welcome to yumblog.co.uk

Two days after the end of our holiday, British Airways very generously and efficiently returned our luggage. We celebrated with a bowl of Yotam Ottolenghi garlic soup. Britain’s favourite soup.

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We’ve gone cold soup crazy this month. This particular variety is based on the classic Ajo Blanco but with the cheeky addition of cucumber and watercress.

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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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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’ve always liked the idea of free food, and cooking a meal with ingredients foraged from nature’s bountiful larder holds a romantic and atavistic appeal. Sadly Bethnal Green doesn’t offer many opportunities for living off the land. You’ll struggle to find a morel growing among the KFC cartons and general crap along the Mile End […]

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What to do with a squash, that eternal question. Should I bake it, fry it, foam it, render it into a mere suggestion as accompaniment to something less orange, or should I take the soup route. Like the silk road but gloopier, the soup route will inevitably involve stock, garlic and onions, the very essence […]

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There were mixed feelings about this recipe at yumblog cottage. One of us had never had Jerusalem artichokes before and so was keen to give them a try, while the other was force-fed them as a child and is still suffering from flashbacks. However, as with most things in life, novelty won out over experience […]

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The British asparagus season starts on 30th April and ends just eight short weeks later on 25th June, midnight - roughly. Fortunately it must be in season somewhere else in the world at the moment as the shops are awash with the stuff at £1.50 a bunch. Generally I prefer it as nature intended, au […]

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Cauliflowers are very much in at the moment. Plus, like snow flakes, crystals, mountain ranges, lightning, river networks, pulmonary vessels and broccoli, they are a fine example of fractal geometry in nature. So when you’re cooking this remember to keep in mind D = Log N(L) divided by the log of 1 over L. Enjoy.

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My fellow blogger recently bought me ‘Roast Chicken and Other Stories’ by Simon Hopkinson. Voted the ‘most useful cookbook of all time’ by somebody or other, it’s a superb book which is not only packed with inspirational recipes, but also makes excellent bedtime reading. It doesn’t have any photographs (usually a prerequisite for any cookbook), […]

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A naked Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on the cover and a long and unnecessary interview with David ‘Call me Dave’ Cameron on the inside. This month’s Observer Food Monthly had one cock too many.

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Happy New Year. It’s 2008 and it looks like the year ahead is going to be shit.

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‘Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us. In the simplest terms. […]

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This one goes out to VJ ‘Mr Prudence‘ - anarchist, transphormetic blogger, psychic geographer, algorithmic obsessive and occasional ActionScript guru. The other day he confessed he was in possession of a celeriac and asked what he could possibly do with it. I’m afraid my advice was a dismissive “either mash it or chuck it in […]

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And then there was this other time when we had a cabbage in the veg box. Observant readers might notice a pattern of veg box-related dinners, indeed dinners built round one vegetable have become a regular occurrence. Not a bad thing as it makes you seek out new ways with seemingly old/tired/well trod/uninspiring ingredients.

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Now there’s a thing. If you go to lentil.com you just get a crappy illustration of ‘Lenny the Lentil’ and an email link, lentil.co.uk doesn’t seem to have been registered, and lentil.org is the blog site of a senior network engineer called Robert Lister. I mention this only because I can’t think of an introduction […]

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If your local shop permits I advise a decent cider for this recipe - so put that White Lightning back on the park bench and try something tasty like this Henney’s Frome Valley Dry Cider.

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Flippin’ eck Tucker, one of the shops on the High Street is selling seven corn-on-the -cob for a pound and that is a bloomin’ bargain. Of course, sweetcorn is delicious eaten just as it comes, boiled or barbecued and simply accompanied with a knob of slowly melting butter, however tonight we decided upon this […]

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Try to get hold of large, plump garlic for this recipe. I always buy mine from market stalls which tend to sell bags of six for a quid. These are far superior to the over-priced, dry, miserable, mean-spirited, walnut-sized, dull 25 watt bulbs they sell in supermarkets.

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Being the middle-class ponces we are, it is only natural that we should take delivery of an Abel & Cole organic vegetable box once a week. Carrots have featured fairly heavily of late and as a result we have developed quite a backlog of the things.

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