recipe: sticky picky sausages

Sticky picky sausages are presented for your consideration, and aren’t you glad it’s not Sticky Vicky sausages? Long time readers of our blog will remember our trip to Benidorm many moons ago where we were ever so disappointed not to see the Sticky Vicky tribute act: but no-one wants a link of sausages pulled out of there, now do they? We do these in an airfryer, not in a damp cavern. But first, some chitter chatter.

Our first ever cooking demonstration was a complete success! We were asked by the good people at Instant to nip down to Situ Live and show off what could be cooked in their new Dual Drawer airfryer. Now you must understand, I’ll cheerfully say yes to anything in the heat of the moment and spend the next few weeks regretting my life choices so this wasn’t such a big deal for me, but Paul was absolutely bricking it. Despite being an absolute legend on the radio, TV and literally everything we ever do together, he’s not one for public speaking. But more on that in a moment.

We travelled down on the Friday night, taking advantage of the Seatfrog app to score an upgrade into first class. First class train travels always promises luxury and comfort when in reality, you’re in a slightly more padded chair listening to wankers moo at their wives for several hours. Even so, the chance to stare moonily out of the window as you’re whisked across the country is always welcome, until you realise it’s winter and there’s nothing but darkness outside so you end up glaring at a greasy reflection of your own face like you’re in an 80s power ballad video. Paul was effortless in his good company though, keeping me entertained by putting his earbuds in the moment we sat down and spending the rest of the journey rubbing my leg with his muddy trainers so I look like I’d shat myself by the time we arrived. I will say though, the onboard catering was lovely. I had braised ox cheeks (story of my life) and a chocolate pudding, and they thoughtfully accompanied this with white wine that they’d put in the microwave alongside the beef to make sure it was scalding hot.

Paul didn’t order any of the free food because he’s healthy and virtuous and one MLM quote away from being a Hun, which naturally made me furious. In fact he couldn’t quite make out what I was saying over his earbuds but we agreed I’d definitely called him a Hun.

We stayed at the Premier Inn Kings Cross Hub Zip or whatever it’s called and no complaints there – I’ve put my head down in this hotel a few times over the years and always been satisfied – although there was a baffling moment where the barman told me they didn’t do cocktails and never had. I pointed out the cocktail menu I was holding in my hand and asked whether he thought I’d brought it from home but this bit of levity didn’t land. Weary that if I pressed the issue his brain might have melted and leaked from his ears in a thick soup, I switched us to cider and left it at that.

The event then: we had our own kitchen in a mock house setup in the middle of Westfield Shopping Centre and had planned to cook several rounds of ‘picky’ food that people could try as they walked around, including the sausages you see below. We were to talk about what we were doing and I’d prepared a load of jokes etc but in the end, it was far more conversational and sedate than I had built up in my head. Not going to lie: that was a relief, as it meant we were far more relaxed and ended up having a really, really good time. Thanks to those who came and said hello!

One thing I’ve learned is that I have a nervous tic – as soon as my mic was wired up, my nose thought that was the best time to give up any structural integrity and start everything slooshing out. You have no idea how hard it is to surreptitiously sniff when you’re broadcasting across a shopping centre floor, you truly don’t. It’s why in the video you’ll see me constantly twitching my nose as though I’m Claire from Steps without the talent and range.

Anyway. You can watch us by clicking on the link below – sorry for the audio quality at the start, but that’s just my accent.

Instant Pot UK (@instantpotuk) • Instagram photos and videos

We spent the rest of the weekend wandering around London (according to my watch, and the fact my feet look like corned beef, we walked over 30km yesterday alone) and agreeing that the fake-Sloaney accent is a terrible thing. Fronds are for flowers, not for socialising. Highlights, kept brief, include Paul telling me off for accidentally wrecking someone’s date (and then sweetly putting it right) in one of the gay pubs, going to the Tate Modern before realising we aren’t ones for art galleries and nevermoreso then when they’re awash with people trying to outsmug each other, and me treating myself to an oyster. Of course, I was reminded immediately why I have only tried them once: they’re utterly revolting. But would it be a twochubbycubs trip away if I wasn’t swallowing a mouthful of something salty? No.

On the way back to the station I did my usual thing of falling in love with wherever I’ve just been and told Paul that I think we ought to move to London to have adventures. He pointed out that a) we have a dog now and b) I’d be dead within two months maximum from ‘misadventure’ and we agreed we were probably best staying where we are. He’s a poor sport.

But, a brilliant one. To go back to my original point right at the start, he was absolutely petrified about getting up to speak in front of people and doubly so cooking in front of them. I swallowed my own worries to concentrate on geeing him up on the taxi over but didn’t really need to: as soon as we were live, he was just amazing. Forgive me a small indulgence here but I’ve seen him flourish in the last year since losing weight: his confidence is high and he faces every challenge head-on. Having been witness to him retreating into a shell of fat and overeating in 2020, it’s beautiful to see. To that end, he’s done a series of blog posts which are coming soon which explains his whole ‘battle’ and I can tell you know, they’re brilliant. I really feel like I have my fun husband back, and I absolutely love it.

Even if the stupid arse doesn’t take advantage of the free food when we’re out and about. But fret not, we can iron out those wrinkles. With an iron.

The sticky picky sausages, then.

sticky picky sausages

Sticky picky sausages – 290 calories for ten, which is nothing really

sticky picky sausages

Goomba with his eyes on the prize: though he looks fuming, he’s just about the sticky picky sausages life

sticky picky sausages

Prep

Cook

Total

Yield 40 sausages

These sticky picky sausages can be done in the oven just as easily as an Airfryer, so don't get your knickers in a twist if you're without one of those. The marinade is really easy but you can adjust to add spice, take it out, make it sweeter, whatever you like. And although we've used sesame seeds, feel free to drop them to save a few calories.

These are perfect to make a big batch of if you've got people over and need picky food. Of course, if you do have people over, make sure that you tell everyone you had no idea it was actually a party and it was all a terrible surprise. It's not so relevant now mixing is legal again, but you know, err on the side of caution. Just because our auricomous, shambling Pinocchio of a Prime Minister can seemingly do what he pleases with absolutely no worry of punishment, doesn't mean you can.

Calorie counts are approximate, as ever. 290 calories for ten.

Ingredients

  • forty precooked cocktail sausages - the ones that look like tiny uncircumcised willies
  • two teaspoons of honey
  • one tablespoon of chilli oil
  • one tablespoon of soy sauce
  • one tablespoon of chilli sauce
  • chilli flakes and sesame seeds

I've mentioned before the crispy chilli in oil that we absolutely adore - we used it here instead of the chilli oil but I haven't included it in the recipe because it can be quite hard to find. However, if you're ready for one of the tastiest foods I've ever had, you can order it here

Instructions

  • tumble all the sausages around in the marinade (leaving the chilli flakes and sesame seeds til the end)
  • airfry until sticky
  • or roast them in the oven
  • scatter the sesame seeds / chilli flakes on top
  • I feel a bit cheeky sticking the recipe on, such as it is, but you wanted it

Notes

Recipe

  • not a fan of spice - swap the chilli oil for sesame oil and the chilli sauce for a wholegrain mustard

Books

  • what's got 100 recipes and lots of knob-jokes? Our second cookbook: order yours here! 
  • what's got 100 more recipes and a not so exciting front page? Our first cookbook: click here to order
  • what's good for standing on when you need something from high up in the cupboard? Our planner: 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 we accidentally ordered a pint in London and that's us on our second mortgage.

Courses snacks, picky food

Cuisine twochubbycubs

Want something else to pick at? Try our jerk pork and pineapple skewers! Click the picture, complete with our cheesy live laugh love style slogan on the bottom, to go to the recipe.

pork and pineapple skewers

I’m off. Take care.

Like the mountains in springtime, like a walk in the rain.

J

recipe reacharound: lovely loaded wedges

Well hello! Here for the lovely loaded wedges? But of course you are, you’re someone of excellent tastes, save for those cheap shoes and moustache. Praise be though, because this recipe is a reacharound – that is, we’ve taken a recipe from way back when on the blog, wiped its bum and gussied it up and, more importantly, worked out the calorie content. Because we’re that type of blog.

The original recipe – found here – is tasty enough but the photo does rather look like we cooked dinner on the elephant’s foot at Chernobyl. Long-time readers, you know what’s coming here, but won’t it be a delightful surprise for everyone else. A giant, molten, hazardous pile of hot slag, Paul is often found in the kitchen making this. Recycle a joke? Me? Never!

Reading that post from 2016, where I was twisting my gob about having to pay council tax…I didn’t know I was born, honestly. Our council tax (same property, mind you) has risen by a smart £350, and boy do we see the benefit of it. For example, we’ve now got more bins than we have things to put in them: one for glass, one for recycling, one for garden waste, one for Paul’s awful shirts – the list is endless. Well no, there’s only the general waste bin to include but for the sake of hyperbole, we’ll leave that out. Still, it does give us the joyful sight of the more senior neighbours all trying to out-do themselves to get their bin out first on collection day. I had to get up at 5am the other day to afford Goomba a chance to call his agent and there was one game old girl pulling her heaving bin to the kerb, dressed in her nighty. I let her get her bin into place and claim gold, then waved a cheery good morning, but she was too busy sitting on the pavement clutching her chest and shouting help. I told her I didn’t need any and left her to it.

But you know, I can take all of these annoyances if they just sped up collecting bulky waste. I’ve had two mattresses and an old armchair sat in our garage since April, and the earliest date they can send some burly blokes to hurl it into the back of a van is late September. I appreciate that logistically they have to send eight men tethered together in a human chain lest one of them falls into my mouth but even so. Even then we have to leave it outside all day which I don’t like the thought of: both of our mattresses look like sponges that God used to clean a combine harvester. They’re well used (mattresses shouldn’t squelch) to the point where we’ll probably be embroiled in a paternity test nine months later from random ladies walking past. Hell, if I drive to the tip at a modest speed with a screen showing some choice pornography in the rear view window, the mattresses will probably slosh their own way there.

I’d write a letter of complaint to my local MP but unless I put on a free buffet and some press photographers, there’s no chance of her turning up to assist. I will refrain from naming her – not least because if I say her name three times she may appear to tell me why schoolchildren should starve at lunchtime to build their spirit – but she’s as useless as balls on a dildo.

Anyway. Enough twisting. Let’s get to the lovely loaded wedges, shall we? They’re a thing of beauty, you’ll agree. Or so help me God.

lovely loaded wedges

Top your lovely loaded wedges with whatever you like. Or, top me, but we’ll need to discuss logistics first

lovely loaded wedges

It’s the same dish of lovely loaded wedges but turned a different way: magic!

lovely loaded wedges

Prep

Cook

Total

Yield 4 servings

This serves four people a normal portion or, if you're like us and the thought of being hungry eight days from now is a terror, two. Adjust the ingredients accordingly.

And, look, this isn't anything especially fancy and can be customised to your heart's content. Add whatever toppings you like: fried onions work, as do jarred peppers, as does enough cheese to make sure you don't need to stock the pond for a week or two. You could even reduce the amount and serve it with hot-dogs, but then you could do a lot of things if you had the money.

Finally, we work all of our recipe calories out using Nutracheck - remember your calorie count may be different depending on what type of cheese you use and all that, so calorie count is a rough guide only!

Ingredients

  • 800g of Maris Piper potatoes cut into wedges
  • one beef stock cube
  • 100g of extra mature cheddar
  • two teaspoons of olive oil (use flavoured if you have it)
  • bunch of spring onions
  • one pack of bacon medallions (or normal bacon, but this is a rare occasion when you're fine without the fat)
  • 25ml of ranch dressing (we use Newman's Own) 
  • 25ml of hot sauce (we use Frank's Red Hot stuff)
  • chilli flakes

Instructions

  • pop your wedges into a bowl with the oil and the crumbled beef stock cube and tumble them around, making sure everything is coated, then:
    • cook for about twenty five minutes on 200 degrees until soft; or
    • whack them in the Actifry until they're golden
  • cook the bacon off under the grill and chop finely
  • chop the spring onion, green and white
  • once the wedges are done, arrange them on a tray if not done already, top with the sauce, cheese, dressing and chilli flakes
  • add more cheese, we both know you

Notes

Recipe

  • as mentioned, you can chuck anything on here
  • minced sausage fried off would be lovely

Books

Courses wedges

Cuisine twochubbycubs

And that’s your lot – I’ll thank you to stay out of my affairs.

Want something else to do with your potatoes? Try this potato salad below!

slimming world bbq

Goodbye forever!

J

recipe reacharound: curry loaf reloaded

Well hello! Normally I’d apologise for the delay between posts but not time time, no way: the last time I updated we were about to move back to Chubby Towers, and now? We’re back, and it’s all very exciting. More on that a moment!

Today’s recipe is one of our reacharounds, where we look at the abominations that were our early recipes and update them for a more modern take: and for this one, we’re going right back to the very beginning, not least because that’s a very good place to start. It was 2014 when we first posted this and honestly, looking at that style we used to have makes me cringe so hard I’m no longer circumcised. I’m not sure why we eschewed capital letters back then, or providing proper ingredient lists, or presented our food in such a cackhanded fashion. But thank goodness we’ve changed.

Curry loaf is one of those things that are held up in highest regard amongst Slimming Worlders, possibly because it’s so easy to cook, possibly because they’re always at bloody taster nights, possibly because it has ‘loaf’ in it and us dieters start bubbling at the lips at the thought of being allowed bread. Who can say? Either way, a curry loaf is just a combination of various vegetables, some microwave rice (leftover rice also works, but none of us got to where we are by leaving leftovers – most of us barely leave the pattern on the plate because we’re so feverishly finishing our food), eggs and a chickpea dahl. Chickpea dahl is an absolute arseache to find these days so we’ve done a few swaps, and if you’re in a rush to get to the food, just scroll straight to the curry loaf photos and be done.

It’s funny though, looking so far back at the old stuff when we are, for the want of a far less hyperbolic turn of phrase, at the start of a new chapter for us. Being back at home is terrific, although I miss terribly the excitement of settling down for a wank and then having housekeeping rattling the door and trying to get in. I’ve tried to recreate it by bundling Paul into the alarm cupboard and locking the door, but his mewling cries about spiders just proved more of a distraction. Plus, it’s Paul, leave him unfed for more than twenty minutes and he’ll start chewing at his own arms in the hope of righting the calorie deficit. Our house wasn’t destroyed in the fire, but pretty much everything needed replacing or redoing, and all the rooms are now blank canvases for my fits of whimsy and it’s great. For example: no house truly needs a toilet brush that looks like a cherry, but we do, even if very good friends grouse about it. But then some very good friends’ lavatories look like the one out of Trainspotting, so they can respectfully sod off. We have some plans for the outdoor bit and our kitchen is far more suitable for filming in, so you can expect some fresh twochubbycubs content soon enough. Well, that, or onlyfans, and I ask that if you do want to pay good money to watch me eating name-brand crisps in my off-brand knickers whilst I scratch at my balls with a bristle brush, you get in touch privately.

Of course, the best thing about being home is simple: we have our cats back, though it was very much an exercise in winning their trust back. We were lucky that they both escaped the fire unharmed (though watching Sola trying to hustle out of the cat-flap with a box of Cooks Matches wedged in her jaw did arouse suspicion) and we were able to house them just up the road with a friend. However, they had to become house cats for ten months, as we couldn’t bear the thought of them plodding back to our house and scratching at the door to be let in to no avail. That would be no problem for Sola, the older one, but Bowser is very much an outdoors cat and if he hasn’t had his four fights with the neighbourhood cats he tends to get a little fussy. I’m not one for sentimentality, I’m not, but when we used to drive back to check on progress at the house I couldn’t bear to turn around at the top of the street in case I saw them looking forlornly at the window like the widows of men lost at sea. I say that as though Sola wouldn’t have spent the ten months learning how to stick her middle finger up.

We decided to bring them back with a week between them in order to allow them to re-acclimatise to the new house without winding each other up. Bowser was brilliant: immediately fussing about us and then retiring to our bedroom to casually shed as much hair as he can all over our new bed. He doesn’t seem to go out as much, but then maybe he’s just observing the COVID guidance. Sola was far more effort: although the initial reunion between us was slightly less hysterical than I anticipated, that’s mainly because she’s grown too fat to run away at speed. She was always such a lithe cat back in the day – now she looks like a teapot when she sits. Watching her trying to lick her nipsy (we don’t have Sky anymore, so gotta watch something) is quite the sight. We’re putting her on a calorie controlled diet. Anyway: she let us pick her up (which she would never do) and carry her home, where she immediately took one look at our newly grey and very hun walls and disappeared under the sofa, where she remained for a good couple of days.

However, as philosopher Daisaku Ikeda said according to the google search for patience quotes I just did to make this blog entry sound more clever, ‘with love and patience, nothing is impossible’. Well, I’m the master of patience (I’ve waited fourteen years for the light of love to leave Paul’s eyes, and still here we are) and also fantastic at pss-pss-pssing, and now she’s back to her normal self. That is, she will meow loudly at me every morning until I move to stroke her, then turn her back on me to show she considers me to be subhuman scum. She’s easily won around with a little baggy of catnip and a fuss, mind, so perhaps we aren’t so different after all.

So: reunited, and it feels so good, and Chubby Towers is complete once more. We have smoke alarms in each room which all bellow at us in unison if we so much as snuff out a candle without using a fire blanket. Speaking of fire blankets, Paul bought one for the kitchen but given it was £3.99 and they have misspelled blanket as blaknet on the box, I’m not especially convinced it’ll do us the world of good if the fire demands a sequel. But we’re home and it is marvellous. Even the neighbours seem pleased to see us save for one miserable old fart who ignored my cheery wave, electing instead to scowl at me. But then he always has a face that suggests he’s just discovered blood in his urine, so I shan’t take it to heart.

To the curry loaf then.

curry loaf

The ingredients for the curry loaf – chop, mix, go.

curry loaf

Curry loaf all cooked!

Curry loaf sliced and ready to go!

lovely loaded wedges

Prep

Cook

Total

Yield 4 servings

This serves four people a normal portion or, if you're like us and the thought of being hungry eight days from now is a terror, two. Adjust the ingredients accordingly.

And, look, this isn't anything especially fancy and can be customised to your heart's content. Add whatever toppings you like: fried onions work, as do jarred peppers, as does enough cheese to make sure you don't need to stock the pond for a week or two. You could even reduce the amount and serve it with hot-dogs, but then you could do a lot of things if you had the money.

Finally, we work all of our recipe calories out using Nutracheck - remember your calorie count may be different depending on what type of cheese you use and all that, so calorie count is a rough guide only!

Ingredients

  • 800g of Maris Piper potatoes cut into wedges
  • one beef stock cube
  • 100g of extra mature cheddar
  • two teaspoons of olive oil (use flavoured if you have it)
  • bunch of spring onions
  • one pack of bacon medallions (or normal bacon, but this is a rare occasion when you're fine without the fat)
  • 25ml of ranch dressing (we use Newman's Own) 
  • 25ml of hot sauce (we use Frank's Red Hot stuff)
  • chilli flakes

Instructions

  • pop your wedges into a bowl with the oil and the crumbled beef stock cube and tumble them around, making sure everything is coated, then:
    • cook for about twenty five minutes on 200 degrees until soft; or
    • whack them in the Actifry until they're golden
  • cook the bacon off under the grill and chop finely
  • chop the spring onion, green and white
  • once the wedges are done, arrange them on a tray if not done already, top with the sauce, cheese, dressing and chilli flakes
  • add more cheese, we both know you

Notes

Recipe

  • as mentioned, you can chuck anything on here
  • minced sausage fried off would be lovely

Books

Courses wedges

Cuisine twochubbycubs

And that’s your lot – I’ll thank you to stay out of my affairs.

If you want to try your hand at a different loaf, may I suggest our chicken and ham picnic loaf? Just click the image below to be taken straight there!

chicken and ham picnic loaf

J (and Paul) (and Bowser) (and Sola)

recipe: cheesy bubble and squeak fritters

Come for the cheesy bubble and squeak fritters, stay for the lengthy polemic about free school dinners. Now, some of you on our Facebook might have seen the condensed version of this already, and some of you might have no time for some fat bloke pontificating about the hungry when all you want to do is read a few knob jokes and see what to do with leftover mash, and that’s fine. You just scroll down to the pictures and crack on. Everyone else though: a subject that is close to my heart (because it involves food) and one I, James, wanted to write a little more fully on.


Last week saw our wonderful Government vote against the proposal for kids to receive free meals. These MPs, who have more than likely never missed a meal in their lives and certainly don’t go without these days, directly voted against supporting hungry kids during a time when so many families don’t know where their next meal is coming from. When you read the reports online, the comments are littered with folks in agreement, including such cheering philosophies as ‘don’t breed them if you can’t feed them’. Fuck off.

I’ve previously mentioned that I used to work for a homeless charity, and if I’m speaking honestly, I started out with so many misconceptions about the homeless and the struggling – misconceptions I still see bandied about by others now – that people who were struggling just weren’t trying hard enough, that benefits were spunked up the wall on fripperies and fancies, all that tired rhetoric. But the longer I spent there, the more my eyes were opened to the reality of what is actually happening out there. And mind, this was before the massive austerity cuts and COVID, so it won’t have got any better.

I remember one father who came in – dressed like he was going for an interview with a bank, well-spoken and clean shaven – and because I was a shameless slut back in the day I took him in for an interview. He explained that his wife had been diagnosed with MS and had to give up work. They’d struggled and then he lost his job too, and suddenly they were faced with bills and a mortgage they couldn’t pay. Children don’t stop needing food and uniform and days out and entertainment and medicine just because you’ve received a P45 after all. Imagine that these days with unemployment absolutely rocketing and costs of living giving chase and then ask yourself what a family like that is supposed to do? If anyone out there has an answer that doesn’t extend to applying for Universal Credit – which takes weeks to process and offers scant difference when put up against cost of living increases – then do let me know. These people didn’t plan to be faced with stark choices between heating and eating, they didn’t have children with the expectation someone else would pay for them. Circumstances forced their hand and the truth is, nobody knows what is coming down the line and never more so than during these COVID times. Of course there are chancers who abuse the system, but they’re few and far between. Why not vent your ire at the MPs who pocket £300 a day to sit and kip in the Houses of Parliament rather than someone getting an extra £20 to feed their kids? What’s the alternative? Let them starve in the name of teaching them a lesson about having fiscal responsibility in a system where all the cards are stacked against them?

It’s easy to kvetch about ‘wasting taxpayer money’ as though we’re talking about delays on building a bypass or cobbling together a fancy garden bridge, but we’re talking about starving children and broken families. To dismiss that as ‘hyperbole’ or ‘emotional manipulation’ does nothing but show the person thinking that as the selfish, myopic prick that they are. If they can piss away £156,000,000 on contracts for PPE that doesn’t work, £87,000,000 on contracts for ferry companies with no fucking ferries, why can’t they help families out during these unprecedented times? It’s an absolute disgrace and make no mistake, none of the MPs who voted against the bill will face the consequences of their actions. They’ll never fret about sending their kids to school with empty bellies, after all.

Some of the MPs who voted against have come out since to wring their hands and say that it’s better to cure the need for this sort of ‘charity’ rather than putting a sticking-plaster over it. Think that through. If you tear your leg open on a nail sticking out of a fence, of course you’ll want the fence fixed so it doesn’t happen again, but you wouldn’t expect to go to the doctors and have them say they won’t bother dressing your wound because it’s better they fix the fence. It’s a short-sighted, piss-weak argument and one made even worse by the fact they’ve caused the bloody need for the plaster in the first place. Much fuss has been made about the fact that the Government has given extra to local councils to meet the shortfall, but councils have been cut to the quick by funding cuts after funding cuts and what has been given back – a veritable crumb off the banqueting table – doesn’t touch the sides. And why do they do this? So the Government can turn around and put the blame at the door of local councils when things go tits-up. Kids going hungry in your constituency? It’s the council’s fault now. They did it with social services – stripped the support bare and then stand looking anguished at the fact that families are falling apart – and now they’re doing it with feeding hungry kids.

You know what fucks me off most of all? There is ZERO accountability. One of our local MPs has been asked repeatedly over and over why she voted no – on Twitter, on Facebook, via letters – and she hasn’t deigned to reply to a single one that I can see. She’s retweeted the odd tweet blowing smoke up her arse, because of course she has, but people with genuine questions asked politely about a situation that any decent person would deal with? Nah. Happy to claim almost £60,000 in expenses though, and I very much look forward to seeing her face adorning the sides of the A1 when it comes to election time, because lord knows I need another reason to wonder what would happen if I put the handbrake on at 70mph. Doesn’t matter though: she’ll be a shoo-in for re-election because people round here have short memories or deep pockets.

And honestly, I think it takes a special type of cold-hearted shit to endorse a government that can hand-wave feeding children away as ‘not our responsibility’. It bloody well is. Homelessness is rocketing, food bank use is off the scale, and if anyone honestly thinks things are going to get any easier for the poor and the disadvantaged and the struggling over the next few months, you should hang your head.

Paul and I both came from families where if someone dropped a pound it would land on the back of their heads – never had a lot (though never went without) and in Paul’s case certainly, often went to bed hungry. He’s certainly made up for this struggle since, preferring to go to bed only when there’s a real and distinct chance his belly-button is going to blow out like a party popper, but neither of us would want what we went through for anyone else. And that’s what I don’t understand. You see people on Facebook – nearly all of a certain age mind you, and nearly always looking as though the last time they went hungry was back when Thatcher was mulling over the Falklands – saying stuff like ‘well when I was young I used to eat gravel and my mother would go out and work 25 hours a day just to get enough moisture in her mouth to fill the tin-bath with spit so I don’t see why parents these days can’t do the same‘.

What sort of argument is that? Why wouldn’t you want kids to avoid that? It’s not a character-building exercise, living in squalor and poverty, but these people seem to think it should be endured because ‘they had to do it’. Mind, I got into an argument with someone along those lines on Facebook which quickly turned into her telling me how COVID was just a ‘plandemic’ (and if ever there was a portmanteau which made my shit itch, it’s that) and how she had survived many a pandemic in her seventy years. When I enquired which ones she replied ‘scarlet fever’ and then went absolutely spare when I pointed out the last scarlet fever pandemic was in the nineteenth century. She did look good for a foaming gas-bag knocking over 200 years old, though. Same as those people who’ll suggest that parents should get their ‘priorities straight’ and sell their TVs and mobile phones. You need a mobile phone and internet access to apply for jobs now – selling your phone might get you £100, but it’ll mean you can fuck right off when it comes to trying to get a job. But that doesn’t matter, because it’s just another stick to beat the poor with. Maybe there’s no reasoning with these people, content as they are to live in their bubbles of superiority shouting at the clouds to do better. Fuck ’em.

We’re all in this together, after all. Except when, you know, we’re not. But just remember all of this next time. Remember how your MP voted. Remember the absolute contempt they have for the poor and those who elected them on the misguided belief those MPs gave a shiny-shite about anyone other than themselves and their pals with their hands in the till. In the meantime, try and do something to help, whether it’s donating to a food bank or raising awareness.

And, if you need support, if you’re struggling, there’s help out there from decent folk and you should feel fuck-all shame in asking for help in whatever form you need it. Don’t let the media, and the parasitic arseholes who comment on it, tell you otherwise. The country is full of decent, kind folk who will give you whatever they can, and you’ve only got to look at the businesses currently rallying around to try and give away meals in order to prove that. They are the people to focus on and celebrate, not the vainglorious, self-serving shitheads in Parliament who wouldn’t give you the steam off their piss unless they could claim it back afterwards.

You know what worries me though? The very same MPs will look at the help that has been offered and claim the whole thing as a success as it proves extra money wasn’t needed.

The full list of MPs who voted against – remember their names and DO something about it when you can – call out your MP, make your voice heard

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/daily-mirror-names-and-shames-every-mp-who-voted-against-free-meals-for-hungry-kids-on-its-front-page/22/10/

Find a food bank near you:

https://www.trusselltrust.org/get-help/find-a-foodbank/

Find a company near you giving away free meals:

https://www.freemeals.uk/  

And that’s me done. If this post is anything like the Black Lives Matter post I did a while ago, it’ll attract some good discussion and comments and, more than likely, more than a few comments telling me I’m a leftie do-gooder. You know what though? If do-gooder is the worst someone can call me, then that’s a hill I’m willing to die on. Far better to be known for doing good than doing nothing.


Right: cheesy bubble and squeak fritters then!

cheesy bubble and squeak fritters

See? These cheesy bubble and squeak fritters are the bollocks with the sauce added!

cheesy bubble and squeak fritters

You could eschew the sauce if you want to save a couple of syns, but let’s be honest, you’re not going to – and rightfully so!

cheesy bubble and squeak fritters

Prep

Cook

Total

Yield 10 fritters

These are an absolute piece of piss to make - if you have leftover cabbage or spring greens to go with your leftover mash, then even better, but even if you have to buy the ingredients in fresh it is a worthwhile cook. They freeze well, and I'm serving them with a cheesy sauce to dip in. Because I'm a whore.

We've worked out the syns - with sauce - as 3.5 for four large hot fritters each. Treat yourself!

This is another recipe inspired from Hello Fresh - we've tinkered with it a little to make it lower in syns for you. We aren't getting paid to promote Hello Fresh, we're just using it whilst our house is rebuilt. We love it, and you probably will too! Click here if you want to give them a go, you'll get £20 off your first box. We also get £20, because damn it someone needs to pay for Paul's extra-wide shoes.

Ingredients

  • 400g of mash (or 400g of tatties cooked through and mashed)
  • six or eight or even ninety bacon medallions
  • bunch of chives
  • 160g of spring greens
  • 30g of panko (5 syns)
  • 50g of Philadelphia Lightest (swap for Quark if saving syns) (but also have a bloody word with yourself, you loon (2 syns)
  • 40g of extra mature lighter cheddar
  • lighter cheddar? I did yes, but she blew it out after and we've since made up
  • enough black pepper and salt to suggest you need to talk to Frank

Instructions

  • chop up your bacon medallions and fry them in a little oil, along with your spring greens, until the greens have softened and the bacon is crispy and you feel really proud of yourself
  • in a big bowl mix the mash with the panko breadcrumbs, grated cheddar cheese, spring greens, crispy bacon and all the vim and vigour you can muster
  • season to taste by eating about half of it 
    • tell your husband there wasn't as much mash as you thought there was
    • offer to make him a sandwich as a conciliatory gesture only for him to turn it down because he's got a tittylip on because you apparently can read minds and should have guessed that he had forgotten to take his lunch to work and was starving
    • have a blazing row where fourteen years of angst and indiscretions come tumbling out so he leaves in a huff and you get to eat the rest which you cook by...
  • heating a flat frying pan to a medium heat and spraying with just a little squizzle of oil
  • form the mash mix into burger shapes and pop them in to almost dry fry
  • serve when they are a bit crunchy on the outside and drizzle with the sauce

The sauce, such as it is, is Philadelphia heated ever so slightly with some chopped chives and black pepper mixed in. Drizzle over rather than drown your fritters.

Notes

Recipe

  • the panko is worth it because the dryness of the crumb help soak up some of the 'moistness' - you could just blitz a breadbun but honestly, it's worth getting some panko – most major supermarkets stock it and you can stick them in an airtight jar and use them wherever - see the recipe list below for more ideas
  • the stronger the cheese, the better these are
  • these make a great little snack for taking to taster nights - stack them on top of each other with a slip of greaseproof paper betwixt them

Books

  • OUR BRAND NEW COOKBOOK IS COMING OUT SOON! You thought the last one was good? It was, but this sequel is even better - it'll be coming out just in time for the new year! Preorder yours here! 
  • our first slimming cookbook can be ordered online now – full of 100+ slimming recipes, and bloody amazing, with over 3000 5* reviews – even if we do say so ourselves: click here to order
  • our new diet planner is out now and utterly brilliant – you can order it here – thank you to everyone so far for the positive feedbacks

Tools

Courses snacks or sides

Cuisine twochubbycubs

Lovely, yes? Want some more ideas on where to use panko? Sure Jan, here you go:

That’s it from me. Stay safe.

JX

home made Slimming World pease pudding

Not going to lie, I’m in two minds to post this recipe for pease pudding. Keen readers may remember me mentioning a few posts back that people are scraping this stuff into pie dishes and pretending it’s a pastry. I can get behind that – sort of – it’s not that much different to a potato crust pie, I suppose. But, to top the lemon meringue pie monstrosity that I saw someone posting the other day, someone’s actually gone and made jam tarts. That’s a jam tart made from pease-pudding and a few squished strawberries. Syn-free, though, so who’s laughing now? Not the people watching you choke down these vile creations, I can tell you – they’re looking at you with thinly-veiled hatred, Sheila – not least because you’ve got pease pudding flakes in your moustache.

But hey, who am I to stand in the way of dignity – so a recipe for pease pudding it is. This isn’t syn-free because in a desperate attempt to make it interesting I’ve added a Newcastle Brown Ale syrup that I made from boiling the bejesus from a bottle of dog – that’s what we call Newcastle Brown Ale up here in tan-teeth-land: so-called because a husband would tell his wife he was walking the dog when instead he was creeping away for a quick drink. The rotter! You can, of course, leave that out. What you do with this pease pudding is entirely up to you – decent folk spread it on sandwiches with ham, sensible folk have it on the side of a good lunch, but if you choose to smear it up a pie tin and make a corned beef pie with it, then more power to your elbow.

A quick reminder before the recipe though:

Reposting this for the summer. Ask yourself a quick question – can you remember the hair colour of the last person who served you in a shop? Can you remember what style shirt the guy who let you out at the lights was wearing? In fact, any human interaction outside of your friends and family in the last three days – can you describe anyone in more than a fleeting detail? Of course you can’t – and that’s why you shouldn’t be covering up your wobbly bits or unsightly ham-arms. Because no-one cares, no-one remembers and only you are worried about them. When I posted this on Facebook yesterday there was a sea of positivity – good – but quite a few comments of people sat inside too scared to go out and enjoy themselves because they were scared of being judged. Please, for the love of Mags Miles-B and her 40 Rothmans larynx, stop. Don’t waste a second worrying about people who’d never give you a second thought (and I mean that kindly). Life’s too short.

The pease pudding then…

pease pudding

pease pudding

home made pease pudding

Yield 10 servings

So two things: you don't need an Instant Pot for this recipe - it just makes things so much easier. Second, you don't need to add the ale - it adds syns, but it makes a lovely base-note for the pudding. Christ, how pretentious. Add plenty of salt and pepper before cooking, too!

Remember that you could very easily switch and make syn free split pea soup! We have a recipe for this.

Oh and finally! Pease pudding in the supermarket is about 70p for a little pot. This recipe makes about 10 pots worth for £1 of ingredients. Pease pudding freezes well, so get it done!

It's this easy!

https://youtu.be/AW-N72urmbc

Ingredients

  • 500g of yellow split peas
  • one large chopped onion
  • 1100ml of ham stock
  • one bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale (330ml) (6 syns) (optional)
  • a right good pinch of black pepper and salt 

Instructions

  • if you're using the ale, reduce it down by adding it into a pan and allowing to reduce on the heat until it's reduced by about a third
  • if you're using an Instant Pot, throw it all in, turn the vent to seal, stick it on manual for twenty minutes
  • once cooked, let out the pressure, give it a good stir and then leave to cool
  • it'll thicken up in the fridge - portion up and freeze
  • if you don't have an Instant Pot, you can do this on the hob - just allow to blip and simmer away for as long as it takes

Notes

We love our Instant Pot - one of our favourite gadgets, and after being out of stock for a whole year, they're NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER! Have a look through the recipes we posted at the bottom of this post for more ideas but in the meantime, if you've sat on the fence about getting one, now is the time to get it! Order one here!

Courses snacks

Cuisine British

Easy! Want some more Instant Pot / Pressure King recipes? Then here you go:

J

super cheesy ham and cheese scones

Ham and cheese scones. Nope. They’re not Slimming World friendly. But sometimes, you’ve got to let your gunt out, shake that Elnett-by-proxy out of your hair and live your life a little. Anyway, a little bit of what you fancy does you good, or at least it does until you’re left with an STD and Graeme from Jeremy Kyle is fussing about your nethers with a box of tissues. I’m feeling a bit soured towards the whole Slimming World thing at the moment anyway: any diet where people are making lemon meringue pies by scrapping a Muller yoghurt into a pastry made from PEASE PUDDING isn’t good.

To be fair, that’s not Slimming World’s fault such as it is people just trying to eat without spending syns, which is ridiculous but ground that we’ve covered so many times before that I earned my Body Magic Platinum badge (urgh) just from eye-rolling alone. You know, perhaps if they changed the name from something as negative as syns (short for synergy or some other such abbol) (abbol being short for absolute bollocks) people would be more inclined to ‘spend’ them instead of fretting about eating something perfectly normal.

Ah well. If I had to represent via the medium of cat how I feel looking at these recipes for Frankenfood, this is it:

I’ve never known a cat have such resting bitch face. For balance, here’s Bowser.

Don’t hate them because they’re beautiful. Shall we do cheese scones then?

cheese scones

super cheesy cheese scones - no, not Slimming World friendly

Prep

Cook

Total

Yield 13 scones

Cheese scones, proper ones mind you, with no nonsense. These have more cheese in them than is entirely decent and you know, that's good because frankly, if you're not having mild chest pains spreading the butter, then are you even alive?

I use the recipe from theguardian because I'm a hippy-drippy middle-class sort. Feel free to swap the butter for Trex and the gentle touch for a bad attitude, if you're so inclined.

Oh and if you're wondering why a diet blog contains a recipe for cheese scones, it's simple: because we're a cooking blog, and we all have a naughty side. Though if your idea of being naughty is a cheese scone, we need to get you out more...

Ingredients

  • 450g of self-raising flour (70 syns)
  • 1 tsp of smoked salt (ordinary salt is fine)
  • 1 tbsp of English mustard powder
  • 100g of cold, from-the-fridge, salted butter (36 syns)
  • 250g extra strong mature cheese, plus a bit extra for the top (50 syns)
  • 180g of shredded ham hock (buy it from Tesco, it's cheap, or cut up some ham yourself)
  • 120ml of cold milk
  • 120ml of cold water
  • 1 egg, beaten up with a drop or two of milk

156 syns. Oops! 12 syns each.

Instructions

  • heat your oven to 220 degrees
  • sift your flour, salt and mustard powder into a big bowl
  • grate in the butter and rub with the tips of your finger until you have fine sand
  • grate in the cheese and add the ham, then stir to combine
  • mix in the milk and water until everything starts to bind together, but don't overwork it - it'll be a sticky dough to begin with but you'll get there
  • tip onto a floured surface and roll to about 2cm high
  • cut into circles of about 6cm across, reshaping as you need
  • pop on a good non-stick baking tray, brush with the egg and milk mix and top with lots more cheese
  • cook in the oven until golden on top - mine took about 16 minutes

Mine came out perfectly but scones are a bitch sometimes - if they don't come out looking great, who cares: strive for good taste, not good looks!

Notes

You don't need any expensive kit to bake. A big bowl, a grater and some scone cutters. Hell, you can use a pint glass if you want. But if you're looking for ideas:

Courses x-rated, scones

Cuisine naughty

I know, right? Want more naughty ideas? We don’t have many but the ones we have…

Ta

J

easy to make Slimming World scotch eggs

I’m almost loathe to post a recipe for Slimming World scotch eggs in case I get eight hundred comments from people moaning about Porky Lights or whatever shite sausage is the current cause celebre amongst slimmers, but hey, let’s just do it anyway. It’ll be a nice simple recipe to type up and, as we’re currently tied up with a bit of an unhappy family situation at the moment, I’m pushed for time. Listen, though, we know how much you love our nonsense and frippery so I’m going to put a new holiday post up – not from Switzerland or our latest holiday, but instead, I’m tying up the loose ends of our Cornwall trip. You may remember last year our ‘lovely’ holiday to Cornwall, no? Refresh yourself with parts one, two and three, and then read on. Warning: I’m just not a fan.

twochubbycubs go to cornwall: part four

The last three entries of our Cornwall trip didn’t exactly make the heart sing with joy, did they? Fair warning, it doesn’t get much better. I don’t know what it was about Cornwall that disappointed me – it’s beautiful (in places) and I’m sure there’s lots to see and do if you’re not a curmudgeonly fatty whose sole exercise is leaning over to fart – but perhaps I’m spoiled. I live in what I reckon is the most beautiful county in England – Northumberland – and eye-watering beauty is never more than a twenty-minute drive away. Anyway, hush. It’s been so long since we went away that we’ll have to forgo a chronological narrative, so just assume that wherever there is a full-stop, it’s where Paul and I stopped the car to eat a pasty.

The Eden Project

Sitting in our cottage in Perranporth, with the unseasonable grey skies blowing around overhead, we decided to head for the Eden Project, a thirty or so minute drive away via relatively easy roads, according to our sassy in-car Sat-Nav. Nope. You may recall that I was stricken with a poor neck which meant I couldn’t look right and Paul was equally laid-out with a sore back that meant he couldn’t look left, so you can imagine how much fun driving a car was. Every junction was one step closer to divorce. Things became so tense that I actually just started pulling out of junctions blindly in the hope that a clotted cream tanker would crash into the side of the car, putting us both out of our misery. We’d die the way we lived: sitting down and covered in fat.

The sat-nav did indeed take us the most direct route but for some reason, confined us almost exclusively to single-track roads. I reckon if you counted up the miles we did in reverse it would actually work out that we never left the cottage in the first place. Why does every road in Cornwall need to be framed by an impenetrable hedge or crumbling wall? At one point we were stuck between a car coming towards us, eight walkers in rustling (is there any other kind) all-weather-ware, two cyclists and a lorry behind us tooting his horn. It was like playing Screwball Scramble, but in a DS3 littered with crumbs and sheer, blinding rage.

We arrived, filling the valley with swearing and Cher, and parked up in the lime car-park. Cheek, I’m a gay man, put me in the plantain park and I’ll be sure to back up correctly. We did think about waiting for the courtesy bus but we could see the entrance only a moment’s walk away and thought better of it. That’s a fib actually, there was a coach full of old folk gamely walking down the hill and putting us to shame so we couldn’t. Buggers.

Getting into the Eden Project cost us £50 between us. That, right there, tells you everything you need to know about it. Yes, it’s lovely and pleasant and the work they do is great, but £50? Kiss my arse. They temper this by allowing you to visit all year long but given that most of their visitors are tourists, that’s a bit of a pointless endeavour – it’s not like I could turn to Paul on a windy Sunday and ask if he fancied a nose round the gift-shop at Eden, and could he prepare the car for the 800-mile round trip. Pfft. I appreciate these places have to make money because gosh, who else is going to pay for all the wank, but haway.

You could have put what we both knew about the Eden Project before we visited on the back of a seed packet. Paul had a vague recollection that it was used in Die Another Day and I automatically assumed that those giant plastic zits were full of bees like in The X-Files movie, but we were both wrong. No, The Eden Project is a very worthwhile endeavour by lots of horticulturists (my favourite horticulturist? Brian Sewell – boom boom) to get as many tourists as possible in one place.

How we admired the many different ways that people could inconvenience us – one particularly (and quite literally) pushy mother gently nudged me out of the way whilst I was reading an enthralling information board on bamboo. She wanted to take a picture of her child, but I hazarded a guess that had I picked up said child and pitched her into the wilderness that I would have been asked to leave, and damn it, I wanted my £25 worth.

We wandered around the herb garden, we idled around the flower section, we sweated our tits off in the rainforest section. It was all very interesting – we’re not complete philistines, you understand – but the sheer amount of people similarly feigning interest in a sugarbush was hard to take. We climbed various stairs and gantries to get a picture of the waterfall only to find such a task impossible due to the sea of giant lenses and Mumsnetters that filled every conceivable space. Deflated, both from disappointment and the sweat wicking away from our body, we left the biomes and staggered outside, where a fine mist (either rain or aerated sweat) greeted us. That, at least, was pleasant.

Now, look here. We’re just as capable of enjoying a garden centre as the best of them. You’ll often find us at Heighley Gate on a Sunday afternoon fingering the dahlias or cooing over the roses. We’ve had lengthy and earnest conversations about the merits of various composts: I prefer to buy in, Paul’s rustic and would spread his own if I let him shit in the garden. But something about The Eden Project left us both cold. Ho-hum.

We stopped for something to eat, thinking we could at least salvage some of the entrance fee by having something delightful in the onsite restaurants, but even these were overpriced and understaffed. Everywhere was noise: children screaming, old people clacking their teeth, parents sighing and braying. The food was what you’d expect from a place like this plus a 20% tedium surcharge. We went outside where, thanks to the rain, we were relatively alone. We ordered a small pasty and a coke (I say coke, I’m sure at least three varieties of dandelion were pressed into it along with a shock of hipster beard hair) and sat down in the drizzle. The pasty was drier than a popcorn fart and the coke was flat. Ho-hum, again.

We made to make our way back to the lime car-park and spotted that this would involve a walk at a level significantly more than horizontal. Panic set in until we spotted that a little tractor with a trailer on the back was trundling around picking up visitors. We hastened over and climbed aboard with barely enough time to wipe the pastry crumbs away from my shirt (I was worried that they’d burst into flames if they rubbed together given how fucking dry the thing was). We were joined in the carriage by another couple – a cheery man with the strongest Geordie accent I’ve ever heard (and bear in mind my dad’s accent is so strong that Paul didn’t understand a word of it for six months, becoming the only person in existence to form a familial relationship on nothing more than polite nods and ‘ee-I-knows’) and a woman on an oxygen tank.

We had spotted them earlier gamely making their way around the biomes and they spent a good five minutes chatting with us, which was lovely. At one point she took off her oxygen mask and told us they were only getting the tractor because she couldn’t manage hills with her failing lungs and we felt terrible: not just for her, but also because we were clearly only getting the tractor because our fat ankles were bowing under the weight of four days of constant and committed pasty consumption. We bid them goodbye (well, I did, Paul was struggling to understand – to him it probably sounded like me and the other gentlemen were arguing in Icelandic) and made our way back to the car.

Just like Land’s End, I drove out of the car park in an absolute fury. The whole exercise just annoys me, you know. People say to holiday in the UK but every god-damn tourist attraction is out to extract just as much money as they can get away with short of employing urchins to root through your pockets for change whilst you go for a piss. I appreciate that places need money to stay afloat but for goodness sake, calm the fuck down.

We took our time driving back to the cottage and decided to stop at a charming little pub that we’d spotted on the way to Eden. It was in a fantastic location – beer garden looking out over lush green fields with a bit of twinkling sea just off on the horizon. The weather had lightened up and, after some energetic singing and maybe, just maybe, a cheer-up-for-fuck’s-sake-blowjob from Paul, all was well. We fair cantered (Paul more so than me – I had to do that discreet unsticking of James Junior from my leg that all men know) out of the car hoping we’d at least get some ale (just a half for me) and food. What could go wrong?

YET AGAIN: EVERYTHING. You know in comedy sketches they occasionally do a joke where a stranger walks into a bar and the whole place falls silent? That’s exactly what happened to us. It was like someone turned off my hearing as soon as we stepped over the threshold. Admittedly there were only a few chaps in there at 3pm in the afternoon but they all looked at us silently and furiously. If it hadn’t been for the disembodied electronic voice of Noel Edmonds shrieking at me to hold my nudges blaring out of the fruit machine I would have sworn I had gone deaf. Paul pushed me from behind (lucky me, normally takes him a good couple of hours and a nap) and we made our way to the bar.

The bar man had one of those faces that told me he’d last smiled in 1977, perhaps when a barn-fire had killed his more handsome brother. There was no hello, how are you, what would you like – just an impassive stare like I was some unwelcome intruder on this otherwise jumping social vista. It felt like I was trying to order from a grazing cow. I asked for two drinks with equal solemnity, paid for them and moved away, all in the continued silence of the bar. We sat outside and had no sooner taken our first pull from the all-head-no-beer drinks when Mr Chatty came outside and started moving tables around, ostensibly because they were expecting a wedding party. I decided against asking if he was doing the best man’s speech as I didn’t fancy driving home with a pint glass sticking out of my face. I haven’t felt as unwelcome in a drinking establishment since I got caught giving my then-boyfriend a blowjob in a Yates Wine Lodge.

Listen, I know, I’m ashamed of that too. I mean come on, a Yates Wine Lodge? What was I thinking?

We didn’t bother finishing our drinks. We didn’t bother looking at the food menu (I presumed that the food would be served with the same kind of panache as the witty raillery from the barman). No, yet again, we drove furiously out of the car park and went back to the cottage, where actually, we spent a very pleasant night getting drunk and smoking cigars the size of shot-putters’ arms in the garden. I only hope that some of that thick smoke made its way across the valley and right up the nostrils of that miserable arse of a barman. I hope his sinuses throbbed and ached and the wedding ended in disaster.

Pfft: Cornwall. You’re really on a roll…


I wish I could say it gets better, but my mother always told me never to lie and well, she could still take me in a fight so who am I to argue? Never argue with a lass who can grow a better moustache, that’s what I say. So this scotch eggs recipe then. Look: the syns depend mostly on the sausages you use. If you use sausages that come in white bags of 46 and have the word animal in speech marks in the ingredients list, they’ll be high in syns. But if you choose good quality sausages with a high meat content, they ought to be low in syns. To be safe, though, use Porky Lights, Musclefood sausages or any other low-syn variety. Sssh, but here’s a secret, we actually used chicken sausages for these, which in turn created a weird feeling of eating a chicken containing an egg. Oo-er. Let’s pretend I used pork sausages and say no more, eh?

slimming world scotch eggs

to make Slimming World scotch eggs, you’re gonna need:

  • eight sausages of your choice
  • one packet of quail eggs (or use normal eggs and just make bigger scotch eggs, I don’t care)
  • lots of black pepper (low syn sausages usually have the taste profile of asbestos, so this adds flavour)
  • 100g plain cous cous (if you’re feeling like a decadent hussy, use flavoured couscous, but watch the syns)
  • one beef stock cube and lots of worcestershire sauce
  • a non-boiled egg

Generally, each sausage will make one scotch egg, so I’m (because I used Porky Lights) putting these at half a syn each.

to make Slimming World scotch eggs, why y’oughta:

  • boil your eggs – if you’re using quail eggs, you’re looking at a couple of minutes (check the packet) in boiling water, for bigger eggs you’ll need to boil for about ten minutes or so – you don’t want them like ping pong balls, after all
  • meanwhile, squeeze your meat by fingering your sausage – you want it all coming out of the end, see – you’ll get sticky fingers doing this but that’s alright. You don’t need to wear protection just as long as you wipe them on your trousers afterwards – you flirt
  • hoy a load of black pepper in there – you want to get your lips tingling, after all, no?
  • cook your couscous according to the packet – but cook it in the beef stock and add worcestershire sauce to add taste
  • then see, it’s all about assembly – wrap the peeled boiled eggs in sausagemeat, and then roll it in cooked couscous – I like to squeeze the couscous into the sausage meat first, then roll in egg, and do a second coating of the couscous
  • bake in the oven for about 30 minutes on 190 degrees until cooked through – you’ll know it’s cooked when the juices stop dripping – when that happens, pop a towel down and enjoy your dinner!

Want more snack ideas? Then click the buttons. Yeah. Like that.

beefsmall  sausagessmall  snackssmall tastersmall

Cheers big ears!

J

droptober recipe #9: chicken cakes

Chicken cakes? I know, it sounds as appetising as sleeping face-down in the cuddle-puddle after a hot session with orange shitbag Donald Trump, but please, bear with me. You can have fishcakes, yes? Well these little buggers are gorgeous, trust me. Like a chicken nugget only you’re not spending ten minutes afterwards thinking about whether you’ve just eaten a bumhole, eyelid, or combination of both.

Only a recipe tonight, mind, as we’re busy working on something exciting. Well, I am, Paul’s busy ironing. WHAT AN EXCITING LIFE EH. This recipe makes about eight or so cakes, and I’m synning them at half a syn each rather than the 0.75 syns that it should be. Don’t tell Mags, eh?

OH one thing. We’ve had word that there’s a Slimming World group in Cornwall somewhere where one of the members is printing off the recipes and selling them as a booklet. Please, don’t do this. We do this for free and we want it to stay that way. If you want to profit from our hard work, at least ask. Don’t be a fucknugget about it.


chicken cakes

to make chicken cakes you will need

  • 500g chicken (or turkey) mince (or chicken breasts, whizzed up in a food processor)
  • half a red, yellow or orange pepper, diced
  • 1 onion, finely chopped
  • 1 pinch chilli flakes
  • half a chicken stock cube
  • 2 garlic cloves, minced
  • 4 tbsp extra-light mayonnaise (2 syns)
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • ¼ black pepper
  • 2 shakes Tabasco sauce
  • 25g panko (4½ syns)
  • 1 egg, beaten
  • 2 tsp dijon mustard (1 syn)

to make chicken cakes you should:

  • in a large pan, spray in some oil over a medium-high heat and add the onions, pepper, chilli flakes and crumble in half the chicken stock cube, and cook together for about 3 minutes
  • add the garlic and cook for another minute
  • add HALF of the raw chicken mince (you read that right – trust me) to the pan, and cook until cooked though – it’ll take about 3 minutes
  • remove from the heat and set aside to cool
  • in a large bowl, mix together the mayonnaise, salt, pepper, tabasco, panko, egg and dijon mustard
  • add the cooked chicken (wait until it’s cool enough to hold) and the remaining raw chicken (it’ll be fine! honestly!) and mix really well together
  • divide the mixture into 8 balls and flatten each one into a burger shape (this burger press is only £3.50 and will do the job nicely)
  • plonk onto some greaseproof paper so they don’t stick and pop in the fridge for about half an hour to let them firm up – pour yourself a gin
  • spray a large frying pan with oil and whack on to a medium-high heat
  • using a spatula, add the chicken cakes to the pan (you might need to do it in batches) and cook for about 4 minutes per side until cooked through
  • serve and enjoy!

We served with chips and some extra-light mayonnaise because we’re classy bitches. Want more recipes? Click the buttons below!

poultrysmallbeefsmallporksmalllambsmallfakeawayssmall

Enjoy!

J

slimming world bbq: chimichurri turkey skewers and an amazing loaded potato salad

Here for the next installment of our Slimming World BBQ series? Well don’t worry, we’ll get to it. But first, indulge me a little time to ramble on…

Today has been a day of getting shit done. I know, a profanity right off the bat, but there’s a good reason for that – I’ve noticed another telling off comment on one of my articles. Please understand: this is a coarse blog about the gay-to-gay lifestyle of two fat blokes with no airs nor graces. There will be swearing. There will be frank and numerous references to sex and knobs and bumholes and slutmanship because well, you write about what you know. There’s a reason this blog isn’t called james’n’paul’n’catz and decorated wth frou-frou hearts and whimsical tales of picnics and cricket and buying peppers in a market. It’s just not us. We’re both about as classy as two seagulls fighting over a discarded packet of chips in somewhere like…oooh, Chelmsford, and we’re quite happy with that. Most of the time I’ll let the little digs wash over me with good grace and a little fart but today I thought I’d reply because, as I said, we’re getting shit done:

slimming world bbq

Oh I’m a stinker, aren’t I? To be fair, I don’t actually think I swear that much anyway. I certainly don’t use the C-word on here because it’s not worth the terse phone call from my mother telling me off for using that word on the Internet. I know, it’s warm under the thumb, but hey, you don’t upset the Keeper of the Inheritance. Though for the record, that works both ways, as Keeper of the Care Home Decision…

So what have we managed to get done today? Well, I pressure washed everything we owned that was looking a little bit grubby: outdoor furniture, fence panels, the blood stains on the front of my car, the hair and scalp in the tyre-wells, the paving slabs and the gate. There’s something amazingly satisfying about watching a tiny jet of water blast away years of accumulated dirt and filth. If I didn’t think it would tear straight through his small intestine I’d have a crack at blasting Paul’s out-pipe. It’d be like pressure-washing a hot Malteser. It goes without saying that I blasted several choice swearwords into the path but Paul made me remove them – apparently it doesn’t do for folks who visit to be greeted by an increasingly-vile set of phrases culminating in mingetacular. Pffft.

When I was putting away the pressure washer into the let’s-tell-Paul-I’ll-use-it-all-the-time-but-then-never-use-it-again pile in our shed, I realised that one of our cats had disappeared under the various detritus on the shed floor and was mewing pitifully. After digging through and locating her and putting her outside the shed (to which point she immediately came back in through the cat-flap to get lost again) (I was all, alright love, you’re not on fucking Fun House here, I haven’t just tagged you back in), I realised it was time to clear out the shed. I know, this is truly riveting reading, but please, bear with me. See, I’ve mentioned before that we turned our giant outdoor shed into a Cat Hotel / stockpile room (hence the cat-flap on a shed, see – it gives them somewhere to go when it’s raining and they can sleep on the cat tree in there). Recently the shed has become a depository for remnants of abandoned hobbies (GPS units from geocaching, walking boots, an unused tent, lightshade made of human skin), stuff from the kitchen which we’re keeping in case we need it (Nutribullet box, ice-cream maker, pickled knees) and well, all sort of other shite. It was chaos, but after two hours and several trips to the tip (mainly because Paul insisted on taking his Smart car rather than my car, limiting us to taking two Rizla papers and a discarded screw at a time), we could see the carpet again.

Yeah, carpet, we can’t have the cats getting cold feet.

As an aside, the men at our nearest tip are a delight, and I’m not just saying that because they wear those fancy hi-vis boiler-suits and I want to be roughly groped behind the oil-disposal drums (though it would be fitting). It’s rare to find folks who seem happy in their job and who are keen to help, pointing us in the direction of the appropriate skip and masking their disapproval of the fact we couldn’t be arsed to separate our garden waste from our general waste. I know, we deserve to be bricked up in a tomb somewhere for killing the Earth, but honestly, Paul’s arse does more damage to the environment and I don’t run the risk of pricking my fingers when I handle that. It’s a far cry from the roughly-hewn grunters at our previous Newcastle tip. I honestly thought I was going to have my face slashed with a shard of a broken Pyrex dish for having the temerity to ask which bin to put hedge clippings in. I mean, I apologised for interrupting their blistering chatter about which bird (sorry: boord) they’d fuck out of the Daily Sport. Pfft.

After clearing the shelves and vacuuming about half a tonne of dried rosemary out of the carpet (hang it in the shed he said…we’ll use it all the time he said…) we had a clear shed and a clear mind. This meant only one thing: time to restock. See, Slimming World and life in general can be expensive but if you buy the staples you use in bulk, you’ll save cold hard cash, and that’s good for everyone, not least because it means you can buy a few more raffle tickets in class and keep Queen Mags in Cheeky Vimtos and Cutter’s Choice. We buy food like beans, chopped tomatoes, passata, pasta and rice in massive bags and store it in the shed, meaning if we’re ever stuck we can throw something together in the blink of an eye. Off we went to B&Ms to replenish.

Now listen, I know B&Ms is like Mecca to some folk, but I just can’t bear it. It’s full of people who dawdle and who hold up a jar of Nescafe in one hand and a jar of Blue Mountain in the other, looking dead behind the eyes whilst their spittle pools around their feet. The aisles are littered with ladies who look like they could punch an articulated lorry to death. It’s awash with screaming children and bright lights and too many not-quite products to bear. We filled our trolley with dishwasher tablets, coal tar soap and oops-sorry-Mags a box of Lucky Charms and hurtled through the checkout. The charming lass behind the counter carried on a conversation with her co-worker the entire time and spoke only to spit the price out at us. Never again. I never learn, I always think ‘let’s save some money’ but then I end up stuck in an aisle with mirrors with the Playboy logo on them whilst Paul holds himself up crying next to the locked display of perfumes featuring classics such as I’ve Just Come by Mark Wright or Gonorrhoea by someone who came second in I’m a Celebrity in 2009.

Celebrity scents confuse me at the best of times – I’ve never in my entire life looked at someone famous and thought by Christ I wish I smelled like them – but even more so when it’s a non-entity from a reality show on ITV Be (Thankful You Can Turn It Over, presumably). I imagine that smells like pure shame.

The good news is the shed is all stocked up. The bad news, if you’re a picker at the Tesco in Kingston Park, I’ve just put an order in for 96 bottles of various mixers to fill up our mixer shelves. If you want, crack open a bottle of the diet ginger ale because that belongs to Paul and I know he’ll spare it. Touch my tonic with a hint of cucumber and I’ll turn your delivery truck over. Obviously I’m kidding, but seriously now. Paul did suggest we go and pick up the drinks ourselves but frankly, if we took his car, we’d only have enough for one of those tiny tins of Coke you used to steal buy from Woolworths. The jokes about his Smart car will never, ever end, you realise. Even he’s accepted that, answering me with a chuckle that says ‘oh my’ and eyes that say ‘fuck you’. Ah well.

The other thing I managed to get done today was to finally open and put to use the copy of Adobe Illustrator that I’ve been paying £30 a month for since January, when I downloaded it in order to design a new front cover for our book. Did I mention we have a book? We do! Yes, click here to have a read. If you’ve read it, leave a review and buy ten copies of your friends. The reason for my dip into Illustrator was to design a little advert I could put into these blog entries to sell our Musclefood boxes – it gets difficult trying to shoehorn in reference to meat, especially when the topics are stuff like online bullying or my nana dying. Some might call me tactless but at least I didn’t put a sponsored ad in the funeral readings. So, you might see something like this on a post, but I’ll keep them discreet and not hammer home the advertising:

advert - summer-01

By the way, that’s an absolutely stonking deal – it’s what is fuelling our current BBQ week and the meat is delicious. We do also have three other deals and you can view them by clicking on our special, updated Musclefood page – even if you’re not wanting the meat, pass it to a friend by sending them a link. Cheers, big-ears.

I really have ummed and aahed about adding adverts – I bet you’ve hardly noticed our current level of advertising because we only have one on a page as a rule, and they’re tiny. Advertising is what keeps the blog going so we do have to have it, but I’m loathe to become one of those blogs where you get ten ads on a page, a newsletter sign-up shaking away at you every few minutes and constant plugging of various products that you know the owner is only saying because they’re getting paid to do so. Everything we recommend is something that we genuinely use, I promise. We do try and strike a balance of user friendliness vs advertising and I reckon – based on feedback I’ve requested in our group – we’ve got it right. Please do tell us if that isn’t the case! We want you to come here for either:

  • the delicious food;
  • the attempts at funny chatter; or
  • the hope of seeing my genitals in a blurred reflection of a polished curry bowl.

We’ll take whatever we can!

Right, right, goodness me, we have to do the recipes, don’t we? Sometimes when I sit down I can think of nothing to type and other times, nothing will have happened but I’ll still be able to spin 1800 words out of it. If you’re not a fan of my verbosity, you can always scroll straight to the recipes. If you are a fan, do me a favour and recommend us in your slimming groups or to mates. Build us and watch us flower.

Tonight we have three recipes – one for marinated turkey chimichurri skewers, another for a genuinely delicious loaded potato salad that tastes like it would be full of syns and nastiness but is actually low in syns and keeps well for lunches the next day, and oh, a seabreeze. We’re really getting into the cocktails thing. I know, just when you thought we couldn’t get any gayer. Ah well. To the food…

slimming world bbq

to make slimming world bbq: turkey chimichurri skewers, you’ll need:

  • 2 garlic cloves, minced finely (hey guess what, I’m not going to recommend…ah fuck it, you know I am: here, use this!)
  • a big handful of parsley and a big handful of coriander

Listen, it’s always better to use fresh herbs. Buy a plant from the supermarket, stick it in water on your windowsill and it’ll grow all summer. But if you’re pushed for time, use dried

  • 1 tablespoon of lemon juice
  • 1 tablespoon of olive oil
  • 3 tablespoons of water
  • a pack of diced turkey – and what do you know, our Musclefood deal has the perfect pack in it – click here for that – you could also use a couple of diced up chicken breasts from the same box, we won’t tell
  • pinch of salt
  • pinch of pepper

Normally proper chimichurri is made with oil – so if you want to be a decadent bitch, get rid of the water and use four tablespoons of oil (24 syns) – this makes enough for eight skewers so that’s still only 6 syns per serving, assuming you have two skewers. If you use the above recipe, it’ll be 1.5 syns for two skewers.

to make slimming world bbq: turkey chimichurri skewers, you should:

  • dice the turkey or chicken if not already done
  • blend in a food processor all the other ingredients – taste with your fingers – you want to get it to a runny paste with some herbs left intact, not a perfectly blended mush
  • tip the turkey/chicken into a food bag and top with the chimichurri – really moosh it in with your fingers to get it pushed into the meat
  • leave for as long as you see fit, but, just like a lot of things, the longer the better
  • actually, that’s a lie, girth is more important, apologies if you’re a guy with a knob like one of those novelty giant pencils you buy in Scottish gift shops, but it’s true
  • when you’re ready to cook and the BBQ is up to temperature, thread the meat onto soaked wooden skewers or, better, metal skewers, together with whatever vegetables you have lying around in the house and place onto the grill
  • turn these a couple of times and for god’s sake, like everything else, make sure it’s all cooked before you eat it

You can also see in the picture there the hickory BBQ steaks and the drumsticks from our Musclefood deal. Just saying. They were delicious.

OK, now the potato salad. This was genuinely amazing, and well worth making! You can gussy it up however you want. This makes enough for four, though it was all Paul could do to stop me mashing my face into the bowl and eating the lot.

slimming world bbq

to make amazing loaded potato salad, you’ll need:

  • 1kg baby potatoes
  • 2 teaspoons salt, for the boiling water
  • 350g bacon medallions
  • 1 red onion, finely diced
  • 2 cloves of darlic, finely chopped
  • 3 tablespoons red wine vinegar
  • 3 tablespoons dijon mustard (1½ syns)
  • 2 tbsp Morrison’s NuMe Reduced Fat Mayonnaise (2 syns) – or use any alternative reduced fat mayonnaise but check the syn values as they vary
  • ¼ tsp salt
  • ¼ tsp pepper
  • 1 small tin of sweetcorn, drained (obvs)
  • 2 big handfuls of baby spinach

to make amazing loaded potato salad, you should:

  • boil a big pan of water and throw in the potatoes, whole and with the skins on – cook until they’re done and they fall off when stabbed with a fork (about 15 minutes or so)
  • when done, drain and then rinse the potatoes under cold water to stop them from cooking. drain again and set aside
  • cook the bacon in a frying pan on a medium-high heat until crispy, then remove from the pan and onto a plate to cool
  • in the same pan add the chopped onion and cook for about five minutes, stirring occasionally
  • then, add the garlic and cook for another minute or so, then remove the pan from the heat
  • in a small bowl whisk together the red wine vinegar, mayonnaise, mustard, salt and pepper
  • cut the potatoes into chunks – either halves or quarters, depending how you like them and place into a large bowl
  • crumble the bacon into small pieces and add to the potatoes, along with the onion and garlic
  • then add the sweetcorn, spinach and mustard sauce and mix well to combine
  • serve!

Perfect, right? Now let’s end with a cocktail. We’re keeping it easy with these cocktails, nice and strong with the idea that you’re not going to down it in one. Frankly, if you’re that type of lady, we both know your BBQ is going to end with you with your knickers off face-down in the neighbours’ leylandii, you shameless hussy.

slimming world bbq

to make a slimming world bbq: seabreeze, you’ll need:

  • a chilled glass
  • 35ml of reasonable vodka – we used Absolut Grapevine, but that’s because we’re extravagant  (4 syns)
  • 50ml of cranberry juice (1.5 syns ish)
  • lots of ice
  • 50ml of grapefruit juice (1 syn)
  • slice of lime

to make a slimming world bbq: seabreeze, you should:

  • lots of ice in the glass
  • vodka in the bottom
  • then cranberry juice
  • then grapefruit juice
  • decorate with a lime

Drink lots and be merry, folks.

J

cheese and onion pasties

Right, not going to lie, this isn’t a cheese and onion pasty any more than a eight-eggs-mixed-with-an-options-and-microwaved is a bloody cupcake. IT’S NOT IT’S A CHOCOLATE OMELETTE. But let’s persevere. Just a very quick post tonight because we’re looking at booking our December holiday to Las Vegas. Las Vegas! I love to gamble but I’m crap at table games, so no doubt I’ll be turning tricks by the side of the strip in a torn dress by the third day. More on that in another post, perhaps. You may recollect my previous experience trying to make a steak bake following the recipe flying about on facebook – it tasted like disappointment and regret. Actually, it tasted like what I bet my cat’s bumhole tastes like, although given how much he’s always licking it to a fine shine, perhaps that’s not as bad as I think. I won’t be trying it and I’ll certainly not be doing a recipe.

Anyway, I love nothing more than a pasty from Greggs. Here in Newcastle they use Gregg’s outlets like one might use a drainpipe – attached to every major building. I swear we’re about three shops away from Inception-Greggs where you go in for a steak bake and never leave, every time you push out through the exit door you tumble back in from the rear entrance, like some dodgy version of the stairs scene from Labyrinth. Though, if it means I get to gaze admiringly at the late David Bowie’s moose-foot whilst I reach in for my oval bite, so be it. Still, we had a couple of those sandwich thins to use up and some leftover mash, so why not?

cheese and onion pasty

to make a cheese and onion pasty, you’ll need:

  • one Kingsmill wholemeal sandwich thins, which I’m reliably told by SW’s own website is a HEB. Invariably it won’t be, so if you need the syns, it’s 5
  • any leftover mash
  • bit of cheese
  • onion powder (classy!) or gently soften some onions (before you start emailing me like you did when I used bloody panko that one time, onion powder can be found wherever the jars of herbs and spices are in your supermarket)
  • one egg, beaten to within an inch of its life so it won’t bloody do it again

to make a cheese and onion pasty, you should:

  • now come on, really?
  • add your HEA of cheese into your leftover mash, tonnes of black pepper, teaspoon of onion powder or some proper onions and salt
  • spread it into your thins
  • cover and pinch the edges together
  • wash with some beaten egg (the thin that is, not your body)
  • it bothers me that I even need to add that qualification
  • cook in the oven for around 15 minutes on say, 170 degrees – you want the top to crisp a little

For the true Greggs experience, pop it in the mouth of a child who can barely gum a rusk whilst you fumble around in your Paul’s Boutick bag looking for your Richmond Superkings.

If you’re looking for more recipes, you’ll find over 300 of the buggers RIGHT HERE. Yes!

Enjoy!

J