Recently BluSky Innoventions™ the ‘Pseudo-Science, Holistic Wellness, Quantum Synergy & Bio-Weapons Division’ of Yumblog Holdings Plc was given an obscenely large EU grant to investigate whether it is necessary to cook pasta traditionally in a large volume of boiling water, or whether it could be prepared ‘risotto’ style in the merest covering of liquid. Our groundbreaking and highly controversial findings …
Kale, Cheese & Bread Soup For what is essentially a soggy cheese and cabbage sandwich, this is very, very tasty. Preparation time: 15 minutes Cooking time: 15 – 45 minutes Skill level: easy Makes: It fed three of us. Ingredients kale (or dark green cabbage) – shredded – enough for 3 people good quality stale bread (no Mothers Pride) – …
‘Remember to take a photograph before you have eat it … otherwise you’ll have to resort to using AI to cobbling together a clumsy visual metaphor’ What better way to round off a sunday in which not only have you built the worlds most magnificent shelving ‘solution’ from scratch (and wood) but also found the time to watch a (double) …
The recent purchase of a £25 bargain pasta maker* has led to a spate of fresh pasta making here at Yumblog Towers. Whether this enthusiasm lasts or whether this gadget ends up in the back of the cupboard along with the onion goggles, Waring Professional Martini Maker, OXO Good Grips® Strawberry Huller, Cuisinart® Soup Maker, some nonsense called a ‘Stirr’, …
A rare meaty yumblog recipe here, although this is still a tasty dish even if the pig element is left out. Preparation time: 5 minutes Cooking time: 15 – 25 minutes Skill level: easy Serves: 2 Recipe: Wa’ro website Ingredients frozen chestnuts – 200g (or 500g of fresh chestnuts) 1 unwaxed lemon sage leaves – a dozen or so 1 …
I found this Lemony Cheese delight in a back issue of the excellent Donna Hay magazine – the eponymous title from food editor, best-selling cookery writer, and from what I can gather, Queen of Australia.
Our new chums at Abel & Cole have been sending us more delicious treats to cook, scoff and review. This week our stash included organic Scottish Salmon which if you follow that link you will find out live in remote and spacious cages off the coast of the Orkneys. It goes on to report that our fish had been coerced …
Why not splash out and spend three and a half euros on a fancy tin of tuna? Was it only a week ago that the yumbloggers were sitting in 35ºC of Madrid heat on the terraza outside the Café Delic eating lunch and drinking chilled glasses of refreshing Mahou Classic? (Stop it, you’re beginning to sound like a middle class …
If you follow the link you’ll discover this young Gorgonzola came to us from Sardinia via Acton. Roasted Tomato and Gorgonzola Tarts with Balsamic Vinegar Caramel Preparation time: 10 minutes plus 3 hours drying Cooking time: 35 minutes Skill level: easy Serves: 4 as a starter or 2 as a main Recipe: Way’ro website Ingredients 8 plum tomatoes – halved …
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 …
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, …
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’ …
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. Preparation time: 10 minutes Cooking time: 20 – 25 minutes Skill level: easy Serves: 2 Recipe: Wa’ro Magazine …
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 …
This layered jellified curiosity comes from Gregg (Beefy beefy mushrooms) Wallace’s book ‘VEG!!!‘. The exclamation marks are mine of course. Preparation time: 15 – 25 minutes plus chilling time Cooking time: 30 – 45 minutes Skill level: easy/medium Serves: 6 – 8 (or 2 people over several days) Ingredients For the Terrine 1 aubergine 2 courgettes 3 peppers – red, …
Preparation time: 20-30 minutes plus 20 minutes proving Cooking time: 60 minutes Skill level: medium Ingredients For the bread dough crust strong white flour – 450g fast action yeast – 1¼ tsp salt – 1½ tsp runny honey – 2 tbsp olive oil – 60 ml warm water – 260 ml 1 egg – beaten For the filling 1 courgette …
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 …
‘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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
“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”* Preparation time: 10-15 minutes Cooking time: 15-20 minutes Skill level: medium Serves: 2 Ingredients 6 medium squid tubes – 400/500g cooked prawns – 300g bread crumbs – 60g 1 free-range …
I came across this recipe in Saturday’s Telegraph magazine (not mine you understand). I was drawn to it because not only does it include a novelty pasta* and three favoured salty ingredients (anchovies, olives and capers) but it also bizarrely contains a smattering of raisins. Would this be (as Gregg and John often say) one ingredient too many? Would it …
A double hit of carbs here – like a chip butty – only posher – innit. Preparation time: 10 minutesCooking time: 20 minutes Skill level: easy Serves: 2 Recipe: Simon Hopkinson IngredientsFor the pesto the leaves from a small bunch of basil 1 clove of garlic – crushed olive oil – 50-75 ml pine kernels – lightly toasted in a …
This was something a little bit special for Valentine’s Day courtesy of Rick Stein. Preparation time: 15 minutes Cooking time: 20-30 minutes Skill level: medium Recipe: Rick Stein Serves: 4 Ingredients For the salmon thick salmon fillet – 750g sunflower oil salt and pepper For the sauce unsalted butter – 25g small shallot – finely chopped champaign – 120ml plus …
Eagle-eyed UK readers of a certain age will no doubt have shed a nostalgic tear at the sight of the Timothy Whites Thermos flask lurking beneath the foliage. It’s MasterChef final week, yeah. Such a shame that the nice Greek guy was dumped last Thursday as he was our favourite, we actively liked him. Now it’s down to the young …
Few words when paired together drain the soul of joy quite as much as the foreboding coupling of nut + roast. Obviously there’s the odious David + Cameron or the thoroughly depressing Cold + Play, but these are both far too loathsome to be mentioned in this little corner of the blogosphere. Nut Roast conjures up the image of a …
Yumblog is now being swamped with spam. So to all those spammers trying to flog us Arcoxia, Atarax, Augmentin, Buspirone, Cardizem, Celebrex and a whole alphabet of other ‘meds’ – fuck off. To the spammers who think we’re so dull-witted we’d publish their comments because they write a generic ‘I completely agree’ – fuck off. To the spammers who have …
I came across this Mitch Tonks recipe on the excellent BBC ‘Get Cooking‘ website. If this dish is anything to go by, fishermen eat exceedingly well. Preparation time: 30 minutes Cooking time: 30 minutes Skill level: easy Serves: 2 mains Ingredients For the aioli 2 cloves of garlic – crushed dijon mustard – ½ tsp 1 free-range egg (yolk only) …
This recipe is for my dad who misses the rostis my mum used to make but has so far been unsuccessful in his attempts to recreate them. There are many ways to rosti a potato – purists would have you boil them first and leave to rest overnight before peeling and grating; others would urge you to add egg or …
OK, so it looks as if this particular fish had its fingers variously crushed in a freak piscine industrial accident, but they are tasty nevertheless. Tastier than Cap’n Birdseye’s even. Preparation time: 10 minutes Cooking time: 10 minutes Skill level: easy Ingredients skinless bass fillets (or other firm white fish) 1 egg – beaten plain flour bread crumbs olive oil …
Following a traditional Christmas in Suffolk (Turkey or Quorn roast with all the trimmings, a disappointing episode of Doctor Who and Israel bombing Palestine, etc) we had a second, less traditional Christmas dinner a few days later in Berlin (Some photos here). This lettuce-wrapped bass was the main attraction, served alongside an indulgent Gratin Dauphinois and a flourish of buttered …
A delicate piece of cod smothered with cream and cheddar and then baked along with avocado – now this is a retro dish the great and terrifying Fanny would be proud of. Preparation time: 5 minutes Cooking time: 15-20 minutes Skill level: easy Recipe: Guardian/Observer Ingredients 2 skinless cod fillets double cream – 140ml mature cheddar – 150g 2 ripe …
Traditionally this dish was a way of using cheaper cuts of meat and worthy root vegetables and was kept topped up and bubbling away over an open fire indefinitely. This is a gentrified version using a recipe from the archetypal gentleman himself, Gordon (Cheat ‘n’ two veg) Ramsay. Preparation time: 10 minutes Cooking time: 40 minutes Skill level: easy Recipe: …
What could be more comforting and warming than soup? Porridge perhaps. So why not combine the two and make this silky smooth winter treat. (Remember to take a photograph before you eat all the soup )
It’s a Hallowe’en tradition at Yumblog Cottage to celebrate the 31st October with this pumpkin fondue devised by the mighty GREGG WALLACE! himself. I say tradition, we made it for the first time last year, however, it is so tasty I am sure we’ll tucking into it again in 2009* Preparation time: 10 minutes Cooking time: 1.5-2 hours Skill level: …
The clocks went back this weekend and suddenly it was winter. Time to lay down some much needed winter fat* to sustain us through the long chill months ahead, and what better way then eating refined carbohydrate swimming in cheese and cream. Preparation time: 10-15 minutes Cooking time: 10-15 minutes Skill level: easy Ingredients cicatelli (or some other good pasta) …
Artist impession of how Pullum Frontoniaum may have possibly definitely looked in the olden Roman times. And so to the cooking of the chicken in the name research for Archaeologist T. That rainy weekend we hastened to Cirencester and having paused briefly at a local butcher selling free range chicken, we hurried on to Waitrose where we knew an organic …
A family gathering in Suffolk this weekend meant I was able to plunder my sister’s vegetable patch and return home with a binbags worth of wonderful homegrown produce. Along with a variety of beans, carrots and onions, my swag consisted of several kilos of beetroot as big as your face. The obvious thing to do was to make a bucket …
A Squid (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) is a very sensitive magnetometer used to measure extremely small magnetic fields and is based on a superconducting loop containing Josephson junctions. Less well known, it is also a tasty fishy treat which it turns out, goes very well with lentils. “If animal trapped call 410-844-6286” — Baltimore, traditional.
