I'm Billie Nabeel Tabassum. I grew up with Pakistani food, but like a lot of people who leave home, I eventually discovered that knowing what something should taste like isn't the same thing as knowing how to make it.
Nubeals Cooking is where I write down the food I actually cook – particularly the Pakistani dishes that were originally taught through instructions such as "bhoono it properly", "add enough water" and "cook until done".
Those instructions make perfect sense when you've spent years beside the person saying them. They're considerably less helpful when you're standing alone in a kitchen thousands of miles away.
So this site tries to write down the unwritten bits: what properly browned onions actually look like, what bhoono means, how loose a salan should be before it cools, why a cooking technique works, and when a measurement genuinely cannot be reduced to a precise number.
A lot of the Pakistani food I grew up with comes from my family's Lahore/Punjab cooking, alongside the food I have picked up from living and cooking elsewhere.
The food here is Pakistani and British because that's the kitchen I cook in now.
That means British supermarkets, ingredients that don't always behave exactly like the ones I grew up with, pressure cookers when they genuinely improve the process, and occasionally improvising when the food infrastructure around a Pakistani meal simply isn't available.
In Pakistan, making a salan and eating it with fresh roti or naan exists within an entire food ecosystem. Abroad, that might mean making roti yourself, using frozen chapatis, buying supermarket naan or occasionally resorting to whatever will get dinner onto the table.
I'm interested in documenting that reality rather than pretending migration doesn't change how people cook.
Nubeals is basically how my internet name happened.
Back in the day, I wanted an email address based on my first name, Nabeel. Naturally, Nabeel itself was already taken, so I started trying variations: Nabeel, Leeban, Nabeal, Nubeel, Nubeels, Nabeals… until eventually I landed on Nubeals.
And somehow, that was the one nobody else seemed to want.
It has followed me around the internet ever since and, unusually, tends to still be available wherever I go.
The way I think of it is simply “Nabeel’s” – written in a slightly mangled internet-handle sort of way.
So Nubeals Cooking is essentially Nabeel’s Cooking.
My Instagram handle is @nubeals. In other words: Nabeel’s Instagram. This is Nubeals Cooking. Nabeel’s cooking.
You see what happened.
Nubeals Cooking didn't appear out of nowhere. Before this site existed, I was documenting the food I cook on Instagram as #nubealscooking – plates finished at midnight, the experiments that worked, and the ones that very much didn't. This site is that habit taken seriously: the same cooking, now written down properly, with the reasoning explained.
These are recipes I actually cook.
The older family recipes often began life as handwritten notes while somebody showed me what to do.
Where a quantity or timing needs testing, I would rather admit that cooking requires judgement than invent false precision.
Recipes can also evolve when I find a clearer, faster or more reliable way to achieve the same result.
Weights are in grams because grams do not lie. Where a cup measurement is genuinely reliable, I give it. Where it is not – dried pulses, chopped herbs, anything that packs unevenly – I say so instead of inventing a number.
Most recipes tell you to bhoono the masala and move on. I would rather tell you what bhoono means, what it looks like when it has happened, and why it matters. Same with tarka, salan, atta, roti and tawa. Cooking someone else's food shouldn't require you to already know the words.
Use the contact page. I read everything, even if replies are slow.
A homestyle Pakistani dish of minced meat and potatoes cooked with red onions, tomato, yoghurt and simple spices until the qeema is savoury, the potatoes are tender and the finished dish is moist rather than saucy.
My Lahore-style safed lobia: a mild, naturally vegan Pakistani salan of tender black-eyed peas cooked with red onions, tomato and simple spices. Made for roti or rice.
