Je Goûterai - I will taste

No. 7: Baked Couscous and Sweet Potato - 14.1.12

Today I really couldn’t be bothered with making something too drastic or anything which required a lot of effort so I thought I could use the simplest thing for my dinner, couscous (food so nice they named it twice!). I’ve seen on Tv a few times that you can bake it after cooking it in boiling water. This recipe is a variation of the article “Five Ways with Couscous - Chicken Breasts with baked couscous” by Nigel Slater, obviously you were meant to use Chicken and baked couscous however I had no chicken and no money for meat so I guess this is my vegetarian version of it :)

Serves 2 and preheat the oven to 180oC

90g Couscous
200ml of chicken stock (if you don’t want to use chicken use veg stock or water flavoured with whatever you like)
a thin slice of butter
5-6 bushy stems of parsley (or whatever you have I guess! I used dried flat leaf)
4 Spring Onions
1 clove of garlic
1 lemon
2 large Chicken Breasts OR 2 Medium or 1 large sweet potato
Dash of Olive Oil

• Start off with the couscous! In a bowl pour the stock over the couscous and let it swell for about 10 minutes! Add the butter in small pieces and stir it in.

• Chop the parsley, spring onions and finely chop the garlic and fold into the couscous. Add the zest of the lemon or lemon juice depending how much you like lemon :) Season with salt and pepper, mix and place in a baking dish. I added a chopped red onion to this as I didn’t have enough couscous and it would help bulk it up!

  At this point the couscous is actually super super tasty, it’s fresh and smells amazing so if you cooked this by itself you could have a lovely side for any dish you wanted.

  

• Sweet Potato Version! At this point I peeled and chopped the sweet potato into cubes. I coated it in a little oil, rosemary, salt and pepper and added on top of the couscous then baked for about 45minutes.

• Chicken Version! Season the Chicken with olive oil, salt and pepper and brown all the sides of the breasts in a frying pan before placing on top of the couscous. Cover it with foil and bake with 45minutes.

I went a bit too wild with the lemon….. but it was quite nice! The flavours of the couscous were really good however (it might have been because I didn’t have enough couscous) baking it didn’t seem to be anything special. It dried it out quite a bit which was okay and some bits had crisped up which were actually pretty nice but overall it wasn’t great! Mainly because the whole dish was quite dry. Maybe if you cooked the couscous separately to the other veg/chicken and make a sauce for the veg/chicken to add more textures and add moisture to the dish instead of just dry the whole way through!