Ahh July. I am loving the heat! How is your week going? Mine is going swimmingly. There’s been a happy hour at my favourite theatre/bar, a dinner with the extended family, lots of sunshine and heat, and some planning of upcoming travels. Happy days. Oh except for the pain beyond belief I am experiencing from strength training which I am trying to get back into. It hurts to sit down. And stand up. Oh, and to walk. Normal?
And here I am back with more grain salad action. It’s just necessary at the moment, okay?
We had a fridge/pantry cull and inventory when we got back from Ashland the other day. Highly recommended. We definitely found some questionable friends in the depths of our fridge! I won’t give you details. Trust me, you don’t want them. Now we know what we have and how we’re going to use it. Case in point: we have a lot of chickpeas and an unholy number of red onions. The result:
Moroccan Chickpea Couscous Salad
adapted from MediterrAsian Cooking
- 1 cup quick-cooking couscous
- 1/4 – 1/2 cup raisins
- 1 1/4 cups boiling chicken or vegetable stock
- 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
- juice of 1 lime/lemon (lemon would actually probably work better but we had a lime on hand and it worked just dandily)
- 1 clove garlic – minced
- 1 teaspoon ground cumin
- 1 teaspoon ground coriander
- 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 carrot – grated
- 1/2 green or red pepper – finely diced
- 1/4 red onion – finely diced
- 1 cup chickpeas
- Mix the couscous with the raisins in a bowl and pour over the boiling stock.
- Cover with a lid and let sit for 5 minutes.
- Place the oil, lime juice, garlic, spices, and salt in a jar with a screw-top lid and shake to mix.
- Fluff the couscous with a fork to separate the grains and stir through the carrot, pepper, onion, and chickpeas.
- Pour over the dressing and toss together until well combined.
This makes a great dinner (plenty of protein from those chickpeas and grains) or a lovely side dish for whatever you’re grilling. Healthy and awesome!
The original recipe for this called for red pepper, not green. Well, I don’t know about you but it’s hard for me to swallow spending $6 a pound on red peppers. In fact, I think it’s outrageous! They’ve become a special treat so green it was…
And why is this Moroccan I hear you ask. The spices – cumin, ginger, coriander – are pretty standard fare in Moroccan dishes (along with cinnamon, mmmm).
This was a big win and a great compliment to the falafel and hummus we made the night before.
When was the last time you had a pantry inventory/cull? Were you surprised by what you found?
