Couscous is a common dish in East Africa and the Middle East. It is made mainly of semolina. It can also be wheat or barley groats finely ground. Couscous dishes, the recipes of which we give below, have the same name, often with a mention of the secondary component. It can be vegetables, mushrooms, fish, meat, seafood and even dried fruits. This dish is traditional for
the Maghreb countries. Prepare it in broth or water. Couscous, the recipe of which does not require cooking, is simple and quick. It is enough to grind the grains with butter, pour hot liquid and leave for several minutes under the lid. The second method of cooking is steaming. It is traditional. As a result, couscous is more crumbly. Basically, we sell ready-made semi-finished couscous (the recipe for cooking is identical to the first). Add a little lemon juice - and we have a great side dish. In this article we will tell you how to cook couscous on your own. A recipe with a photo and a detailed description can be found below.
First, let's make a green salad with couscous - Tabule. We need two hundred grams of couscous, parsley, iceberg lettuce (about one hundred grams), equal proportions of mint and green onions, two tomatoes, the same amount of sweet pepper and cucumbers, as well as olive oil, lemon juice and spices to taste . In this case, cook couscous for a couple. If there is a double boiler - excellent! But for lack of such, you can build a steam bath and cook on it (cooking time - about 20-30 minutes). You can just pour half-prepared couscous with hot water or broth.
Mix the mass thoroughly with a spoon. Then it should be stretched by hand, so that the couscous is loose. Sprinkle everything with lemon juice, mix. Finely chop the greens, cut the vegetables into small cubes, and lettuce can simply be torn. We combine all the components, salt, pepper and season with a mixture of olive oil and lemon juice. Done!
The next dish is sweet couscous. The recipe is pretty straightforward. So, take five hundred grams of couscous, one hundred and fifty grams of raisins, butter - fifty grams. Sugar, ground cinnamon - to taste. Again, cook the couscous for a couple. We put raisins in water in advance so that it swells. Then add oil to couscous and mix with raisins. Then sprinkle the mass with cinnamon and sugar. You can replace the latter with honey. Mix and serve. Enjoy your meal!
Couscous, the recipe of which we present below, is a full-fledged dish. We need 250 g of couscous, 300 ml of broth, 2 zucchini, 1 eggplant, 1 sweet red pepper, red onion - 1 piece. And also 4 cloves of garlic, 300 ml of olive or sesame oil, fresh mint, salt and pepper to taste, 1 tsp. caraway seeds and juice of one lemon. Zucchini, onions and eggplant are cut into rings, sprinkled with salt so that they let juice, and then washed. Cut the pepper into cubes. Mix two tablespoons of oil with finely chopped garlic, onion rings and caraway seeds. Preheat the oven to two hundred degrees and bake vegetables for about twenty minutes. Pour couscous with hot vegetable broth and leave for ten minutes under the lid.
Meanwhile, mix the remaining oil with minced mint, garlic, zest and lemon juice. Pour the prepared vegetables into the resulting sauce, and then put them on couscous. This dish can be diversified by the addition of minced chicken. Ready minced meat or finely chopped chicken fillet, salt, pepper, sprinkle with lemon juice. Leave to marinate for ten to fifteen minutes. After fry over high heat until a golden crust forms. Let’s sweat under the lid for about twenty minutes - done!