Fuck the Tories
Obviously you don’t really need to be told how to mull cider as like us you’ll just explore the deeper regions of your spice cupboard and gather together whatever seems to conjure up memories of Christmas. Then you’ll discard anything that is more than a year out of date, guess how much of the remaining you’ll need to conjure up …
Here is a recipe for toothsome* yuletide tipple which if you start now will be ready to sip on 28th December. Technically still Christmas. WARNING: This posting has not been edited by my educated co-blogger and so may contain all sorts of grammaticle erors.
As most foraged food is either unpalatable, bitter, or tastes ‘a bit like spinach’, our advice to you is to smother it with refined sugar and alcohol and transform it into a cheeky little apéritif and/or digestif. First up, Sloe gin.
A few miles up the road from Yumblog Mansion in the beautiful unspoilt Lancashire town of Bacup there is the last fully operational commercial Granola quarry left in the country. We are lucky to have a source of such quality Granola right on our doorstep as these days most people have to make do with the imported low grade variety …
When the Spanish cook octopus they like to ‘scare’ it first by dunking it in and out of boiling water a couple of times before the final plunge…this being an Italian dish we decided to refrain from terrorising our poor dead eight-legged cephalopodic friend and just plop it straight in the pot.
Ever wished you could enjoy your Fish Supper in one convenient, portable, pastry-encased handful? Of course you have. Then rejoice for your days of yearning are over as we here at the Laboratoires Yumblog have developed the Cod, Chips & Mushy Peas Pasty. Now you can scoff the nations favourite health food whilst out and about and on the go, …
I had a rare yen for something sweet the other day, so I commissioned my fellow blogger (the tart) ( …pie, cake and dessert specialist) to make a honey cake. After the initial face-to-face where we defined objectives, budgets, timelines and composed the all important mission statement*, we set about building the team who would take the project forward. As …
We had some lovely irregular muddy carrots in our latest Abel & Cole box, so we thought we’d break with tradition and instead of ignoring them for a week until they were as limp as a Young Conservative’s handshake, we’d use them right away …
Pity the green pepper, no wonder it’s a little bitter, here in the UK its sole function is to ‘add a bit of colour’ to that dull and unwanted guest at every barbecue, picnic or family gathering* – the rice and sweetcorn salad. Not so in Spain where the pimiento verde is treated with the respect it deserves and makes …
Forget the mapping of the human genome, the discovery of the Higgs Boson God particle, or the invention of L’Oreal’s age defying Boswelox™, I think we here at Laboratoires Yumblog can humbly announce we have made the single greatest scientific breakthrough since our prehistoric ancestors rubbed two dinosaurs together and conjured up fire. Like many of humanity’s greatest achievements it …
Perhaps it’s the imminent collapse of free-market capitalism, the melting of the polar ice caps, the influence of our reptilian Illuminati shapeshifting overlords, the demise of the bumble bee, or just our shameful lack of regular posts, but of late freebies have been few and far between here at Yumblog. So when our new best friends at Elizabeth Shaw got …
This is a bit like a kedgeree … but with potatoes instead of rice… and smoked mackerel instead of haddock … and horseradish instead of curry powder… In fact now I think about it, nothing like a kedgeree. In that case, consider this a Salade Niçoise with mackerel replacing the tuna and an absence of olives, green beans and anchovies. …
Middle-class dilemma #23: Lovely things beetroot, but what to do with them when they turn up for a fourth time in your Abel & Cole veg box? In the past we have roasted them, pickled them, rosti’d them, risotto‘d them, borsch‘d them, and even brownied them – all delicious in their individual ways you understand, but we here at Yumblog …
Ok, here’s a plan…the next time you make pizza dough (what do you mean you don’t make your own pizza dough?) make double/quadruple/sextuple quantities, portion them out and freeze the surplus for future generations. That way, whenever you fancy something a tad tastier than can be supplied by your local Dominoes, you’ll have a pizza instantly on hand (assuming of …
For some time it has been our mission here at the Castle Yumblog to create the perfect sourdough loaf – a subtle alchemy of simple and ancient ingredients – flour – water – salt – animated into being by wild airborne yeasts, and sculpted into final form by that most primitive of the elemental forces, fire (gas mark 9). A …
Disaster struck us here at Yumblog Mansions when heavy rain caused the moat to burst its banks and overflow into some of the outer buildings. Fortunately the water damage to the Orangery, Keeper’s Lodge and gift shop was only superficial, however the wine cellars were completely deluged and much of our renowned collection was lost to the world, including tragically, …
A sourdough starter is similar in many ways* to the tortoise – with love, care and regular meals it can last a lifetime and give many hours of contemplative pleasure. On the other hand, with indifference, neglect and irregular feeding, like Freda from Blue Peter, it’s prone to die a slow, silent and lonely death. Regrettably, shamefully, but not entirely …
The arrival of Granny and an aunty to celebrate Yumblog Junior’s second birthday had the added advantage of the potential for babysitting and therefore a rare evening out for the parents. Searching for tasty and cheesy ballast with which to fortify ourselves before what was inevitably going to be a multi-pint boozy night out, we sensibly turned to the ever-dependable …
What’s that? Your house doesn’t smell fishy enough? You like the idea of being greeted by a fishy waft every time you walk in the front door – no matter how much Glade ‘After the Rain’ you have sprayed about? Then why not make your own fish stock? And here’s how …
The original source of this recipe was the excellent ‘Abel & Cole Cookbook’ – currently given away free with a month’s trial of their veg boxes. They called it something along the lines of ‘Baked spinach with cheesy weezy wosty eggy wegs’ – a little twee and Belle and Sebastian for comfort – hence the renaming. Preparation time: 5 minutes …
What could be more patriotic and celebratory of sixty years on the throne than baking a batch of white rolls? Actually lots of things – but none of them took place here at the Socialist Republic of Yumblog.
You have probably read in the financial pages that Yumblog Inc. has once again upped sticks and relocated its corporate HQ a few miles up (or is it down … or along?) the road to Hebden Bridge (pop 4,500 + 3). This was no reflection on our old location of Todmorden (pop 15,000 – 3), which is a charming and …
Perhaps with the exception of the odd East End boozer and the ready availability of Waitrose, there are not many things to miss about no longer being in that there London. However, living as we do in the heartland of Greggs, we have yet to find any bakers which sell a decent loaf – some have made wild and reckless …
Let’s say you like marmalade but have missed the Seville orange season by a whisker and this was going to be the year when you made marmalade for the first time, darn it. Let’s say that’s what’s happened. Well what if instead of using Seville oranges you go tri-citrus instead? The tartness of a couple of lemons and a grapefruit …
Regular reader(s) will probably be aware that every year at this time we here at yumblog experience a visitation from the son of God ‘His Royal Highness Jesus H Christ’ in the form of the appearance of his princely fizzog on various domestic items. Imagine how shocked we were when this Easter it wasn’t the apparition of the King of Glory that …
For this recipe we experimented with frozen clams from a recent Ocado shop. Despite our middle class credentials we wouldn’t ordinarily shop at Ocado but we had a £20 off voucher and thought we’d make use of the offer. A flourish of reckless clicks and 240 quid later, this didn’t seem such a bargain. Also, frozen clams it turns out …
Sorry about the irregular nature of recent posts but I have recently started a new job in Manchester and feel it would be considerate to my new employer to wait a few weeks before I spend all my working day writing up posts for yumblog. On the plus side I have discovered a superb fishmonger in the Arndale centre which …
Living as we do at the very epicentre of the rhubarb triangle – the mysterious 30-square-mile area formed between the three cities of Leeds, Wakefield and Bradford famous for early forced rhubarb and the unexplained disappearance of countless ships, planes and whippets – it seems only appropriate that we should make more use of this local delicacy. Coming up soon …
We had a pair of Hebden Twins coming to dinner so obviously we Googled ‘What do twins eat?’ in search of appropriate ways to tickle their sapphic taste buds. The results threw up a biography of Sue Perkins and an incongruous and seemingly random set of images, but very little in the way of practical advice. Undeterred and after consulting …
Want to know how to make Iced Tuna Mousse, Monday Risotto or Coffee Hedgehog? Need to know how to crisp up a limp lettuce using a lump of coal, or remove tar from your clothes/children after a day out at the seaside? Perhaps you need to convert fl.oz. to decilitres? Then look no further than this 1972 publication from the …
Needing as we did to both satisfy a craving for something sweet and shift some particularly average Christmas chocolate balls from Lidl, these ChocChip™ Cookies perfectly fulfilled both requirements. Obviously you don’t need to rush to Lidl and rummage through the ‘end of line’ slop bucket in search of the last remaining net of stale Yule Chocco Balls as they …
A while back we bought a bumper pack of frozen sweetcorn for Yumblog Junior hoping this might make a healthy addition to her somewhat restricted and monotonous diet. As is invariably the case she gave our offering a glance of contempt, shook her head and returned to her preferred menu of bananas, Marmite and toothpaste. Parenthood can sometimes be a …
“You know me and my weakness for a juicy pear” – Gregg Wallace, MasterChef, 2012. “I just love the big flavours of Dick” – Gregg Wallace, Celebrity MasterChef, 2010. Looks like Gregg butters his toast on both sides. Our constructed Colcannon soup can be found here.
If any of you dodgy lot were to break into Yumblog Cottage, you would probably notice (apart from how bloody cold it is) that despite several shelf loads of cookbooks, there was virtually nothing ‘written’ by TV chefs. No matter how frantically you rummaged, you’d find no Jamie, Nigella, Gordon, Heston, Sophie, Ainsley, Gino, Levi, Hugh or god forbid Nigel. …
Well I never, I’ve just discovered our local Morrisons now sells packets of fresh yeast for breadmaking… and at the very reasonable price of 50p for 126g. This was unexpected because a) as far as I know you can’t even get it at Waitrose, and b) Morrisons is very much at the (Sp)Asda end of the supermarket spectrum and tends …
It’s taken a while to write up this, the third of our festive gravali because to be honest I got a little over excited at the fishmonger’s (Paul, Todmorden Market) where I bought the salmon and ended up with 1.5kg of the stuff. Delicious as it was (and this beetroot version was the tastiest of the three) this was a …
…or goat’s cheese pancakes.
Although the fridge has now all but emptied of Christmas goodies the cheese compartment is still heavy with half-eaten lumps, wheels and wedges of every variety of soft, hard, blue, holey, mature and goat. It has become clear that the occasional lunchtime snack is never going to make much headway into this cheesey surplus and we need to start shifting …
Obviously our enjoyment of Christmas was seriously curtailed by the devastating news of Prince Philip’s hospitalisation – thank God the BBC ran half-hourly news bulletins to keep us up to date with every nuance of this never-changing national cataclysm. Here at Yumblog Cottage we tried to keep our subjective peckers up by preparing and scoffing a variety of delicious foodstuffs …
Every little helps