Rubbishy Cookery

  On a recent road trip to New Brunswick and la belle provence  Québec I had some knockout meals. Surprisingly, the most memorable meals were not in the main destination, Quebec City, but in Fredericton NB, and inspiring today’s recipe, in Rivière du Loup, Québec. A fantastic little restaurant called L’innocent had a terrific vegetarian curried fried rice and I have tried to recapture its essence here, with some intentional (and some not-so-intentional) twists to make it my own, et plus « rubbishy ». (Sample of menu with inspirational fried rice at the end of the list, reproduced sans  permission.) Ingredients: There are some definite differences already between my experimental inspired version and the restaurant’s original: I’m using brown basmati rice, not white; whatever vegetables were in the fridge missing celery and adding red cabbage and cauliflower; I have no seeds (pumpkin and sunflower) but using chopped walnuts and almonds (I can’t recall what noix  they ...

  When I was a young idealistic vegetarian, I was obsessed with this book: I was obsessed with the personal 20th anniversary introduction, the part of the book called “Recipe for a Personal Revolution” (note: there was a chapter within, which almost inspired me to drop out of grad school and become Frances Moore Lappé’s groupie)(additional note: I met FML at a book reading and signing event in Toronto during this time, and she cautioned me to not make any rash decisions about grad school, which actually convinced me to continue my studies. Sigh.), the parts about food insecurity and the real reasons for hunger in the world (spoiler alert: it’s poverty, unequal distribution of wealth, and powerful corporations and governments keeping the status quo), and, of course, the recipes! Today’s blog entry is a distant relation to a recipe in this book. It’s so distant, I’m not sure which one it was based on. I think it may be this one, because it has a few of the same ingredients and there ...

Hello hungry readers! Welcome to my lowbrow recipe collection. Here you will find my favourite tasty treats—all of which are my own inventions, or highly modified versions of classics made with my own rubbishy spin.  Let’s start with this fan favourite: beans and rice and processed cheez. I invented this dish when I was a young, poor university student. I was living away from my parents for the first time and rooming with my friends. This dish met the student criteria of cheap und gut. I thought it was such a weird and lowbrow and rubbishy dish that my housemates would leave it alone and it would be all mine. Unfortunately, they all tried it and loved it… as did their visiting friends and partners.  One of my housemates urged me to up my game and stop using the cheapest processed cheez. She urged me to switch to a slightly higher-brow product: the gourmet “Ingersoll” processed cheez. I did use Ingersoll in this dish for years, and it was a game changer. Unfortunately, Ingersol...