Funny how you wake up one morning and decide that the thing you want to do most in the world (ever) is to make cucumber soup. Maybe it’s a form of neurosis that all food bloggers share and perhaps writing these blogs is a therapeutic, legal and relatively harmless outlet for our collective obsession. Who knows. Who cares. Just had …
I didn’t have high hopes for this soup when I started it, mainly because it contains little more than the humble sprout and onion. However, it turned out to be quite a clever ‘everyday’ soup and would be an ideal way to use up any sprouts you might have knocking around from Christmas. It’s a Sophie Grigson recipe, so clip …
Eagle-eyed UK readers of a certain age will no doubt have shed a nostalgic tear at the sight of the Timothy Whites Thermos flask lurking beneath the foliage. It’s MasterChef final week, yeah. Such a shame that the nice Greek guy was dumped last Thursday as he was our favourite, we actively liked him. Now it’s down to the young …
… or cauliflower cheese in liquid form. A perfect winter warmer for the snowiest (and therefore the most exciting) day in 18 years. Preparation time: 10 minutes Cooking time: 40 minutes Skill level: easy Serves: 2 – 4 Ingredients 1 cauliflower – approx 550 g 1 medium onion – chopped 2 celery sticks – chopped 1 large leek – chopped …
Yumblog is now being swamped with spam. So to all those spammers trying to flog us Arcoxia, Atarax, Augmentin, Buspirone, Cardizem, Celebrex and a whole alphabet of other ‘meds’ – fuck off. To the spammers who think we’re so dull-witted we’d publish their comments because they write a generic ‘I completely agree’ – fuck off. To the spammers who have …
I came across this Mitch Tonks recipe on the excellent BBC ‘Get Cooking‘ website. If this dish is anything to go by, fishermen eat exceedingly well. Preparation time: 30 minutes Cooking time: 30 minutes Skill level: easy Serves: 2 mains Ingredients For the aioli 2 cloves of garlic – crushed dijon mustard – ½ tsp 1 free-range egg (yolk only) …
Phwaaar! Great flavour combinations. You’ve got the sweetness of the tomatoes, then an explosion of fragrant basil, finishing with the floral kiss of honey. Yes, MASTERCHEF!! has returned to our screens. Actually this is a delicious and unusual dish. If you can only summon the enthusiasm to cook one thing this year, make sure it is this soup. Preparation time: …
Traditionally this dish was a way of using cheaper cuts of meat and worthy root vegetables and was kept topped up and bubbling away over an open fire indefinitely. This is a gentrified version using a recipe from the archetypal gentleman himself, Gordon (Cheat ‘n’ two veg) Ramsay. Preparation time: 10 minutes Cooking time: 40 minutes Skill level: easy Recipe: …
What could be more comforting and warming than soup? Porridge perhaps. So why not combine the two and make this silky smooth winter treat. (Remember to take a photograph before you eat all the soup )
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 …
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 – …
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.
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 – …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
The British asparagus season starts on 30th April and ends just eight short weeks later on 25th June, midnight – roughly. Fortunately it must be in season somewhere else in the world at the moment as the shops are awash with the stuff at £1.50 a bunch. Generally I prefer it as nature intended, au natural with a sprinkling of …
Cauliflowers are very much in at the moment. Plus, like snow flakes, crystals, mountain ranges, lightning, river networks, pulmonary vessels and broccoli, they are a fine example of fractal geometry in nature. So when you’re cooking this remember to keep in mind D = Log N(L) divided by the log of 1 over L. Enjoy. Preparation time: 15 minutes Cooking …
My fellow blogger recently bought me ‘Roast Chicken and Other Stories’ by Simon Hopkinson. Voted the ‘most useful cookbook of all time’ by somebody or other, it’s a superb book which is not only packed with inspirational recipes, but also makes excellent bedtime reading. It doesn’t have any photographs (usually a prerequisite for any cookbook), but it doesn’t seem to …
A naked Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on the cover and a long and unnecessary interview with David ‘Call me Dave’ Cameron on the inside. This month’s Observer Food Monthly had one cock too many. Preparation time: 5 minutes Cooking time: 30 minutes Skill level: Easy Serves: 4 Ingredients red lentils – 300g 1 onion – chopped vegetable stock – 1 litre chopped …
Happy New Year. It’s 2008 and it looks like the year ahead is going to be shit.
‘Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us. In the simplest terms. In the most convenient definitions. …
This one goes out to VJ ‘Mr Prudence‘ – anarchist, transphormetic blogger, psychic geographer, algorithmic obsessive and occasional ActionScript guru. The other day he confessed he was in possession of a celeriac and asked what he could possibly do with it. I’m afraid my advice was a dismissive “either mash it or chuck it in the bin” A melancholic celeriac …
Now there’s a thing. If you go to lentil.com you just get a crappy illustration of ‘Lenny the Lentil’ and an email link, lentil.co.uk doesn’t seem to have been registered, and lentil.org is the blog site of a senior network engineer called Robert Lister. I mention this only because I can’t think of an introduction to this recipe.
If your local shop permits I advise a decent cider for this recipe – so put that White Lightning back on the park bench and try something tasty like this Henney’s Frome Valley Dry Cider.
Flippin’ eck Tucker, one of the shops on the High Street is selling seven corn-on-the -cob for a pound and that is a bloomin’ bargain. Of course, sweetcorn is delicious eaten just as it comes, boiled or barbecued and simply accompanied with a knob of slowly melting butter, however tonight we decided upon this smoked haddock chowder.
Try to get hold of large, plump garlic for this recipe. I always buy mine from market stalls which tend to sell bags of six for a quid. These are far superior to the over-priced, dry, miserable, mean-spirited, walnut-sized, dull 25 watt bulbs they sell in supermarkets.
Being the middle-class ponces we are, it is only natural that we should take delivery of an Abel & Cole organic vegetable box once a week. Carrots have featured fairly heavily of late and as a result we have developed quite a backlog of the things.
