Vegetarian Recipes

Consider the humble chickpea. Nutritious, ubiquitous, tasty, cheap, and as versatile as a 46-piece socket set. It can be stir-fried, casseroled, tagined, enstewed, devilled, saladated, hummouserised, soupified, and in this case, masalaed. If you’re contemplating doing something interesting with a tin of chickpeas this weekend, we here at Yumblog Villas urge you to give this […]

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By far the most prolific and rampant vegetable currently growing in the collective garden here at Yumblog Villas is the courgette. Some have become so pumped up they have started to hang around with the marrows. Two such swaggering beasts constituted the bulk of this refreshing, light yet substantial summer soup. I’ll suggest next year […]

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Blimey, looking at the date of the Fondue below, it would appear we haven’t written a post for a year and a half. I would be inclined to feel guilt were it not for the troubling matter of the past 18 months, during which you dear reader(s) seem to have become crazed and in our […]

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Ooh, the nights are drawing in. A pudding was required for esteemed guests and having banished thoughts of complex custards I alighted on the idea of feeding our friends something sweet and sticky instead, plums and apples away with you and your dull autumnal associations.

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Baked stuffed tomatoes from yumblog

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If, like us, you thought the tastiest way to deal with a beetroot was to borscht it, you’re in for a treat – this is possibly tastier. Better still, apart from the beetroot and a bit of cream, it can be constructed from what are commonly called ‘store cupboard staples‘.

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…or beetroot soup made with leaves. Not knowing whether beetroot leaves are a tasty and nutritious alternative to chard or a toxin filled time bomb of agonising death, I thought I’d better check their edibility before posting this recipe. Turns out they are perfectly benign and not dissimilar to the aforementioned chard.

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Hey meat-eaters! Invited a hapless vegetarian over to your barbecue? Why not forego the meat-free delights of (Sp)Asda and surprise them by serving up something which is actually tasty for once – fr’instance, this hearty succulent and colourful burger packed with thought-provoking flavours and textural anomalies!

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This is number seven in our occasional series ‘In search of the perfect pasta sauce’, and once again we have turned to our adopted Italian granny Marcella Hazan for inspiration. Thus far she’s rarely let us down.

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We have been doubly blessed since we moved here to sunny Brighton, for not only do we now have casual access to a Waitrose, but a mere 20 strides away on the opposite side of the street is the Taj grocer, a large independently owned store offering a cornucopia of (eastern) international ingredients the likes […]

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Want to start your weekend with a lime zest and a chilli zing? Then look no further than this curious and surprisingly delicious Mexican inspired egg-based brunch. Arriba! Arriba! Andale! Andale!

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Turning once again to the esteemed ‘Livre de Cuisine des Monsieurs Hommes’ in search of culinary inspiration, Yumblog Junior chanced upon this complex and controversial confection from disgraced chef de cuisine and one time enfant terrible, Monsieur Fouineur. Hounded by the tabloids and plagued by rumours of espionage and peeping tomfoolery, this once great pâtissier […]

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“Oh Pater, dearest…” exclaimed Yumblog Junior from her preferred leather winged Bergere situated in the Soft Play and Cigar Lounge of The Junior Carlton Club, “It says here in the esteemed ‘Livre de Cuisine des Monsieurs Hommes’ that Chef Marcel Muddle has created the most divine cornflake encrusted Petits Beurres which evidently are the talk […]

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There are only 3 shopping days left until Hallowe’en, so why not hot foot it down to your nearest pumpkinorium, grab yourself the largest Cucurbita pepo you can carry and drag it back to the kitchen table, there to prepare it not once, not twice, but thrice-wise as prescribed below – ensouped, seedled and carved. […]

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I’m always reluctant to write up a recipe for soup as it seems far too simple to warrant a post and possibly risks insulting your no doubt exemplary culinary skills dear reader(s). After all, your average soup is usually just a few veg zhuzhed up in olive oil or butter, simmered for 20 mins in […]

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As much as I love to cook, sometimes it’s a welcome treat to prepare a meal which requires little more effort than a nifty flip of the switch on the Magimix. Spaghetti with green tomatoes & herbs

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A monthly review of this site’s stats shows that in your endless and futile search for all that is novel and inconsequential, on average you lot spend only 11 fleeting and no doubt twitchy seconds reading Yumblog. For fuck’s sake, dear readers, you’re a capricious bunch … sometimes I wonder why we bother. …8, 9, […]

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Obviously when I first eyed a display of Romanesco at the local veg market I mused how the inflorescence had an approximate self-similar character, with the branched meristems making a logarithmic spiral and how it approximated a natural fractal with each bud composed of a series of smaller buds, all arranged in yet another logarithmic […]

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Despite your average British tomato being a Dutch grown, prematurely picked, under-ripe, woolly, anaemic, flavourless, blemish-free and over-chilled orb of disappointment, it’s still hard to get a genuine green tomato in this country… unless of course you live in Yorkshire and grow your own, in which case they’ll ALL be green from lack of sunlight. […]

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Matt the Cat loved this soup (once we’d given her a spoon). Spiced carrot soup with harissa

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It’s been a while since we’ve borsched a beetroot so when the Hebden Twins paid a brief visit the other morning and dropped off among other home-grown things, these handsome fellows, we knew exactly what to do with them. Borsch

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The (ish) is there because to be properly Deutsche this should of course contain in some part or many a piggy porcine element, and if our experience of eating out in Berlin is anything to go by, a solitary pineapple chunk. Well you know what potato salad looks like, and it doesn’t photograph pretty, so […]

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The day started with two itinerant cows and ended with a trip back in time to 1978. In between there was a misfuelling which led to three spontaneous guests for dinner. We served them pasta with this simple and deceptively delicious roasted pepper sauce. Roasted pepper pasta sauce

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…not to be confused with a Vinegaroon which is an ugly and menacing fucker you definitely wouldn’t want to share the dinner table with. If you are short of time AND have been lucky enough to get hold of some juicy ripe flavoursome tomatoes (i.e. you live outside the UK) you can skip the whole […]

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Like the yoghurt, this is our second posting for Labneh and also like the yoghurt this uses a simpler Valentine Warner-inspired process. Labneh – strained yoghurt

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It was way back in May 2009 when we first wrote a post on homemade yoghurt – that was 218 miles, 4 houses, 2 floods and one small child ago. I am ashamed to say the whole knit-your-own yoghurt thing was a short lived fad due no doubt to this early technique requiring thermometers, sterilised […]

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There are as many varieties of flat breads as there are varieties of Heinz products, or indeed bi-pedal humanoid aliens living amongst us – 57*. I can’t vouch for all of them, but this particular variant is tried, tested, easy to make, and very tasty. We laced ours with cumin although you could of course […]

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If you would like to keep a fidgety child amused for an hour AND at the end of it have something tasty to dunk in your tea, this could well be the recipe for you. If you don’t have a child of your own don’t worry, you could always rent one … we hire ours […]

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Sun turns to grey, grey turns to wet and wet heralds the first flood alert for, ooh days. Time to get nostalgic about those long balmy Yorkshire summer evenings sitting on the white-washed terraza under ancient gnarled trees, their branches heavy with succulent ripe Barm Cakes still warm from the day’s sun. It was on […]

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How about something unusual and tasty which requires the minimum amount of preparation and no cooking? You’d be a fool not to. Another recipe from the infallible Polpo Venetian cookbook. Chocolate salami

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Apologies (again) for the blogging hiatus. We can offer no excuses other than an extended trip outside the country, a redundancy, a three year old who has gone slightly bonkers and the usual plagues of locusts, frogs and boils. Here by way of compensation is a tasty morsel ideal for an extended al fresco (it […]

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We started writing yumblog because (like most food bloggers) we wanted to give you dear reader, the opportunity to press your greasy nose against the window of our perfect world and enviously look in slack-jawed and drooling at our incomprehensibly magnificent lives. Yumblog Cottage is a haven of sunlit space, children’s laughter, crisp white linen, […]

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Spinach, egg & parmesan pizza is like so yesterday. This is now our Friday evening pizza of choice.

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This could possibly be the last comforting soup of the season as summer has finally reached these parts and the Pennines are roasting under 40 degrees of searing Yorkshire sunshine. Evenings are now spent sitting in the dappled shade of Hebden Bridge olive groves, drinking ice-cold Albariño, and listening to the song of the cicadas […]

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As the snow fell on Yumblog Cottage thoughts turned to sledging and comfort food.

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As a rule I tend to avoid drinks with the suffix pis, but this sounded so intriguing I had to give it a try.

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Pleasant surprise permeated through the Yumblog household when the first viewing of ‘Paul Hollywood’s Bread’ turned out to be a relatively straightforward cookery programme. There was of course the now obligatory 5 minute introduction guaranteed to elicit shouts of “Get the fuck on with it” plus the adoption of Jamie Oliver’s technique of looking just […]

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Sometimes I wonder why we bother. We try our best to make this blog an edifying and sophisticated experience, but a glance at our site stats shows that the top three search queries which brought you here today were ‘Soft porn’, ‘Chicken pox’ and ‘Dairylea Lunchables’. You’re a weird and mucky bunch. Incidentally, anyone browsing […]

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This recipe does require the use of a pasta maker so you’ll need to have a rummage around in your cupboard of only-used-once things. There it is next to the Ken Hom wok set … to the left of the Jamie Oliver Flava Shaker … and behind everything you ever bought from the Lakeland catalogue.

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Look, everyone I have an iPad Mini. In fact as I write this I’m on the morming commute steaming through the Calder Valley aboard the Northern Rail Executive Express. For those of you not in the know, the Northern Rail Executive Express is a sleek luxuriously upholstered silver bullet from the future which flashes silently […]

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