I recently matter-of-factly told someone over tacos that chicken was at the bottom of the meat totem pole. What I meant was that chicken is not something I ever really order at a restaurant (the exception being fried chicken, of course) because, well, it’s boring and for the most part tasteless. Hot take! I still mostly stand by my assessment, but this week as I was organizing upcoming recipes to post, I noticed that every non-vegetarian dish I have on the list is…chicken.
I hope it does not seem condescending that I’m sharing a recipe for roasted vegetables and couscous, which is very intuitive and barely a recipe. It follows the same format I use often for work lunches (a grain + roasted vegetables) but with a spice combination that I hadn’t thought of, and a dead simple couscous preparation that I hadn’t used. Those two tweaks and the addition of deeply toasted almonds made this something I couldn’t keep my hands out of and needed to “sample” a number of times before it hit the fridge. And also once it was in the fridge.
When it comes to dessert, I crave the richest stuff. I’m always in the mood for chocolate, or cheesecake, or a butterscotch bread pudding. With vanilla ice cream, please. So it’s sometimes hard for me to get excited about typical desserts from the Middle East and North Africa, where it’s all about nuts and honey and filo dough and tends to be very sweet and a little syrupy.
Every time I start to feel particularly guilty about the number of as yet un-read food magazines that are piling up on my coffee table, I’ll hit the proverbial jackpot with a few recipes that make the plethora of subscriptions worthwhile. Clearly I’m choosing to ignore the counterargument that these recipes are generally available online at on the magazines’ website for free, but I like the feeling of flipping through real, tangible pages filled with colorful and inviting pictures of food. I like to splatter all kinds of stray sauce to be permanently archived on the recipes while I follow along. Isn’t that what cooking is all about?
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