Ever since our Media Centre PC (the one that records all our TV for us) broke recently, we’ve been reduced to scrolling through the NTL guide to find something to watch in the evenings.

We’ve ended up watching quite a bit a bit of Gordon Ramsey and last night we finally caught an episode of the f-word. It’s an hour long and action packed - and swear-word packed seeing that Gordon’s about!

The premise is that they bring in a team of 4 amateur chefs (last night was the firemen) and Gordon gets them to cook a 3-course set meal for 50 people in the restaurant (including celebrities). The people eat the food and then decide if they would pay for it or not. Reasons for not paying can run from ‘took too long’ to ‘badly cooked’, etc.

I felt really sorry for the firemen last night, and I think Gordon did as well - the punters were awful and complaining about foie gras ‘being too fatty’. As Gordon pointed out - it’s the fattened liver of a goose, so how on earth could it be less fatty? But you can never please some people…

They also flick out to other stories, they has Janet Street-Porter going to France to pick out a horse to be slaughtered and then serving the cooked horse meet to punters at a racecourse. What we didn’t hear on the screen was that in the wake of her stunt, representatives of animal rights group PETA protested by dumping a tonne of horse manure outside Ramsay’s restaurant at Claridge’s in central London. In another segment, Gordon taught a busy family how to prepare 5 tasty, healthy meals in under 15 mins each.

They flashed up the program’s website at the end and I took the time to have a look and discovered that they have all the recipes listed from each program, going back for 3 series!! Gordon’s food usually looks to be crammed with flavour and natural ingredients, even if like all celebrity chefs I think he uses a LOT of butter - but maybe that’s why their food has so much flavour!

Check out the recipe collection, there’s something to suit everyone’s tastes - and many of them have video instructions as well.

My favourite recipes from last night were:

1. Butter-roasted rib eye of beef
2. Bacon, pea and goats cheese omelette with a tomato salad
3. Pan fried salmon pea and mint puree and crème fraiche
4. Fillet steak sandwich with a green salad
5. Chicken and mixed vegetable stir-fry with noodles

That was a good weekend, even if it did pass too quickly!

We got all the household stuff out of the way in the morning as George had his assessment at the gym on Sat afternoon - his workouts are going really well, as are mine and we’re both building up more endurance and stamina - I just hope that we start to see some more obvious results soon.

We’ve also started tracking our daily calorie intakes on spreadsheets designed by Jeremy Zawodny, which uses some cool 5-day averages and monitors our weight, so it should be useful to help us keep tracking our progress! We’re pulling the calorie info from CalorieKing and so far it’s encouraging, we’re both tracking under 2000 calories per day, and are buring about 300 or more of those off with each trip to the gym (every other day at this point). I’m fairly sure that we’re just creating muscle at this point, so hopefully our weights (and circumferences) will start falling now in month 2!!

On Sunday we headed down to Laois for our first full dinner with Avril & Robert since they moved into their new house - it’s really shaping up and it’s gorgeous! We sat down to a great roast pork, with oodles of lovely crackling - I was practically fighting with the kids over it.

Dinner finished with “Eton Mess” - I’ve never had it before but it was a gorgeous, easy to make dessert - some recipes below:

Eton Mess - strawberry, no yoghurt
Eton Mess - raspberry, no cream
Eton Mess - like Avril’s, except she uses Dark Rum instead