Roast Cauliflower & Chorizo Couscous

I feel like this is getting to be a bit of a habit - grabbing ideas from other bloggers, but this is one of the things I have LOVED since starting blogging - looking beyond my groaning shelves of cook books and the Good Food website, to the great wide blogosphere for inspiration for meals. There are so many people cooking so much great food out there, and it's been fantastic picking up different ideas.

The latest great idea came from the brilliant Crumbs website. Probably the simplest yet - don't steam or boil your cauliflower: roast it in olive oil with salt and pepper. I like cauliflower, and cauliflower cheese is a big favourite for me. Blue hates it is less keen (I may have mentioned this once or twice before) so it's not something that graces our table that often, but this evening, I had an opportunity.

Mondays are a little strange for us. The kids do choir (Pink) and football (Blue - no gender stereotyping there, is there?) after school, finishing at 4.30, then Blue has Cubs at 6.30. I take it in turns with another mum to have the kids after school. This means that I either have 4 kids for madness and tea, or almost an extra 2 hours of peace and quiet after my working day has finished to sit around and drink tea to get ahead. Today it was the latter, with only the Husband and I to feed, albeit that the meal then needs to be fitted in between getting Pink back from the tea date at 6.30 and one of us collecting Blue at 8...

The Husband and I were going to have a Rose Prince based meal: cold meat pilaff from her great book, The New English Kitchen (which, incidentally is a great treasure trove of ideas for leftovers) but for a variety of reasons, far to complicated to go into here, we didn't have any leftover roast meat from the weekend, which rather put paid to that idea.However, I did have a cauliflower waiting to be eaten, and like a voice from the food heavens, this post from Crumbs popped up in my blog list. 

I roasted my cauliflower with the intention of turning it into a delicious cauliflower cheese for  the Husband and I, but one thing and another (mainly my greed and the fact that the roast cauli is totally delicious just on its own) meant that there didn't seem to be enough to make just a cauli cheese. I had some cooking chorizo in the fridge, and one of my new favourite ingredients - giant wholewheat couscous - in the cupboard. I hatched a plan...





Roast Cauliflower and chorizo couscous

serves 2 

1 small cauliflower, chopped into florets
olive oil, sea salt & fresh ground pepper 
150g giant couscous
125g cooking chorizo, diced
2 sticks of celery, chopped
400ml chicken stock
a handful of runner beans, sliced  
1 can chick peas, drained
juice of 1/2 lemon
chopped parsley to garnish

Roast your cauliflower: Pre-heat the oven to 220 C, put the cauli florets on a roasting dish, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and roast for 15 minutes before turning the oven down to 180 C and roasting for another 10-15 minutes till cooked. The florets will be slightly charred, but that just adds to the flavour.

Drizzle a little olive oil into a pan, heat and add the chorizo. Cook for a little till the oil starts to run, then add the celery. Put the stock in a pan to warm up (or make it up using hot water) so that it's hot when it goes into the pan. Cook the chorizo and celery together for a few minutes till the celery starts to soften then chick in the couscous and pour in the stock. Bring up to the boil and cook, stirring every now and again, till the couscous is almost cooked - it will take around  15 minutes - then chuck in the runner beans, the chick peas and the roasted cauliflower, stirring in, to finish off the cooking.

When the couscous and runner beans are cooked, squeeze in the lemon juice and stir in the chopped parsley.