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.
Cheesy Lemons with Basil Oil
Starter
Potted Mackerel
Take one Guardian Weekend magazine and one quandary about what to feed Archaeologist T. Realise that multiple small dishes that can be dipped into at a fixed pace are just the thing. Go to the market and buy fish. The market being a fish stall on Roman Road just round the corner, these fish were Mega Mackerel having been fished …
Potted Cheese
As with the mackerel, so with the cheese. It was in the same Fearnley-Whittingstall spread* as the potted mackerel and required cheese, butter and a splash of vin rouge or some vine-based glug, thereby having all the markings of a winner about it. The man himself suggested you play with the recipe and use whichever combo of cheeses takes your …
Review: Abel & Cole Gorgonzola Dolce (Roasted Tomato and Gorgonzola Tarts with Balsamic Vinegar Caramel)
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 …
Savoury Rhubarb Soup
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’ …
Roasted Vegetable Terrine
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, …
Cucumber Soup No.2 with Wasabi Pea Relish
As you might have guessed, I got a job lot of cucumbers from the market – three eye-wateringly large shafts of Cucumis Sativus for a credit crunching quid. Unlike the previous version, this soup is entirely prepared in the blender and requires no cooking – just a blender. Preparation time: 15 minutes plus chilling time Cooking time: 15 minutes Skill …
Cucumber Soup No.1
Funny how you wake up one morning and decide that the thing you want to do most in the world (ever) is to make cucumber soup. Maybe it’s a form of neurosis that all food bloggers share and perhaps writing these blogs is a therapeutic, legal and relatively harmless outlet for our collective obsession. Who knows. Who cares. Just had …
Griddled Spring Onions with Harissa
Here’s a simple spicy little snack/starter from Gregg ‘beefy beefy mushrooms’ Wallace. Preparation time: 5 minutes Cooking time: 5 minutes Skill level: easy Serves: 2 Recipe: Gregg (bbm) Wallace Ingredients spring onions – 20 harissa paste – 4 tbsp olive oil lemon – wedge to serve rock salt Trim and wash the spring onions and place in a bowl of …
Lemon Dhal Soup
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 …
Cauliflower & Cheddar Soup
… or cauliflower cheese in liquid form. A perfect winter warmer for the snowiest (and therefore the most exciting) day in 18 years. Preparation time: 10 minutes Cooking time: 40 minutes Skill level: easy Serves: 2 – 4 Ingredients 1 cauliflower – approx 550 g 1 medium onion – chopped 2 celery sticks – chopped 1 large leek – chopped …
Onion Soup
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 …
Honeyed Tomato Soup
Phwaaar! Great flavour combinations. You’ve got the sweetness of the tomatoes, then an explosion of fragrant basil, finishing with the floral kiss of honey. Yes, MASTERCHEF!! has returned to our screens. Actually this is a delicious and unusual dish. If you can only summon the enthusiasm to cook one thing this year, make sure it is this soup. Preparation time: …
Potato and Oatmeal Soup
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 )
Borsch
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 …
Minestrone Soup
As 10 CC once said: “Life is a minestrone wrapped up in Parma ham/cheese. Death is an old D’Artagnan, suspenders in deep freeze”. Or something like that. Preparation time: 25 minutes Cooking time: 1 hour Skill level: easy Ingredients 1 onion – finely chopped 2 medium waxy potatoes – peeled and diced 2 carrots – finely diced 2 courgettes – …
Parmesan Custards with Anchovy Toasts
Blogger-D was lucky enough to have a free work jolly to Le Café Anglais last Christmas and said the food was some of the best she’d ever tasted. Blogger-R unfortunately has yet to be offered such a generous perk and so has had to content himself with making this – Rowley Leigh’s ‘signature’ dish of parmesan custard with anchovy toasts. …
Garlic Soup with Harissa
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.
Almond & Grape Gazpacho
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. Preparation time: 15 minutes plus a few hours for chilling (the soup) Cooking time: 10 minutes Skill level: Easy Serves: 4 starters, 2 mains Ingredients 2 1/2 cucumbers – cut into 1″ dice – …
Avocado Gazpacho
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 until now have never tried …
Radish & Apple Salad
The yumblog balcony cottage garden celebrated its first harvest this week – a dozen juicy, crunchy, peppery radishes. There’s a little-known double-barrelled bloke called Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall who has a similar, albeit more modest operation to ours, so we thought we’d give him a little free publicity and try out one of his recipes.
Gazpacho
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. Preparation time: 10 minutes Cooking time: none (although you’ll need to allow a few hours for chilling) Skill level: Easy Serves: 2 main …
Stinging Nettle Soup
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 Road, wild garlic is a …
Seared Squid with Roasted Pepper Sauce
There were scenes of mild peril when I got my squid tubes home and discovered they were not, as I had assumed, empty, but in fact contained tentacles and all sorts of other body parts. Blogger-D had to step in and perform some deft and discrete fishmongery to remove the offending bits of cephalopod. Pathetic I know. Preparation time: 20 …
Chilli Prawns with Aioli
The weekend started with a nostalgic ‘The Only Ones‘ gig at Koko, and ended with a boozy tapas extravaganza of which this was the main attraction. Between the two the sun shone on Bethnal Green, a traveler returned and Thunderbirds Were Go. Preparation time: 10 minutes Cooking time: 5 minutes Skill level: Easy/Medium Ingredients For the aioli 2 egg yolks …
Asparagus Soup
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 natural with a sprinkling of …
Courgette & Feta Cakes with a Dill Yoghurt Sauce
WARNING: In order to prepare this dish you’ll have to master the subtle art of crumbling feta cheese. But don’t worry, if you find this daunting and would like guidance, there is a website to help you. If you need help with grating the courgette or holding a spoon then I’m afraid you’re on your own.
Cauliflower Soup with Red Pepper Ginger Sauce
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.
Parsley Soup
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), but it doesn’t seem to …
Pimientos de Padron
I love these little beasties. Fried and salted and accompanied by a cold tube of Cruzcampo. Tradition and statistics dictate that 29 out of 30 are mild and sweet with the remaining rogue being hot and fiery. I’ve never seen them sold in this country before but have recently discovered them tucked away on a stall in Borough Market.
Spicy Lentil & Coconut Soup
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. Preparation time: 5 minutes Cooking time: 30 minutes Skill level: Easy Serves: 4 Ingredients red lentils – 300g 1 onion – chopped vegetable stock – 1 litre chopped …
Tuna & Tomato Empanadillas
I had the yen to make some Cornish pasties, but not having all the necessary ingredients and not wanting to brave the ugly madness that is Bethnal Green on a Saturday afternoon to get them, I made these instead.
Sushi – Maki-Zushi
Find a Yo! Sushi…walk through door…sit down…grab nearest thing on conveyor belt…shove in mouth – what could be quicker? Certainly not making your own. However…
Minted Pea & Lettuce Soup
Happy New Year. It’s 2008 and it looks like the year ahead is going to be shit.
Celeriac & Chestnut Soup
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 the bin” A melancholic celeriac …
Spicy Lentil Soup
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 to this recipe.
Butternut Squash ravioli with Sage Butter
The butternut squash is the king of all the squashes, and right now it is squash season. So if you are feeling adventurous, have an afternoon to spare, and want to try something tasty then give this recipe a go.
Stilton and Cider Soup with Goat’s Cheese Toasts
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.
Garlic Soup
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.
Carrot Soup with Ginger & Honey
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.