Chickpeas in couscous. Not inspiring! In fact, its almost scary. After our lesson with weird vegetarian food last week with the lentil burgers, we decided that we would get creative with flavours before we even started.
Neither chickpeas nor couscous are foods I grew up with. I bought my first tin of chickpeas only a couple of years ago when I found a recipe for hummus and I LOVE hummus, so I make it often. I don’t think I would recognise un-tinned chickpeas in the shop. I am only on my second box of couscous ever. These are ingredients that are just not in my culinary repertoire. But they are the main ingredients in tonight’s warm salad dinner.
The recipe is simple and quick. Make couscous with stock, add green and yellow peppers, chickpeas and freshly torn or chopped coriander. That’s it. But we decided to take it a bit further and added some dry fried smoked turkey bits and the dish was saved. And really, it was the turkey bits that saved the dish. With them, Son scored the dish at 6/10. Without them he would not have enjoyed the meal. And I am completely in agreement with him. The dish without the turkey would merely be a side dish. And then I would add finely chopped red onion.
I must share something about chickpeas that I thought everyone knew, but apparently not. If you do not wash the chickpeas from the tin, you will fart like a two stroke the next day. So I always make two big holes at the bottom of the tin and run water through it from the top for a few minutes, directly under the tap. If the chickpeas are to be mashed as they are in hummus, add a little cumin; this little spice also does the job of preventing gas attacks the morning after.
We finished off the meal with some leftover trifle which I made yesterday to take to my cousin’s place for desert. I have never been a critical foodie until now, so my trifle has always been a carefree throwing together of swiss roll, sherry, jellies of different colours, tinned fruit cocktail and boxed custard and my results have been uniformly successful. And it has always been a winner with my Boys - that's all that really matters. But this time something just was not right. I could not find swiss roll at Checkers so I stopped off at our local bakery and bought the last one there. I also used some banana bread because one swiss roll was not going to be enough.
The trifle was different. The colour of the bakery’s swiss roll was more mocha and there was cream in the roll and not much castor sugar. While I thought swiss roll is swiss roll (what the heck), I realise now that the secret ingredient to a successful trifle is that mass produced swiss roll with jam in the roll and oodles of castor sugar that you get at supermarkets. It gives a nasal flavour of caramelized vanilla which is the signature to a good trifle in my opinion. Nothing else will do. Now that I am looking at what I do in the kitchen with more care, I will make the jellies up to 400 ml and not the suggested 450 ml in future. This will make the jelly firmer. I will add maraschino cherries (when I can find them) for surprise bursts of flavour (like coins or charms in a Christmas pudding), and I will make the custard myself, making it less runny than the box custard I normally use. Maybe next weekend…
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