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When God gives you lemons, make lemonade. Two things. Firstly everyone who blogs up a lemonade recipe starts with this proverb and secondly there is no God. There is however a Waitrose, which is where we got our unwaxed fruit. So more accurately, when you go to Waitrose to buy lemons to make lemonade, make lemonade.

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How do you take your olive oil? Pure, virgin, extra-virgin, hand-picked, first cold press, single estate, non-filtered, Greek, Tuscan, Andalusian, Carbonell, Bertolli, Filippo Berio, Il Padrone, Masia el Altet, Tesco’s finest? Boof, here at yumblog we have bespoke olive oil! Olive oil personally pressed and kindly donated by a handsomely moustachioed Frenchman who goes by the moniker of J-P. A precious 87.5ml from total pressing of less than a litre. That’s the level of poncy, middle-class, Guardian-reading dandyness you’re dealing with here. Beat that.

A humorously shaped Alessi thing to anyone who can.

Perhaps.

Needless to say J-P’s Hand-Pressed Olive Oil tastes superb.

Butter & Tomato Sauce

A recent trip to the magnificent St John led to a visit to their website which in turn resulted in the purchase of a Fergus Henderson-endorsed cookbook called The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan. It’s perfect bedtime reading and has an intriguing section on simple tomato-based sauces for pasta - with three ingredients this is the simplest of them all.

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Michelin Mums

Maverick TV, the company that makes ‘How to Look Good Naked’ and ‘10 Years Younger’, is looking for friends who are up for a fun cooking challenge. If you would like to take part in some filming for a Channel 4 pilot could one person in your group please email a.walsh@mavericktv.co.uk with a contact name and an evening and daytime telephone number.

The information collected from you will be kept in the strictest confidence and will not be disclosed to any third party for any purpose other than for the purposes stated herein. Your personal information will only be used for the purpose of evaluating whether you would be a suitable contributor to the programme. Your personal information will NOT be used for any marketing, publicity or research purposes. All information will be dealt with according to the Data Protection Act 1998 and all other applicable laws and regulation with respect to Data Protection.

In the light of ongoing shenanigans at Westminster and with the desire to be always open and transparent with you, dear reader, perhaps this posting should be called an ‘Advertorial’ or possibly a ‘Blogvert’. This is because the mixed organic fruit’n'veg box below was supplied to us completely free of charge; in a complimentary manner; gratis; or if you like, unimpeded by vulgar monetary exchange. Not that this would in anyway bias us towards those lovely, friendly, generous, gorilla-hugging people at Abel & Cole. All they asked of us in return was that we eat the contents and write up what we thought of the experience…

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A couple of weeks ago we had a slap up anniversary feed at St John in Smithfield, and this dish was on the menu. Obviously visiting the home of ‘Nose to Tail eating’ and plumping for the vegetarian option is like… (Note to Blogger-D: Please insert apt and amusing analogy here.) (Note to Blogger-R: Can’t think of one. Don’t worry, nobody reads this shit anyway). However, it sounded so intriguing (and tasty) we had to try it later at home.

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I know what you are thinking. Rhubarb soup? Savoury rhubarb soup? Never heard of that before. Sounds intriguing. Could be tasty. Could be unpleasant. Could be a toxic coupling of sour fruit and salty meaty water. Must get some rhubarb and give it a go. Well that’s what I thought anyway. Besides, the recipe was in Colin Spencer’s ‘Vegetable Book’ which in the past has always proved to be great source of unusual yet tasty recipes.

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A weekend with a sister who keeps 4 exceedingly pampered chickens (Dolores, Fifi, Jolene and Daphne) afforded us with a dozen beautiful, tasty, fresh very-free-range eggs, some of which are shown below. Special thanks to Daphne who laid the one in the middle.

Not bad handwriting for a chicken.

The plan is at some stage to make our own Ricotta from the whey left over from Yumblog Amalgamated Dairy Industries yoghurt-making enterprise. However I suspect the quantities involved will be minute and certainly a lot smaller than our massive combined appetites.

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The obsession with yoghurt continues - this time using it to fashion a traditional Middle Eastern-style cheese called Labne. Once made it is rolled into small balls, coated with fresh herbs, placed in a jar and covered with olive oil. Simple and delicious.

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I got this recipe from an article called ‘Five ways with potatoes’ in this months OFM. Nigel Slater calls it ‘Potato pancakes with herb and youghurt sauce‘ but I changed the name as for me the feta was the main event and therefore deserved higher billing. I’m also not sure my brain can accommodate yet another variation on the spelling of ‘yoghurt’.

“Very well, Mister Moon! In order to prove that I am indeed the Unholy One, a Frobisher & Gleason raspberry-flavored ice lolly shall be yours - in a trice”

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It was a star-studded glitzy night at the first annual yumblog ‘Taste of London‘ ticket giveaway awards, held in the magnificent Princess Diana memorial banqueting suite at yumblog corporate headquarters in the heart of London’s fashionable West End. From the spectacular opening sequence by dance troupe sensation ‘Diversity’ to the closing rendition of ‘Anyone Can Fall in Love’ by curly-haired espoused rock duo Anita Dobson and Brian May, it was certainly a night to remember and will no doubt be the talk of the town for minutes to come.

And the winner?

It is …

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One Saturday we decided to get up and do the shopping before breakfast. Hard to imagine, but true. We went to the fish stall round the corner and witnessed it in it’s full bounteous glory. Indeed such was my excitement that I went crazy and bought shrimps for to make potted shrimps. Tis lucky that the recipe I was following didn’t warn of the obvious pitfalls of shelling sixty billion shrimps, else I fear this recipe would not be before you now. 100 minutes it took. 100. And we ended up with half a ramekin each of potted shrimp. That said, it was delicious and I will definitely make it again, though I may invest in the shelled version or employ an underling.

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Once again Team Yumblog will be slipping sexily into lycra cycling breeches and pedalling the 54 miles from the heart of London’s Clapham Common all the way down to Brighton. There is a specially designed team t-shirt available here which anyone is welcome to buy should the urge grab them. A full size version of the graphic can be viewed here. Our mark up (£5.00) will of course be donated to the British Heart Foundation.

This layered jellified curiosity comes from Gregg (Beefy beefy mushrooms) Wallace’s book ‘VEG!!!‘. The exclamation marks are mine of course.

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Is it me, or is that John Hurt’s lovely face in a piece of his own salami? It’s either a minor miracle, a vanity project, or the designer working on the ‘What’s in your basket?’ feature in this Sunday’s ‘Observer Food Monthly’ was a bit bored and decided to counterbalance Dr John Briffa’s usual pessimistic analysis with a little light Photoshop work. If you have the OFM close to hand, could you confirm that this isn’t just a weird printing anomaly in our particular copy?

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Fill the raw cannelloni, as they are in the box without boiling them. (The stuffing must be cold). On the bottom of the empty bakepan strew tomato sauce. The cannelloni, as they are settled in the bakepan on one layer, strew above fluid tomato sauce in order to counterbalance the interior expansion with the outer surface, to avoid the crevice of the cannelloni. Finished laying them in the bakepan, cover completely with cool tomato sauce or ragout very fluid, or with sauce prepared with butter, flour and milk very fluid. Strew parmesan cheese and butter flakes. Introduce the bakepan in the (hot oven) having care to put a cover on the bakepan. Make it cook at a medium temperature for about 40 minutes. ATTENTION: the bakepan, after prepared, must be put quickly in the hot oven. CAUTION: Handle with care, the impact will cause breakage of the cannelloni.

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As you might have guessed, I got a job lot of cucumbers from the market - three eye-wateringly large shafts of Cucumis Sativus for a credit crunching quid. Unlike the previous version, this soup is entirely prepared in the blender and requires no cooking - just a blender.

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Funny how you wake up one morning and decide that the thing you want to do most in the world (ever) is to make cucumber soup. Maybe it’s a form of neurosis that all food bloggers share and perhaps writing these blogs is a therapeutic, legal and relatively harmless outlet for our collective obsession. Who knows. Who cares. Just had to make cucumber soup.

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An idle few minutes waiting for a tube found us pondering a poster championing the now unfashionable consumption of bottled water and sponsored by a quasi-official sounding organisation going by the name of the ‘Natural Hydration Council’. We are both big fans of the ersatz scientific ‘research’ body such as Laboratoires Garnier or The Institute of Trichologists and so were sufficiently hooked to visit the associated website the following day.

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Spelled rarebit. Pronounced rabbit. Tastes delicious. Incidentally this cheesy delight can also be used in the construction of an Illinois delicacy known as a Horseshoe Sandwich (aka Freedom Sandwich). To make one simply take a thick slice of toasted bread and top with a quantity of cooked meat (hamburger/deep fried pork tenderloin/chicken/etc.). Next cascade with a generous portion of chips/freedom fries and finally crown with a heavy dollop of welsh rarebit. Probably very tasty. Possibly illegal this side of the Illinois state border.

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I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with raspberry vinegar when I started making this, although I’ve since heard tell that among other things it can be mixed with equal parts sugar syrup and diluted to make a refreshing summer drink much enjoyed by Jane Austen and various other Regency types.

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The making of yoghurt has been the most exciting discovery in the yumblog kitchen since the finding of a forgotten and unopened Kellogg’s Variety Pack at the back of the cupboard. There are a multitude of techniques for transforming milk into yoghurt, but our objective was always to do it with the least amount of faff, equipment and financial investment. The knack/problem is to keep the milk at a constant 50C for 8 hours and it is something we are still working on … as the title suggests. That said, so far both attempts have produced delicious, thick, creamy yoghurt.

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There’s that fork again.

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I came across this recipe in last month’s Wa’ro magazine and it looked so tasty I had to give it a try. It also gave me the opportunity to photograph it alongside this stylishly knackered old fork which I bought recently in a charity shop purely for use as a prop. Everybody’s doing it - look at the Observer Food Monthly.

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‘I can’t be in love if it’s plastic
to live on my own just seems tragic
but we’ll raise our swords high when our day comes
you thought it was gold but it was bronze
so, get here in time when our day comes
you thought it was gold but it was bronze’
If this doesn’t make you laugh you have no soul

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Here’s a simple spicy little snack/starter from Gregg ‘beefy beefy mushrooms’ Wallace.

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Who’d have thought you could pickle and eat watermelon rind?

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There was a first birthday party to attend and we thought that, in the interests of encouraging the eating of biscuits from as young an age possible, we would make chocolate chip cookies. Thing is we had plenty chocolate but no chips, plenty cocoa powder but no desire to add nuts to the mixture, so these are rather more chocolate biscuits with russian roulette bonus green & blacks chopped up bits of chocolate. It should also be borne in mind that if you bake a chocolate biscuit dough in an oven for ten minutes, there is a reasonable inevitability that the chocolate bits will melt, thus compounding the chocolate biscuitness of the whole enterprise.

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This lovely dish is made only from locally sourced fresh ingredients and is very popular at our friendly and unpretentious ‘local bistro’ restaurant ‘Charlie Uniform November Tango’.

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Always on the lookout for the opportunity to appear on the fringes of yesterday’s zeitgeist we cooked up a plan to share with you - our faithful - an album choc full of infitessimally predictable and overexposed tunes that you couldn’t possibly have playlisted yourselves. We call it Cook-In - like the sauce you use when no-one’s looking - and it’s inspired by the tunes we like to listen to while we cook up a storm here at Yumblog Towers. From the custard-hued Yellow by Coldplay to the diarrhoea-themed Run by Snow Patrol via perennial favourite Dancing in the Moonlight by Toploader, we feel that there is something for every 30-something white English male out there. And what is more there is a special treat in the guise of up-and-coming band Crimson Order showcasing their fantastic song Hourglass - a classic for our time and featuring the dual drumming antics of Bloggers R and D. Pedestrian and MoR it ain’t.

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We would like to reassure readers that despite selling 20% of yumblog to Coca-Cola for a cool £30m, we are adamant that our ideals* and pseudo-eco-friendly sentiments will be in no way compromised. Yumblog will still be cynically overpriced, we will continue to put patronising and twee drivel in a ‘handwritten’ font on all our packaging and our 2009 AGM will as usual be held on beanbags.

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In accordance with government guidelines and the criteria laid down by the Foods Standards Agency (FSA) (and because you are all, dear readers, lazy obese mollycoddled porcine cretins incapable of making a decision unless the myriad complexities of an issue are reduced to a simple 3-digit number) yumblog will in future state the calorific value of all published recipes. Olive Magazine claims this dish feeds a family of 4 and contains a modest 206 calories per portion, however, we scoffed the lot between the two of us, so perhaps that should be modified to 412 calories. Oh, and there was the accompaning bottle of red (500 calories) and the jar of olives nibbled during preparation (230 calories) and afterwards a few tiny chunks of Green and Bla …

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Hi Guys,

Just wanted you to be the first to know that at 2:46 this morning, Jools gave birth to a beautiful baby girl!! She weighed 6lbs 10 and we have called her ‘Petal Blossom Herbal Essence Bonjela Aviva AmbiPur ScarletDivision Clinique FlavourShaker™ Twitter Pantene Pro-V Sky+ “Ooooh Danone” Sainsbury’s Tefal Yulumba Rainbow Oliver’. Both Jools and ‘Bonjela’ are doing well and we are all so happy!

Lots of love

J’me xx

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A range of T-Shirts inspired by a recent trip to Berlin.

This and many more designs available from our shop

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“I’m sitting at this table called love, staring down at the irony of life.
How come we’ve reached this fork in the road, and yet it cuts like a knife”*

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Winner here.

Yumblog in association with ‘Taste of London’ is offering you the chance to win a pair of tickets to the world’s greatest restaurant festival. All you have to do is simply send us hilarious puns which aptly combine ‘food’ with ‘London’. Huh? For example how about ‘Hot Cross Barnes’, ‘Beef Shadwellington’, ‘Rhubarbican’ or possibly ‘Lobster Thermidalston’? Get the idea? We’ve set the standard and as you can see it is pretty high. Send in as many entries as you like and we’ll use our judgement and bias to pick a winner. Competition closes Friday the 29th May 2009.

Click below for T & Cs

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Rolf tells how it is.

This and many more designs available from our shop