Vegetarian Recipes

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Hello again dear reader and sorry for the brief interruption in transmission but the logistics of relocating the entire Yumblog Corporate Empire Inc. from fashionable East London to its new HQ in the even more fashionable outskirts of Media City, plus the switch over from analogue to digital (can you see the difference in quality?), [...]

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Trawling through the dusty archives in the Fanny Craddock Wing of the Great Library here at Yumblog Towers, it seems that in all our years as honoured custodians of this esteemed and venerable blog, we have never written up a recipe for pizza. A possible explanation for this (should your legal department require one) is [...]

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Watching Michel Roux eulogising the virtues of hand-crafted bread on the ‘Great British Food Revival‘ reminded me that shamefully I hadn’t baked a loaf for several weeks. Thus suitably laden with middle-class guilt I put on a pinny, grabbed a jar of Mathos Organic Polygonum Honey (dark, strong and liquorice-ee) and made this simple white [...]

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Fellow bloggers… is it a crime to recycle an old post?

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It’s ok, put the dogs back in their kennels, tether the steed, the search is over, we’ve found it. The perfect white bread f’toasting is here and even better hardly any kneading is needed. Brilliant.

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This recipe was the result of a pioneering scientific experiment to recreate something similar to Dr. Karg Crispbreads which, despite their medical honorific and Teutonic wholemeal worthiness are surprisingly tasty and addictive – especially if topped with a wedge of Extra Mature and a dollop of Branston. And so to the experiment…not being experts in this [...]

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Hmm, onions, hmm, bread, hmm, onion bread, hmm, onion bread in individual portions, hmm, lovely lunch.

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It’s finals week and MasterChef has entered the wacky ‘It’s a Knock Out’ stage. The three finalists are being set some fairly arbitrary ‘tough’ tasks such as last night when they were shipped out to Jodhpur in order to cook for some royal toffs in 120 degrees of heat. No doubt tonight they’ll be forced [...]

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What to do on Easter Sunday when you’ve already filled the cupboards with tasties but there is a sweet tea-time shaped hole in the kitchen – it’s actually a hatch, but I saw Doctor Who and I know all about holes and cracks in walls and time/space continua and giant eyes. So anyway, hot cross [...]

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Well I suppose that’s the surprise spoilt already.

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This is a recipe from the Hairy Bakers/Bikers. It’s meant to contain brown ale but we didn’t have any so instead I used an alcohol-free driving Cobra which was gathering dust in the fridge. Let’s be honest, it was never going to get drunk.

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‘Eating lots of white bread raises the risk of a cancer that kills thousands of Britons every year … those who eat five slices a day are almost twice as likely to develop the most common form of kidney cancer compared to those who have one and a half slices.’… or so says that putrid [...]

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It’s all very well making a tasty loaf of brown bread for your toast and sandwiches, but sometimes bread has to be a bit different. Sometimes it has to be made out of mashed potato. Think bread. Think potato. Think Walkers new Onion Bhaji flavoured crisps, between brown bread. You are of course nowhere near [...]

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Another recipe purloined from Dan ‘Pour some sugar on me’ Lepard, which was in turn of other provenance, but such is cooking, dishes are passed from one to another and in doing so they evolve. Talking of Darwin, he was 200 the other day you know and Google honoured this on their homepage. I wonder [...]

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This Saturday I had the urge to spend all day in the kitchen and there is no better way of achieving this than embarking on one of Dan Lepard‘s more involved and elaborate recipes. This loaf takes the best part of a day to create and requires the making of two separate doughs – one [...]

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Here we have another superb and satisfyingly time-consuming recipe from Dan Lepard. This one caught my eye because two of the ingredients are cream and golden syrup.

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Always on the look out for novelty bread flours, I came across a packet of Doves Farm organic Barleycorn in Way’ro. It’s a mixture of wheat and barley flours, malted barley flakes and linseed. Apparently this loaf was one of two things named in honour of Prince Albert.

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I had to give this one a try, if only because it contains treacle, soggy Ryvita and onion. What’s more, it takes a whole weekend to make.

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After the sourdough fiasco I felt the need to purge the memory by baking something successfully. This is a handy recipe as it uses only store cupboard essentials: flour, salt, yeast, honey and lager.

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Ok, so we now have our sourdough starter sitting ominously in a jar at the back of the fridge gently seeping brown water. Time to make some bread. For a recipe I turn to the Observer Organic Allotment Blog and follow their elaborate and long-winded instructions to the letter.

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If you believe the hype (well in my narrow Guardian reading world anyway) everyone in credit crunch UK is now an artisan baker spending their precious downtime in the kitchen fashioning crusty bloomers and squeezing out granary torpedoes. Generally (and childishly) if I find myself on a bandwagon I have the irrestable urge to jump [...]

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On Saturday we went to a rain-drenched Oxford and had lunch at the highly recommended Branca Restaurant. Before tucking into fried calamari with lemon and chilli dressing followed by a big fat skate wing with scallops and mash, I soaked up the house red by nibbling away at some fine rosemary focaccia. So fine in [...]

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What could herald the arrival of summer more than a big bowl of cold soup. Wasps perhaps. Or possibly sharing the big bowl of cold soup with a wasp. A wasp in shorts. Anyway, if you’ve bothered to read the posts below, you’ll know I am intimately familiar with the red, tomato-based gazpacho, however, up [...]

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Regrettably, and I feel unreasonably, Tower Hamlets Council won’t let us keep sheep on the balcony so making our own feta cheese is out of the question. We do however have a healthy and ever-expanding mint plant and so at least were able to locally source half the ingredients in the title.

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Summer reluctantly and briefly visited the UK this weekend, and so as a gesture of thanks to the mighty sun god Ra we held up this delicious offering – the first gazpacho of the cold soup season.

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I knocked up these whimsical little critters one Sunday morning partly because I was in the market for a bread product less brown and worthy than the usual, and partly because it was an effective way of delaying various foreboding DIY chores. Four of the five fancy shapes are illustrated below. The fifth, a curly [...]

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Now it seems it’s no longer middle class enough to simply bake your own bread. To be a fully paid-up member of the bourgeoisie takes more time. We have to allow our dough to slowly ferment overnight to encourage friendly bacteria which will protect our delicate constitutions from bloated, irritable bowels and leaky gut-type conditions. [...]

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According to Babel Fish couronne is French for crown, and according to the title this loaf is meant to be couronne-shaped. But it was snowing, I got over excited, couldn’t concentrate, and failed to read the recipe properly. As a result I missed out one small, but essential, step and by way of punishment the [...]

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I’ll tell you what bugs me, people who travel to work in the morning drinking their tea/coffee from those aluminium thermos mugs. They’re designed for camping in the woods, not commuting from Forest Hill. Are we supposed to look on enviously and wonder at the cool, impulsive, incandescent lives led by these urbane creatures? Probably. [...]

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If you came here in search of an American-style muffin to accompany your tall caramel macchiato, then you’ll be disappointed. They’re not muffins, they’re cakes. If however you are in search of an English muffin which is light and yeasty and perfect for toasting and smothering in butter, then you’re in luck. A word of [...]

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As well as being very tasty, Soda Bread is also great when you need a loaf in a hurry or can’t be arsed with all that kneading and proving. Unfortunately on such occasions you’re unlikely to have soured cream (a major ingredient) and a desperate trip to your local urban Costcutter is guaranteed to prove [...]

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Searching through my book of breads I came upon black bread. It brought back fond memories of the rush to join the throng following the bread van as it arrived with fresh warm supplies, back in the pre-Lukashenko Minsk of 1993. And then I had to get rye flour which meant another trip to Holland [...]

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A lunchtime trip to Holland and Barrett for sundry dried fruits and seeds meant there were now things to put in things for extra flavour/texture/goodness – I believe the term is ‘value added’. And so to my value added loaf. Not merely a humble malthouse loaf but one now boasting bonus tasties such as pumpkin [...]

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Another recipe from the much used ‘The Bread Book’ by Sara Lewis. This time I turned towards the back where the more fancy bread-based products can be found. Essentially this is a loaf which can magically be torn into individual rolls. We live in exciting times.

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Ah, the weekend of baking. It was the day before my first day at work for over two weeks. We’d sworn off booze for three weeks (soon to be somewhat foreshortened to one week) and the weather was its usual dull hue so the only thing for it was to cook like fiends. The dinner [...]

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It seemed like everywhere you turned there was someone eulogising about the magnificence of spelt. They featured a farmer who had gone back to growing the stuff and was now coining it due to some middle-class fad of using an ancient relative of modern wheat in their constant search for the secret to life itself. [...]

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Well I’d opened the packet of spelt flour you see and not wishing for it to sit in the cupboard forgetten and rapidly staling, the fate that had previously befallen the buckwheat flour, I sought out another recipe. And what do you know, my bread book (called The Bread Book, published by Hamlyn) had just [...]

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