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Recently a friend of Yumblog arrived breathless on our doorstep brandishing a bag of chickpea flour and gabbling lavish tales of a crepe-like dish prepared for her by a Frenchman with an impressive moustache. With some reluctance we let her in and once calmed with a Lager & Campari, set about making sense of her [...]

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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 [...]

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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.

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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 [...]

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Obviously the most productive thing you can do with an egg is lob it into the fat one-eyed face of <nazi cunt>Nick Griffin</nazi cunt>. However, if for some reason he isn’t goose-stepping through your neighbourhood you could do a lot worse than use it to make these delicious and comforting spaghetti fritters.

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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 [...]

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Who’d have thought you could pickle and eat watermelon rind?

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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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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.

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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 beast would be waiting.

Artist impession of how Pullum Frontoniaum may have [...]

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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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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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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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Poor old salsify. It seems to be either unknown, forgotten or unloved. Virtually unavailable in the shops, not a single search result for it on the usually flawless Waitrose cooking and recipe website, and salsify.com still available and up for grabs. All of which is a shame as it has to be one of the [...]

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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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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 [...]

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We found these amongst the impressive array of fancy potatoes at Waitrose. As you can see, the flesh is yellow with a markedly blue vascular ring and as with all [...]

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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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Another Tuesday, another veg box. But today was different. Having said no to parsnips – don’t get me wrong, I like a parsnip, but I don’t want them every week and I will get them every week without fail once they’re in season – I got black salsify. I’d only ever seen these earthy black [...]

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