Now we had no idea Interflora sold anything other than flora, so when they got in touch and asked if we’d like try one of their Christmas hampers we thought we owed it to you, dear reader, to say ‘Yes please’. Two days later we were sent the ‘Merry Christmas Tray‘ which we greedily hurried to the secret yumblog laboratory …
If you would like to spread this message of Christmas joy, click on ‘Read more’ for our FREE Christmas card download. Just imagine how lovely this will look on your Grans’ mantlepiece
It was Hallowe’en and amid the regular, numerous, and it seems to me slightly gratuitous pictures of sad-eyed children with hare lips, the Guardian magazine had this Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe for marshmallow. Perhaps naively, I had no idea Marshmallows were a simple man-made concoction of sugar and gelatine – I assumed they grew on trees like spaghetti and money. Preparation …
Residents only. Another HF-W recipe from the Guardian magazine. His ability to tap into the Blogger-D taste-psyche is uncanny. Preparation time: 10 minutes Cooking time: 50 – 60 minutes Skill level: easy Makes: So much you’ll end up feeding it to the squirrels Recipe: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall Ingredients medium oatmeal – 340g plain flour – 185g soft brown sugar – 2 …
‘Remember to take a photograph before you have eat it … otherwise you’ll have to resort to using AI to cobbling together a clumsy visual metaphor’ What better way to round off a sunday in which not only have you built the worlds most magnificent shelving ‘solution’ from scratch (and wood) but also found the time to watch a (double) …
Hi Guys, is Jamie Oliver’s Spicy Olive Garlic & Tomato Pasta Sauce not salty enough for you? Why not try the Yumblog strawberry flavoured salt lick – It’s guaranteed to get your blood boiling! Only £12.99 from all good branches of Cost Cutter. Great sprinkled on chips!
Fwd: Underground food and drink festival, E8 Hi R (a) It costs £40 (b) It involves booze (c) It is pitching itself as so intolerably cool I can almost feel the moustaches Obviously we won’t be able to call ourselves cutting edge any more, never mind. D xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The recent purchase of a £25 bargain pasta maker* has led to a spate of fresh pasta making here at Yumblog Towers. Whether this enthusiasm lasts or whether this gadget ends up in the back of the cupboard along with the onion goggles, Waring Professional Martini Maker, OXO Good Grips® Strawberry Huller, Cuisinart® Soup Maker, some nonsense called a ‘Stirr’, …
I don’t know about you, but I think all this talk of Gordon Ramsay having a facelift is utter nonsense… his lovely new complexion is just down to sympathetic lighting and a good daily skin care regime. This portrait of Gordon was taken a year ago – I have studied both photos carefully and I can’t see any difference.
Here’s a great idea – why not get up early on Saturday morning and spend an hour baking for a cat? After all it has to be a rewarding experience, our feline colleagues are renowned for their un-fussy attitude to food and the appreciative way they savour every meal lovingly placed before them. What could go wrong? Preparation time: 10 …
Hi guys. The new issue of Yumie Magazine trudges wearily over the well-trod ground of the US of A! We’ve asked around the office, spent the morning on Google and flicked through a 20 year old edition of ‘Floyd’s American Pie’ to cobble together this lazy cliché-ridden feast of Americana. Some of these recipes have never been published (or cooked) …
A rare meaty yumblog recipe here, although this is still a tasty dish even if the pig element is left out. Preparation time: 5 minutes Cooking time: 15 – 25 minutes Skill level: easy Serves: 2 Recipe: Wa’ro website Ingredients frozen chestnuts – 200g (or 500g of fresh chestnuts) 1 unwaxed lemon sage leaves – a dozen or so 1 …
This is a recipe from the Hairy Bakers/Bikers. It’s meant to contain brown ale but we didn’t have any so instead I used an alcohol-free driving Cobra which was gathering dust in the fridge. Let’s be honest, it was never going to get drunk. Preparation time: 30 minutes plus 2 hours rising time Cooking time: 25-30 minutes Skill level: easy …
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.
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 …
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 …
Rejoice, MasterChef is back! This time around it’s a mixed bag of ‘Professionals’ who have to cook for Gregg and friends and thankfully the format is little changed. Despite being an irregular at my local gym, Gregg “That’s a twist of a lemon and a chop of a chilli away from perfection, my friend” Wallace is now sporting an impressive …
Sadly Dolores has joined the chicken choir invisible and is no longer with us. She failed to return to the coup one evening and was subsequently found lying repose and bereft of life under my sister’s hedge. On the plus side she* has been replaced by not one, but three brand new (secondhand actually) chickens – Willoughby, Babs and Geraldine. …
We were so impressed by the chocolate coloured wax casing of this fine cheddar when it arrived from our friends at A&C that we immediately took it down to north meadow and photographed it among the wild fritillaries. We have a particular fondness for cheese here at Yumblog Hall so we stayed pure and did nothing fancy with this Godminster …
At some time during the day when we were otherwise occupied playing on the beach, a film crew came to town. That evening as we sat in the square enjoying a by-then customary pre-dinner bottle of white, we watched the crew and actors as they milled about outside the bar opposite. Obviously we were totally ignorant as to who the …
Our new chums at Abel & Cole have been sending us more delicious treats to cook, scoff and review. This week our stash included organic Scottish Salmon which if you follow that link you will find out live in remote and spacious cages off the coast of the Orkneys. It goes on to report that our fish had been coerced …
Why not splash out and spend three and a half euros on a fancy tin of tuna? Was it only a week ago that the yumbloggers were sitting in 35ºC of Madrid heat on the terraza outside the Café Delic eating lunch and drinking chilled glasses of refreshing Mahou Classic? (Stop it, you’re beginning to sound like a middle class …
Hope you all noticed another bit of cheeky photoshop work in the latest Observer Food Monthly – Chuck Palahniuk’s face in a piece of KFC chicken.
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 …
Hi Guys, exciting news, Yumie magazine is now being sold in all good branches of CostCutters across the UK** as well as the usual Timothy Whites. So now there is no excuse not to read this supremely glossy example of vanity publishing. Pick up issue 4 and see how we have belatedly jumped on the Barack Obama bandwagon. Wonder at …
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall was the guest on Desert Island Discs this week. Although I never actually listened to the programme subsequent research showed him to have the reasonable (albeit mainstream) musical tastes of a man of a certain age. The Specials – Gangsters. The Who – Love Reign O’er Me. Beethoven – Symphony No.9 in D Minor, the Choral Symphony. David …
A lovely lady called Gwydwr came up to the big smoke and gave us some handsome home grown turnips and a pair of socks each. We ate them thinly sliced and raw in a salad. They were peppery and delicious. The turnips weren’t half bad either. Ha.
When God gives you lemons, make lemonade. Two things. Firstly everyone who blogs up a lemonade recipe starts with this proverb and secondly there is no God. There is however a Waitrose, which is where we got our unwaxed fruit. So more accurately, when you go to Waitrose to buy lemons to make lemonade, make lemonade. Preparation time: 5 minutes …
Last weekend Team Yumblog shaved an hour off their personal best and finished the London to Brighton cycle ride in record time. There was to be extensive photographic documentation of this momentous event but the camera battery went flat the night before and the charger was the other side of the river.
They had gooseberries at the fruit and veg stall on Saturday morning and so I just had to buy some. When I got home and set about working out what I was going to do with them I realised that gooseberries are generally cooked up and mixed with cream, just in various different ways. I didn’t really fancy that so …
… or if you prefer green sauce, or maybe sauce verte, possibly Grüne Soße. Preparation time: 5 minutes Cooking time: none Skill level: easy Serves: 2 Ingredients parsley – 5 tbsp garlic – finely chopped – 1 clove 6 anchovies capers – 2 ½ tbsp olive oil – 8 tbsp lemon juice* – 1 tbsp strong mustard – ½ tsp …
Butter & Rosemary There is a pasta dish called ‘La pasta col tocca d’arrosto’ or literally ‘with a touch of the roast’ which is essentially made with the rich meaty/garlicy/herby juices left over from a Sunday roast. This is a clever approximation of that sauce which takes minutes to make and is very, very tasty.
How do you take your olive oil? Pure, virgin, extra-virgin, hand-picked, first cold press, single estate, non-filtered, Greek, Tuscan, Andalusian, Carbonell, Bertolli, Filippo Berio, Il Padrone, Masia el Altet, Tesco’s finest? Boof, here at yumblog we have bespoke olive oil! Olive oil personally pressed and kindly donated by a handsomely moustachioed Frenchman who goes by the moniker of J-P. A …
Butter & Tomato Sauce A recent trip to the magnificent St John led to a visit to their website which in turn resulted in the purchase of a Fergus Henderson-endorsed cookbook called The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan. It’s perfect bedtime reading and has an intriguing section on simple tomato-based sauces for pasta – with three ingredients …
In the light of ongoing shenanigans at Westminster and with the desire to be always open and transparent with you, dear reader, perhaps this posting should be called an ‘Advertorial’ or possibly a ‘Blogvert’. This is because the mixed organic fruit’n’veg box below was supplied to us completely free of charge; in a complimentary manner; gratis; or if you like, …
A couple of weeks ago we had a slap up anniversary feed at St John in Smithfield, and this dish was on the menu. Obviously visiting the home of ‘Nose to Tail eating’ and plumping for the vegetarian option is like… (Note to Blogger-D: Please insert apt and amusing analogy here.) (Note to Blogger-R: Can’t think of one. Don’t worry, …
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’ …
A weekend with a sister who keeps 4 exceedingly pampered chickens (Dolores, Fifi, Jolene and Daphne) afforded us with a dozen beautiful, tasty, fresh very-free-range eggs, some of which are shown below. Special thanks to Daphne who laid the one in the middle.
The plan is at some stage to make our own Ricotta from the whey left over from Yumblog Amalgamated Dairy Industries yoghurt-making enterprise. However I suspect the quantities involved will be minute and certainly a lot smaller than our massive combined appetites. Preparation time: 10 minutes Cooking time: 20 – 25 minutes Skill level: easy Serves: 2 Recipe: Wa’ro Magazine …
