Vegetarian Recipes

Let’s say you like marmalade but have missed the Seville orange season by a whisker and this was going to be the year when you made marmalade for the first time, darn it. Let’s say that’s what’s happened. Well what if instead of using Seville oranges you go tri-citrus instead? The tartness of a couple of lemons and a grapefruit can be countered by a few oranges ordinaires and suddenly you’ve got your first batch of marmalade and in a hitherto unexperienced guise. Marvellous.

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Regular reader(s) will probably be aware that  every year at this time we here at yumblog experience a visitation from the son of God ‘His Royal Highness Jesus H Christ’ in the form of the appearance of his princely fizzog on various domestic items. Imagine how shocked we were when this Easter it wasn’t the apparition of the King of Glory that greeted us, but the heathen boat race of the heretic, cloven hooved, God-denying so-called ‘Professor’, Richard Dawkins. We live in Godless times. Good Friday and Happy Easter. x

Dirty tea towel, or ghostly apparition?

For this recipe we experimented with frozen clams from a recent Ocado shop. Despite our middle class credentials we wouldn’t ordinarily shop at Ocado but we had a £20 off voucher and thought we’d make use of the offer. A flourish of reckless clicks and 240 quid later, this didn’t seem such a bargain. Also, frozen clams it turns out are a bland and uneventful experience, so please use fresh when making this tasty dish.

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Sorry about the irregular nature of recent posts but I have recently started a new job in Manchester and feel it would be considerate to my new employer to wait a few weeks before I spend all my working day writing up posts for yumblog. On the plus side I have discovered a superb fishmonger in the Arndale centre which stocks a fantastic range of fish and seafood. Hence this and subsequent octopi.

In space no one can hear you scream

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Yumblog are now on Pinterest (obviously)

Living as we do at the very epicentre of the rhubarb triangle – the mysterious 30-square-mile area formed between the three cities of Leeds, Wakefield and Bradford famous for early forced rhubarb and the unexplained disappearance of countless ships, planes and whippets – it seems only appropriate that we should make more use of this local delicacy. Coming up soon will be a potent rhubarb vodka, but in the meantime why not try this deliciously splendid upside-down cake?

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We had a pair of Hebden Twins coming to dinner so obviously we Googled ‘What do twins eat?’ in search of appropriate ways to tickle their sapphic taste buds. The results threw up a biography of Sue Perkins and an incongruous and seemingly random set of images, but very little in the way of practical advice. Undeterred and after consulting the cookery page of ‘Femflaps’ magazine we decided to serve them the classic lesbian menu of Cheese Fondue followed by Chocolate Pithiviers.

For some reason something went awry with the quantities and we ended up with a considerable amount of the filling left over after we had made our pithiviers, hence this potted version.

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Want to know how to make Iced Tuna Mousse, Monday Risotto or Coffee Hedgehog? Need to know how to crisp up a limp lettuce using a lump of coal, or remove tar from your clothes/children after a day out at the seaside? Perhaps you need to convert fl.oz. to decilitres? Then look no further than this 1972 publication from the Hyde Heath Women’s Institute – an heirloom handed down through the generations from Gwydwr (aka Nanan) to Gwydwr (aka Gwydwr) to Blogger-D (aka Daisycarolineleitchlollypopsbananasvanillaicecreamcigarettesandcigars).

> View all recipes and tips

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Needing as we did to both satisfy a craving for something sweet and shift some particularly average Christmas chocolate balls from Lidl, these ChocChip™ Cookies perfectly fulfilled both requirements. Obviously you don’t need to rush to Lidl and rummage through the ‘end of line’ slop bucket in search of the last remaining net of stale Yule Chocco Balls as they can be substituted by any chocolate you like. Green and Blacks 70% if you’re posh…Smarties if you’re common…you know which you are.

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A while back we bought a bumper pack of frozen sweetcorn for Yumblog Junior hoping this might make a healthy addition to her somewhat restricted and monotonous diet. As is invariably the case she gave our offering a glance of contempt, shook her head and returned to her preferred menu of bananas, Marmite and toothpaste. Parenthood can sometimes be a frustrating hobby. Anyway, these sweetcorn fritters seemed a tasty way to mop up some of our surplus.

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“You know me and my weakness for a juicy pear” – Gregg Wallace, MasterChef, 2012.
“I just love the big flavours of Dick” – Gregg Wallace, Celebrity MasterChef, 2010.
Looks like Gregg butters his toast on both sides.

Our constructed Colcannon soup can be found here.

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If any of you dodgy lot were to break into Yumblog Cottage, you would probably notice (apart from how bloody cold it is) that despite several shelf loads of cookbooks, there was virtually nothing ‘written’ by TV chefs. No matter how frantically you rummaged, you’d find no Jamie, Nigella, Gordon, Heston, Sophie, Ainsley, Gino, Levi, Hugh or god forbid Nigel. Of course we do allow a few exceptions such as Rick Stein, Valentine Warner and Simon Hopkinson, plus the odd rogue publication by Delia Smith, Gary Rhodes and even Rusty Lee, but generally we eschew anything branded by celebrity.

Another exception to this rule are the cheeky Hairy Bikers as we like their cheeky northern cheekiness and honest, hearty grub …and grub doesn’t get more honest and hearty than this excellent supper dish.

Now put down that book and get out of our house or we’ll release the hounds!

An artist’s impression of what Dave Myers’ Mam
might most probably definitely looks like.

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Well I never, I’ve just discovered our local Morrisons now sells packets of fresh yeast for breadmaking… and at the very reasonable price of 50p for 126g. This was unexpected because a) as far as I know you can’t even get it at Waitrose, and b) Morrisons is very much at the (Sp)Asda end of the supermarket spectrum and tends more towards the processed and ‘value added’ convenience foodstuffs. In fact they still seem to think of olive oil as an exotic foreign embrocation for loosening earwax rather than a middle class kitchen essential and prefer to bottle it in vials and shelve it in the ‘Health and Beauty’ aisle somewhere between nit shampoo and Tena Ladies.

Supermarket snobbery aside, I’ve never used fresh yeast before so I did an AW-T, slipped a packet up my chef whites and made a run for it.

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It’s taken a while to write up this, the third of our festive gravali because to be honest I got a little over excited at the fishmonger’s (Paul, Todmorden Market) where I bought the salmon and ended up with 1.5kg of the stuff. Delicious as it was (and this beetroot version was the tastiest of the three) this was a lot of gravalax to get through and as a result we ate rather a lot over a short period of time. Subsequently the thought of it has made me a little queasy ever since. But don’t let that put you off, you don’t have to make it in such industrial quantaties.

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…or goat’s cheese pancakes.

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Although the fridge has now all but emptied of Christmas goodies the cheese compartment is still heavy with half-eaten lumps, wheels and wedges of every variety of soft, hard, blue, holey, mature and goat. It has become clear that the occasional lunchtime snack is never going to make much headway into this cheesey surplus and we need to start shifting the stuff in more varied and imaginative ways. This tartiflette* is one such way.

Incidentally welcome to 2012 – the year which in the future we will look back on as marking the beginning of the end. Quietus anyone?

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Obviously our enjoyment of Christmas was seriously curtailed by the devastating news of Prince Philip’s hospitalisation – thank God the BBC ran half-hourly news bulletins to keep us up to date with every nuance of this never-changing national cataclysm. Here at Yumblog Cottage we tried to keep our subjective peckers up by preparing and scoffing a variety of delicious foodstuffs and washing them down with an alarming range of booze – it’s what PP would have wanted. Anyway, one such preparation was this, the second of the three ways – the spicy gingery way.

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Every little helps

Thus far we have glogged and grogged… time to get nogging.

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Despite being grammatically only one letter away from Glogg, this is actually a toddy far removed from its near namesake. The alcoholic element can be supplied by either Rum, Brandy or as in this case Kirsch – we had some left over from our post-modern ironic fondu phase. Less of an infused libation and more of a medicinal compound, this is tasty nonetheless.

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According to this year’s Yumblog Winterval menu, on Christmas Eve we’ll be sitting down to a meal of ‘Gravalax 3 Ways with Horseradish Cream and Vodka’. Ever wary of eating raw flesh, we thought we’d do a dummy run of this, the most trad of the trio just to make sure it wasn’t too ‘wet and fishy’. It turned out we had no need to be so cautious as the results were spectacular and far exceeded our expectations. Also, at a little over a quid per 100g, it works out to be about an eighth of the cost of its shop bought cousin – you do the maff. We urge, nay insist, you hot foot it down to Paul the Fishmonger and give this a try over the next few days.

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Here’s wishing you, dear reader(s) a very happy Christmas. We have of course sent each and every one of you a beautiful handcrafted card which you should be receiving any day now. If you would like a magical insight into the brilliant young artist behind this challenging work, please watch the video below. Warning – depicts scenes of child labour which some viewers may find distressing.

We had some Pimms in the house, we wanted to make a new hot boozy drink, a recipe was found that indicated a potentially minimal expenditure on further ingredients in order to fulfill our warm Pimms dream. After no debate apple juice was bought.

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The plan is to try out as many festive toddies as we can in the run up to Christmas so that you, dear reader(s), will have a selection of Yuletide tipples to choose from come the big day. With only 12 drinking days to Christmas we realise we have set ourselves a daunting task, but hey, that’s the sort of selfless devotion to duty you’ve come to expect from us here at Yumblog. Bottoms up!

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At the last count Yumblog Junior had an impressive vocabulary of 38½ distinct words*. These range from the traditional and vital Mummy, Daddy, Dog, Cat through Cheese, Spoon, Cock-a-doodle-doo to more personal choices such as Shoes, Crumpet and Cheers (accompanied by the touching of the parental beer glasses). One of her first and still most frequently used words is B’nana – not surprising as along with olives, gherkins, apples and salami, this is one of the few things she’ll consistently and enthusiastically opt to eat. As a result we always have a ready stock of bananas close to hand which sometimes, due to regular transport from kitchen to pram to bag and back again, can sometimes get a little bashed up. This recipe was an ideal way to use up some of these less than perfect bananas. Relax, an 18 month old toddler is not a prerequisite.

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Restaurants in the Dordogne serve them under the name of ‘Pois Détrempés’; in Italy they are commonly known as ‘Piselli Pastosi’ and are a popular filling for ravioli; the Germans claim ‘Deutsche Matschig Erbsen’ to be their national dish, and of course the Spanish love nothing more than a tapas of ‘Guisantes Fofos’.

Here in the UK Gordon Ramsay has them on the menu at his authentic East End pub ‘Gordon Ramsay’s The Boozer’ as ‘Marrowfat Cassoulet with a Mint Persillade Suggestion’ and charges a reasonable £16.99 per portion, and on her ground-breaking cookery series ‘The Delicious Miss Dahl‘ Sophie added her own inimitable tweest and reimagined them as ‘Sophie’s Luvely Wubly Mushy Wushy Fluffy Wuffy Ploppy Pea Poos’. But that is as maybe, here up north us no nonsense northerners simply call them as they are – ‘Mushy Peas’. And they are reet good.

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The inverted commas are there because this loaf contains no yeast and is actually more of a savoury cake than a bread. This has the added advantage that as well as being pleasantly toothsome, it can also manifest from a wishful inkling to an incontrovertible plateful in just under an hour and a half. That’s quicker than it takes to boil an egg*.

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Our recent enthusiasm for cooking with mushrooms is appropriate as at the moment we seem to be cultivating several interesting varieties of our own on the increasingly damp internal walls here at Yumblog Cottage. The damp man* who came round to investigate told us we can eradicate 70% of the problem by simply keeping the windows open and the heating on, twenty-four hours a day, for the next four months. All donations towards our winter gas bill will be much appreciated.

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We like a bargain here at Yumblog Cottage, so when we spied the veg stall at Todmorden Market selling large boxes of portobello mushrooms for the VERY reasonable price of two quid, we couldn’t resist. They proved to be the frugal basis of three meals – this, a tasty cream of mushroom soup (recipe in the queue), and a disappointing and binned pâté which failed to set properly and slopped out onto the plate like farmyard slurry. But discard all visions of cowplop from your mind, for this is an interesting and tasty dish.

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In some parts of the world it is still illegal to smother a cabbage, but thankfully not in Italy where this recipe originates.

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Porcini Mushroom (with Tomato) Sauce

This was less of a search for the perfect pasta sauce, and more because we had an empty fridge and needed to knock up something tasty from what is commonly known as ‘store cupboard standbys’. What do you mean you don’t always have porcini mushrooms in the house? Hand in your John Lewis Store Card at once and never darken this blog again!

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A few Saturdays back one of us (me) joined the Incredible Edible Foraging Walk which took place in and around the IE Market Garden Training Centre just down the road at Walsden. Contrary to naive expectations I didn’t skip home through the woods afterwards with a trug filled with wild garlic and exotic fungi, however I did more importantly get an excellent introduction to the fascinating (and increasingly fashionable) world of foraging. As our instructor Mike said, foraging isn’t about self-sufficiency or eating for free, it’s about understanding the natural environment with the occasional tasty nibble thrown in on the way.

Much of what we foraged was necessarily green and leafy and invariably tasted similar to either spinach or watercress (nothing wrong with that), however a few stand-out discoveries were Wild Sorrel (sharp and more lemony than a lemon), Goosefoot (seeds like tiny hazelnuts) and best of all, Fuchsia (sweet fruits reminiscent of Pomegranate). Less desirable was a fungi called Jews Ear, the eating of which was like sucking mushroom-flavoured jelly from a slightly perished condom.

Canal @ Walsden

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The woman at the market who sold us our Jam Round informed us that it is sometimes also referred to as a Brighton Tart. Asking the obvious question as to why this traditional local treat is named after an East Sussex town caused much debate among the staff which, even after one had tweeted her friends, came up blank. Further investigation back home was also fruitless with a Google search of ‘Brighton Tart’ inexplicably returning Peter Andre as the main result.

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Now I know I don’t need to remind you dear reader, that when Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calender in 1582 he decreed that the third Sunday of October would herald the beginning of Soup Season (Source: Wikipedia). Obviously in these most modern of times we are much more relaxed about such things and tend to live and eat to a generally less proscriptive timetable – some of us even eating cold soup in summer! But whatever your beliefs on such matters, I’m sure we can all agree that the nights are drawing in and there is a whiff of Winter in the air, so what better way to fortify oneself against the forthcoming long months of cold and misery, than a warming nutritious bowl of soup?

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A few Sundays back (BT*) we travelled out east to Walthamstow where we came upon Belinda and her lovely stall of tasties. Once upon a time Belinda was ‘Gavin’s sister Belinda who’s in a band and is an Arsenal fan’. Now she’s Belinda who makes lovely jams and chutneys and cordial too. Special mention also to her father John who made the bread for tasting the jam with, a nice crumbly wholemeal. Marvellous. Oh, and her scones, they were very good.

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Yumblog has won ‘Best Food Blog‘ for an unprecedented tenth year in a row! (Surely some mistake – Ed) So thank you to the thousands of kind and generous readers who voted for us in this year’s Observer Food Monthly Awards. Thanks also to OFM’s panel of judges who singled us out for our extraordinary talent, enthusiasm and vision … we feel humbled.

Waiting in the Tudor Chippy for the haddock component of our chippy tea to be cooked, I noticed ‘Dab – 30p’ chalked up on the menu board. Enquiring on your behalf, dear reader, I was told it was a lump of mashed potato deep fried in batter. Before I had time to ask for one to be added to my order a free sample had been slid onto my fish and chips, wrapped up in a copy of the Manchester Metro and handed over with a bid to ‘Enjoy’.

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Aubergine Sauce (with tomato and chilli)

Well this is as close to perfection as you are likely to get in this increasingly imperfect world. As with all the other sauces in this occasional series, I turned to the ever reliable Marcella Hazan for inspiration and guidance, and once again she delivered the goods with this simple (slightly faffy) delicious recipe.

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…or potato pancakes with toasted goat’s cheese. Or indeed rosti with toasted goat’s cheese. But another Alsatian dish anyway.

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A Fat Rascal is essentially a flat dry fruit scone/Garibaldi biscuit hybrid which, after a disappointing tasting, was fed to the ducks.

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