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This weekend’s planned camping trip to Whitstable had to be cancelled because of the shitty and weirdly biblical weather we are having this summer. So I found myself on a Sunday afternoon at the beginning of August wanting nothing more than to curl up on the sofa in a dressing gown and eat comforting wintery […]

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Despite a mouthful of fillings, I don’t really have a sweet tooth and so tend not to delve into the sugary world of desserts, afters and puds. However, we had a friend over for a boozy Sunday lunch and this Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall-Clafoutis-Recipe had caught my eye in the Guardian the day before.

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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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I’m struggling to think of anything interesting to write in this intro, so why not give this falafel based game a play instead. Alternatively, learn DotNetNuke module development from Falalel Software - the experts who brought you ’some of the best sellers DNN modules worldwide’. They look like a friendly bunch.

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I came across this Loyd Grossman recipe whilst driving my decrepit G4 along the Information Super Highway. Obviously Mr Grossman recommends we use one of his jars of special authentic Italian-style tomato pasta sauces, but (equally obviously) if you’re taking the time and trouble to cook a meal from scratch, what’s the point?

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Another recipe from the mighty Yotam Ottolenghi. Perfect for an anniversary meal. x

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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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This recipe involved the dazzling debut of our latest item of kitchen equipment - a Black Iron Omelette Pan bought for the bargain price of £7.60. It came from Dentons Catering Equipment Ltd - a magnificent shop crammed with professional quality cooking gear and definitely worth a pilgrimage - providing you can tolerate the multitude […]

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There’s nothing finer than getting up at 05:00 on a Sunday morning, amassing on Clapham Common with 27,000 other Lycra-clad humans, and pedalling off on a six-hour ride to Brighton. To help us reach our destination we packed the traditional sausage and Branston sandwiches, a bunch of bananas, 2 gallons of Lucozade and, for the […]

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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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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.

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Regrettably, and I feel unreasonably, Tower Hamlets Council won’t let us keep sheep on the balcony so making our own feta cheese is out of the question. We do however have a healthy and ever-expanding mint plant and so at least were able to locally source half the ingredients in the title.

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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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… or at least it would have been if I’d had any molasses sugar. However there was something similarly brown and sweet at the back of cupboard and this seemed to work just as well.

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I knocked up these whimsical little critters one Sunday morning partly because I was in the market for a bread product less brown and worthy than the usual, and partly because it was an effective way of delaying various foreboding DIY chores. Four of the five fancy shapes are illustrated below. The fifth, a curly […]

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This is traditionally a humble peasant dish designed to use up stale bread and lovelorn broken bits of pasta and was ironically published in the current edition of Waitrose Food Magazine. Considering the imminent global economic melt down it is of course prescient as we’ll all be peasants soon … or at least those who […]

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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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Somewhere round the end of March I saw my friend Hazel for the first time in nearly three years. She married an Australian chap back in 05 and opted for a warm climate and good standard of living over London - crazy but true. Anyway we had lunch and talked about food and then she […]

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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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I can see every red-blooded carnivore spitting derision at the idea of a tofu ’steak’, and to be honest when I came across this recipe in the excellent ‘Harumi’s Japanese Cooking’ I was dubious myself. OK, so this isn’t a real steak such as you’d get in a Harvester “Have you used a knife and […]

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It was in the Guardian magazine and looked tasty and wholesome which is just the thing when you wake up on Saturday morning feeling less than complete and utterly narked by the complete idiocy of the London electorate in voting for an upper class Tory idiot cos he made them laugh on the telly and […]

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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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The front page of Ken Livingstone’s campaign website is frozen in pre-election time with the simple message ‘Don’t vote for a joke. Vote for London’. Shamefully, it seems Londoners (or at least the 45% who could be bothered to get off their arses to vote) fancied a bit of a laugh. Anyway, this depressing result […]

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Now it seems it’s no longer middle class enough to simply bake your own bread. To be a fully paid-up member of the bourgeoisie takes more time. We have to allow our dough to slowly ferment overnight to encourage friendly bacteria which will protect our delicate constitutions from bloated, irritable bowels and leaky gut-type conditions. […]

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Regrettably the dodgy photograph below does not do this recipe any justice. Even the desperate and clumsy application of random photoshop filters has failed to give an impression of the deliciousness of this dish.

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For those of you not in the know and unwilling to look it up on Wikipedia, paneer is a cottage cheese used in South Asian cooking. It can either be crumbly or in block form, doesn’t contain rennet and so is completely vegetarian, and refuses to melt when heated. It has a good texture but […]

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With my itinerant sister in Libya I thought I’d seek out something vaguely Libyan for the blog. I’d heard tell of unfathomably sweet tea, stodgy pudding things and meaty dinners, none of which appealed, so a short trip round the internet later I found this salad. It may be wholly unrepresentative of the diet of […]

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This is an interesting recipe from ‘The Crank’s Bible’ which would make a great vegetarian option for Sunday roast or even Christmas dinner. Be warned though, it’s fairly involved and time-consuming and probably scores 8.75 on the International Scale of Faff … but it is worth the effort.

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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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According to Babel Fish couronne is French for crown, and according to the title this loaf is meant to be couronne-shaped. But it was snowing, I got over excited, couldn’t concentrate, and failed to read the recipe properly. As a result I missed out one small, but essential, step and by way of punishment the […]

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This morning my co-blogger expressed a desire for asparagus with a supplementary fancy of chilli. Combine this with a lunchtime purchase of parsley, a basil plant wilting on the windowsill, and the recent gift of a superb slab of Parmesan from Parma, and you get the recipe below:

And here be a short film about […]

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It seems every house I visit these days has a copy of ‘Jamie at Home‘ lurking in or around the kitchen. Personally I am not a great fan of the ‘celebrity chef’ cookbook, although truth be told this is a very well produced and photographed book and one of the best currently doing the rounds. […]

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I’ll tell you what bugs me, people who travel to work in the morning drinking their tea/coffee from those aluminium thermos mugs. They’re designed for camping in the woods, not commuting from Forest Hill. Are we supposed to look on enviously and wonder at the cool, impulsive, incandescent lives led by these urbane creatures? Probably. […]

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Working until 7 on a Friday is never what I would class as fun. And when there’s a gig to go to then even less so – a gig with a 10pm curfew too. So I got to the pub at 7.30, inhaled two pints of Pilsner Urquell and then to the gig. The Only […]

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Well, we’d done a spot of shopping down the road and as we passed the local baker - Percy Ingle - I thought of Scotch Pancakes, it was, after all, tea time on a Saturday in the rain. Then I thought of that being a greedy thing and simply walked on by. Then I got […]

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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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In the U.S. the sweet potato is incorrectly referred to as a yam. But there again it’s the land where they call aubergines - eggplants, courgettes - zucchini, biscuits - cookies, jam - jelly, jelly - jello, and torture - water boarding. That said, it’s not technically a potato either. It’s sweet though.

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If you came here in search of an American-style muffin to accompany your tall caramel macchiato, then you’ll be disappointed. They’re not muffins, they’re cakes. If however you are in search of an English muffin which is light and yeasty and perfect for toasting and smothering in butter, then you’re in luck. A word of […]

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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 […]

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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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