Family Feasts: Lamb with Mougrabieh (Big Couscous)

Here's something I put together the other night that turned out very tasty - Lamb and Mougrabieh (Big Couscous). Couscous is a family favourite, I always pick it up at a bulk foods store in every size they sell it - I love how the texture changes as it gets bigger. The big stuff like this is almost gnocchi-like - a pleasantly chewy texture that makes any meal hearty. 

I remembered to take photos while I was cooking! 

I started by searing the lamb - these are lamb chump chops (one of the cheapest cuts of lamb you can get, I think!), these were pre-marinaded in garlic and lemon. The brand is Campbells - no idea where we got this from, I just fished it out of our chest freezer!

 Then, I looked at what veggies we had on hand - broccoli, leek, carrots and potato as it turned out, so I coarsely chopped these (wanted them to be big chunky bites and not disintegrate, as I intended to let the lamb simmer).

In a second saucepan, I put the couscous on - following the instructions on the packet, I salted the water and let it come to the boil before putting the couscous in. We got this from the Oasis Bakery - so much more than a bakery, I'll talk more about this amazing place in a post soon.


 Then, I added water, stock cubes (Oxo brand) and left it to simmer until the lamb was falling off the bones.

 Just before serving, I strained and added the couscous to the dish, which soaked up all the delicious stock and changed it from a soup to a stew instantly.

This was well received by the hungry hordes, a tasty and filling meal for a cold night.

Family Feasts: Indian Style

For my first post here, I thought I would begin with a home-cooked meal I made for my family: my partners Omega, (my co-author here, and author of Fashion Adjacent) and Anastasia, Mz Anime (Omega's 15y/o daughter) and Tactical Baby (Omega and my 17m/o baby girl). Tactical Baby gets her name from my other blog, Apocalypse Equipped, check it out of that takes your fancy. We have a large household, with two housemates, and one night a week my other daughter, Triceratops Girl (4y/o) so between them, and frequent other visitors (like Anastasia) I like to have a variety of ingredients I can put a meal together out of and tailor for taste and number of mouths, on the fly. This is one such meal:


This is a red lentil dahhl that I put together by simply simmering dry lentils in a pan with water, adding more as it cooked, with a dash of a mixed Indian spice packet a colleague gifted me (it's in Hindi, so I can;t really tell you much about it, but I added it "to-taste" and kept it at the mild end of flavorsome. Once it was mostly cooked, I added dollops of "Smashed Cheese" dip we had gotten from the Oasis Bakery. I let it simmer further, till the cheese heated up, and served it sizzling in the pan.





The second dish was roughly chopped broccoli (stalks included, because I think they are quite tasty, and always try to use all available components of food). I braised this in a pan with rendered bacon fat, and once mostly cooked through, topped with the remains of the fabulous bacon-jam that friends of ours gifted us a while back, and we had been rationing. Tossing the broccoli through the jam coated it, and following deglazing the pan, I returned the brownings to the bowl for added crunchy flavours.

 The purple rice comes in a mix which included regular long-grain rice, split peas and "purple sticky rice" which I treat like wild rice, and generally cook in the microwave, at a 1 cup rice-mix to 3 cups of water ratio. It is a delightful, hearty, sticky dish, slightly sweet, and subtly flavoured. Perfect accompaniment for this meal, I thought.

Lastly, was the pre-marinated Tandoori mix butterflied chicken, (from Safeway), which I grilled. Before grilling, I also re-spiced this with a dry Tandoor spice mix that my same colleague had gifted me, to add to the flavour, and vary it from simply a "store-bought" meal. Butterflying the chicken makes it much easier to cook, I find, especially when getting a bunch of components together at once, whilst not wanting to run the oven. I also like grilling, because of the slight charring you can get to the edges and skin, which harkens back to the authenticity of cooking in a tandoor oven.

We had a lovely meal, no complaints from fussy teenager, and Tactical Baby ate with gusto.