Giant Couscous with Preserved Lemon, Chargrilled Onion, Halloumi and Herb Dressing

Despite the long title, this is a really simple and delicious vegetarian supper dish.  It's full of punchy flavours and I've also found it pretty adaptable.  It's another great recipe from Waitrose, this time from their weekly free newspaper.  About once a year I make a jar of preserved lemons, so it's nice to find another way to use them, aside from the predictable tagine.

Giant Couscous with Preserved Lemon, Chargrilled Onion, Halloumi and Herb Dressing

150g giant wholewheat couscous
1 tsp cumin seeds (I omit these as I don't like cumin)
1/2 Preserved Lemon, skin only, shredded
1 clove garlic, crushed
50g pistachios, roughly chopped (I've also tried cashews when I'd run out of pistachios - worked fine, it's the texture you're after)
20g pack dill, leaves roughly chopped
25g pack flat leaf parsley, leaves roughly chopped
(NB I've subbed basil and coriander for the above herbs, was delicious)
4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
Juice of ½ lemon, plus extra to taste
2 tsp pomegranate molasses
1 bunch salad onions, trimmed
1 green chilli
250g Halloumi
2 tbsp pomegranate seeds (never bothered with these, they're just a garnish)
½ tsp sumac (likewise - optional)

1. Rinse the couscous in a sieve under cold running water and tip into a medium saucepan. Cover with fresh water, add a pinch of salt and bring to the boil. Simmer for 7-8 minutes or until tender. Drain, refresh under cold water and leave to drain well. Place into
a large mixing bowl.

2. Add the cumin seeds (if using) to a dry pan and toast over a medium heat for 1 minute, until browned and aromatic. Remove and grind to a powder using a pestle and mortar then tip into the couscous bowl with the preserved lemon, garlic, pistachios, dill, parsley, all but 2 tsp olive oil, the lemon juice and pomegranate molasses to the bowl. Mix to combine.

3. Warm a frying pan over a medium heat until smoking hot. Coat the salad onions with the remaining oil and cook along with the whole chilli for 4-5 minutes until charred. Cut the salad onions into thirds and the chilli in half, discarding the seeds. Chop the chilli and add to the couscous.

4. Cut the halloumi into thick slices, brush with oil and cook on the hot griddle for 2-3 minutes until golden on both sides. Cut into bitesize pieces and place on top of the couscous. Season and add more lemon juice if needed. Spoon into a serving dish and scatter with pomegranate seeds and sumac just before serving.

Brown Rice with Chorizo and Egg

I don't tend to buy many food magazines, but somehow I seem to accumulate piles of cut out recipes.  We pick up the free Waitrose magazine every month which always seems to have lots of lovely things to cook, and this, coupled with recipes I snip out of newspapers, or photograph from friends' cookbooks means I feel like I'm fighting a losing battle to keep them organised. 

So I've decided to use this blog to keep a record of the ones we've cooked, enjoyed, and would like to make again.  This should mean I don't need to keep so many bits of paper around the kitchen...  we will see how that goes!  Some blog posts might have photos to accompany them, but many won't.

Anyway, here is a lovely 'midweek' recipe that I found in the Waitrose magazine last month.  It's really versatile because you can add in any ingredients that need using up (at this time of year I like/need to throw in a chopped courgette to pretty much anything that I make!).

Brown Rice with Chorizo and Egg

Serves 2

125g chorizo (about half a Lidl chorizo), chopped
8 (or more) cherry tomatoes, halved
1 tsp hot smoked paprika, plus extra to serve
2 garlic cloves, crushed
250g cooked brown rice (the recipe says to use a packet of ready cooked, I cook my own)
100g green beans, chopped (or any other green veg - courgette especially)
2 tbsp chopped dill (I subbed this with basil)
2 eggs (recipe says soft-boiled and halved, I found it quicker/easier to fry them)
2 spring onions, trimmed and sliced

In a large frying pan, cook the chorizo for 5 minutes, or until golden brown - it releases plenty of oil so you don't need to add any.

Add the cherry tomatoes and cook for a further 2 minutes.

Stir in the paprika and garlic and cook for another minute or so, until fragrant.

Tip in the rice and beans, season with a little salt and add a splash of water.  Cover with a lid, turn to the lowest heat and cook for 5 minutes until the beans are tender.

Fold in the dill (or other herb), top with the egg (softboiled or fried - poached would work too), and scatter over the spring onions with extra paprika if wanted.

My husband likes this served with extra chilli sauce.

Slow-Roast Asian Chicken

A while back, whilst still in the UK, I picked up a free recipe leaflet in Waitrose.  One of the recipes included was for a slow-roast Asian chicken.  We went through a phase of cooking it often, but then stopped as it slipped our minds and other recipes were discovered.

However, since being in Brunei we're finding that chicken is our main source of protein and we're eating it a lot.  We had a sudden flashback to this chicken recipe, but as our shipping from the UK (including all my recipe books...) has yet to arrive - and I couldn't find the recipe online - I had to work from memory.

Fortunately it worked - better than worked, it was even nicer than we had remembered it!  The key to its success is, I think, the addition of toasted sesame oil.  Be sure to buy toasted as it has the most incredible flavour - the untoasted oil is bland in comparison.  Of course when we were searching for it here, none of the sesame oils were labelled as 'toasted' but we went for one labelled 'fragrant' and it was perfect.

Here - again from memory! - is what you do.

Slow Roast Asian Chicken

Ingredients:

1 whole chicken
an inch of ginger root, sliced (don't bother to peel it)
6 cloves of garlic (just slightly crushed, no need to peel)
3 star anise
2 onions
250ml chicken stock (from concentrate) - or just boiling water
2 or 3 tsp toasted sesame oil

Slice the onions and place them in the bottom of a roasting tray.

Place the chicken on top of the onions, and put the slice ginger, garlic cloves and star anise inside the cavity of the chicken.

Pour over the hot chicken stock - or boiling water.

Tent the chicken with foil and place into a low oven (150C - lower for a fan oven) for about 3 hours.  A little longer won't hurt at all, that's the joy of slow-roasting.

Half an hour before you want to serve it, remove the foil, drizzle over the sesame oil and turn the oven up to 190 degrees C.  Put the chicken back in the oven for half an hour or so, until the skin is burnished and crispy.

Serve with plain rice and a vegetable of your choice.  We like to shred cabbage finely and then steam it with a very small amount of water.  When still al dente we strain it and stir through a chopped chili and a teaspoon of sesame oil.

OK, it's not beautiful - far from it!  I forgot to even take a photo until I had served it up, hence it looks like it's been in a fight.  But it's what it tastes like that matters, and this tastes great.

A spoonful or so of the flavourful juice made this meal complete.  And it made enough for 2 evening meals for the 2 of us.  Simple and delicious!

In Defence of Foraging

Waitrose is the UK's 'posh' supermarket.  I don't often shop there - largely because my nearest one is about half an hour's drive from home, and not on my daily commuting route - but I really enjoy popping in when I find myself in the vicinity of a store.  Although some of the products in Waitrose verge on the scurrilously expensive, it does have an excitingly wide range of stock that you simply don't find in Tescos.  There also seems to be a strong sense of ethics behind the running of the chain, of which I thoroughly approve.

Last week I found myself in Waitrose in Berkhamsted and bought a few little excitements, not least being a copy of the excellent 'Waitrose Food Illustrated' magazine which, as ever, is full of mouth-watering recipes and interesting articles.  (Incidentally, all the recipes from the magazine can be found online here, which is a fantastic resource for cooks looking for inspiration).

One article in this month's magazine really caught my eye.  Written by Tim Hayward and entitled 'Fruits of the Forage?' it is a scathing attack on what he sees as the modern middle class obsession of foraging for food. 

Foraging appeals to the middle classes at a visceral level he begins.  It must be the sense of woolly, green wellbeing, plus the knowledge that they're distinguished from the masses.

He goes on to attack the Yummy Mummy (how I detest that phrase!) he recently spotted picking nettles along the Regent's Canal towpath in a posh area of London, and then the Boden-clad locusts... stripping our endangered hedgerows in the countryside.  (Note to Waitrose: way to go, attacking your core consumer base of Boden-clad yummy mummies..!) 

Now whilst I tend to agree that anyone foraging in a city close to the bars and restaurants of a busy high street possibly deserves all they get (Hayward informed the hapless woman that the previous night he had witnessed a group of drunken city-boys pissing in the very nettles she was lovingly picking for soup) I found the tone of the article pretty patronising... not to mention wrong!

I enjoy foraging because I think that it is a way of getting back to more traditional ways of eating.  Our 21st century norm of plastic-encased, imported food means we have moved away from the idea of seasonality in our diets, and I love the idea of eating what is in season. 

I can't deny that I also like the idea of getting food for free - but I am under no illusion that I am saving a great deal of money...  after all, you may spend a happy half hour foraging for nettles for your soup, but when you consider that you will have paid for the other ingredients - potato, stock, milk, seasoning, cream - it's hardly a 'free meal'. (OK, it's a cheap meal, but then most soups are). 

But you are saving some money.  Buying enough fruit for jam is expensive, so using things like foraged cherries, blackberries and apples make jam and chutney-making a pretty economical option, never mind the fact that it's nice to know exactly what you're eating because, well, you made it yourself. And why on earth, when you live close to the countryside as I do, would you BUY a punnet of blackberries in the supermarket when the hedgerows are full of them?!

It's also a great way of eating things that you would never normally get to eat as they're rarely available to buy.  Hayward quotes chef Rowley Leigh saying: The idea of going out, picking wild leaves and saying they're delicious when in reality they have a nasty, feral taste is nonsense.  Yes, that would be nonsense, but who could argue that Wild Garlic has a 'nasty, feral taste'??  That's something that can only be foraged.  Elderflowers, rosehips, elderberries and crab apples also come in this category, and I'd hate to be without them in my kitchen. 

Hayward's story of author Nicholas Evans serving foraged mushrooms (thinking they were chanterelles) to his dinner guests who then all ended up on kidney dialysis for 2 weeks is a salutary tale, but not one that need label all foraging as 'daftness'.  Personally I'll leave the fungus-gathering to the experts - I'm happy to just photograph them - but if I made the effort to identify them I'd certainly give it a try.

 Yes, there are things that I probably won't bother with again - hawthorn berries, green walnuts (although I have yet to sample either the toxic-looking liqueur or the equally frightening looking pickled walnuts, so maybe I shouldn't judge too hastily...) - but isn't life dull if you don't try new things every now and again?  And surely the chance of creating something utterly delicious from foraged treasures is worth the occasional less-than-stellar result.

So I will continue foraging unashamedly, and encouraging others to do so too. It's just so much fun - and often extremely tasty!