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Posts Tagged ‘cooking’

  1. Slimming World: I’ve lost count

    January 11, 2012 by Amy Hansford

    My memory is dreadful. I have no idea how long we’ve been doing this now other than it’s over a week. This I know because everyone had their weigh in on Monday and they were all very happy with how much weight they’d lost. Alex lost 5.5lb, which we were impressed by.

    Last night we had spinach and mushroom cannelloni which allegedly takes an hour to prepare and cook. I started at 5.15pm and we at at 7.15pm. It tasted brilliant, but was a bit too much for me to be playing around with at the end of the day. I think I’ll need to prep it all in the middle of the day next time, give me a bit more time to breathe (and feed/bathe daughter, tidy for visiting photographers).

    It was carnage in the kitchen by the time I’d got it all in the dishes. Slimmers World suggests that you pipe the spinach/mushroom mixture in or use a teaspoon. Sod that – get stuck in and use your fingers. It’s the only way to get it all done in less than two hours.

    The finished product was lush. The highest aspiration I have is that my food be like a Marks and Spencer ready meal, and this wasn’t far off. We also have plenty left for another day – the recipe is for four, but we easily got six portions out of this and I still had some broken Cannelloni and mixture leftover.

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  2. Slimming World: Day 1

    January 5, 2012 by Amy Hansford

    Alex, like many of the Griffin Players, has started Slimming World. The theory behind this diet is that most meats trimmed of all visible fat, veg and fruit is ‘free’, while other things have ‘Syn’ points. For example, two tablespoons of light mayonnaise is 1 Syn, a Jaffa Cake is 3 Syns, etc. Alex has up to 15 Syns a day. I make up a menu at the start of each week (mainly so I can make sure we have enough shopping in), only now it’s run by Slimmers World.

    You should know at this point that I dislike cooking. I don’t hate it, but there is a definite resentment at the amount of time it takes to grate an onion, chop veg, measure out spices etc. You should know also that whenever I’m preparing dinner I’m also feeding my nine month daughter whilst aiming to be out of the door as soon as Alex arrives home in order to make it rehearsals 20 minutes late. This means that these meals had better bloody be worth it, or I’m going back to sticking something in the oven for 40 minutes.

    I thought it might be valid to have a real world look at someone on Slimmers World, so here it is.

    Day one.

    Breakfast was brilliant. Giant fry up. Lovely and took me through to well past lunchtime hunger wise.

    For lunch we nipped over the marina to the Carvery. Nomilicious. Alex found he could eat pretty much everything on offer but needed to check Syns of a few things when we got back.

    For dinner, I made meatballs and spaghetti. We used wholemeal spaghetti – I bought pretty much wholemeal everything in the last shop as it’s meant to be better for you, Syns or no Syns. You know what? Wholemeal spaghetti tastes fine, don’t fret it. It was a bit of a pain prepping and cooking everything simultaneously, but it came out pretty good. I whacked a salad on the side so my portions didn’t seem too small. I’m impressed at how good it tastes. I made enough to put two portions aside to ‘ding’ another day, so not a bad start.

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