Recipe post: Lemon Couscous
Make plans with your lover to cook an elaborate middle eastern dinner, starring the preserved lemons you put up last month.
Get distracted by pointless meetings all week at work and end up taking work home with you for the weekend.
Show up to your lover's house an hour late, with a half-written slide deck and a broken Powerpoint master template. Narrowly avoid having a complete meltdown over how your virtual desktop display has decided to develop a heretofore unseen bug in which it does not resize to fit your laptop screen, and won't let you view anything useful on the remote screen, and how are you supposed to get the data you need out of the remote server if you can't see or enter commands into your fucking terminal.
Realize that there is no way you are going to make an elaborate multi-course dinner tonight. Stubbornly insist on doing something with the preserved lemons anyway.
Root around in the freezer and find an uncooked hamburger patty and some ground pork. Remember that there's a jar of instant couscous in the pantry. This is enough to improvise with.
Ask your partner to chop up and saute an onion in olive oil while you curse at your virtual desktop software, powerpoint, and yourself for agreeing to give a talk first thing in the morning on Monday.
When the onion is caramelized, add spices to taste and lightly fry them. Ground coriander seed and dried parsley are good choices. Do not add salt at this point, because the lemons are preserved in brine and are very salty. Crumble the hamburger patty and add it and the pork to the onions. Cook until the meat is browned. Dice up a preserved lemon (leaving several remaining in the jar for the elaborate tagine that you are definitely going to make some day that is not today). Add the lemon and a cup or so of couscous to the pan. Lightly toast the couscous in oil, because Mark Bittman says you must never neglect to toast couscous before adding water, regardless of what the instructions on the package of couscous says, and you should never go against Mark Bittman's advice. Except when you should, but toasting the couscous is actually a pretty good suggestion.
Add the couscous, meat, onion, lemon, and all to a pot of boiling water. Turn off the stove and let the couscous rest for several minutes. Marvel at how delicious your half-ass improvised meal turned out to be. Resolve to repeat this experiment, but adding fresh fennel and shaved carrot next time.
comments were made at DreamWidth. You can comment there using OpenID.
Get distracted by pointless meetings all week at work and end up taking work home with you for the weekend.
Show up to your lover's house an hour late, with a half-written slide deck and a broken Powerpoint master template. Narrowly avoid having a complete meltdown over how your virtual desktop display has decided to develop a heretofore unseen bug in which it does not resize to fit your laptop screen, and won't let you view anything useful on the remote screen, and how are you supposed to get the data you need out of the remote server if you can't see or enter commands into your fucking terminal.
Realize that there is no way you are going to make an elaborate multi-course dinner tonight. Stubbornly insist on doing something with the preserved lemons anyway.
Root around in the freezer and find an uncooked hamburger patty and some ground pork. Remember that there's a jar of instant couscous in the pantry. This is enough to improvise with.
Ask your partner to chop up and saute an onion in olive oil while you curse at your virtual desktop software, powerpoint, and yourself for agreeing to give a talk first thing in the morning on Monday.
When the onion is caramelized, add spices to taste and lightly fry them. Ground coriander seed and dried parsley are good choices. Do not add salt at this point, because the lemons are preserved in brine and are very salty. Crumble the hamburger patty and add it and the pork to the onions. Cook until the meat is browned. Dice up a preserved lemon (leaving several remaining in the jar for the elaborate tagine that you are definitely going to make some day that is not today). Add the lemon and a cup or so of couscous to the pan. Lightly toast the couscous in oil, because Mark Bittman says you must never neglect to toast couscous before adding water, regardless of what the instructions on the package of couscous says, and you should never go against Mark Bittman's advice. Except when you should, but toasting the couscous is actually a pretty good suggestion.
Add the couscous, meat, onion, lemon, and all to a pot of boiling water. Turn off the stove and let the couscous rest for several minutes. Marvel at how delicious your half-ass improvised meal turned out to be. Resolve to repeat this experiment, but adding fresh fennel and shaved carrot next time.
comments were made at DreamWidth. You can comment there using OpenID.