavian Coffee Party‘ suggests ‘jam sandwiches and cookies’ which sounds delightful and even Ireland gets a mention with ‘An Irish Dinner‘, a stunning festivity consisting of Irish coffee and bread. You rather get the sense that ‘Betty’ is phoning it in at this point but fret not, she pulls it out of the bag for the ending. If you have ever agonised at night what to serve at an ‘Out of Town Guest Buffet‘ (usually clumsily-administered poppers in my case, and if they were halfway decent, I’d make them some toast after) then the answer is here: a marinated cauliflower and broccoli salad set in aspic BECAUSE OF BLOODY COURSE IT IS. We end on my personal favourite: a ‘Soup and Sandwich Late Supper‘ (presumably for the times you don’t want to wake Iris and instead microwave your own soup) where Betty suggests that when you get home of an evening stinking of shame and sambucca, you should set about making scotch shortbread and creamy split pea soup. I mean goodness me, it’s all I can do not to void myself into the wash-basket after three sniffs of the barman’s cloth – where does Betty get her stamina from?

All the above sarcasm aside, it really is a terrific book that I will be taking more than a few recipes from. Given we only let people into our homes if they’re punching a hole in something (walls, ceilings, my bumcheeks) we tend not to have many buffets but with this handy guide, perhaps that’ll change. Shall we do the coconut chicken then? No, we must.

coconut chicken

We served our coconut chicken with a traditional puck of Uncle Ben’s (ANOTHER LIE) rice and some chilli sauce

coconut chicken

You can use any chutney for this coconut chicken – anything you want

coconut chicken

Branding shot for the coconut chicken right there

chutney stuffed coconut chicken

Prep

Cook

Total

Yield 4 people

So desiccated coconut - aside from being one of those ingredients I actively avoid because I can't spell it (desiccated I mean, I can manage coconut) - is one of those things I say I don't like until I actually eat it and realise it's like eating a Bounty bar. If you're not a fan of coconut however then you're shit out of luck here and I suggest you leave right now, before you fall any deeper.

You'll forgive me if I don't make any obvious jokes about chutney stuffing in this recipe, because that would be childish and immoral.

I apologise for the somewhat uninspired photography - I was in a rush because as I was serving up, Goomba was staring at me with his big sad eyes like he was Link's nana from Windwaker and that only means one thing - he needed to be let out. It was very much a plate up, photo and go affair otherwise we'd have another kitchen disaster to handle.

We used fig chutney from Tesco here because it was the first chutney Paul spotted on the shelf, but you can - and perhaps should - use a red onion chutney or similar. 

Finally, as ever, all calories are approximate and worked out via the NHS app. Your experience may differ. If that's the case, sorry.

Ingredients

  • four large chicken breasts
  • chutney of your choosing - we used Tesco Finest Fig & Balsamic chutney here because we are fancy bitches
  • two large eggs
  • 100g of desiccated coconut
  • salt and pepper

We served ours with microwave rice and some chilli sauce because we were in a rush, see. You will also need some cocktail sticks and preferably a big rolling pin. What can I say: size-queen for life, me.

Instructions

  • bring to mind someone who you absolutely hate: the type of person who if you accidentally ran them over, you'd reverse back over them to make sure the job was done
  • whilst you're thinking of them, take a knife and cut your chicken breasts in half horizontally - through the breast so it can open like a book
  • place onto some greaseproof paper and cover with more greaseproof paper
  • still got your enemy in your head - excellent - take your rolling pin and bash the absolute buggery out of those chicken breasts, imagining it is the skull of your nemesis, flattening them so they're easy to roll
  • hiding your 'excitement', remove the greaseproof paper, smear a good tablespoon of chutney in the middle of each breast, ignoring the fact it now looks a bit like a beskiddered gusset
  • carefully roll the breasts up in a nice spiral and secure them with cocktail sticks
  • they can sit in the fridge for a bit until needed
  • once you're ready to cook, carefully dip them in beaten egg (seasoned with a pinch of salt and pepper) and then roll in the desiccated coconut
  • cook - you can bake in the oven but we put ours in our Instant Vortex Airfryer (cocktail sticks removed) for twenty minutes, until the chicken was cooked through
  • serve with rice

Notes

Recipe

  • please make sure the chicken is cooked through before serving - at a minimum you want an internal temperature of at least 75 degrees celsius to be safe - see our notes under tools

Books

  • twochubbycubs: Dinner Time is our new book and it's out in May and has over one hundred meal ideas for every single evening event you can imagine - you can pre-order here!
  • our second book, glorious in its rainbow spine, is perfect for every other meal occasion: order yours here! 
  • our first cookbook is still a sight to behold, full of our sass and meals: click here to order
  • everyone forgets about the planner which is silly because it's brilliant for whacking ganglions with (and also contains 26 recipes, just saying): here

Tools

Disclosure: the links above are affiliate links. This means that, at zero cost to you, we will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and make a purchase. Which is handy, as Goomba is going to the groomers next week and if he's anything like his Dad, will tip the groomer generously in the hope of being roughly tumbled about in the back room by the lad clipping his hair

Courses retro, chicken

Cuisine chicken

May we take a moment to appreciate the retrorecipes so far? We have domino sandwiches, a fabulous cocktail salad, a party pate and a recipe, such as it is, for cheesy bananas. I mean, I’ve worse.

I want your horror, I want your design.

J

retro recipe: party ham pâté (microwaved, but not really)

A huge thank you to everyone who has pre-ordered our amazing new cookbook – twochubbycubs: dinner time launching on May 26 2022! We are super excited to finally show you the fruits of our hard work, and it really makes us smile when we have your support! The price has already dropped so if you’re holding out, now is the time to buy! You’ll get the cheaper price if it drops again! You can order it here – thank you! Also: we are out of action for the next couple of days doing Book Stuff – the next blog will be Wednesday – we haven’t died.

We need to get this out of the way right from the get-go – this party ham pâté looks absolutely disgusting in the recipe book and the fact that the author microwaves it is absolutely beyond me. As you can see from the photo below of the original recipe, it looks like what you’d imagine Satan’s sphincter to be. It reminds one of something you’d use industrial strength Bazuka gel to burn off a limping horse’s foot. It is the kind of party dish you’d wheel out only if you wanted your guests to leave with scowls and for one of them to kick your dog in anger on the way out.

So, of course, we must try it. As you may have guessed by the subtle clue in the title, this recipe comes from ‘The Book of Microwave Cookery’ by none other than our good friend Sonia Allison. I ordered the book because the idea of a book devoted to microwave cookery delighted me and it was only after receipt that I spotted Sonia Allison was behind it. I mean, of course she was, there was seemingly a few years in the eighties where she was a veritable doyenne of hosting parties and writing recipes.

I’m experiencing strong Baader–Meinhof effect with this woman: I’ve seen her name once and now she’s everywhere, filling every conceivable cooking niche. I half expect to go for a crap and pick up some of the bathroom shiterature we have scattered about only to find her face walking me through 100 recipes for entertaining in the Khor Virap Monastery or 87 billion things to do with boiled eggs. She was certainly comprehensive.

Speaking of comprehensive, don’t you agree I make a wonderful Fanny?

The book does promise an awful lot – the cover is awash with interesting looking dishes that I refuse to believe were made in a microwave, including a lovely looking coffee cake and an elegant gateaux, though there’s scant reference to these in the book so I fear it may have been a bit of a bait and switch: stick a microwave in the background of a pre-prepared spread. I’m not saying you can’t trust Sonia but there’s clearly shenanigans afoot. More mysteriously there are five dessert glasses filled with a luminous purple slop that looks like something you’d scrape from your bumper after a drunken drive in the country which are entirely missing from the recipes.

There’s a whole chapter devoting to cooking safely with the microwave where Sonia walks you through exactly what a microwave is with the deft touch of someone who is also scrabbling together 100 Marmite recipes on the side (not even kidding there, I’ve got it in front of me). She does go against all accepted safety knowledge by stating you can put metal skewers in the microwave with no ill-effect, which is a nonsense. I once left a teaspoon in a cup of tea I was reheating and accidentally opened a portal through to 1992 – I could see Past James. Should have shouted through that he’ll end up doing alright and looking fit.

Perhaps my favourite writing touch from the whole book is the way she will start every single chapter with the same schtick: a dramatic declaration that using the microwave really serves no benefit and it does nothing a conventional oven and hob can’t do, before having herself an epiphany by the end of the chapter and crying out that she couldn’t believe she was so foolish. This is endearing at chapter three and vexing by chapter fourteen. She’s the 80s author equivalent of Troy McClure in The Simpsons slapping his cheek and looking shocked.

One thing I do love though: she thanks her scientific husband for his constructive advice and guidance, which I think is beautiful. Those who have read our books may have realised that Paul and I struggle with the romantic love-letters to one another at the back of the book. We are told to be mushy but if we were being honest, Paul’s note to me would be to thank me for staying out of his hair and mine to him would simply be a photograph of my guilty face with ‘WHAT AM I LIKE’ in cerise Mistral underneath.

To be honest, I do feel a bit mean reading these old cookbooks and scoffing because at the time they would have been an invaluable resource I’m sure, and plus, who is to say that in thirty years time someone won’t be reading our recipe books and chortling at our air-frying ways and crazy ingredients? Hell, it’ll probably be me doing it. Hi Future James, glad you made it through the bad weather, you’re looking fit!

The good news with this party ham pâté is that Sonia reassures us it is ‘an excellent recipe for slimmers’, presumably because you’ll spend most of the evening dry-heaving and pulling your lips back like a snarling dog at the thought of eating it. According to Sonia, for added piquancy, half a clove of garlic could be added. To 800g of ham. She was a wild one for sure! Saying that in the hints and tips bit at the very back she does coyly give a guide on how to microwave ‘body lotion or oils’ so maybe those dinner parties were a hotbed of filth after all.

I confess though: I did try following her recipe to the letter – which was difficult as I only have a normal microwave whereas she seems to be cooking in something you could climb inside for safety in the event of a nuclear war – and it was awful. When a recipe warns you that the edges will brown but this will have ‘no effect on taste or texture’ a warning sign should shoot up. Sonia also suggests using cling film in the microwave, which I did to no real ill effect, though it meant posting myself outside the microwave door lest it burst into flames.

With one ham entirely wasted, I tinkered with the recipe to bring it in line with a more ‘doable’ option at home. I have kept the ingredients largely the same, adding only a couple of modern touches to up the flavour a little. Finally, you can bore off if you think I’m spending time cutting a boiled egg just so for decoration like she did – slicing those pimento olives you see in the picture almost finished me off. To the recipe then!

party ham pâté

As you can, the original party ham pâté wasn’t a looker!

party ham pâté

But with a few tweaks, the party ham pâté can be made delicious!

party ham pâté

And when served with piccalilli and decent bread, the party ham pâté is really quite good

party ham pâté

You want chives with your party ham pâté? Then you’ll smoke a whole PACKET of dried chives

party ham pâté

Prep

Cook

Total

Yield 4 big portions

As discussed at length above, Sonia Allison's microwave party ham pâté is a surefire winner at the dinner table, as long as you change the ingredients, method of cooking and presentation style. But if you follow a recipe and change all the ingredients, method and delivery, is it the original recipe? Or your own? Either way, if you stick to the original method you'll be left with a Ship of Faeces, I guarantee.

This makes enough for four giant portions and if you do as we did, it goes really well with bread and piccalilli. As ever, calorie counts are approximate.

Oh: although Sonia feels the need to decorate the top with eighty-seven keels of dried chives, you absolutely shouldn't. I sneezed bringing this to the table (it's OK, we're among friends) and thought I was at a leprechaun's wedding. If you must adorn it, try just a sprinkling of fresh chives.

Ingredients

  • 800g unsmoked gammon joint
  • two large white onions
  • two cloves of garlic
  • three large eggs
  • thirty olives stuffed with pimento
  • salt and pepper for days
  • 25g parsley (fresh is better)
  • one teaspoon of dried sage

Instructions

You will need a food processor / blender for this recipe - see notes if you don't have one

  • cook the ham as per the instructions - we use our Instant Pot - about twenty five minutes on high pressure and the whole thing is cooked and ready to shred
  • blitz the cooled ham in a food processor until very fine indeed
  • do the same with the onion and garlic and combine with the ham
  • stir the eggs into the mixture with a really good pinch or two of pepper and one of salt (don't add too much salt, the ham is already salty) together with the pepper and sage
  • grease a loaf tin - and really go for it mind you - and then press the mixture in and cook for around an hour on 170 degrees or until the egg has cooked through
  • allow to cool and adorn with the sliced pimento olives and whatever else you want
  • slice and serve

Notes

Recipe

  • you could do so much with this - add curry powder for a bit of spice, chopped egg rather than beaten, different herbs and spices and all that
  • not got a food processor - shred the ham with two forks as much as you can instead - it'll be coarser, but so am I

Books

  • our new cookbook - Dinner Time - is now available to pre-order and we quite honestly believe it is the best one yet - you can pre-order here!
  • our second cookbook Fast & Filling is all about saving time and eating well: order yours here! 
  • our original cookbook will also tickle your pickle with 100 slimming recipes: click here to order
  • and if you're looking to track your dieting successes, then we have a gorgeous little planner: here

Tools

  • we have silicone loaf tins and they work superbly as you can just plop the food straight out - the ones we use are cheap on Amazon nearly all the time and can be found here

Disclosure: the links above are affiliate links. This means that, at zero cost to you, we will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and make a purchase. Which is handy, as I just wanna dance with somebody, I wanna feel the heat with somebody, and frankly with energy prices the way they are we need all the money we can get.

Courses retrorecipes

Cuisine snacks

Got some leftover ham? Chuck it in our cheese and ham quiche from 2016 – click the picture to be taken straight there!

There ain’t no way that I’ll make do with anything less than I’m used to!

Jx

retro recipe: fancy sandwich dominoes

Firstly, before we even get to the dominoes!

We are taking part in Situ Live at Westfield London on Saturday between 2-4pm where we will be doing our very first product demonstration for the Instant Vortex Dual Basket Air Fryer, which I’m sure they’ve given us just so I stumble over the name. We have no idea what we are doing having never done a sales thing before but lordy, it’ll be fun and there’ll be free food, so please do some along. We’ll sign anything that isn’t going to make our fingers sticky. Us being in London does mean next week’s blog entries will be pushed back a day or two, but fret not, they’ll be coming.


Did I choose this recipe simply because it had the word dominoes in it and I thought it may get you all in a tizzy with the thought of dough laden with cheese and oil and wonder? Maybe. But all I’ll say is, steady the buffs a little: although these sandwich dominoes are actually rather pleasant, they aren’t going to beat the taste of anything that you can pull from a greasy box.

This recipe for sandwich dominoes is the next in our little trip through old recipe books and I shall confess something right from the off: this recipe is very much a compromise wheeled in at the last moment to replace something I just could not face eating this week. It isn’t a spoiler to tell you that it comes in a moulded jelly shape. But so do I, and here we are. However, I did try and select something that was faintly edible but unusual this week and, deciding to give old Sonia a week to catch the dragon she’s been after, turned to ‘The Best of Salads and Buffets’, published back in 1992.

Perhaps that’s the most bewildering point about this book, actually: it’s published in 1992, so came out when I was eight, yet so many of the recipes look entirely alien to me. Admittedly I wasn’t cutting about hosting many dinner parties at the age of eight: I was far too busy pretending I was on the Crystal Maze or stotting my head off my bedroom door attempting to do a cartwheel in my bedroom to Could It Be Magic by Take That. Mother, if you’re reading this, the clues were there, no? I’ve got a very faint scar across the top of my forehead from that one and I’m fairly sure if you looked at the door you’d be able to see an imprint of my lips.

I tried to do some research into the author of the book with the aim of inventing some backstory for the author but, a shade mysteriously, I can find very little about the chap who penned it. I like to imagine he lived a merry life full of parties and buffets where people could coo over his wares and slap him on the back for spending an hour making flowers from radishes, before he finally passed away content and happy. I bet the queue of visitors wanting to pay their respects at his funeral ran out of the church and down the street, though if they were anything like me they’d be turning up at the wake just to see if there was one final splendid buffet to be snaffled. To be fair, he was probably buried with his body set in aspic and squeezed into a giant fish-shaped mould for one last flourish. I do hope so.

Finding a recipe that didn’t involve eight hours of preparation and the use of every utensil in our kitchen was a chore indeed so, in the interests of brevity, I settled on the sandwich section. Let me tell you: I could cheerfully live on sandwiches for the rest of my life if I had to and I consider them to be one of the greatest food delivery systems there is. If I ever found myself in one of those classic action movie moments where I’d raced from a picnic to the edge of a cliff to stop Paul falling to his doom, only to find myself with him clinging onto one arm and the other arm holding a cling-film-wrapped cheese sandwich that was warm from the boot of the car, well, it would be an impossible choice indeed. Do I let Paul go before I had a chance to reach down into his pockets with my teeth to check if he had a sachet of salt to hand, or drop him straight away and risk a slightly unflavoured sandwich? It’s little wonder I can’t sleep at night.

And I jest of course, I’d save Paul every single time without fail, because you have to think about the long term here: an alive Paul can make me many more sandwiches, after all.

Now you might think you can’t really present sandwiches in any unusual ways but reader, you’re so wrong. You don’t know how wrong you are! For example, Nigella Lawson does a croque monsieur bake in Nigella Express which is quite possibly one of the loveliest things you can put in your gob of a morning. But you expect nothing less than perfection from Nigella, so that’s an easy win. In this ‘Best of Salads and Buffets’ book however they come up with two ‘attractive’ ideas: the sandwich skyscraper and the dominoes. The sandwich skyscraper is simply four sandwiches stacked on top of one another and then the entire thing ‘iced’ in cream cheese, so instead of a selection of sandwiches you’ve simply got a warm, anonymous, white cube to tuck into, the mystery of the fillings never revealed until it was cut open. As above, I love sandwiches, but I don’t think we need to go down the gender reveal route to add excitement.

The alternative were these dominoes which are really nothing more than several sandwich fillings stacked ever so neatly and cut into these attractive shapes. Before I get to the recipe, such as it is, a word about dominoes. Growing up in the middle of Tumbleweed, Northumberland didn’t leave you a lot of things to do in the evening when you were young and hadn’t discovered wanking. The village elders, in between waving their fists at cars going faster than the average man could walk and spending two years debating on the right type of swing for the playground, would occasionally put on something called a domino drive. Most of the village, including us youngsters, would be shepherded into the village hall to play dominoes, working your way around the tables and up the ranks until victory was yours. Well no it was never mine, I never had the right type of brain to play strategically nor the heart to tell old Thelma she was breaking the rules. It’s hard to be authoritarian when you’re 11, respectful of your elders and unsure whether someone’s knocking on the table because she has nothing to play or a degenerative essential tremor. Between that and the beetle drives, it was a roaring time. Paul is still mystified by the idea of everyone getting together to roll dices against one another and draw bloody beetles – unsurprisingly perhaps given his childhood was a whirlwind of twoccing cars and putting together the waltzers with a prison-grade roll-up clenched between his teeth – but it was bloody good fun. Might be overselling it with ‘bloody good fun’ but I’ll tell you this: the old joke about how you get 70 old ladies to shout ‘fuck‘ at once (you get one old lady to shout ‘house‘) is very true: there was utter acrimony against whoever won that beetle drive and the naff little shield that was given out to first place.

Explains why, a couple of weeks later under the ruby light of a blood moon, we stuffed Thelma’s wolf-fleece jacket with straw and assorted herbs then sacrificed her to the beetle Gods in a swirl of flame.

Goodness me, that wasn’t so much a diversion as a cathartic trip down memory lane – but I make no apologies. Let’s do the sandwich dominoes then!

sandwich dominoes

See the recipe for sandwich dominoes to explain why they look a mite frozen…

sandwich dominoes

Can you imagine dishing that up to guests? Here, have you tried our sandwich dominoes? No, but have you tried going clean? 

sandwich dominoes

Turns out if you cut the sandwich dominoes just so, a tiny little rye vagina – a ryegina, if you will – will appear to ruin the shot

fancy sandwich dominoes

Prep

Total

Yield 12 sandwiches

I'm going to level with you: this is an absolute faff. They suggest making a batch of these ahead of time to 'spoil your guests' but given the state of my kitchen after I'd made them, chucked the first batch out, made another batch and waited diligently to carve them up, I'd be in no mood to receive guests. In fact, at this point, I'd be asking people to leave and then crying into whatever pint of hard liquor I could find.

So, to that end, although I'm going to show you how to make them, I suggest if you don't want to fart about making them so frou-frou, the individual fillings would do very well served on a Ryvita or similar. This made enough for twelve dominoes so I'm saying three each as finger food. Haha, finger.

Final thing - it's bloody hard to take a photo of these because of the boring colours. In the book, they seem to suggest serving them with a garden trowel of paprika close to hand. Presumably that's so you can hurl the powder into someone's face when you need to shut them up. But who'd do such a thing? 

Calorie counts are approximate. Depends on your bread, what cheese you use and whether or not the chicken that laid the eggs was a heavy smoker.

Oh! And you'll note that they look a little frozen in the picture. I'll explain that in the recipe.

Ingredients

  • five slices of rye bread - we use Schneider Brot (Gesundheit!) from Tesco but I know for an absolute fact that Lidl and Aldi do an equivalent - but if you're stuck, use any heavy bread
  • two hard boiled eggs
  • 300g of Philadelphia Lightest
  • 1/2 tsp of salt
  • pinch of black pepper (they use white pepper, but who does that, honestly, might as well not bother)
  • one teaspoon of strong mustard, though I'm not sure how you measure the strength of mustard: presumably if your teaspoon comes out of the jar looking like Uri Geller's been having dark thoughts then that'll do)
  • they recommend a pinch of saffron but these are austere times, feel free to choose heating your house over this step
  • one teaspoon of tomato puree
  • pinch of paprika
  • few drops of lemon juice
  • one teaspoon of dried mixed herbs, or a tablespoon if you're chopping it out nice and fresh

Instructions

  • peel your eggs and discard the whites by eating them before anyone else gets a chance
  • beat your cream cheese with a pinch of salt until it's nice and fluffy then divide into four bowls
    • in the first, add the pepper and mustard and mix
      • in the second, add the egg yolk and beat into the cheese
        • in the third, add the tomato puree and paprika
          • in the fourth, mix the lemon juice and herbs in with a pinch of salt
            • on the fifth, let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the face of the firmament of the heavens
  • alright calm yourself down
  • spread the cheese mixes across four slices of bread and stack them ever so neatly on top of one another, then pop the final slice on top of the stack

Now, this is important: whoever came up with this recipe clearly had access to a laser cutter because they suggest slicing it up straight away. Do not do that: it'll ooze out the sides like well, something that isn't nice to talk about. Instead, wrap the whole brick firmly in tin foil and pop in the freezer for about an hour. Once lightly frozen, take it out and with a sharp knife, slice into dominoes. Arrange on a plate and be ready for people to gasp in admiration at your astonishing skills.

Or, make the fillings and whack them on a slice of bloody toast like a normal person.

DO NOT DO what I did and stick it in the freezer for seven hours because you meant to put it on for an hour, but Paul was at work and the sunlight on your face was making you frisky so you took yourself off for some alone time and fell asleep.

Mmmhmm.

Notes

Recipe

  • if you do end up freezing it to the point where you could use it as a murder weapon, let it defrost naturally - if you do what we did and microwave it, you'll regret it

Books

  • despite this blog post, we're actually excellent cooks these days and you can see the fruits of our labour in our wonderful second cookbook, which is full of delicious recipes and lots of nonsense: order yours here! 
  • mind, book one was talking, and book one was talking first - 100+ slimming recipes that'll really make your bull run: click here to order
  • want to keep track of how you're doing and marvel at cartoon versions of us - try our weight loss planner: here

Tools

  • nothing to say other than you'll need a good sharp knife - I asked Paul what he uses to sharpen the knives he plunges into my back every night and he recommends this very simple knife steel - I'm just shocked he doesn't just buy new ones when the old knives get dull, given that's what he does with his clothes

Disclosure: the links above are affiliate links. This means that, at zero cost to you, we will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and make a purchase. Which is handy, as Sola's just been done for GBH and aggravated assault and we have to pay to get her out of the country before the rozzers get her.

Courses retro, sandwiches

Cuisine mystery

Here, if you are just after a normal sandwich to fill your hunger-hole, why not try our egg, cheese and pastrami endeavour? You can find it here, fussy-knickers.

Mr. Haze, is it way too loud?

Jx

retro recipe: fantasia cocktail (salad, but fancy)

A fantasia cocktail awaits you at the end of this retro recipe, which sounds utterly magical until you realise it’s really just a fancy salad. But, having made it, we can confirm that it is both tasty and fairly low in calories. In my new quest to find recipes of old I am inexorably drawn once more to the comfortable, modest busom of Sonia Allison, the utter maniac from the previous retro recipe entry for cheesy bananas on toast. I was going to try out a Fanny Craddock recipe but the book hasn’t arrived so, and you’ll understand this is a sentence I thought I’d never say, I’ll be saving the fanny for later.

What caught my eye about this recipe is the way she presents it: in a giant wine goblet. Now I know there’ll be people out there already mooing and wanting to shake me by the shoulders and say there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s not too dissimilar to a prawn cocktail, and listen, perhaps you’re right, but prawns are absolutely gopping so you can shove that argument. No, I’ve never sat down to a plated salad and pushed my tomatoes around with a tittylip and imagined how delicious the meal could be if only I could pour it straight into my mouth or see at a moment how it would look all layered up in my belly.

I suppose we ought to be thankful she hasn’t served the bloody thing on a teaspoon because lord knows she’s tried to do that with most of the other recipes. Teensy tiny mouthfuls of food all served on an array of shiny teaspoons. I’m not suggesting for a moment that she was on the gear but I can’t conceive of any other reason why one might own so many bloody teaspoons. Check the underside for scorch marks, I say. I mean we’ve got three teaspoons to our name and two of those were only recently acquired from a Premier Inn breakfast. Maybe I’m onto something though: maybe this book was at the start of her dangerous slide into addiction and that’s why she ended up doing the Microwave for One book: she’d pawned everything else. Someone ring Cash Converters and see if they’ve got an AGA kicking around from 1982.

Everything that doesn’t fit onto a tiny teaspoon has been stylishly decanted into a seemingly never-ending pile of serving dishes that are shaped like the food they contain. Got a salad that’s heavy on lettuce? Why not impress your guests by serving it in a giant ceramic lettuce leaf! Have you tried serving your eggs from a giant chicken – your visitors will barely be able to eat for laughing uproariously and slapping their legs. Spaghetti bolognese (or spaghetti neapolitan as she rather primly calls it: I bet Sonia voted leave so hard she cracked her pencil in two scratching in the ‘X’) is served in a dish painted with spaghetti as though she is expecting a party of visually impaired folks to turn up unexpectedly and she wants to leave clues. It really is a colossal amount of tat.

Perhaps I’m only jaundiced because it brings back memories of a bloke in Doncaster who I ‘visited’ in my late teenage years. He promised me a rough time and no mercy, what I actually got was gently troubled in his living room. And even that’s stretching it, although you mustn’t worry, it tends to snap back after an hour or so. Anyway, his rough butch exterior didn’t quite marry up with the exhaustive and highly visible collection of Clarice Cliff cookware and plates that he had dotted around his entire house. It was like making love in a nursing home whilst peering through a kaleidoscope and I can’t pretend I had a great time. Mind you, nor did he – at one point I exuberantly kicked a leg out as though I was Edele from B*Witched doing the Riverdance bit from C’est La Vie and knocked a saucer clean off the side table and onto the floor. We agreed there and then that it was perhaps best I left as we were never going to be best friends.

I have no regrets even now: I might have wasted a good chunk of my disposable income on the train tickets but I did steal a fancy looking spoon rest off the side as I departed, so we’ll call that a win. I used it to keep my change in for a couple of years before it was lost – Mother is probably holding onto it so she can sell it at the right moment and nick off to Greece.

But it is certainly an era of cookware that has passed us by. Frankly, unless someone can find me an entire set of those soup bowls that had the recipe emblazoned on the side, I’m happy with that.

Shall we get to the fantasia cocktail then? For the novelty we did indeed serve this up in a wine glass like Sonia suggests, but I don’t think it will impair the flavour too much if you serve it on a plate. Oh and just one further note: Sonia suggests using tongue, but you’d expect that from a goer like her. I can’t bring myself to eat tongue, not least because I know where my own has been, but if you were so inclined you can pick it up in most major supermarkets. Not for me though: I don’t like to think that my food can taste me as I eat it.

fantasia cocktail

Hosting a swingers party? Try this fantasia cocktail to get the conversation started!

fantasia cocktail

Remember, you don’t need to serve it in a glass, a plate will do just fine for your fantasia cocktail

fantasia cocktail

You’ll note I put my key in a bowl for this fantasia cocktail photo – it just seemed somewhat fitting

fantasia cocktail

Prep

Total

Yield 4 glasses of salad

I mean, let's not pretend that this fantasia cocktail is anything more than a salad in a wine glass, but it's a good salad none the less and the homemade dressing actually had a good bit of kick to it. If you were so inclined you could swap out the dressing for a ready made one and no-one would be any the wiser.

We have worked the calories out via the NHS app at roughly 350 calories, but of course it depends on the meats and cheese you use. So do make sure to double check.

Ingredients

  • one large little gem lettuce (a contradiction I know, so feel free to use two little little gems (I ought to explain, that doesn't mean use a tiny lettuce either) (fuck it, use an iceberg lettuce for all I care) (why use lettuce at all - just cos)
    • of course, you're not making a honeymoon salad here, which is lettuce alone
      • get out
  • 225g of small ripe tomatoes (Sonia says use firm tomatoes, but firm tomatoes are always watery and tasteless, so listen to me), sliced fine
  • 225g of chopped cooked chicken
  • 125g of chopped ham or tongue
  • 225g of cucumber, sliced fine
  • 125g of button mushrooms, sliced fine
  • a green pepper, sliced so fine you blow my mind
  • one teaspoon of mixed herbs
  • 1 tablespoon of white wine vinegar
  • 125g of mild cheese - we used a mixture of Gouda and Edam

For the dressing

  • six tablespoons of mayonnaise (full fat, mind you)
  • one teaspoon (level) of mustard powder
  • two tablespoons of lemon juice
  • pinch of salt and pepper

Or, controversially, just buy some salad dressing.

Instructions

  • line the bottom of your glasses with lettuce leaves or finely chopped lettuce
  • layer the tomatoes on top
  • season with a bit of salt and pepper
  • add equal amounts of chicken into each glass
  • in a separate bowl, add the sliced cucumber, mushrooms and pepper and douse with the vinegar, herbs and another pinch of salt
  • spoon that mixture on top of the chicken
  • top that with ham and cheese
  • top cat, the indisputable leader of the gang
  • whisk all the dressing ingredients together, thinning with water if needed, and then pour over the top to (in Sonia's words) moisten your ingredients
  • serve, and then present yourself alluringly on the banquette so one of your neighbours can have a go to say thanks for such an amazing dinner
  • get yourself a reputation on the street for being a filthy slattern who steals husbands
  • turn to a life of crime 
  • fall from grace
  • end up making a book of Microwave for One meals

The circle completes!

Notes

Recipe

  • as mentioned, you can swap the tongue for ham
  • after dinner, you can swap the tongue for pork if you're nasty

Books

  • we have a few salads in our second cookbook which is a treasure and contains nothing served in a wine glass other than your dear author's morning gin: order yours here! 
  • the berry cheesy salad we made (well, tried to make) on James Martin is in the first book, and it's really quite delicious: click here to order
  • want some motivation and wish we were there to help assist you with your weight loss - why not try our planner - it's like having us with you only without Paul blowing pastry crumbs all over you: here

Tools

  • I have nothing to really put in here today save for this ABSOLUTELY GIANT WINE GLASS I found on Amazon - I think this would be perfect for the school run, but then that's why I'm not a school bus driver

Disclosure: the links above are affiliate links. This means that, at zero cost to you, we will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and make a purchase. Which is handy, as Paul's boobs need another layer of scaffolding

Courses salad

Cuisine retro recipes

Now, if you’re in the mood for another salad, may we point you in the direction of our fabulous mixed bean salad? Worth a try!

We could have been stardust.

J