Rubbishy Cookery

  A good friend recently had a dinner party and served a delicious true tagine which inspired this experiment with leftover ingredients in the fridge and pantry. Allons-y! Ingredients: This was made on the fly with ingredients added as I went, so I don’t have my usual class photo of ingredients, but instead, a list: - leftover canned chickpeas - leftover canned tomatoes  - a peeled and cubed sweet potato  - a peeled and chopped carrot  - 4-5 finely chopped garlic - a chopped onion  - chopped dried apricots  - chopped prunes - many spices: salt, ground cumin, ground coriander, ground cinnamon, turmeric, saffron, smoked paprika  - olive oil Directions: Heat up a few gluts of olive oil in a soup pot and start frying the chopped onion: Add the chopped garlic, stirring often, until golden, and maybe a little browned: Add the chopped sweet potato: And chopped carrot: Keep stirring so nothing sticks or burns! Add all those lovely spices: Stir a minute or two ...

  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...