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February 20, 2005
Cool as a Cucumber
Recipe: Cucumber Couscous
Ingredients:
1 chicken sausage, cooked, teriyaki flavor
1/2 tomato, diced
1/4 cup white wine vinegar
1/4 cup cucumber, diced
1/4 cup cheddar cheese, diced
1 cup dry couscous
1 1/2 tbsp dill
1/2 tbsp basil
salt, pepper
Directions:
- Brown chicken sausage in a little bit of olive oil in a 1 quart saucepan.
- Add tomato, vinegar and 1/2 tsp salt plus pepper to taste. Cook until vaguely sauce-like.
- Add 1 cup water and bring to boil.
- Remove from heat, add couscous and stir until evenly mixed. Cover completely.
- After 4-5 minutes, fluff couscous with a fork, add cucumber, cheese, dill and basil. Stir and let sit until cheese has melted slightly.
- Serve and enjoy.
Many people see couscous as a side dish; over here, I see it as a main course. This is actually one of the better incarnations of a similar formula that I use occasionally for a one-pot meal. Just cook your meat in a saucepan, add veggies and/or season appropriately, then at the proper moment add the water and boil for a little bit before adding the couscous. Frozen veggies added to the water and boiled briefly will add some nice flavor, but obviously fresh vegetables as above will be the best.
By the way, whoever invented the phrase "cool as a cucumber" was spot-on. Cucumbers really are the coolest vegetable. And I'm not just talking temperature :)
Posted by kgutwin at February 20, 2005 06:56 PM
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Comments
Try this with chicken breast. I suspect the teriyaki flavored sausage was pretty strong - they usually are since otherwise they would be very bland (the chicken they use is pretty tasteless).
I'd suggest you avoid prepared food (like the chicken sausage) as you're experimenting with flavors. It's very difficult to control how the chemical flavoring will affect the overall taste.
As an aside, couscous is a pasta - and you can get equally dramatic effects by sautéing cooked pasta (spaghetti, ziti, etc.) with flavor agents as you did above. You need to be careful, as the bulk of the spaghetti can make the prep pretty unmanageable. What you're going for is cooking the flavor into the pasta. That’s why you always want to put pasta sauce on very hot pasta, but ideally a few seconds sautéing the pasta and sauce produces a significantly different flavor.
Posted by: Paul Gutwin at February 21, 2005 09:50 PM