Slimming World Pakoras Recipe...

I made these ages ago but never got round to posting the recipe, since starting work I've found it hard to find things to take for my lunch and to keep me going throughout the day so I've been looking for some Slimming World friendly snacks that I wont feel guilty for eating. I love Indian snacky things like Pakoras anyway so to find a syn free version made me really happy! 

Ingredients:
2 large potatoes
1 red onion
1/2 a bag of frozen mixed vegetables
2 tbsp curry powder
3-4 tbsp fat free yoghurt
1 egg, beaten
frylight

Method: 

1. Peel the potatoes then chop and boil until soft. When soft, mash with no butter or milk

2. Chop the red onion and leave the frozen vegetables to defrost. When they have defosted, put in a large bowl with the chopped red onion and mashed potato. Mix together then add curry powder and fat free yoghurt

3. When everything is mixed together, spray a tray with frylight and place tablespoon sized dollops on the tray

4. Bake in a 200 degrees pre-heated oven for around 40 minutes then leave to cool

These are so yummy and just the perfect little snack! Perfect to go with a curry too.

Other Slimming World recipes - Slimming World Brownies, Spaghetti Bolognese.

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5 Years - Chiquitos, Ab Fab and Cineworld VIP...

It was mine and Georges 5 year anniversary on the 6th of July and of course I had to do a blog post about it. I love reading my old blog posts back and I know this will be one of my favourites.

So we started off the day really well with breakfast in bed, opening our cards and presents and looking forward to what we had planned for the few days off we had. We wanted to do something really special so a while ago we found a really nice hotel, booked a fancy room but then when we got there it all went wrong. It wasn't what we expected and so many things just completely ruined it, so without going into detail, we got our money back and tried to think of other things we could do to still make the day special. We didn't want to do our usual date night thing of going to the cinema and going for a meal but thats what we ended up doing and it was really nice, it might be similar to what we usually do but it actually ended up better than staying at the hotel, it wouldn't have been worth the amount of money it was at all and we'd have just been disappointed. 

We ended up booking a table at Chiquitos at Centertainment for that evening as we hadn't actually been there together before, no idea why as we both like Mexican food! We had a really nice booth and even though the service was a bit slow it ended up being a really lovely meal and we wanted to go back the next day the food was that good. George had the nachos to start which were honestly amazing and I had the Tortilla Garlic Bread, for mains I had Beef Chilli with Spicy Rice and Nachos and George had Beef Enchiladas. Both were so good! I wish I had taken some pictures but we just wanted to eat it straight away! We didn't get chance to try the desserts as we had already decided to see a film afterwards so we were a bit pushed for time but next time I definitely want to try the Chocolate Orange Cake! As we have Cineworld unlimited cards aswell we got 25% off which took a nice amount of the bill as it would have been quite expensive otherwise. Definitely worth it though. After our meal we went to the cinema to see Absolutely Fabulous, it was actually really good and even though I wouldn't say its the best storyline, it is funny and worth a watch, there is one line which just gets to me and makes me laugh whenever I think about it. 

Breakfast in Bed, Some of the presents from George, and Cineworld VIP. 

On Friday, a few days after our anniversary we went to Cineworld again but this time it was to see Now You See Me 2 in VIP which was overall such a good experience! The film was really good, I thought it was much better than the first one and I didn't expect that. The VIP experience was well worth the money, we booked it a while ago and it was £19 each for us because of the unlimited cards, the normal price is £29 each but even then I think it is worth that amount, you get a buffet when you first go in, they had a selection of pizzas, pasta, rice, salad and soup, and they also have a frozen yoghurt section and cakes and loads of drinks to choose from. The best bit about it though is the unlimited amount of cinema snacks you can have, you can choose from popcorn, nachos and hot dogs or have all of them which of course we did, you can then choose to go back for more of these during the film and the same with drinks too, the comfy seats were so good too! I can't wait to do it again, I can't recommend it enough. 

So even though we had a bit of a disaster with the hotel during the day it did end up been better than we had planned and we did had have a really lovely few days together, I didn't want it to end. 

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Lemon Drizzle Cake Recipe

A few weeks ago I decided to try making a Lemon Drizzle and I am glad I did because it turned out so well and was actually surprisingly easy. Much better than shop bought lemon drizzle!

First one with sugar topping, second one with icing sugar topping.

Ingredients:
225g butter/spread
225g caster sugar
275g of self raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
4 eggs
4 tbsp milk
grated zest of 2 lemons

Topping - You can either do a sugar topping which is literally about 175g of sugar mixed with the juice of 2 lemons or you can do one made with icing sugar and the juice of the 2 lemons, I preferred the icing sugar one but both are good!

Method:
1. Pre - heat oven to 180 degrees and grease a square baking tin (I don't know the exact measurements but this makes quite a lot of mixture so I used a pretty big tin)
2. To a bowl, add the butter, sugar, self raising flour, baking powder, eggs, milk and grated zest, you don't need to add things one at a time and then mix, this is so simple and you can literally put it all in at once if you're using an electric whisk, this is definitely easier and takes no time at all! If you did just want to use a normal wooden spoon to mix i'd maybe add a few ingredients in at a time. 
3. When the mixture is smooth, you can add it to your prepared cake tin and bake for around 40 minutes, I check it after about 35 minutes and use a skewer to check if its done, it if it comes out clean then it means the cake is cooked and ready to come out, if there is any of the mixture still on it then it needs a bit longer.
4. Depending on which topping you go for, will depend on when you put the topping on! If you go for the sugar topping you will need to put this on while it is still warm and before it cools completely, it won't go on aswell if its cooled. Or if you go for the icing sugar topping, leave the cake to cool then add it, i literally drizzled this all over the cake and it was so nice, I got loads out of it too when I cut it into squares.

This was such an amazing cake and I'm so glad I finally attempted it! It was so soft and just perfect with icing sugar on top!

My Other Baking Recipes - Chocolate Loaf Cake, Cornflake Tart and Slutty Brownies.

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Slimming World Egg Fried Rice and Pork Stir Fry Recipe

I love Chinese food but it's not the healthiest thing and takeaways are expensive so I was really happy to find some good Chinese slimming world recipes recently. Stir fry isn't something we have loads but I always enjoy it when we do and egg fried rice is one of my favourites things and it is so easy to make so todays post is a recipe for both of them!

Stir Fry - To start I cooked pork loin steaks and then sliced into thin strips, I put aside on a plate while I cooked the vegetables. I just bought a stir fry pack from Aldi for less then a pound which had cabbage, carrots, peppers, onions and I fried this until it was soft and then added the pork back to the pan. If you wanted to add any beansprouts you could add them now or if you wanted to add noodles, they only take a few minutes to cook in boiling water so you could add these too at this point, I normally add some soy sauce while its cooking but this time I used a chow mein stir fry sauce from Aldi which if you follow Slimming World would be a few syns for each person. While i'm finishing the rice I leave this in the pan to all cook through and stay hot. 

Egg Fried Rice - I start some water boiling in 2 saucepans, when its boiled I use one pan for the rice and one for peas, cook them both as you normally would and then when cooked and drained mix together in a big bowl. You can now add a beaten egg, as the rice is so hot that will cook the egg, but if you don't want to do it that way you can just scramble a few eggs and then add to the rice, thats what I normally do. I add a bit of seasoning and then add soy sauce and mix. It's so simple to make and tastes so good.

The egg fried rice in particular is one of my favourite slimming world recipes, I could eat it all the time! Let me know if you make either of these! They are such good fakeaway recipes.

Other Slimming World Recipes - Overnight Oats and Keema Curry Pie.

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