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Mulled cider

Obviously you don’t really need to be told how to mull cider as like us you’ll just explore the deeper regions of your spice cupboard and gather together whatever seems to conjure up memories of Christmas. Then you’ll discard anything that is more than a year out of date, guess how much of the remaining you’ll need to conjure up …

Granola

A few miles up the road from Yumblog Mansion in the beautiful unspoilt Lancashire town of Bacup there is the last fully operational commercial Granola quarry left in the country. We are lucky to have a source of such quality Granola right on our doorstep as these days most people have to make do with the imported low grade variety …

Cod, Chips & Mushy Peas Pasty

Ever wished you could enjoy your Fish Supper in one convenient, portable, pastry-encased handful? Of course you have. Then rejoice for your days of yearning are over as we here at the Laboratoires Yumblog have developed the Cod, Chips & Mushy Peas Pasty. Now you can scoff the nations favourite health food whilst out and about and on the go, …

Honey cake (with extra honey)

I had a rare yen for something sweet the other day, so I commissioned my fellow blogger (the tart) ( …pie, cake and dessert specialist) to make a honey cake. After the initial face-to-face where we defined objectives, budgets, timelines and composed the all important mission statement*, we set about building the team who would take the project forward. As …

Pan Con Patatas

Forget the mapping of the human genome, the discovery of the Higgs Boson God particle, or the invention of L’Oreal’s age defying Boswelox™, I think we here at Laboratoires Yumblog can humbly announce we have made the single greatest scientific breakthrough since our prehistoric ancestors rubbed two dinosaurs together and conjured up fire. Like many of humanity’s greatest achievements it …

Garlic bread

Ok, here’s a plan…the next time you make pizza dough (what do you mean you don’t make your own pizza dough?) make double/quadruple/sextuple quantities, portion them out and freeze the surplus for future generations. That way, whenever you fancy something a tad tastier than can be supplied by your local Dominoes, you’ll have a pizza instantly on hand (assuming of …

The perfect sourdough

For some time it has been our mission here at the Castle Yumblog to create the perfect sourdough loaf – a subtle alchemy of simple and ancient ingredients – flour – water – salt – animated into being by wild airborne yeasts, and sculpted into final form by that most primitive of the elemental forces, fire (gas mark 9). A …

Basic tomato sauce

Disaster struck us here at Yumblog Mansions when heavy rain caused the moat to burst its banks and overflow into some of the outer buildings. Fortunately the water damage to the Orangery, Keeper’s Lodge and gift shop was only superficial, however the wine cellars were completely deluged and much of our renowned collection was lost to the world, including tragically, …

Raisin water starter

A sourdough starter is similar in many ways* to the tortoise – with love, care and regular meals it can last a lifetime and give many hours of contemplative pleasure. On the other hand, with indifference, neglect and irregular feeding, like Freda from Blue Peter, it’s prone to die a slow, silent and lonely death. Regrettably, shamefully, but not entirely …

Fish stock

What’s that? Your house doesn’t smell fishy enough? You like the idea of being greeted by a fishy waft every time you walk in the front door – no matter how much Glade ‘After the Rain’ you have sprayed about? Then why not make your own fish stock? And here’s how …

Lemon barley water

You have probably read in the financial pages that Yumblog Inc. has once again upped sticks and relocated its corporate HQ a few miles up (or is it down … or along?) the road to Hebden Bridge (pop 4,500 + 3). This was no reflection on our old location of Todmorden (pop 15,000 – 3), which is a charming and …

Cheesy Rolls

Perhaps with the exception of the odd East End boozer and the ready availability of Waitrose, there are not many things to miss about no longer being in that there London. However, living as we do in the heartland of Greggs, we have yet to find any bakers which sell a decent loaf – some have made wild and reckless …

Tri-citrus marmalade

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 …

Happy Easter from Yumblog

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 …

Clams with garlic & nut picada

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 …

Pulpo a la gallega

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 …

Rhubarb upside-down cake

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 …

ChocChip™ Cookies

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 …

Dave’s Mam’s killer fishcakes (with cheese sauce)

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. …

Seed & grain white bread

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 …

Tartiflette* with Brie

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 …

Gravalax the 2nd way – Ginger spiced

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 …