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 …
Porcini are very much in vogue here at Yumblog Towers. Along with late Sunday roasts. And baked potatoes with cheese and beans and coleslaw. And spending Saturday morning watching 5Live on the red button. And Sophie the teething giraffe. And Friday night beer and pizza after swimming. Lots of things in fact. But not duck eggs. Or Paul Rankin’s Potato …
The last six months have seen many changes here at Yumblog Towers. Saturday nights are no longer a time of cage fighting (for her) or pole dancing (for him) but instead spent indoors looking after our increasingly fidgety but exponentially lovely offspring. Although compensation is not necessary, we do like to remunerate our parental devotion with a slap-up Saturday evening …
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 to run around the kitchen …
Soups are always tricky to photograph and mushroom soup, being the colour and consistency of weetabix-based gruel is particularly unphotogenic. So by way of a diversion, here is an ant’s-eye view of a random mushroom (or toadstool) which may (or may not) be delicious (or lethal).
As the financial markets imploded and governments around the world desperately threw good money after bad, we were at a market in the South of France spending (accidentally) €6.65 on a single mushroom. At the time of writing that’s about a fiver. A fiver for one bleeding mushroom. It had better be good.
