Rubbishy Cookery

  Happy New Year! Let’s start 2026 on the right foot with a nice chili dinner! Ingredients: Directions: Start with a couple of good glugs of neutral flavoured oil (I’m using canola oil) in a big pot and heat over medium high heat. Chop an onion and add it to the hot oil pot: Sauté the chopped onion until softened: Then add 3-ish finely chopped garlic cloves and sauté further for a few moments until fragrant and maybe not as browned as I’ve done: Then add your lean ground beef, hopefully not still partially frozen like mine: Is fine! Brown the beef with the onions and garlic on medium heat until no longer pink: Still pink! Keep going: Perfect!  Now start adding spices: a really generous amount of chili powder, about a tablespoon of ground cumin, and a few shakes of ground chipotle powder: Golly it’s hard to see with all that steam! Stir that all together on medium heat until the spice aroma fills your kitchen with fragrant spicy goodness, then add a can of tomatoes: Pro tip: ma...

  The star of this recipe is the black garlic so I hope you can get some. If not, it’s just a good ‘ole goat cheese omelette and also wonderful. Ingredients: Note the black garlic, above photos. Directions: Heat some butter in a nonstick pan on medium high heat: Beat your eggs and add a little salt. I forgot I had some fancy truffle salt so I’ll add that for more umami. Add the beaten and lightly salted egg mixture to the pan with the melted butter: And start moving the mixture around, almost like you would if you were making scrambled eggs: When the egg mixture is starting to set, stop scrambling and start spreading them out evenly (but there will be egg lumps and bumps—that’s okay!) and turn the heat down to low: The top of the eggs will still look undercooked and that’s fine!  Add a middle row of crumbled black garlic. It’s very soft and spreadable and will stick to your fingers (tasty!) but distribute them as evenly as you can in a line down the middle: This is two black g...

  It’s all Greek to me—let’s make tzatziki! Ingredients: Note the ingredient labelled “Skyr”. This is a game changer for making homemade tzatziki. I used to use Balkan style plain yogurt, but had to first turn it into yogurt “cheese” by straining it for at least an hour, but the longer the better. My method, in case you’re interested, was to spoon a quantity of yogurt into a coffee filter lined plastic funnel positioned in a cup to collect the liquid that strains (“whey”) and let it rest in the fridge. If you use Skyr, a thick low fat, high protein Icelandic yogurt, you don’t need to do any of this rigamarole because it’s naturally so thick and unctuous. Time saver! Directions: Using a garlic press, crush a clove of garlic into a bowl and sprinkle with kosher salt to allow the garlic to mellow, soften, and, pardon the expression, sweat: Smash the salted crushed garlic after a few moments of rest into a paste: Add the Skyr (or strained yogurt cheese): Add a lot of finely chopped fre...

  This is a recipe that uses not one, but two (2!) types of canned fish! Ingredients: Missing from the above photo, but should usually be assumed: salt and pepper. Also missing and a last minute optional addition: Directions: You’ve probably heard that kale needs to be massaged with oil for salads in order to soften the tough leathery leaves. We’re going to be extra frugal and massage our kale (which is coming from the late fall backyard garden crop today, harvested in the dark cold rain) with the fishy olive oil with which our canned tuna is packaged.  Here is a picture of pre-massaged kale: Add that tuna olive oil: Get in there with both hands and massage! Then you’ll have nice tender oily kale: Nice! Meanwhile, in a little dish, squish up a clove of garlic and add some salt to let the garlic mellow and soften for a minute or two: Add an anchovy: Mash them up together: Add some squeezed fresh lemon juice and a few squirts of Worcestershire sauce: Mix it all up and add a good...