Couscous tutorial

I wanted to make something new to show you today. But aside from the fact that the kitchen was a mess anyway, we had a bit of excitement with a pipe that is leaking through the ceiling in the kitchen, which soaked a pile of my homework on the table, and won't be fixed until tomorrow. Yeah.

I'm just grateful that the only casualties to the water damage besides the ceiling was the homework.

So! Because of the aforementioned excitement, I'll post something I meant to put up a week ago anyway.

I am going to show y'all how to steam couscous, without a couscousierre (which is a fancy pot used to steam couscous simultaneously with vegetables or meat). If you do have one, use this tutorial. It is lovely and has pictures.

My husband informed me a long time ago that most Americans make this tasty pasta completely wrong. His family lived in Morocco for a couple years where couscous is a common meal, and traditionally it is steamed and buttered three times. I was always like "dude!" (I call a lot of people dude) "Boiling it is so much easier!" and he was like *sadface* And then I ate couscous in Morocco and am convinced that steaming is the way to go. Boiling yields an almost polenta-like mush, but steaming makes fluffy pasta.

So I won't claim that this is necessarily authentic, but I did base my instructions on directions that my mother-in-law told me, and the Man thought it tasted good. So there you go.

I used 1 cup of couscous, and it yielded enough to serve 2 by itself, or 3 or 4 when served with tagine.


Dry couscous.

This step is optional, but it seemed to help prevent clumping later. Add 1 tsp of olive oil/ cup of dry couscous.

Stir! Traditionally you use your hands, but I used a rice paddle. It worked just fine.

Add a 1/4 cup of water/ cup of dry couscous...

And stir! It has already fluffed up quite a bit, and this will help the steam penetrate in the next step.

In the meantime, boil a few inches of water in a saucepan that you can fit a steamer or a sieve over.

Like this! A sieve this big wouldn't work with any more than a cup of couscous, and I don't own a real steamer. for small amounts, though, this worked fantastically.

steam for 10-15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Dump it out into a bowl and add 1-2 tablespoons of butter. It worked better when I melted the butter, but this was fine too.

Stir until everything is distributed. Add another 1/4 cup of water, and keep stirring.

Return the couscous to the sieve over the pot and steam for another 10-15 minutes.

Add another 1-2 tablespoons of butter to the couscous, and stir. (see? Melted. This was easier then solid butter)

Stirring!

I had some daylight, so here is a slightly dramatic-looking picture of the finished product.

My lovely mother-in-law says that steaming and buttering twice is usually plenty, but you can steam and butter a third time to make it extra-delicious, and to be traditional.


Here's what i put on top of it, but that will be a different post.

mmm, beef and prune tagine.

Chicken Alfredo Sauce

It looks like a fancy romantic dinner. But really those wine glasses are full of white grape juice.
College students totally know how to live :D

I love pasta. Love it a lot. But my repertoire of recipes for homemade pasta sauces was pretty much limited to spaghetti until a couple years ago when I was living "on my own" and started experimenting (the quotes are because I was still technically in student housing and only lived a few miles from my parents).

Because I only ever ordered Alfredo pastas in restaurants, I assumed they would be really complicated to make. As it turns out, it's not hard at all if you are good as whisking.

Recently I tried some sort of 3-cheese Alfredo sauce from a jar and eww. It was not pleasant. I believe that there is such a thing as a tasty Alfredo sauce in a jar, but why try sorting through dozens of brands when making your own is way better?

So here is my recipe/method.

Please note that this is not remotely low-calorie.

Alfredo Sauce:
Makes 2 generous servings

2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour
1/2 cup cream
2/3 cup milk
pinch of salt
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
2 garlic cloves (minced)
1/4 red bell pepper (They cost 2 bucks each.. so I am a little stingy with how I use them)
2-3 mushrooms (I used something that looked like a button mushroom... I am no mycologist)
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 cup cooked chicken (or 1 chicken breast)
fresh basil to taste


First melt the butter over medium heat. This is more like 3 tablespoons. Two would have been better.

Add the flour and whisk immediately or the flour will clump. (if I had used less butter or more flour, this would look more paste-like, which is good)

Add the milk and cream and keep whisking. The flour has a tendency to want to stick to the bottom of the pan, but don't let it or the sauce will never thicken. Anyways, keep stirring until the sauce gets a good bit thicker. That could be 5-10 minutes.

When the sauce has thickened, add the cheese and salt and keep whisking! No need to be too vigorous, but just to keep it from burning.

And this is what it will look like when done. Set aside on warm heat, stirring occasionally, until you are ready to add the "fixings"

In another pan, heat the oil on medium. When pan is heated, add the garlic, sautéing for a minute or two. Also, mince your garlic finer than mine if you don't like chunks or garlic in your pasta.

Add mushrooms, minced Parsley (if you have fresh oregano or basil, use that too!) and stir. I should have added the bell pepper at this point, but I had forgotten and chucked it right into the Alfredo. It tastes a little better when cooked, but it didn't ruin it for me either.
After toasting the ingredients for a minute or two, add them to the Alfredo sauce along with the pre-cooked chicken and stir.

Serve over linguine noodles, and enjoy!


So much better then anything out of a can.

Tomato sauce

When I was about four, I went through one of my (many) picky eater phases. In this particular one, I didn't like pasta sauce and ate my spaghetti noodles plain. Anything with tomatoes was gross and was shunned.

I still don't like raw tomatoes, but I love pretty much anything with cooked tomatoes. Really glad I grew out of that phase.

I use canned tomato sauce all the time when cooking, but homemade tastes a lot better, so I thought I would try making my own.


Pretty much you just need to peel, de-seed, chop, simmer, and puree as much tomato as you would like, but have some pictures of the process anyway!


So to peel tomatoes, cut an "x" on the end, then boil them for about 30 seconds, and then plunge them into ice water. They'll peel easily after that.

Pretend I am using two hands to do this. Also, pretend that this is ice-water. I used about 1.5 pounds, or 5 roma tomatoes.

The next part was too dang hard to photograph. Just cut the peeled tomatoes in half and cut out the middle septum (do you call it a septum in tomatoes?) and pull out the seeds.

Cutting tomatoes over the sink reminds me of my least-favorite part of food prep at my old sandwich-related fast food job. We had to slice tomatoes on this mandoline-like thing that was never sharp enough and sometimes a tomato would explode and get juice and seeds all over my face and clothes and tomato juice kind-of stings.

Does this look like ventricles to anyone else? Ahaha, biologists are weird.

Roughly chop them, and add about a half cup of water. You don't want a lot because the tomatoes have a lot of juice in them.

Bring to a boil then cover and simmer over medium for 10 minutes. Then remove the lid and reduce until enough liquid has boiled off. For me this was about 20 minutes. At some point during this part, squish the fruit with a potato-masher.

This is what it looked like after the 20 minutes of simmering.

So at this point you have tomato sauce that is ready to be used in a recipe that calls for the canned stuff. Or put on pasta if you are a purist. There is enough here for 2 servings.

I like lots of other stuff in my pasta sauce, so I minced half of a red bell pepper, about a third of a yellow onion, a tablespoon of butter (sounds weird but it is good) a splash of vegetable stock, and pepper, oregano, and basil. I let it simmer another 10 minutes, then served with spaghetti noodles and Parmesan.


I have hopes to start a container garden with several kinds of tomato, and then make and can sauce. We will see if that actually happens this summer!