The Yummy Food Blog

So, now hopefully you've read a bit about the blog (or skipped it because you reckon it looks boring and just WANT TO SEE THE CAKES FOR GOODNESS SAKE), but all in good time dear reader. In this Blog, I am going to submit some of my most fail safe recipes that coincidentally and luckily happen to taste good too. I am definitely not professing to be an expert, no, not by any means whatsoever but if you are a likeminded person who enjoys baking and whipping up a dinner for your family in the safety of your own home (or even just wants to learn a basic repetoire), AND get more than appropriately excited when you see a range of complicated looking culinary utensils, I may have some recipes that interest you. Probably not blow torches and nitrous oxide though...
Some of the stuff will be dead basic, some a little trickier for when you want to pull out all the stops and say with a knowing look in your eye:
"Oh yes I do haute cuisine. Gastronomy and all that..."
I hope you enjoy cooking my recipes and borrowed recipes with fantastic results!

An introduction to the Yummy Food Blog:

Okay, firstly, before I embark upon writing this blog, I have one thing to say. If you are reading this, you are potentially just as good a cook as me. (Unless of course you happen to be Michel Roux, and um in that case you definitely are a lot better - and as you were).... It is frustrating to hear people say, "oh I just can't cook," just because they had one bad experience in their lifetime. Food is something that is quintessential in our every day lives, if we care so much about the clothes we wear (once to twice a day), why aren't we as scrupulous about what we put into our mouth (three times or more per day)? It's not like we all tried to walk, fell over and said, "you know the funny thing is, I just can't walk" and proceeded to bum shuffle for the rest of our lives. If I'm being honest, that is what a lot of us are like with cooking, metaphorically bum shuffling our way around ready meals and takeaways - I'm not talking about when you have 20 minutes to knock something up and you use jus-rol instead of crafting your own pastry - that is pretty much a certified kind of bum shuffling.

What I'm really trying to say in my own special way is that like everything in life, cooking has limits. Instead of saying, "I can't cook", say "I can't cook a roast poussin with wild mushrooms and caramelized shallot sauce very successfully, but I can do eggs three ways." It's just like saying, "I can't run twenty miles without stopping, but I can run 10k in under 45 minutes."So make yourself good targets. In the end, cooking is following a set of instructions on a page, and like everything, repeating and repeating until you have it cracked.

Cooking is also pretty adaptable for whoever you are. Whatever qualities you have, bring them out in your food. For example, if you can be creative and very determined, yet over ambitious and slightly neurotic, (me), you have to think about striking the right balance between practicality and the surreality of your mind. Cooking and baking is also pretty therapeutic. Rumour goes that I have been known to take anger out on slicing root vegetables to 'a town called malice' by the Jam. If you make your kitchen your space, cooking and baking can be relaxing, but I'm not going to lie, if you push the boat out it can get stressful.

So I hope you can gather and gain ideas from here - adapt them, add twists, test them, disagree with them (mentally not physically), and I hope you can try these recipes that basically work for me every time and hopefully and probably for you, but I don't want to put any definites on that, as I don't want to receive an angry email saying that your masterpiece fell apart in front of your entire family who flew over from Australia to specifically sample your culinary genius.....

Oh and P.S - my title 'the yummy food blogger', yeah that refers to the food as being yummy not me, it isn't weird sideline advertising for anything. Just to clear that up....