Tuesday's couscous gratin

Having been away for the weekend, and not yet having had the opportunity to go shopping, the food storage areas were looking rather sparse. Matt, my husband, had picked up a few essentials for Monday's pizza (mushrooms) and we had acquired a large number of leeks and apples, plus a couple of enormous wedges of pumpkin from various friends and relations but other than that the range was slightly limited. On further inspection I found a butternut squash that I had bought a few weeks previously, some aged and wrinkly cherry tomatoes and some aged and wrinkly peppers (partially deployed on Monday's pizza).

Mum, who was staying (along with dad), for a few days suggested roasted veggies with halloumi cheese (Matt ensures that we always have halloumi in the fridge since a barbeque incident a few years ago when the shops were all sold out) but this seemed a bit of a cop out that I serve to them frequently. I decided that the squash and the leeks would form the basis of the dinner since we had the most significant quantity of these. I still wasn't sure exactly what I was going to cook, we might be looking at risotto or something baked in the oven, but started off by putting the butternut squash (whole) in to pre-roast. This bought me some time, during which I decided the oven option would be preferable and I imagined up what I wanted to created. This was some sort of gratin, but rather than using breadcrumbs I would make a big couscous topping (that is a big topping based on couscous, rather than a topping made with big couscous – which we discovered does exist!).

I got one of the giant leeks and cleansed and chopped this (the squash was still roasting). Once I deemed that the squash had had enough time (skin going a bit black and wrinkly) I extracted it from the oven and, once it had cooled sufficiently to allow handling, peeled and chopped this too. In actual fact I only peeled and chopped half of it – I'm always amazed at just how far an apparently moderate butternut squash will go. I arranged the chopped veggies in a large oven proof dish. It was looking slightly dull and since I had those half used wrinkly peppers I sliced those thinly and scattered those over. Not wanting to risk under cooked veggies I put it all back in a hottish oven to roast a bit more before adding the topping.

 

It struck me that the whole thing was at risk of being rather low in protein, mum suggested adding sweetcorn (which I don't really think is a high protein food), but I decided on butter beans and tipped a (drained) can of these on top of the veggies. In order to evenly distribute these I ruined my beautiful arrangement of veggies and swooshed everything around in the dish. The ruining of the arrangement was not really too much of a problem as it was all going to get covered with the couscous topping. I covered the veggies and beans with a thin (but complete) layer of (raw) couscous dotted in a few lumps of garlic and herb soft cheese (left over from the pizza) and poured about a pint of hot vegetable stock over the top of it all. I sealed it up with some kitchen foil and returned it to the hottish oven.

This might seem like an unusual way to cook couscous, but I can assure that it works – a sort of steaming. The usual couscous rule applies of using about the same amount of water as couscous by weight, but in this scenario be mindful that the veggies / beans will soak up some of the fluid. So after about 20 minutes I extracted the oven proof dish and removed the tin foil, the couscous looked nearly done but for good measure I added a little bit more fluid and topped the whole thing off with the wrinkly cherry tomatoes that my mum had fettled up. Back in the oven (uncovered this time) for another 10 minutes (until the tomatoes look even more wrinkly and there are a few crispy bits around the edges and it was ready to eat.

It tasted really nice, a good mixture of flavours and textures. Dad even went back for seconds which, for dad, is most unusual. And pleasingly it only used one cooking dish. Really it should have been served with a nice green salad, or maybe some sort of green vegetable but we had only a few leaves left over from the previous day's pizza dinner which mum and I polished off afterwards. And mum pointed out that it might have benefited from some sort of extra sauce. I've been thinking about this and maybe a sort of fruity sauce along the lines of redcurrant would be nice. But that would rely on you having redcurrants available. It turned out to another good dish to reheat for the next day's lunch, maybe even tasting better once the flavours have had a chance to “mature” a little bit.

(In case you're interested butter beans have over twice as much protein per 100g as sweetcorn. My favourite yeast extract has 6.6 times more protein per 100g than butter beans but I'm not sure that I could manage 100g in one sitting and it wouldn't have been very nice in the dinner.)