Delightful (and easy) Couscous

I (Emily) have liked cous cous for a long time. It's a nice break from pasta and rice, and it lends itself super well to the Middle Eastern palette as well as to quickly-fashioned dinners. Couscous is also pretty cheap if bought in bulk. I get mine at the Seward Co-op, and I know Trader Joe's has boxes of it. Much of this recipe was a result of improvisation, so feel free to adjust proportions/veggies based on what you've got. And don't let the long ingredients list fool you, because the actual process is quite simple. Enjoy!

Ingredients

For the Couscous

• 1- 1 1/2 cups whole wheat couscous
• 1- 1 1/2 cups water and/or veggie broth
• dash salt
  
• 1 TBS butter

For the Veggies:

• A drizzle of olive oil
• 1/2 red onion, sliced or diced
• 1/2 pepper, sliced or diced
• 2-4 cloves garlic, chopped small
• 1 cup chickpeas, canned or rehydrated and boiled
• a handful of parsley, roughly chopped
  
• a sprinkling of sesame seeds
• a dash of hyssop, if you've got it
• 1-3 TBS tahini paste
• 2-3 generous squirts of lemon juice
• 1/3- 2/3 cup veggie broth, for simmering purposes
• a handful or two of fresh spinach
• salt and pepper to taste

For the top:

• a handful of kalamata olives, sliced
• crumbled feta cheese to taste
  

Procedure

• Boil the water or broth, along with the butter and salt, in a medium saucepan. Once it's boiled, add the couscous, stir remove from the heat, and let it sit, covered, for five minutes.
• Drizzle the olive oil into a skillet and cook the red onion over medium heat until it softens.
  
• Add the pepper, garlic, chick peas, sesame seeds, hyssop, and lemon juice and cook for a little while, until the ingredients are warm and the pepper is starting to be a little less firm.
• Pour in the broth and mix in the spinach. Now just let it simmer for awhile, adding the lemon juice and parsley as you like.
• Once everything is softened to your satisfaction, and most of the broth has been absorbed or evaporated, season to taste. Then mix the veggies into the cooked couscous, along with the tahini.
• Serve topped with sliced olives and feta.

Greek-Stuffed Eggplant

So this dish came strictly from necessity; I had an eggplant in my possession the night before returning to Georgia for Christmas and knew that it wasn't going to last the break. I decided to bake it, thinking that it'd be easy enough to make it into eggplant pasta or something, but then I realized that I had half a red onion and some feta too and started just kinda experimenting. The results were far superior to what I'd anticipated. Amounts are approximate, and I'm sure this could be easily doubled.

Greek-Stuffed Eggplant

Ingredients

• 1 medium eggplant(or any size, really), sliced in half lengthways and salted(if you don't know how to salt an eggplant, see my post on eggplant pasta from the summer)
• A few TBS olive oil
• 1/2 red onion, sliced thinly
• a generous slosh of lemon juice
• 2-4 TBS tahini (which can be easily home-made, it turns out!!)
• 1 huge clove garlic (or a couple little ones)
• 2 tsp dried oregano
• 1-2 handfuls of parsley, chopped or ripped into little bits
• 1/4-1/3 cup feta cheese crumbles
• salt and black pepper to taste

Procedure

• Heat the oven to 400°F
• Put the salted eggplant onto a well-oiled baking sheet and coat both sides in more oil. You don't have to go overboard, but make sure the eggplant doesn't stay dry. Bake the eggplant until it's brown and slightly crispy on the edges-- 30-45 minutes. You'll probably want to flip the eggplant once.
• Heat olive oil in a skillet and saute the onion and oregano over medium heat until they're soft. The slower you do this, the better it'll probably taste. (This was the point in my evening when I was going "Oh geez, I have a lot of stuff to use up. Umm...let's get this side dish going and figure out what to do with the eggplant when it's done," so I was stalling for time a bit). Add the garlic, lemon juice, and parsley, and stir in the tahini.
• Once the eggplant comes out of the oven, wait a minute for it to be cool enough to handle, and then scoop out the innards. Do this carefully, so you don't go right through the skin. I used a spoon to get out most of it, then pulled out the rest with a butter knife, but whatever works for you. Throw the pulp into the skillet with everything else and mix it in well, chopping it into smaller pieces with a spoon.
• When everything's nicely incorporated, and you've thrown in some salt and pepper and whatever other seasonings you like to taste, scoop the whole mix back into the eggplant shells. Sprinkle the tops with the feta crumbles and more tahini (if you like) and then let it bake at 350°F for about 10-15 minutes, then broil for 2-3 minutes more (broiling is scary, so watch it carefully or it'll burn!)
• I ate mine just as it was, but I'm sure a spinach salad with kalamata olives would have made it even better.
  

Happy New Year, all!

Mmmm Scones!

Well, we're finally back. It's been a pretty busy couple of weeks. I (Emily) started my job and Iain's been going crazy trying to find a place for us to move into come September 1. But he did and we've signed a lease and it's going to be fantastic. It's got a great kitchen, anyway.

So while we have been cooking/baking quite a bit (expect a post soon with some brief descriptions of our latest adventures), we haven't found much time to blog about it.

Anyway, last weekend I thought it would be lovely to make some scones. We'd let some milk go close to sour and so I figured it would be good to buttermilkify it. We had most of a lemon sitting around too, so I decided that traditional lemon-buttermilk scones were probably the way to go. That thought was gone, however, as soon as we opened the cupboards. We were, shall we say, low on some essential ingredients. So the planned breakfast quickly morphed into a baking adventure that resulted in, incredibly enough and to my great delight...

Lemon Chai Scones

Now, before we get started I would like to stress, once again, that this was a baking adventure. I did not follow a recipe while actually cooking, although I did consult a couple of generic scone recipes. Thus, the ingredients and procedure are approximate, nothing was recorded until after the fact, and I cannot guarantee that if you follow this to the letter you'll get the same results I did. I was, however, shocked by how great these turned out! The flavors melded really well, the whole wheat flour added nice texture and depth, and as far as nutrition and scones go these are pretty decent. So I do recommend giving these a try, particularly if you enjoy chai. Ingredients

• 1 cup flour
• 1.5 cups whole wheat flour
• 1/4 - 1/3 cup white sugar
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 - 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 TBS chai powder *note* One of my friends gave me a small bag of this 'chai powder' for my birthday. According to the website of the company it's from, the ingredients are: sugar, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, vanilla and black pepper. If you can't find any where you are, you can probably try mixing it yourself.
• cinnamon sugar to taste
• 1/2 stick (4 TBS)butter.
• 3/4 c. buttermilk
• juice and zest of half a lemon

Procedure

Pre-heat the oven to 350°F.

As with most muffins, start by stirring together the dry ingredients-- in this case the flours, sugar, baking powder, salt, chai powder, and cinnamon sugar.

Cut in the butter. If you aren't familiar with this term, it means slicing the butter into little chunks and then using two knives to cut it into smaller bits (aiming for the size of peas, more of less) and incorporating it into the dry ingredients. If you have a pastry cutter, that's easier, or you can throw it into a food processor and have it done in twenty seconds, but I really enjoy the manual work.

Pour the buttermilk, lemon juice, and zest into the dry mix. If you're so inclined you can mix the wet ingredients together first-- it would probably help. But I was lazy so I didn't. Also, a note on buttermilk. I don't think I've ever actually bought it, because you can sub in sour milk, and you can actually make milk into sour milk by adding one teaspoon of vinegar for every cup of milk you want to buttermilkify. It sounds strange, I know, but it really does work. It might not have the same delicious flavor as buttermilk, but chemically it works well (and it certainly doesn't taste bad).

Bake for 25 minutes, more or less.

Lemon-Chai Glaze

I decided to throw this on top just for fun, and also because we still had a quarter of a lemon left. And also because I was already deep into baking adventure mode and we're trying to use up ingredients before we move. Anyway....

Ingredients

• 1/4 lemon, juiced
• chai (liquid this time. I had some chai tea I'd iced in the fridge and just poured some in. Probably a couple of tablespoons. But it's all a matter of proportions with this stuff so I won't try to give exact measurements)
• Powdered sugar (same deal as chai).

Procedure
Combine the ingredients and stir/whisk thoroughly until a good pouring/spreading consistency is reached. This is where it gets super subjective, because it comes down to individual taste/texture preferences. Personally, I used probably no more than a few tablespoons of liquid and well over 2 cups of powdered sugar. Others might take that even further and use 4 cups of sugar for that amount of liquid. Others might want something thinner. So just mess around. Add liquid slowly and taste the glaze to make sure it doesn't taste like pure sugar. After the scones have cooled a little, spoon (or spread, depending on the consistency) the glaze on top. Enjoy!


So that'll do it for now. But expect a post from Iain soon regarding a particular Italian-inspired adventure. G'night, everybody!