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 ...

Hello again! Where did I go? I got a bit lazy and didn’t feel like blogging for a while, but then I discovered this recipe—did I invent it? Doubtful, but maybe?—and had to document it. Let’s face it. This blog is my personal recipe electronic notebook… Anyway, you need to try this, it’s so good! Ingredients: Directions: Melt a good chunk of salted butter in a nonstick pan on medium high heat until sizzling. Beat two eggs in a bowl until frothy. Get your mise en place ready with the other stuff. That means chop the tomatoes annd basil, and crumble the feta cheese. And giddy-up! Once the butter is sizzling, but before it browns, toss in the chopped cherry tomatoes and sauté: While the tomatoes heat up and cook in the hot buttery pan, chiffonade (I believe that’s the word for delicately chopping rolled up leaves to avoid bruising) the fresh basil leaves: Don’t abandon your tomatoes! Keep sautéing! And get your beaten eggs ready: I’m not adding any salt to the eggs, just pepper. Things are...

  This is a great way to use a $3 bag of beets from the farm market up the road, but be forewarned: beets are not just a vibrant colour! They turn everything they come in contact with a vibrant colour! That includes your hands, your clothes, your cutting board, your tablecloth, and even your insides. So DON’T PANIC when you go to the bathroom the next day! Ingredients: I forgot to photograph the raw beets pre-Instant Pot cooking, how rubbishy of me! Rubbishy bloggery! I also added on a bonus ingredient halfway through: Directions: First, cook the beets. As mentioned previously, I use an Instant Pot and have a chart for pressure cooking time by average beet circumference: I don’t remember where I found this chart, so I can’t give it credit, but it’s perfect every time. Thanks to whoever published this on the interwebs!  You can also boil or roast the beets, just get them cooked so that you can easily poke a knife into them: Peel and slice the beets, maybe wearing an apron so yo...

  Today I will show you how to make a versatile  quinoa salad. Ingredients: The list of ingredients is irrelevant because you can add almost anything to this salad and it will be fine. There’s quinoa, of course, but the remaining ingredients can be whatever you have on hand. Someone gifted me the package of Veggie Sticks Salad Topper, so in they go. We had cucumbers in the garden, so giddy up. I forgot to put feta cheese in this photo, but it makes an appearance because I thought of it later. And so on. Ignore the defrosting tofu burger sitting on top of the toaster oven. That’s not in the salad but will be eaten on the side. But who’s to say it couldn’t go in the salad too? Who’s to say?? Directions: First, we make the quinoa, and we make it pasta-style by boiling a big pot of water. We also start, simultaneously, by boiling a little pot of water for the frozen shelled edamame: Simultaneously, we roast up some frozen corn kernels in the toaster oven on fairly high heat for as...