Kiwis, curries and rats with style

It’s that time again. Time to see what Chat has to offer this week. Once again, I am blown away by their fabulous witticisms, sprinkled throughout. For example, I open the magazine and the first thing which greets me is a photo of a pig in a picnic basket, with the caption ‘designer ham bag?’

Brilliant. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why the massive photo of the pig is there, just a little sentence about how the pig looks so comfy, “there’s no way we could ‘rasher’ to go anywhere.”

And on we go, to the photos page and there are a few good ones this week. The first is a here-are-some-cupcakes-I-made photo. The second is a here’s-me-with-a-huge-plastic-ape picture. And no, I’m not kidding. Someone really thought that the world would be interested in a picture of her with a huge plastic ape. Check it out.

There are some others of dogs and cows, which aren’t even worth mentioning in any greater detail.

So onward we go, past a story about a girl who had a maggot living in her back and a story of scandal with a 9.9 shock factor (!), to the Blimey, That’s Clever page.

And what have we here today? I think my favourite might be the kiwi fruit tip. Put it in an egg cup, we’re told. And that’s it. That’s the tip. Eat a kiwi out of an egg cup. £25 they got for that.  

Maybe I’ll make up some top tips and try to get £25 from Chat. Watch this space. I’ll think some up for tomorrow.

Another of the top tips is to use toothpaste to clean your mugs if they have tea stains. While I can’t see anything initially wrong with this, it just sounds a bit dodgy, cleaning a mug with toothpaste. You’re bound to have toothpaste-tasting tea for the next few days, I reckon.

Another tip seems to be, my granddaughter chewed the straw bit off her favourite beaker, so I put a new straw in. I don’t know whether that really warrants a place on the Blimey, That’s Clever page, do you? It’s not as though, previously, people have been throwing away their children’s beakers every day with no clue how to fix it and then they open Chat, see this tip and go ‘Wow! I’ll just stick a new straw down the hole where the old straw was. That’s genius.’

Next we have some more scandal, a murder, some letters, some weight loss stories and then the baby photos page. Ahhhh, the baby photos page. Photos of babies. Doing nothing at all. Just being babies. A whole page. One is a baby on a slide, one is a baby swimming, another is a baby and a cat, one is two children smiling a bit. A whole page.

To the side of this page, we have the recipe section. Now previously, I have seen some amazing gourmet recipes that opened my eyes to a whole new world. The week they had a recipe for mushrooms on toast was a week that changed my life. This week’s recipe? Onion and potato curry.

Mmmm. Doesn’t that sound great? Onion and potatoes. In a curry. Like when you look in the fridge and you don’t have anything in so you bung together some nonsense and fill up on ice cream afterward. Mmm. Nothing-in-the-fridge curry. The ingredients? Olive oil, 4 potatoes, 2 onions, spices and mustard seeds. And the attraction in making this meal? It’s only 54p per head.

Now it doesn’t take a genius to work out that it’s not 54p because Chat are so great at providing good meals on a budget. It’s because there’s NOTHING IN IT.

If you want great meals on a budget, I can give you far better, go-to ingredients – squid is really cheap, people. Fry it with fennel. Re-use old bread by chopping tomatoes, adding red wine vinegar and basil and ripping your old bread up and mixing it in for a panzanella salad. If you want a curry, spend your money on some chicken and chuck it in a pan with tomatoes (tinned or fresh) and add whatever combination of spices you find in the cupboard, depending on what country’s cuisine you are chanelling.

See? All those will probably be about £1 per person but don’t resemble student food or invoke severe depression in the person who is eating it.

Anyway, back to Chat, the finale is the ‘Ratwalk models’ story on page 46. Yes, RATwalk models. You know what’s coming. It’s a story about a lady who designs and makes clothes for rats. Yes. Rats. It started with making ‘couture creations’ for her pet chihuahua, inspired by a dress worn by Penelope Cruz to the Oscars.

A few years later, business was booming, she went full time into her pet clothing designing and her friend asked her to help “raise the profile of her annual rat convention.”

Honestly, this is not a joke. It’s all true. Her friend runs a yearly rat convention.

So she designed and made the dresses. There was a fashion show with 12 of the ‘models’. Post-show, fame and fortune came her way, she got calls from everyone, even David Letterman.

The article finishes with the touching line, “After all, every single pet should feel like a star.”

That’s something we should all remember as we go on with our days today.

I hope you have learned something here.

Evil cows, Peppa Pig brides and handy tips

It’s that time again, everyone! Time to delve into our favourite magazine! That’s right, Chat! I know you’ve all come to love Chat and probably have a subscription to it so I don’t really need to go over this week’s best stories, because you already know them. But for the few who haven’t yet joined the Chat party, here’s the lowdown this week.

The main headline today is:

That’s it. Straight to the point. Evil cows! “Hang em!” said a friend, in true Chat spirit. It just seems a little juvenile, calling someone a ‘cow’. That’s what you’d call the other girls in school when you were 14 years old and they’d been spreading rumours about you.

Well anyway, there’s always the obligatory ‘I fell in love but she/he fooled me’ story in Chat and these aren’t much different. One is a woman who pretended to have kids and look after the guy’s ill mum but she didn’t really have any and she was buying a load of stuff with the mum’s credit card. (The story has a Shock Factor of 9.8, so you know it must be serious!) The second one was a woman who got married 14 times and stole stuff from each person then buggered off. Pretty standard. This second story is called ‘Behind The Big Crime!’ I feel like maybe that’s been overplayed, don’t you? The ‘Big Crime’? If they were talking about solving the mystery behind Ted Bundy’s murders, or finally arresting and charging John Wayne Gacy or the Yorkshire Ripper perhaps, I’d see what they meant. But a bigamist who stole a few thousand dollars? The ‘Big Crime’? I think they might have gone a bit overboard there.

The standard ‘I was fat but now I lost weight and my life is better’ story came from the ‘Real Life’ section of the magazine. Wait a minute – isn’t it ALL real life? That’s the point, surely? Anyway, back to the story. A woman talks about meeting a man, loving takeaways, stuffed crust pizzas are her fave, she loves chips, she loves chocolate, she loves noodles, she eats lard for dinner and drinks it down with oil, etc etc. She gets married, she feels great, she feels happy, she loves lard etc etc. And then the wedding photos arrive and….

Now, she’s pretty massive in the pictures. She tells us she weighed 15 stone. And she hadn’t noticed she was big, she says. Well, I’m not saying anything, just that when I hit 11 stone, I noticed! Anyway, then she joined Slimming World and twenty years later, she’d dropped to 14 and a half stone. Yeh! Woop woop! No, it was a year later and she dropped to a reasonable size.

There are some handy tips in the ‘Blimey! That’s Clever!’ section, that I want to share with you, to help you around the house. One is that if you wear one of your rubber gloves out faster than the other, turn the other one inside out and it will go on that hand. You’d have to wear through two pairs though, wouldn’t you? To have two left ones and no right ones, so you could do this. And to be honest, who does enough washing up to wear through two whole gloves?? You’d have to be storing your one old left one for ages, to wait for the new right one to wear through and throw away so that you could revive your old left and turn it inside out. A pair of Marigolds is only about a pound, it’s not like you’re saving a load of money by storing your one dirty old glove in the cupboard, waiting to use it again. I don’t even use Marigolds actually. I’m tough.

Another tip, called ‘Easy Squeezy’ tells us to use a rolling pin when the toothpaste is almost finished, to get the last few dregs out. Again, I brush my teeth upstairs and have my rolling pin downstairs. It’s very unlikely that I’m going to run downstairs with my toothpaste to roll it out on the table and then go back upstairs to get one last little bit out to brush my teeth with. What’s a lot more likely to happen, is that I’ll chuck that tube in the bin and open the new one. Not saying it’s a rubbish tip. Just saying I’ll never do it.

PS. I think Chat have been reading my blog! Remember when I wrote a story to send in to Chat? Called Asparagus Fingers? Well, if this advert for next week’s Chat isn’t a total rip off of my story, then I don’t know what is!

There is also this story coming next week. It’s not really to do with anything I’ve talked about. I just thought you might like to see it.