A regular game we play to enliven the joyless visit to a supermarket is to hunt down the most ridiculous, unappetising, over-packaged or ill-conceived snack ‘food’ and snarl Duncan Bannatyne style derision at it. However, as enjoyable as this is, I sometimes feel we are just being middle-class OFM-reading wankers and so perhaps should give these products the benefit of …
Coburg Loaf
Always on the look out for novelty bread flours, I came across a packet of Doves Farm organic Barleycorn in Way’ro. It’s a mixture of wheat and barley flours, malted barley flakes and linseed. Apparently this loaf was one of two things named in honour of Prince Albert. Preparation time: 20-30 minutes with 2-3 hours proving. Cooking time: 40 minutes …
Chewy Light Rye Bread
I had to give this one a try, if only because it contains treacle, soggy Ryvita and onion. What’s more, it takes a whole weekend to make. Preparation time: 20-30 minutes over 2 days Cooking time: 30-40 minutes Skill level: easy Recipe: Dan Lepard – The Guardian Ingredients For the sponge 4 slices of plain Ryvita cold water – 275 …
Pullum Frontonianum (Chicken a la Fronto) – Part 2
Artist impession of how Pullum Frontoniaum may have possibly definitely looked in the olden Roman times. 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 …
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 …
Squid with Lentils and Preserved Lemon
A Squid (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) is a very sensitive magnetometer used to measure extremely small magnetic fields and is based on a superconducting loop containing Josephson junctions. Less well known, it is also a tasty fishy treat which it turns out, goes very well with lentils. “If animal trapped call 410-844-6286” — Baltimore, traditional.
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 – …
Lager Batons
After the sourdough fiasco I felt the need to purge the memory by baking something successfully. This is a handy recipe as it uses only store cupboard essentials: flour, salt, yeast, honey and lager. Preparation time: 20 minutes Cooking time: 15 minutes Skill level: easy Makes: 4 batons Ingredients strong white flour – 425g lager – 250ml dried yeast honey …
Sourdough Fiasco
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. Preparation time: a wasted 48 hours Cooking time: 40 minutes Skill …
Making a Sourdough Starter
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 off and find a more …
Rosemary Focaccia
On Saturday we went to a rain-drenched Oxford and had lunch at the highly recommended Branca Restaurant. Before tucking into fried calamari with lemon and chilli dressing followed by a big fat skate wing with scallops and mash, I soaked up the house red by nibbling away at some fine rosemary focaccia. So fine in fact, that I had to …
Pullum Frontonianum (Chicken a la Fronto) – Part 1
A broken cumana The following (lengthy) request came from the archaeologist sister of Blogger D, we’ll call her Potkicker T: ‘Ok, here’s the culinary challenge … for my lecture in September I wish to distract the audience as much as possible with nonsense and pretty pictures. So, to make it a bit more lively I want not just to talk …
Marrow & Goat’s Cheese Gratin
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 food as outside it rained …
Clafoutis
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. Preparation time: 10 minutes Cooking time: 25 – …
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.
Seafood with Chickpeas
To distract herself from the terror of the flight back from Madrid, Blogger D bought a Spanish food magazine called ‘Cocina Viva’. This dish was cobbled together/expertly assembled via a combination of close scrutiny of the photograph and a bad translation of one of the recipes. Despite this, it turned out to be a triumph. Serve with an Antony Worrall …
Penne a la Vongole (clams) and big, juicy Mediterranean Prawns)
Guest contributer JW of Madrid via Clapham writes: This is an Italian dish that I have been curious about for a number of years, and what prompted me to try it out was seeing a well-known TV chef preparing it in such a way that I’ve been obsessed with making it ever since. Madrid, which is nowhere near the coast, …
Spaghetti with Aubergine, Mozzarella & Basil
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?
Goat’s Cheese Ravioli
Another recipe from the mighty Yotam Ottolenghi. Perfect for an anniversary meal. x
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 – …
Goat’s Cheese, Roasted Pepper & Basil Pasta
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 of cityboy urban tossers infesting …
L2B Energy Bar
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 first time this year, these …
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.
Feta & Mint Bread
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.
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 …
‘Fancy’ Rolls
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 knot construction, resembled something a …
Thunder & Lightning
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 have a bit of land …
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 …
Salsify in Garlic Vinaigrette
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 most unusual and tasty members …
Tofu Steak with Stir Fried Summer Vegetables
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 fork before?” Bar and Grill, …
Pan Fried Salmon with Avocado Remoulade
I got this recipe from Simply Recipes – an excellent foodblog by Elise Bauer. Other essential reading on the web this week was this article on Guardian Unlimited, which in turn leads to the very informative and equally disturbing ‘Wolf at the Door‘ website by Paul Thompson. Enjoy avocados while you can and don’t say you weren’t warned. I’m not …
Yellow Pepper, Goats Cheese & Spinach Lasagne
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 left us in need of …
Traditional Fermented Bread
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. On a less intestinal note, …
Tandoori Cauliflower
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.
Tandoori Paneer
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 its flavour is the mild …
Mushroom Wellington
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. Preparation time: 30 – 40 minutes Cooking time: About 1½ hours Skill …
Jerusalem Artichoke Soup
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 and this soup was the …