Fuck the Tories
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
At the last count Yumblog Junior had an impressive vocabulary of 38½ distinct words*. These range from the traditional and vital Mummy, Daddy, Dog, Cat through Cheese, Spoon, Cock-a-doodle-doo to more personal choices such as Shoes, Crumpet and Cheers (accompanied by the touching of the parental beer glasses). One of her first and still most frequently used words is B’nana …
The inverted commas are there because this loaf contains no yeast and is actually more of a savoury cake than a bread. This has the added advantage that as well as being pleasantly toothsome, it can also manifest from a wishful inkling to an incontrovertible plateful in just under an hour and a half. That’s quicker than it takes to …
Lately crabs have become very much the decapodic crustacean of choice here at Yumblog Towers. This is a preference very much aided by the fish stall at Roman Road Market which sells big brown locally caught (Mile End Road at low tide) specimens for under four (s)quid. Having recently made this magnificently delicious crab tart by Rick Stein, for comparison …
As well as a handsome moustache and a penchant for white trousers, The Frenchman also has a strong liking for desserts. We made him this HF-W dish. He had three helpings.
This is a variation on yet another recipe from Rick Stein’s current and excellent Spanish cookbook. Variation because gone is the tarragon (tarragone?) as we didn’t have any growing in the Victorian walled garden here at Yumblog Towers and ditto the carrot*. Plus we decided to construct one big fat tart rather than 12 individual dainties. However despite these omissions, …
What do you do when you’ve been engauntleted by a friend regarding the potentiality of high quality picnic foodage? Why you go to your most recent recipe font and seek out something large and sublime that will sate the masses. And it has all the food groups too, cream cheese, cream, sugar, eggs.
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 …
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.
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.
Fellow bloggers… is it a crime to recycle an old post?
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.
I’d never made a lemon cake before and we have thyme aplenty on the balcony so how about a lemon thyme cake as featured in the Observer mag a few weeks ago? Oh and the cake master herself was coming to visit Yumblog Junior, perhaps I could show off my culinary skills – she’s tasted my flapjacks and chocolate biscuits, …
Bored with biscuits out of off of the cupboard? Want to eat a flapjack that will taste nothing like the dense sugar marathons that you can get in packets labelled ‘Mrs Futtocks’ home-baked country goodness treats’? Have you a spare half hour? I have the answer.
In our new guise as parents we have entered a world where being invited to someone’s house for lunch doesn’t necessarily mean that you will be leaving at midnight having drunk the Rhone valley dry. It’s novel and despite our underlying fatigue, sensible drinking on a weekend still seems inherently wrong. So we had been invited round for salmon barbecued …
In the lull between milk extraction and nappy changing I remembered the vast amounts of 85% plain chocolate I had bought and sought to put some of it to work. I was looking for a chocolate biscuit with a melty bit as I’d never made one before and none of my books could help. A quick google later and Jme …
Victor: A scone and tea at half past three, makes the day a little brighter. So you can keep your cakes and fancy tarts…. Jack and Victor: …and stick them up your shiter.
This recipe is from the poetically titled and yet to be published ‘Purple Citrus and Sweet Perfume‘ by Silvena Rowe which was featured in the latest OFM. If this and the other published recipes are anything to go by, this particular publication could well be joining the myriad cookbooks gracing the West Wall of the Keith Talent Wing in the …
This recipe was the result of a pioneering scientific experiment to recreate something similar to Dr. Karg Crispbreads which, despite their medical honorific and Teutonic wholemeal worthiness are surprisingly tasty and addictive – especially if topped with a wedge of Extra Mature and a dollop of Branston. And so to the experiment…not being experts in this particular field, we first went …
Another Simon Hopkinson recipe, although this time one he borrowed from a cookbook written by Roald Dahl, who in his turn took it from a nice man in Arnhem who made these tasties at his patisserie. Judging by the photo in the (subsequently purchased and truly delightful) Roald Dahl book, these biscuits aren’t quite the right shape but they are …
Ok, so if your beloved pussy approached you for a friendly lick and offered a tongue as mis-shapen as any of the examples below, you’d probably recoil with disdain, bundle it into a sack and rush it to the nearest canal vet. In our defence, this was our first attempt at such butter-rich chocolate-filled biscuits, so perhaps these errant little …
Hmm, onions, hmm, bread, hmm, onion bread, hmm, onion bread in individual portions, hmm, lovely lunch.
What to do on Easter Sunday when you’ve already filled the cupboards with tasties but there is a sweet tea-time shaped hole in the kitchen – it’s actually a hatch, but I saw Doctor Who and I know all about holes and cracks in walls and time/space continua and giant eyes. So anyway, hot cross buns. With a twist. I, …
Cornish Yarg is a mild yet flavoursome firm cheese not to be confused with the Cornish ‘Yarp’ – the only word uttered by Michael in ‘Hot Fuzz’.
Well I suppose that’s the surprise spoilt already.
Residents only. Another HF-W recipe from the Guardian magazine. His ability to tap into the Blogger-D taste-psyche is uncanny.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
I came across this recipe in last month’s Wa’ro magazine and it looked so tasty I had to give it a try. It also gave me the opportunity to photograph it alongside this stylishly knackered old fork which I bought recently in a charity shop purely for use as a prop. Everybody’s doing it – look at the Observer Food …
‘Eating lots of white bread raises the risk of a cancer that kills thousands of Britons every year … those who eat five slices a day are almost twice as likely to develop the most common form of kidney cancer compared to those who have one and a half slices.’… or so says that putrid voicepiece of everything that is …
Another recipe purloined from Dan ‘Pour some sugar on me’ Lepard, which was in turn of other provenance, but such is cooking, dishes are passed from one to another and in doing so they evolve. Talking of Darwin, he was 200 the other day you know and Google honoured this on their homepage. I wonder how many deluded creationists boiled …
This Saturday I had the urge to spend all day in the kitchen and there is no better way of achieving this than embarking on one of Dan Lepard‘s more involved and elaborate recipes. This loaf takes the best part of a day to create and requires the making of two separate doughs – one for the inside and one …
Here we have another superb and satisfyingly time-consuming recipe from Dan Lepard. This one caught my eye because two of the ingredients are cream and golden syrup.
And so it came to pass in dying chill days of October that the idea of soup for lunch started to grow in its appeal and so it was that a pair of Thermos was bought. And then Blogger D did make a rather tasty spinach and rosemary soup. And it had been recommended even on the Waitrose website that …