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...

  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 ...

  It’s that time of year again—holiday parties! You have to bring something, you can’t arrive empty handed, but what can you whip up rubbishly without appearing rubbishy? I can help you. These nuts are originally from a published recipe on a long-forgotten bougie recipe blog, but I’ve pimped them up so much I don’t feel any compunction to confess to any plagiarism. These nuts are original Rubbishy Cookery now baby. Ingredients: Directions: This first part is the part I’ve “borrowed” from the other posh blog (whose name I’ve forgotten so I couldn’t credit them even if I wanted to. Sorry not sorry!). Toast a tray of mixed or single type of nuts at 300F for about 10-15 minutes or until the nuts are fragrant and light brown inside, without burning them: This part is critical (and thanks to the other highbrow blog of long forgotten title): get those hot nuts into a bowl and pour in a good glug  of tamari sauce and a smaller glug of toasted sesame oil—they will sizzle hard and evapo...

  If this recipe sounds familiar, it’s because it’s one of three of my rubbishy recipes featured in this best selling cabbage recipe book: On page 28: But here you will get the full recipe with step by step photos! Ingredients: As you can see from the photo above, all of my ingredients today have seen better days and are looking a little shabby. Some wasteful folks might even toss such pathetic odds and ends, but not us! We will make them shine in this simple and tasty slaw! Panch phora is a mixture of 5 spices, traditionally an Indian spice mix and usually consists of cumin seeds, brown mustard seeds, fennel seeds, nigella seeds, and fenugreek seeds. I used to have a supplier at the local farmer’s market but she has vanished and now I mix my own from individual spices and toast them lightly in the toaster oven: Missing from today’s mix is the nigella seeds, and I can’t really notice their absence. Everything else is pretty essential. Directions: Finely chop your cabbage without ch...