Oh My Goddess Couscous

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Brian and I threw this pearl couscous salad together for an infomercial tomorrow. Super easy and super delish.

Ingredients:
1 pkg Pearl/Israeli couscous
1/2 cup chopped marinated artichoke hearts
1 marinated red pepper chopped
1 can garbanzo beans
1/2 cup sliced black olives
1/4 cup Trader Joes Goddess dressing
Splash of white balsamic vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste.

In a pan melt a tbsp of butter or earthbound. Toast the dry couscous until lightly golden. Add water and boil until tender and water is absorbed.

Toss all together and serve warm or cold. Enjoy!!


- Posted from Craftlandia

Roast Chicken and Persimmon Fennel Walnut Couscous

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Episode 3 is here!!

After reading Denise from Denise's Kitchen and BayAreaBites' recipe for fuyu persimmon couscous I was desperate to make it an episode. But you know how I can't possibly make things easy on myself, so I decided to also roast my first clucker. Yes, that's right, I have NEVER roasted a chicken. I was downright frightened of the whole process. After watching Julia Child's chicken episode I wasn't sure if I'd be able to manage, what with all the trussing and stuffing. Sewing a bird?! Gross.



Hair pulled back, Whole Foods fryer chicken on the board, I massaged and stuffed that little lady till she was ready for the oven. I've read on some message boards that searing the skin in pan before you roast ensures a crispy skin. INDEED! The skin was flavorful and crispy.

As for the rub, my mother has used Onion Soup mix as a rub for our turkeys for years. I figured, "Why the heck not my little baby bird?" So I rubbed it in Earthbound, salt, pepper, onion soup mix, garlic and fresh thyme. You really can't go wrong with that killer team. I made sure to cook it with the breast side down to make sure I didn't overcook the breast meat.

Chicken safely in oven, on a lid since I have no roasting pan, I set out to make Denise's couscous.
What an easy dish to make. Make sure you chop the fennel and onion small, they will integrate with the couscous grains better. Also the recipe does not specify salt, I would just add what you normally would like, I tend to do the same number of grinds on my salt grinder for every dish, don't know why but it seems to work.

The smells coming from my oven were heavenly. For the first round of basting I didn't have enough juices yet so I made some using Earthbound, bouillon and water. Worked like a charm. Subsequent bastings had enough juice, so I kept using what was collecting on my little lid. Once the chicken was brown and crispy I figured it was done. I will say this, I am buying myself a dang meat thermometer! I did ok without it but I'd rather not risk it in the future. When I took the chicken out of the pan I noticed how the onions had cooked down in the juices and had made an extremely fragrant broth.

Did someone say gravy? I can't even hear the word gravy without thinking of

Tim and Eric's Gravy Robbers sketch.

I transferred the drippings to a pan and heated them with a tablespoon of flour whisked in. The sauce thickened into what I can only call, Gravy from Heaven. This stuff was addictive. My roommate and I kept going back to the gravy pan and grabbing more to drizzle over our chicken and couscous. Mmmmm.....



I will definitely make this again. Yes it cost me about the same as buying the the one that they make in the store, that's what you get when you buy organic, but it was worth the cost to have my entire house smell like roasted chicken and to have the amazing onion drippings for gravy. I hope you give it a shot, and feel free to let me know any of your own tips on roasting a chicken the easy way.

Mediterranean Pearl Couscous with Rustic Tomato Chard

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Now that we have moved on to the letter "C" I can't seem to pick a veggie. With so many delicious choices I decided last night that I wouldn't choose. Couscous and Chard it is. All summer long my roommate and I were obsessed with a pearl couscous salad that we had been making with sun-dried tomatoes and kalamata olives. The great thing about this salad is that you use the juices from each jar to make the dressing. We eat it cold and hot, as a side dish or main course. My roommate added the fried tofu to make it a super filling main dish.

The chard in tomato is super yummy and would go great over pasta or risotto as well as the start of an Italian soup. Chard is so healthy for you, rich in Vitamin K, C, and beta carotene. It's great for bone and lung health, so you smokers should eat up on your chard! For more healthy bennies of chard and other veggies check out World's Healthiest Foods.


INGREDIENTS:

1 1/2 cup pearl couscous
5 julienned sun-dried tomatoes in oil
8 chopped kalamata olives
1 tbs of sun dried tomato oil (from the jar)
1 tbs of kalamata olive jar juice
1 tbs of red wine vinegar
1 pkg firm tofu cubed into small size
1 half red onion chopped
1 bay leaf

1 bunch of red chard de-stemmed and chopped
1 bunch of swiss chard de-stemmed and chopped
1 can of chopped tomatoes
1 half of red onion chopped
3 cloves of garlic chopped
1 tbs of capers
Mrs. Dash- or Italian seasoning

Start with the couscous.
In a pan with a tablespoon of Earthbound butter, salt, and pepper, saute the onions. When the onions are translucent add the couscous and toast the pearls until they are slightly golden.

Add the bay leaf and 1 3/4 cup of veggie stock. I used a Trader Joe vegetable stock pouch. They are amazing. Think the crystal light go-pouches but full of concentrated vegetable bouillon. They are great to keep in the pantry for sauces and soups.
Bring the couscous to a boil and then reduce the heat to simmer and cover. Cook until the water is absorbed. Maybe 15 min or so. Lucky for me my lid is glass so I can just keep looking at it to make sure I don't burn it, which on occasion I still do.

In your frying pan, heat up a tablespoon of the oil from the sun dried tomato jar. Fry the tofu cubes until they are crusty and golden.

Transfer the cubes to a bowl when you are finished.

In your frying pan heat up a tablespoon of olive oil, salt, and pepper. Saute the rest of the chopped onion, garlic and slowly add handfuls of your chard. Keep stirring the chard into your garlic onion mixture so that the garlic doesn't burn. As the chard cooks it will shrink down so that you can add more. Once the last handful of chard has cooked down add your tomatoes and a bit of garlic seasoning or Mrs. Dash.

Continue to cook the chard in the tomatoes with the lid off.

Once your couscous is ready, add the tofu, sun-dried tomatoes, olives, olive juice, tomato oil and red wine vinegar. Toss a few times to mix up.

We decided that the flavors were so good together that we would plate the chard first and then the couscous over with a sprinkling of shredded asaigo. Either way this was fantastic, vegetarian and super healthy.

Barley Risotto Stuffed Roasted Butternut Squash

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It finally decided to be Fall in Los Angeles. Yesterday the dark clouds hovered over the studio where I work, self-indulgently gloomy. This weekend was full of sadness as I went through a painful breakup. Bring on the comfort food! I am so happy that it's Butternut Squash Week so that I can dive into cooking and heal my heart with some deliciously healthy squash soups, casseroles and whatever I can think up. I'm excited about this week's possibilities. Enough of the bummer, let's just get down to it!

Ingredients:
Big ol' B'nut Squash
1 white onion
1 zucchini
1 pear
1 cup barley
1 cup pearl couscous
Vegetable stock
Earthbound or Butter
optional- cooked seasoned ground turkey, McCormick's Chipotle Rub

Preheat the oven to 400.

Cut the squash in half. Good luck with that. I did a terrible job. I thought that I was cutting it in half and quickly saw it was going at an angle and had to readjust my cut. Scoop out the guts.

Spread butter on each half and sprinkle salt, pepper and chipotle rub. As you can see in the pictures, I put the butter on after but when my roommate baked hers last week it came out better having been buttered first.

Put them on a cookie sheet and put those babies in the oven. Bake for about an hour or until it's tender. Mine took maybe 1 1/2 hours.

Chop up your onion, zucchini and pear. The pear was inspired by some soup recipes that I read while researching this week. I figured the sweetness would be a nice touch. I would also add garlic, I forgot and think it would make a nice addition.

Melt some butter and saute your veggies till the onions are getting translucent. At this point I added the barley and couscous but I think that reserving the veggies in a bowl to add later would be better.

Toast the barley and couscous in the pot and then slowly add your vegetable stock. It's just like making a risotto with rice, you add the stock and the grains will give up that starch to become chewy and delicious. A quick word about barley. Barley is rich with fiber and selenium, zinc and vitamin B6. Fiber is great for your digestion and can lower cholesterol and selenium protects us against free radicals and has been linked to slowing or preventing tumor growth. Hurray for barley!

OK. Keep adding vegetable stock to the grains, stirring constantly. The liquid will begin to get cloudy and creamy. I added some bay leaves and thyme leaves at this point for some extra flavor. You can also use the McCormick's French Herb rub I raved about earlier. I also got impatient and added a ton of the stock, but it was all absorbed. Add your veggies back to the pot once the barley starts to get tender.

Once the squash is tender pull it out of the oven and scoop out the squash to create a bowl. Add the removed squash to your risotto. If you aren't vegetarian add some cooked ground turkey or even turkey sausage, a great way to extend the stuffing if you were serving a larger crowd. Put the stuffed squash back into the oven and cook till it's a little crusty. I cut them in half and it was a filling meal.

Notes: I added some extra salt to taste to the risotto once it was done. It's up to you. What I love about this recipe is that you can reinvent it based on what you have around, add mushrooms, wine, or Parmesan, use quinoa or wild rice, or turn the whole thing into a casserole.

Enjoy!

Chicken Stew with Artichoke hearts Over Pesto Couscous

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From Alphabeet Soup

After spending a whopping hour in Whole Foods trying to figure out an Artichoke recipe to start off Artichoke Week, I emerged clutching two giant sacks. In these sacks were artichokes (clearly), rotisserie chicken, canned artichokes in water, herbs, Better Than Bouillon vegetable stock, pesto pearl couscous, freeze-dried porcini mushrooms and canned crushed tomatoes. It was looking like I was making Chicken stew with Artichoke hearts.

First up- chopping up some white onions I had on hand. It was rough work, as I was racing the tears that were building, but got them into my Martha Stewart Dutch Oven. Olive oil, salt, and pepper (the seasoning bff's), all in there, as I saute the onions. I added a last minute cup of chopped carrots and I was in motion. Add some water to the onions and carrots once the onions are translucent or you are going to have a pot full of sadness, believe me I've done that plenty.

With the onions and carrot diligently doing their darnedest in the pot I started at the chicken.

IPhone: check. Speakers: check. Boyfriend's playlist: check. I highly recommend Dr. Dre and Aesop Rock when eviscerating chicken, somehow it just works.

OK back to the foul nature at hand...sorry had to go there. Rip that chicken apart. Problems at work? Issues with the boss? Tell that chicken how it is. TPS Report THIS!! Now you have a bowl of bones and skins and a bowl of meat (minus a few snuck morsels while I work). Oh and if you are like me, you can choose this opportunity to almost dump the entire cutting board of chicken juices, skin pieces and random bones on to the kitchen floor. Luckily, I have a roommate who loves to clean, at least that's what helps me sleep at night.

Add more water and some of the bouillon paste. I think I added about 6 cups of water but basically I filled it half full. Add the chicken carcass and some of the choicest skin pieces, a few sprigs of sage, rosemary and stripped twigs of thyme. (note: I almost posted this without mentioning the 4 cloves of garlic that I crushed with my knife and threw in whole, a nearly tragic omission)

Things are about to start smelling goooood. Really really good. Right about now people will start cycling through the kitchen with their noses in the breeze trying to track down what smells so divine. Roughly chop up the can of artichoke hearts and throw those puppies in along with the mushrooms.

Now it's time for a glass of wine. Let the soup boil down a bit. Let the yummy bones, skin and herbs ooze their flavors into the soup. Once you feel confident that what's in your pot is the straight bizness, with some tongs, remove the chicken bones and herb sticks.

Now we get to dump in that chicken meat and the can of crushed tomatoes.

Almost forgot the cup of red wine, add that here as well. Now your soup might taste a bit too tomatoey at this point. You're sad, I know, but trust me that once it boils down a bit it will mellow out and blend together into a maelstrom of flavor that will put you on your keister. But if you feel like it, throw in some more salt. Keep the lid off the pot. Let the wine cook into the tomato. Tomato and wine are like those irritatingly cute people on the eHarmony website, once they were matched and read each other's profiles it was love. True tomatoey winey love.

Start the couscous so that you have something to do while Tomato and Wine flirt with each other shamelessly. By the time the couscous is cooked you have Chicken Stew with artichokes.

I put a 1/2 cup of the couscous in my bowl, ladled the chunky soup over and finished it off with some freshly grated Parmesan.

Soooo good!! Seriously, I am patting myself on the back for this one.

Bon Appétit y'all!


(ADDITION: already good suggestions!! A shopping list was requested for this. Here goes..)

Ingredients List:
1 can artichoke hearts in water
1 rotisserie chicken
1 large can of crushed tomatoes with basil
8 dried porcini mushrooms soaked in hot water
1 bottle red wine
2 carrots
1 white onion
5 cloves of garlic
1 bunch rosemary, sage and thyme
2 teaspoons bouillon
1 tablespoon olive oil
1-2 tablespoons grated parmesan
salt and pepper to taste

Tools:
tongs
crock pot or dutch oven
wine opener
chef knife
patient roommate