Cous Cous Is A Great Start

For a quite interesting meal. Couscous is a mostly North African food, made from ground semolina wheat, and can be cold-soaked or steamed or cooked similarly to rice. The semolina flour is processed into fine grains. There’s also an “Israeli” version where it’s rolled into pearls about the size of baby peas. You can do almost as much with couscous as you can with rice, so it’s the carb basis for many meals.

Breakfasts into Dinners

The Turks make a meal of a bed of couscous with roasted vegetables, poached eggs, and capsicum oil, and I’ve often riffed off that tune to make dinner for us. Why I like this is the flexibility, it looks and smells fantastic, and the flavours are off the leash. I can use leftover vegetables and meats, a few simple additional dishes, and the result is something that’s always slightly different and interesting, and always a hit with my spouse.

Last night (and I so wish I’d taken time to do a few reasonable food photos but unfortunately strapped for time) I tried something different and tried to make the couscous in the rice cooker. (I have stuff in the relevant section, there are gotchas)

So last night’s well generous meal for two used:

Couscous
1c small-grain couscous
2c water or stock, divided
(optional) diced red onion
(optional) chopped chives or spring onions

Basics
1 small red bell pepper char-grilled (or as I did, buy a jar of char-grilled pepper)
1/2c semi-dried tomatoes
small salad for two
roast or steamed vegetables
4 poached, or semi-hardboiled, or boiled eggs, whole or quartered

Options
roast chicken portion for shredding
short cut bacon wrapped around asparagus or cornichon and roasted
Greek yoghurt
capsicum oil or olive oil
red onion
olives ad lib

Making it is all things optional – I generally leave everything to get cold and serve warm couscous.

The Salad
I quartered and sliced a medium tomato, several baby Lebanese cucumbers, some red onion, sprinkled a pinch of salt and the juice of half a lemon over, tossed it, set aside, and later added small spinach leaves and a splash of olive oil and tossed again.

The capsicum (red bell pepper)
If making from scratch hold directly over flame and turn frequently until the skin blisters and chars, set aside until cool then slip the skin off, split in half and remove pith and seeds, divide the charred capsicum as required. (Or do as I did and buy a small jar from the supermarket – there is no judgement.)

Roast vegetables
Carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, parsnips – any high flavour vegetables will do here. You don’t need much of each, hence leftovers are good here. I had none so I peeled and sliced a large carrot and a few fresh green beans and put them in with the eggs for the last five minutes. (I washed the eggs before cooking, and salted the water so the veg are clean)

Either way, just prepare the vegetables in small bite sized pieces.

Bacon bites
I had a few slices of shortcut bacon and a jar of cornichon gherkins, so I rolled two pickles apiece lengthways in each slice of bacon and pinned then with two half toothpicks and roasted them at 180C for eleven minutes, turning after six minutes, then set aside to cool.

The couscous

Normal Mode:
Couscous is simple – unless you’re trying a new technique. I’ve always done it in a saucepan, 1c couscous to 1.5c liquid, if using water I add a pinch of salt, place over low-medium heat and stir, once it starts to thicken take off the heat and let stand. My kitchen’s had a revamp and now has an electric range that I find annoying so I’ve put a “noodle board” over it and rarely use the top cooker elements. So I decided to try doing this in my small rice cooker (0.7litre, just one cup of rice dry, should have bee perfect for this – right?) instead.

Overconfident Mode:
I made mistakes. Firstly, I put the couscous and chicken stock in ahead of time so I could just push the button and go when I needed to. Why was it a mistake? Remember I said you could cold soak couscous? It absorbed all the stock while it was set aside, and rice cookers are simple things, once the temperature goes over 105C or something, they switch to the warming mode.

Since all the liquid had been absorbed, there was no water down the bottom of the pot to hold the temperature below 100C, so it heated up rapidly, and switched to warming mode. Result was the couscous was cold soaked except for the very bottom layer.

Fixing Overconfident Mode:
All a but hard I reckon, you’d have to put the liquid into the rice cooker and let it come to the boil, manually switch over to warming mode, and trickle the couscous in, close the lid, and turn the rice cooker off. A lot of mucking about, but if you’re stuck for that one pot and burner, this would work.

Smart Mode:
I finished this up in Smart Mode. I put the couscous into a heatproof non-metallic bowl (a sutiably-sized pyrex one) and added a splash more stock, them microwaved on 50% setting for two minutes, pausing halfway through to stir it with a spoon and then stir it again once the time had finished. I don’t know why I didn’t do this from the start.

The Add-Ins:
I usually add things like small diced tomato, small diced onion, or whatever takes my fancy. In this case, I’d been using one smallish red onion in various ways so a tablespoon or so of diced red onion went in with the couscous to cook along with it. Like I said, I love how I can adlib with ingredients with this dish.

Serving

You can do this multiple ways, from making up individual plates, making up a serving platter with everything arranged on top of couscous, or a bowl of couscous to serve oneself from, and the other ingredients on a platter or multiple serving bowls.

I use the separate platter method most often, and did that this night.

Starting from about ten o’clock I quartered a few more baby cukes lengthways and lightly sprinkled salt over them, the same with a few rings of red onion, then added the steamed vegetable slices, some chargilled pepper, a portion of shredded chicken breast at three o’clock, sundried tomato, haloumi cheese thinly sliced, peeled four eggs and placed them in the centre then surrounded them with green pitted olives, and laid the bacon roll-ups over the top of everything.

The bowl of couscous, bowl of salad, and the platter were provided with tongs and spoons for serving. You can drizzle olive oil or capsicum oil over the couscous, or a squeeze of lemon – all to preference – and even serve with some crusty bread and butter. (Our green pitted olives were anchovy-stuffed, for example. The are not many rules to this dish. Flavour, colour, texture. )

Hope you enjoy your version of this meal if you decide to make it, please like this page and share it, and go to the very bottom of the page and use the donation links to make a small donation, it’s really appreciated!