A very substantial and vibrant vegetable dish, add an easy protein source such as cheese and chicken and your meal will be complete.
I love to take shortcuts in the kitchen and over the past couple of years I’ve been blitzing things like kale, broccoli, cauliflower etc to create a vegetable ‘crumb’ in the food processor and then I quickly ‘cook’ it by placing it in a colander over a large saucepan and then pouring over boiling hot water from the kettle, squishing out the excess moisture with a spatula and that’s it, veg is ready!
Turmeric & Vegetable Couscous:
You will need / Ingredients:
Knob Butter
250g couscous
1 tsp turmeric
300ml hot stock (vegetable or chicken made up from a cube is fine)
Handful cranberries (optional)
Juice of 1 lemon
Handful pumpkin seeds
6 sweet baby peppers or 1 red pepper
1 cucumber
2 spring onion
1 head broccoli
Method:
Melt the butter in a medium sized saucepan
Stir in the turmeric and the couscous and cranberries with a wooden spoon – turn off the heat
Pour in the hot stock, cover the saucepan with a lid and set aside for the couscous to absorb the liquid for 5 minutes
Toast the pumpkin seeds in a hot dry frying pan for a minute until they start to change colour, set aside
Chop the sweet baby peppers into bite-size pieces.
Cut the cucumber in half, length-ways – scrape out the wet pulp and seeds with a spoon and then cube the cucumber
Chop up the spring onion
Blitz the head of broccoli using a food processor to a crumb-like texture, then place in a colander over a saucepan, pour over boiling water from the kettle, then press the excess moisture through the colander.
Use a fork to fluff up the couscous and pour in the lemon juice and mix it through
Place the couscous in a large serving dish with the broccoli and combine with the broccoli crumb, top with the chopped peppers, cucumber, spring onion and pumpkin seeds and mix well.
Ready to serve!
I would eat this with some oven baked chicken pieces simply roasted, skin on with a drizzle of oil and a sprinkle of paprika.
Leftovers make for a delicious lunch.
xx Sheila
