Here’s a quick and tasty meal to enjoy as the earth’s crust inexplicably crumbles and spews forth molten drivel*.
Farfalle with spinach, basil and ricotta
Puy lentil & roasted butternut squash ‘soup’ with harissa
Again, inverted commas as the viscosity gradient of this dish leans very much more towards the stewy than the soupy. However, let’s not get bogged down with culinary thixotropics, pull up a chair, grab yourself a spoon and tuck in.
Spicy seafood stew
It was Saturday morning and so the evening meal needed to be planned. She wanted something seafoody (but not with mussels). He wanted something spicy (but not Asian). They both wanted something tasty (not the usual slop they serve up). Cook books are leafed and websites consulted (but not food blogs as these are written by amateurs and are invariably …
Bermondsey Frier
The weekend here at Yumblog Towers begins peasant-like with a simple and humble Friday evening meal of bread and cheese. Mind you, the bread is an alarmingly expensive sour dough from St John which we lightly toast and rub with garlic and the cheese is a hand-picked selection from Neal’s Yard and represents the best of UK artisan producers. There’ll …
La Tiella Barese
A traditional Italian (Puglia) one pot dish of mussels, potato and rice.
Travels: Berlin
A few randon shots from our last trip to Berlin. View all images
Happy birthday …
to Yumblog Junior, who is one today. A birthday wish from Marc Riley on 6Music.
Tuna confit salad
Are you sitting confitably, then we’ll begin …
Vanilla risotto with poached rhubarb
For lovers of puds and alliteration this is a tasty toothsome treat…
Griddled courgette & mint salad
…a simple refreshing salad.
Sage and rosemary potato wedges
The beauty of this recipe is you can kid yourself you are eating a healthy authentic Mediterranean potato dish when in fact you are just scoffing fancy chips.
Wilted greens and potato with cheese sauce
If you fancy two of your five-a-day smothered in cheese sauce then this is the recipe for you.
Tomato and cumin soup (avec egg)
With the weekend Guardian scattered over floor and table, Adam and Joe on 6Music and Yumblog Junior playing happily and noisily within the Tachyon beam containment field, few meals are more eagerly anticipated here at at Yumblog Towers than Saturday brunch… and few dishes have endorsed that anticipation with more spicy gusto than this delicious tomato and cumin ‘soup’. The …
Yoghurt & pearl barley soup with spiced chickpea koftas
If you’re in the market for something weird yet tasty then give this recipe a go… I guarantee* you’ve never eaten anything like this before. A word of warning though, pearl barley has a bent for clogging up dishwashers so best go manual on this one. * UK and Ireland only. Terms and conditions apply.
Fusilli with 3 herb pesto
Being a puritan and a snob, I wouldn’t normally condone any recipe for pesto which strayed away from the traditional holy trinity of basil, pine nuts and parmesan. Profane variations such as ‘Rocket and walnut’ or ‘Spinach and sun-dried tomatoes’ have a desperate and makeshift ‘Ready Steady Cook’ feel about them, which in my experience never fails to disappoint. FACTOID: …
Potato and Asparagus Frittata
In an attempt to escape the hysterical media build up to ‘the wedding’, not to mention the event itself with its stupid street parties, stupid bunting, stupid flag waving and general unseemly national deference to our ‘betters’, we left the country and spent Easter in the relaxed sun-drenched (republic) of Berlin. Fortunately for us the Berliners were far too preoccupied …
Soft cheese, puy lentil and parsley salad
A few weekends back the Yumblog family boarding a cramped Virgin train and sped uncomfortably northwards to West Yorkshire in what could be referred to as Phase Two of their cunning plan for a bright and exciting new future. A few days later they returned to Yumblog Towers refreshed and excited and carrying a modest cache of local beers, hand-crafted …
Brandade de Morue (Salt Cod and Potato Purée)
Oft of a weekend we don disguises, dodge the border guards, dash across the metaphorical railway tracks and stealthily enter the sanctuary of E9 – aka Victoria Park Village. VPV (as I am sure it is referred to by Foxtons) is a culinary oasis in the otherwise apocalyptic wasteland of Costcutters and sub-KFC-style ‘restaurants’ which like radiation-tolerant cockroaches infest our …
Baked new potatoes in a creamy Parmesan sauce
The following recipe can be found in this month’s edition of the excellent Wa’ro Kitchen Magazine. Its creator is Gill Meller – head chef River Cottage HQ … not to be confused with the annoying pointy sideburned twat who has featured heavily in HF-W programmes of late.
Honey Roasted Rhubarb
‘Chase me, girls, for I am full of rhubarb!’
Honeyed White Loaf
Watching Michel Roux eulogising the virtues of hand-crafted bread on the ‘Great British Food Revival‘ reminded me that shamefully I hadn’t baked a loaf for several weeks. Thus suitably laden with middle-class guilt I put on a pinny, grabbed a jar of Mathos Organic Polygonum Honey (dark, strong and liquorice-ee) and made this simple white loaf. And on the subject …
Baked Camembert
This is less of a recipe and more of a reminder to shove a Camembert in the oven once in a while for a fast fatty indulgent treat … and do it soon before this world inexorably unravels to a lawless (and cheeseless) wasteland.
Warm honeyed citrus fruits with yoghurt
The visitation of Blogger-D’s errant sister and her luxuriantly mustachioed Frenchman and ‘associate’, coincided perfectly with the recent arrival of 2 freeby jars of delicious Greek honey from Mathos. For this recipe we opted for the Olympus Honey which with its lighter floral flavour made it the perfect companion to the pert zestiness of the citrus fruits.
(Beetroot) Risotto Rosso
The starting point of this recipe was a forgotten and up until now unused bargain basement cookbook called something along the lines of ‘A Zillion and One Easy To Make Risottos’. I should have been forewarned, for even after the most cursory of scans it was obvious the editor had struggled to fulfil the ambitious promise of the title and …
27 ways with onions …
4. Potato and Onion Gratin Remarkably after only 4 (admittedly onion heavy) meals, we have reached the end of our £2 sack of onions. On this occasion they were consenting adults in a cheeky extramarital foursome with potatoes, cream and cheese – resulting in this very rich and even verier delicious gratin.
27 ways with onions …
3. Smothered Onion Sauce (for pasta) When looking for tasty ways to eat our way through a sack of onions it was only natural we turn to The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking‘ by Marcella Hazan, a book which up to now has never failed to deliver excellent pasta sauces. And this is no exception … sweet, unusual and utterly …
27 ways with onions …
2. Creamed onion and cider soup with Stilton A quarter of the way into our sack of onions, time to try another soup… Featuring as it does cider and Stilton, this could probably be called an English Onion Soup.
Forman & Field
London Cure Smoked Scottish Salmon On a grey and damp Saturday last October all of us here at Yumblog Towers boarded the Globe Town charabanc and trundled eastwards to the annual Forman & Field open day. It transpired to be a great day out with talks and demonstrations from farmers and food producers, a tour of the smokery, and most …
Latest Yumie magazine hits the newsagents
Hi guys, hot off the press, the latest issue of Yumie magazine hits the newsagents’ shelves today. However, as the covershot is a photograph of an unmarried man casually tossing a salad, we feel we are beholden to public decency to place it behind our Family Shield™. Boom! And THAT ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is called satire. (WARNING! …
27 ways with onions ….
1. Vegetarian(ish) French(ish) Onion Soup Around our way virtually every shop sells these 4kg sacks of onions for a very reasonable £2, so we thought we’d buy one and see if we could eat the entire contents in sufficiently varied ways that we didn’t slump into an Allium ennui induced coma. This onion soup is French(ish) because it is made …
Minty Pea Fritters with Smoked Salmon
I couldn’t think of an introduction to this recipe so I ran it back and forth through BabelFish a few times until I ended up with ‘Muntachtige pea fries in oil the pie of meat [s] in order to fumigate the salmon of the friend’. Incidentally, apologies to Gordon Ramsay for our childish reference to his facelift and hair transplant, …
Chocolate Bavarois
Yumblog Towers saw in the new year with a feast which started with a (very disappointing) trout mousse, followed by a spectacular post-modern deconstructed prawn vol-au-vent, and rounded off with this profoundly rich Simon Hopkinson chocolate and cream-based dessert. A belated Happy New Year to our reader(s).
Stilton (& Rocket) Tart
Despite heroic efforts on our part, post-Christmas still found us with a substantial wedge of a 3 tonne wheel of Stilton left uneaten. This tart was one of several tasty ways we found to remedy the problem.
Œufs brouillés au fromage de chèvre
… or scrambled eggs with goat’s cheese. If you want a different more goaty way to scramble your eggs, this is the recipe for you.
Oatmeal & Molasses Loaf (Revisited)
Fellow bloggers… is it a crime to recycle an old post?
Cocktail: Swimming Pool
Three or four years ago (I’m sure my co-blogger can tell you the exact date *) we went on a mini train tour of East Germany which took us from Dresden to Berlin via Leipzig. If there had been a soundtrack** to this journey, it would have been the final slurps of a draining cocktail glass followed by an enthusiastic …
Porcini Risotto
Porcini are very much in vogue here at Yumblog Towers. Along with late Sunday roasts. And baked potatoes with cheese and beans and coleslaw. And spending Saturday morning watching 5Live on the red button. And Sophie the teething giraffe. And Friday night beer and pizza after swimming. Lots of things in fact. But not duck eggs. Or Paul Rankin’s Potato …
(The Perfect) White Bread (Toaster)
It’s ok, put the dogs back in their kennels, tether the steed, the search is over, we’ve found it. The perfect white bread f’toasting is here and even better hardly any kneading is needed. Brilliant.
Gordon Ramsay’s hair transplant
Yumblog exclusive: Gordon Ramsay reveals the results of his £30,000 hair transplant.
3 Cheese Risotto
…which makes this three times better than a mono cheesed risotto.