Couscous royale

When I lived in Paris, every Wednesday night without fail Parisian Boy and I went to a nearby Tunisian restaurant to eat couscous with friends. We were often a large group of 10-12 in total and there would be good-natured arguments over what type of couscous to order. Invariably, because couscous is a communal way to eat, we'd settle on couscous royale because the platter of mixed meats offers something for everyone.

When the food arrived, there would be one huge platter of steamed couscous laced with chickpeas, another huge platter of grilled merguez, lamb chops, skewers of grilled beef and chicken pieces, and perhaps other meats, and a huge tureen of vegetable broth. These would be passed round the table, along with the pots of harissa to add some fire to the mix.

Despite having three distinct components, it's fairly quick and easy to make for one. It takes about 30 minutes in total. The couscous grain itself is the most filling component (it can swell up in the stomach!) so start with a small amount on the plate and top up if you're still hungry.

What you need:
2-3 merguez sausages
1-2 small, boned chicken thighs, skin off
Olive oil
1 onion
1 large carrot
1 courgette
2-3 baby aubergines
1 baby turnip
1 small pepper
1.5 tsp ras el hanout
1/2 litre boiling water
Harissa paste
Portion of couscous, about 75g dry weight

What to do:
First make the broth. Peel and quarter the onion, leaving the root intact. Peel the carrot and slice into thick 2cm rounds. Trim the stalks off the baby aubergines. Trim and quarter the baby turnip. Quarter and deseed the pepper. Cut the courgette into very thick 3-4cm rounds. Heat the oil in a deep pan on a medium hob. Add all the vegetables except the courgette and pepper and fry gently for a few minutes. Don't let the veg brown. Add the ras el hanout, stir through and fry for a minute then pour in the boiling water. Bring it just to the boil then turn down the heat and leave it to simmer for 30 minutes. Add the courgette and pepper halfway through.

Cook the meat. Rub the chicken thighs with a little oil and either grill them on the hob in a cast-iron grill pan or cook them under the grill of your oven. They need about 15 minutes. Turn halfway through. Grill the merguez for 10 minutes in the same pan, turning halfway through. Turn off the heat when cooked and keep warm.

Make the couscous. Boil the kettle again. Tip the dry couscous into a heatproof bowl and pour over just enough boiling water to cover it. Cover the bowl with a plate and leave it for 5 minutes to swell then fluff it up with a fork.

To dish up, pile the couscous into one side of a deep soup plate. Use a slotted spoon to take out the vegetables and pile them on the other side of the plate. Fill a ladle with the broth and stir in about 1/2 tsp of the harissa, then pour it over the veg. Pile the meat on top.

Cook's tips:
Harissa and ras el hanout are widely available in supermarkets. Finding merguez - a fresh, lamb-based, long and skinny sausage flavoured with paprika and harissa - is a little trickier. They sometimes turn up in the meat section in supermarkets, mainly in the summer barbecue season. I always buy them when I spot them, freezing the spare packs for later. You can buy them online too. If you can't get hold of any, grill a couple of small lamb chops instead.

Be flexible with the vegetables. It's traditional to use what's in season, so that could include chunks of squash, broad beans or green beans (haricots verts). If you are very hungry, you can add a spoonful of cooked chickpeas to the couscous grains (use the rest of the tin to make hummus).

If you have leftover couscous, you can use it up as the basis of a tabbouleh salad. I like to whiz any leftover vegetable broth in a blender to make a spicy and filling soup.

Roasted sea bream with chermoula on couscous

I acquired a taste for north African food when living in Paris. The city has a huge population of first, second and third-generation Moroccans and Tunisians thanks to France's colonial past and their food is as ubiquitous as curry is in the UK. Parisian Boy and I used to go out for couscous every week - a glorious mix of grilled spicy meats, vegetable broth laced with harissa and the couscous itself.

The Moroccans also invented chermoula, a fiery, sour paste used to marinate chicken and lamb, add to a tagine or to stuff into fish. The ingredients are fairly standard but you can tinker with the quantities to suit your palate.

What you need: 
1 sea bream
Olive oil
4 cloves of garlic
1 red chilli, finely chopped
2tsp each of ground cumin and ground coriander
1tsp each of chilli powder and paprika
Juice and zest of 1 lemon
Couscous

1 heaped tsp of sultanas
5-6 pitted black olives, sliced
1 tsp flaked almonds
1 dessertspoon of fresh chopped coriander

What to do:
Make the chermoula. Crush the garlic cloves with a pinch of sea salt in a pestle and mortar until they form a fine paste. Add the chopped chilli and pound a little more to break it down and blend it with the garlic. Add the rest of the spices, the lemon juice and zest and about 4 dessertspoons of olive oil. Mix well.

Marinate the fish: Stuff the cavity of the sea bream with the chermoula and leave it for at least 20 minutes, longer if possible.

Heat the oven to 200C and roast the fish for around 20-25 minutes. While it's cooking make a portion of couscous (about 100g if you need to measure it) - put it in a heatproof bowl with the sultanas and cover it with boiling water to about 1cm above it. Cover the bowl with a plate and set it aside to soak up the water. Fork it through after 10 minutes to break up any lumps and if it looks too dry, add a little more water from the kettle. When it's ready, stir through the olives, flaked almonds and chopped coriander.

Make a bed of couscous on the plate and put the roasted fish on top.

Cook's tips: 
Get the fishmonger to prepare the fish how you prefer it. In Morocco, you'll get the whole fish on the plate - head, tail, bones - but I always ask mine to take the head off and fillet it while leaving it whole. If you use two separate fillets just sandwich them with the chermoula. Whichever way it's prepared make sure the skin is on as it protects the flesh during cooking. If you can't find sea bream, another small meaty fish such as red snapper or tilapia is equally good.

I like my chermoula really hot and garlicky although I usually discard the seeds when I'm chopping up the chilli - leave them in if you like more heat. For less heat, leave out the fresh chilli and just use the powdered. The finished chermoula should have the consistency of a thick paste so you may want to add the oil a spoonful at a time as you mix it, as you may need less than you think. If it's too thick, add a little more lemon juice. The quantities here make about 2-3 times what you need for the fish - it will keep in the fridge for 2-3 weeks.

Last year I bought Yotam Ottolenghi's brilliant book Jerusalem and discovered that he uses a couple of preserved lemons in his chermoula instead of fresh. I've started doing the same as I love the extra tartness. The preserved lemons need to be very finely chopped and the pips removed.

A fruity goat tagine

By now you're probably aware how much I love goat meat. It's not eaten just in Greece, but all round the Med - I've never quite managed to erase the memory of the sight of a row of skinned kids' heads lined up on a butcher's stall when on a stroll through the Arab market in Jerusalem's walled old city. Their eyes were blue and, like the Mona Lisa's, they seemed to follow me as I walked past. Creepy eyes aside, I'm sure the heads were delicious when cooked.

No heads for needed for this recipe, just some diced shoulder. And don't be put off by the long list of ingredients - this is simplicity itself to make. It takes just 5-10 minutes to prep. Makes enough for two portions, so you can eat one and freeze one.

What you need:  
A good glug of olive oil
About 300g goat meat, cubed
1 onion, chopped
2-3 cloves of garlic, crushed
About 3/4 pint chicken stock
1 orange, juiced and zested
Piece of cinnamon stick, about 3cm
Piece of fresh ginger, about 2cm, peeled and very finely chopped
Half a preserved lemon, finely sliced
Handful of pitted green olives
Handful of dried apricots
Handful of finely chopped fresh mint leaves
2 dessert spoonfuls of ground almonds
About a dessert spoonful of flaked almonds
Seasoning
A little chopped coriander

What to do: 
Using a heavy sauteuse, brown the goat in the olive oil over a high heat then scoop it out and set aside while you fry off the onions and garlic in the same oil until translucent and giving off aroma. Return the meat to the pan and pour in the stock, plus the orange zest and juice, cinnamon stick, ginger, preserved lemon and green olives. Grind in some black pepper. Turn down the heat until it's just simmering and leave for about 2 hours. (You can transfer it to the oven if you prefer - about 160C.) Check on it occasionally and top up with boiling water if it looks like it might dry out.

After 2 hours, add the apricots, mint and ground almonds, stir through and let it cook for another half an hour or so. The meat should be tender by now and the juices thickened by the almonds. If the meat's not quite ready, just cook it a while longer - it won't spoil.

Season to taste, stir in the flaked almonds and scatter over the coriander then dish up with some cous-cous and a side salad of tomatoes, cucumber and mint dressed with a little olive oil and lemon juice.

Cook's tips:
If you can't get goat meat, use mutton - it'll need about the same cooking time, but be sure to trim off the fat first. If you use lamb, it will only need about an hour to 90 minutes in total to cook.

Tagines are very flexible - if you don't have any apricots, use some dried figs or dates. Black olives can be used instead of green.

If you freeze a portion, do it before you add the flaked almonds and coriander.

Cous-cous doubles in size when it's ready so measure out about half of what you want to eat. Dump it in a heatproof bowl and cover with the same amount of boiling water. Put a plate over the bowl to trap the heat and steam and leave it for 5 minutes. It should have fluffed up - fork it through to break up the grains. If it looks too dry, add a little more water and leave for another minute or so (it's better to have too little water and top up than too much, which will make it soggy). If you have leftover cous-cous, cover it with cling film and chill in the fridge - it makes a good base for a salad.

Quinoa stuffed peppers

With a food delivery due tomorrow, I'm having a leftovers spree as I clear out things from my fridge that need eating. I never bin food unless it's obviously gone off, then it goes into a special food waste bin that the council collects from every week. Things that have use-by dates get sniffed - if they smell ok, they are almost certainly still edible. Not so long ago, I ate a pot of plain yoghurt that was more than a month past its due date - it hadn't been opened and it was fine (it must have been - I'm still alive, with no symptoms of food poisoning, and anyway, yoghurt is fermented so unless it's been exposed to air and left out of the fridge it's unlikely to go off).

My veg bin is almost empty but I found three peppers that were just starting to wrinkle so I decided to stuff them. I also grabbed a half-full packet of lardons, half of which I ate a few days ago (I think they went into an omelette). And lurking in the back of my larder was an unopened box of quinoa. I bought this more than three years ago when I became single again and was stocking a larder from scratch in my new home but never got round to trying it. I usually use cous-cous as a filler grain but the jar is empty right now so it was time to experiment with the quinoa.

Cooking the quinoa ahead of preparing the peppers was interesting, to say the least. The packet instructions said to use 70g per person and boil in twice the volume of water - that is utterly meaningless when you're given two entirely different measurements so I did what I usually do and fetched my mug. This mug is old and white and I never drink from it - I use it only for rough measurements of dried ingredients, mainly rice (a mugful is enough for two generous portions). So I tipped the quinoa into the mug until it was just under half full, gave it a quick rinse in a sieve under the cold tap then put it in the pan and poured a kettle of boiling water on top. All guesswork. I left the grain to boil for 10 minutes as per the box instructions although, disappointingly, it only doubled in volume rather than quadrupled. I left it covered, off the heat, to absorb the rest of the cooking water and it did fluff up nicely. But my house now smells like wet cardboard.

Fortunately, the quinoa doesn't taste of wet cardboard but a bit like barley. Except nuttier.

What you need: 
2-3 peppers
1 small onion, chopped finely
Half a pack of lardons, or cut a couple of slices of bacon into strips
A clove of garlic, thinly sliced
A couple of small tomatoes, chopped
Small handful of roughly chopped parsley
Quinoa
Halloumi
Olive oil
Seasonings, to taste

What to do: 
Prepare enough quinoa to fill the peppers. Heat the oven to 180C. Sauté the onion gently in olive oil until it is transparent. Add the lardons and garlic and fry until cooked. Tip into a bowl with the grain, parsley and chopped raw tomatoes and mix well. Throw in a small handful of diced halloumi then season to taste - I used only black pepper as lardons and halloumi are already salty enough for me. Cut the peppers in half vertically, pull out the seeds and pith, then stuff. Pack the peppers into a small, ovenproof dish and pour about half a centimetre of cold water into the dish. Pop in the oven and bake for about 45 minutes.

Cook's notes: 
This is a great way to use up almost any leftovers - mushrooms, diced carrot or courgette, leeks, even a handful of frozen peas if you're short of veg (don't bother to defrost them). I've used spinach leaves and black olives before, and you can also add pinenuts, pumpkin seeds or capers. If you don't have quinoa, use cous-cous, rice, bulgur wheat or even breadcrumbs from a wholemeal loaf. Instead of halloumi, try feta or even some crumbled stilton or grated cheddar if that's all you have. If you don't have bacon, you can use leftover cooked chicken or pork, or ham or chorizo (replace the meat with nuts if you're vegetarian).

I had two half-peppers left over - that's tomorrow's lunch sorted, then...