Back for good!

Hey guys,

Please forgive the cheesy Take That lyric but I figured it was a pretty good description of what is happening right now.  Scarily I realised today that is is almost 2 years (minus a week) since I last posted on this blog.  A lot has happened since then and I am now finally ready to get back on this weight loss journey and finally get to a place where I feel happier in myself!

Well let me see what have I done since I have been away??? Hmmm well I had a baby who is now growing up to be a gorgeous and precocious little girl, I have finished my graduate program and am now a fully fledged geek and have finally decided that now is the time I am going to make changes to my life.

There are a few changes that I want to make but the main and most important one at this time is to start eating healthier and start living a bit healthier.  I already cook lots of lovely and healthy meals for my daughter so now it is time for me to extend that a bit more and take a closer look at what I have been/am going to eat.

I have decided to go back to Slimming World as I love the program and it is ridiculously easy to follow and I will start posting up new recipes, with pictures of course, of all the wonderful food I am going to be eating.

I seriously doubt that anyone that used to check this blog still does but that doesn’t matter, this is a record for me and I just hope that it can be of some use to other people!

Well that’s it for just now but I will post another blog later with details of the fabulousness that will be my dinner tonight – philli chicken.

 

Chilli Chicken Ramen

So I was craving something spicy and virtuous so I looked for a recipe for Chilli Chicken Ramen.  I eventually found one that checked all my boxes and had a bash.  When I was making it though, I had to make a few changes to suit my tastes better, but you can find the original recipe here.

Serves 2

Syns per serving:  1 1/2 syns to be safe on EE

Ingredients:

150g beansprouts

150g dried noodles

2 Chicken breasts

1 tsp teriyaki sauce – 0.5 syns

1 litre chicken stock

2 spring onions – chopped

1 red chilli – deseeded and sliced

1/2 red onion sliced

1/2 lime – quartered

1/4 tsp sugar – minimal

1 tbsp malt vinegar

1 1/2 tbsp hot sweet chilli sauce – 2 syns

1 1/2 tbsp soy sauce

 

So here are the ingredients I used:

Okay so first make the ramen sauce. Dissolve the sugar in the vinegar over a low heat. Allow to cool and combine with the chilli and soy sauce.

Cook the noodles in the boiling water for 2-3 minutes or until tender.

Heat a griddle pan until hot and almost smoking. Spray the chicken with frylight and cook for 3 minutes each side or until cooked through. Remove from the griddle and brush with teriyaki sauce. Cut into thin slices.

Heat the chicken stock and add the ramen sauce once hot.

Divide the noodles between two bowls and add the beansprouts, red onion, spring onions and chilli slices.  Place the chicken on the top and spoon the stock over the chicken until the bowl is nearly full.

I hope you make this, it is wonderful and I definately recommend it!

 

Fantastic Ragu Bolognese

It has taken me years to get my other half to start eating bolognese after years of being practically force fed it my his mother (his story, not sure how factual that actually is) and I finally found a recipe which he looks forward to eating.  There is nothing worse to me than jarred sauce for something like bolognese, and this recipe more than fits the bill!

Syns per recipe: 7.5

Serves: 3

Syns per serving:  2.5

Ingredients:

• 50g Parma Ham chopped – 1 syn

• 2 medium carrots finely chopped

• 2 celery sticks finely chopped

• 1 large onion chopped

• 100g extra lean minced beef

• 100g extra lean minced pork

• 125ml red wine – 4.5 syns

• 300ml beef stock

• 4 tbsp tomato puree – 2 syns

• salt and pepper

Method:

• Heat a pan sprayed with fry light and add parma ham, carrot, celery and onion.  Fry gently for 10 mins.

• Add the minced meat, stir and break up with a spoon until browned

• Add the wine and a ladle of the stock  and cook for a couple of minutes to allow the wine to reduce slightly

• Stir in the tomato puree and reduce the heat to low.  Cover and simmer for an hour, stirring every so often.  Add more stock if the mixture starts to dry out.

• After an hour season to taste and if required add a little more stock to thin the sauce out slightly.

Serve with spaghetti or tagliatelle and a sprinkling of parmesan, making sure to add the syns accordingly.

 

Awesome fresh coleslaw

Hey peeps,

I have been meaning to post for ages but you know what this time of year is like, it is so busy just now and when I do have a spare minute I am normally vegging in front of the TV!

Now this recipe wasn’t created by me, don’t think I have ever created a recipe????  But anyway I have tweaked it slightly to make it more Slimming World friendly and I urge you to try it.  It is so light and fresh, the last time we make it we couldn’t help but eat it right out of the bowl like the pigs that we are…….

Anyway here it goes and it makes alot and is best used straight away so just adjust the ingredients to suit the amount you need.  I also make this using the shred blade on my food processor so it literally takes about 2 mins to put it all together.

You will find the original recipe here, and the picture at the bottom of the page is also from that website (Which I love by the way, their food is always great.  Just a shame most of it isn’t SW friendly).  I will update with my own when I make it next.  I can promise you though that mine won’t look as pretty!

Syns per recipe: 4 1/2

Servings: 4-6 generous portions

Syns per serving: 1 to be safe

Ingredients:

• 180g finely shredded cabbage

• 180g  finely shredded red cabbage

• 1 medium carrot, peeled and grated

• 1 small onion, shredded

• 24g  finely chopped spring onions

• 9 tbsp extra light mayonnaise

• 2 tablespoons (40ml) white vinegar

• 1-3 teaspoons sweetner – I would add a little and taste and add more if you need it

• Salt

Method:

• Stir mayonnaise, white vinegar, sweetner together in a small bowl. Cover bowl and refrigerate until required.  Once needed taste and season accordingly.

• Mix all the shredded/grated vegetables together in a large bowl and add the dressing when about to serve.  If you mix the vegetables and dressing a while before serving it can make the vegetables go limp so only dress the coleslaw as you are going to serve it.

I urge you to make this, it is really worth it.  Would be excellent with homemade burgers……

Now this isn’t my picture as you will notice straight away, my camera certainly isn’t good enough to take a picture like this.  Come to think of it neither am I….

 

Slimming world friendly pizza

Hey guys,

Well after Vicky got the go ahead from SW that the wholemeal bread mix from Tesco can be used as a HE (well 57g worth can) here, I just had to make some pizza and rolls.  The rolls were a little heavy but they certainly filled a hole and the pizza was absolutely awesome!!   I used a fail proof pizza sauce recipe that you can find here.

The whole pizza came out at 7 syns as I had 2 HEB worth of base and used my HEA for the cheese, I do Extra Easy, and the base sauce recipe come out at 1 syn because I didn’t use any parmesan.

You can see the various stages of my pizza and ingredients below (The pepperoni isn’t mine):

 

Bangers and mash with awesome onion gravy

Oh I had the best onion gravy with my bangers and mash last night, it was awesome.  And even better, there wasn’t a gravy granule in sight!!!!!

I got the recipe from here, but tweaked it to make it more slimming world friendly and it worked out at 3 1/2 syns for 2 servings.  It was gloriously oniony and beefy but it was completely vegetarian, or so I was lead to believe on the website and it was worth the 2 syns that I gave it to be safe!

Ingredients:

• 1 large onion (sliced into rings).
• 1 clove of garlic (Finely chopped
• 1 level tbsp of plain flour – 3 1/2 syns
• 350ml of stock (boiling water poured over 1 veg stock cubes)
• 1 level tsp of Marmite
• 2 tsp of soy sauce
• 1 tsp of balsamic vinegar
• 1 pinch of decent mixed herbs (my addition)
• Ground black pepper to taste

Method:

• Heat the frylight in a pot over a low heat and add the onion slices.
• After five minutes add the garlic.
• Sautee until the onions are soft and transparent.
• Add the flour and stir in well. Let the flour get a bit nutty.
• Add the stock gradually, stirring constantly. Then add the Marmite, soy sauce, balsamic vinegar,  mixed herbs and black pepper.
• Bring the mixture to the boil and simmer very gently for 10 – 15 minutes. Stir every 5 minutes until the gravy thickens and the flavours blend.

So I had it with M&S Extra Lean Pork Sausages and I have to say they are yummy.  I can be very fussy when it comes to sausages incase I get a grizzly bit but these were lovely and at only 1/2 a syn each totally worth it.  Better than any other extra lean sausages I have had before and not a grain of rice in sight, bleurch!

I also had mashed potato’s which I couldn’t finish and loads of petit pois to go with it.  Yummy yummy get in my tummy.

And these are the sausages incase anyone is interested, think they were £1.99

 

Chicken pasta bake

Well I was looking for something to make for dinner on Wednesday night and couldn’t think what I fancied so I had a look on Britmum’s website, who has not let me down yet, and came across her recipe for chicken pasta bake which you can find here.

The only changes I made was to add the cheese to the bake before I added it to the oven and mixed it all through and then covered it and cooked the bake for about 20 mins which was more than long enough, I didn’t want it to dry out.  But it was yummy, made enough for me and my other half for dinner and my lunch the next day!

 

The plan going forward

Well I have been very lazy at writing everything down lately, I have been very good this week though and am definately within my syns but I think it helps when I have a visual aid of what I have done to look back on 🙂  So that means you are now going to be subjected to my food diaries a little more often!

Oh and how exciting, for anyone that isn’t on Minimins or reads Vicky’s blog then you might not know but she contacted Slimming World about a wholemeal pizza base/bread mix that could be used (within weight limits) as a Healthy Extra, which means I can now have pizza!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  How fab is that, I have been dying to make pizza for a few weeks just now but didn’t want to waste the syns.  But now I can as I can deduct my HEB worth of syns from my base and use my HEA as my cheese allowance meaning I can have a proper pizza with hardly any syns. Wooooo hoooo.  Can you tell I’m excited???????  So pizza will definately be on the menu this weekend, and I will post pics to prove it!!!!!

So the plan for this weekend is to be as good as possible which means no junk and minimal drinking.  Now I could be angelic and not have any booze this weekend but where is the fun in that I ask you????  So I will be very careful and make sure I stick within my allowance and see if that makes any difference on Thursday as we all know I am only bad at the weekends 😉

Oh and I am ashamed to say I missed my weigh in this week, but I have a good excuse 😉  I didn’t want to leave the dog in on her own this year.  The older she gets the more skittish so I thought it wouldn’t be fair to leave her.  Thats my excuse and I am sticking to it 😉

So anyway enough prattling on this is the food plan for the next couple of days!

Friday:

Breakfast –

Fruit Salad and mullerlight yogurt

Snack –

Alpen light HEB

Lunch –

Baked potato with home made veg curry (1 syn as I got alot more out of that batch of curry than I thought I would)

Snack –

Alpen light HEB

Dinner –

Bangers and mash with onion gravy and peas. 1 1/2 syns for 3 sausages, 2 syns for the gravy and HEA for milk for the mashed potato’s.  Sooooo 3 1/2 syns for dinner, ideal!

Syns for the day – 4 1/2 Syns

Saturday:

Breakfast –

Bacon, beans, 1 sausage, mushrooms and scrambled egg – 1/2 syn

Lunch –

Some kind of homemade soup probably

Dinner –

Homemade pizza baby – Will update the syns once I make it and figure it all out

Snacks – Some vodka and diet coke, if that can be called a snack 😉

No idea what Sunday will entail yet but I will update as soon as I think of it 😀

 

Hmmm…………………….

Okay well I had another awful weekend, I ate and drank everything I shouldn’t have but as I will always say I didn’t regret it.  I had a great time but I have also realised that I need to make a real effort to stick to this diet, so I can finally see if it works for me or not.  And that means following the plan 100%, no flexible syn weekends just stick to the plan 100%.  Measure everything and stop being a greedy fat b****rd 😉

So anyway I wasn’t feeling to hot yesterday, had a bit of a dicky belly so wasn’t particularly bad yesterday but wasn’t great either.  The only good part of my day last night was my dinner which was pretty damn good but was high in syns a whole 10 of them.  But you can have a look for yourself and see if you think it was worth it.  I will admit though, I probably needed to add a wee touch of chicken stock to the sauce as it was just a touch bland but I still enjoyed it.  So I made chicken enchiladas, the recipe for which can be found here,  and as I was really hungry I decided to have two.  BUT I did use Weight Watchers tortilla wraps which come in at 5 syns each which isn’t too bad, and as I was doing extra easy everything else was free including the sauce.  You really should try these but will warn you if you don’t like overly spicy food dial back on the chilli powder 😉

So here it is, drumroll please (I think they look that good):

Now these are the cakes I made during the week for the little get together at my friends house on Friday night, and I have to say they went down really well.  They are NOT diet cakes though, but I thought they looked pretty so I wanted to share them with you.  Plus I am of the mindset that you can’t be good all of the time 😉  If you want to make these you can find the recipe here:

 

Weigh in 4

Well peeps I lost another pound this week which makes the total 4 pounds in 4 weeks.  Now I have to say I am quite disappointed in this, especially since my friend has been going for 6 weeks and has lost 13 pounds!!!!!!

However I MUST remind myself that I haven’t been an angel and I have went out for dinner and drinks etc and still managed to lose.  I also think that the gym isn’t doing my any favours on the scales, obviously I am getting fitter and am enjoying it so will continue to go but I think for some reason it is causing me to not show a loss on the scales.

BUT I am still losing and it might just be that in order for me to get to where I want to be now I will just have to be patient, and wait for my pound loss every week.  Unfortunately I have lots planned this weekend, but I think I have nothing on next weekend so I will try 😉 and be as good as gold and see if I can possibly go for 2 instead of 1 pound.  But we will see 😉

Anyway I know I haven’t posted any recipes for a while, I added one this morning though, so I thought I would share a couple of pictures I have taken recently and I will eventually post the recipes for.  But if you like the look of them and would like the recipe sooner, please just let me know and I will kick my lazy bum into gear 😀

Oh and I am working on a few cakes for some friends for a party tonight, and if they turn out really want to share them with you.  I will warn you now, you don’t want to make these if you are on a diet but I have to say I have found a passion for baking and making everyone else fat 😉

Soooooooo here are my pictures:

Spring rolls with filo pastry:

Vegetable chilli with a baked potato and cheese:

Vegetable Curry: