Harissa explosion salad

What I really love about this salad is that each mouthful is an adventure in texture, conducted while taste buds are thoroughly stimulated.

You need:

·         One pickled red pepper, diced

·         As many jarred mushrooms as you can handle (the ones in oil)

·         A sprinkling of toasted sunflower seeds, then some more

·         Two handfuls of lettuce, finely shredded

For the dressing:

·         An almost empty jar of harissa – about a teaspoon left

·         Olive oil to fill the jar (about a tablespoon and a half)

·         A dash of vinegar (about a dessert spoon and a half)

Serve with:

·         Cous cous bake

·         Hardy bread

Ok, so here’s what you do – spread the lettuce over a plate and add mushrooms, pepper, and most of the seeds. Add the liquids to the harissa and shake up. Pour some dressing on it and mix it up well. Sprinkle the remaining seeds over the salad, serve with cous cous bake and bread and enjoy!

~Gwen

Camping

Here are edibles for a 4-day camping trip:

What you see up there fed two people for a period of four days - that's three meals a day plus snacks. We bought some much appreciated grapes and raspberries, and a baked potato with veg curry between the two of us, but apart from that it's all up there.

Below are four meals that came out of the above ingredients. Read and imagine!

This is cous cous with sprouting beans, flavoured with chilli mix and tomato paste.

Amazingly fresh tasting and filling.

Now, this one was a stroke of genius. It's TVP with the chilli spices and tomato paste again, this time with sun dried tomatoes and lovingly surrounded by a tortilla wrap.

Again with the TVP - this time with pasta, stir-in pasta sauce (light to carry!) and sun dried tomatoes. You would not believe how warm and comforting that lovely thick sauce was in a cold Scottish field. Beautiful.

Now, before thinking too much about the meal below please remember that camping is hungry work, and by the fourth day having something hot that will sit there in your belly making its presence known is exactly what you want.

Ok, so please find below a pitta bread topped with baked beans, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, TVP and (ahem...) red wine. It tasted good. Honestly.

There's something strangely satisfying about seeds that have soaked up a load of liquid - their texture becomes easier to eat and - I'm told - digest. And no-one can deny that red wine is a good liquid. As is bean juice. Just take a look at this concoction...

Thai Courgette and Cashew Nut Cous Cous

This is a wonderful dish, and not just because of the alliteration.

Dry roast a handful of cashews. No, dry roast several handfuls, then you can save some for later.

(Dry roast just means heat it without fat, either in a pan or in the oven / grill.) This will bring out the sweet nutty flavour of the cashews.

Fry up some Thai green curry paste and add some diced courgette. When it's nearly done pour in a load of boiling water then throw in the cous cous and stir. Keep doing this till you get a cous cousish texture. Add a load of cashews and mix in till it's pretty.

Thinly slice an onion or two, fry it up with a bit of sugar then add a load of chopped chard. When it's wilting throw in some tinned sweetcorn.

So!

Spoon the sweet vegetables on to a bed of fragrant cous cous and sprinkle with cashews. (Gastro speak-a-go-go.)

This can be prepared pretty quickly; I think it took me about 7.42 minutes.

Harissa Cous Cous

This is some sort of harissa paste:

Mix LOADS of tomato paste with a good deal of paprika, chilli powder, ground cumin, coriander powder, black pepper and olive oil. Taste it and do what you want to it, then stir it into a big bowl of cous cous that's just been covered with boiling water. Leave it to sit for about three minutes then add more harissa or water as necessary.

Chickpeas and cous cous are a marriage made in culinary heaven. They are made for each other. This lot had courgette, onion, garlic and sweetcorn as well, and most veg will be pretty tasty fried up and served on top of this tasty goodness.

Cous Cous Stuffed Peppers

Anything can go in a grilled pepper. Well, almost anything, I wouldn't recommend things like aeroplanes or arsenic. Although I once read about a man who ate a whole aeroplane, but by bit. It was the Guinness Book of Records. These peppers were stuffed with a mixture of vegetables and couscous and topped with mozzarella.

Grilled peppers

Wash the peppers.

Cut the end of the pepper with the stalk, about a centimetre in. It should come off with the seedy bit in the middle, which you can twist out and throw away. Someone told me once that the seeds are poisonous, but that was after I'd been a pepper-seed eater for a long time, and I'm fine, so they're probably not too bad.

Place them under a grill and keep an eye on them and turn them regularly, so that they go black all over. Sorry, that's chargrilled' to all you Jamie Oliver's out there...

Cous Cous

Is a wonderful grain.

At it's most basic you can just cover it in boiling water for about 3 minutes, stir it up, and it will obligingly fill a hole in your belly. If you care about your taste buds then you can throw in any manner of sauces, spices, herbs, pastes... whatever comes to hand in those hungry moments.

At it's best, it is full of interesting tastes, colours and textures, and will go well in a salad meal, as a light carb in one of your square meals, as a lunch, in a buffet... you get the picture.

Some people like to chop up vegetables SUPER fine and mix them in to the cous cous which has just had boiling water thrown on it. This makes it very tasty. Spring onion, cucumber, garlic, olive oil, black pepper and lemon is a good mix. Harissa paste makes it warm and moroccanney. (Yes, that is a word.)

The cous cous in the picture was made like this:

Onions and garlic fried in oil, then a load of chopped leeks and mushrooms thrown in. Two handfulls of cous cous and enough water to cover, stirred for about five minutes, then a load of spinach added, some salt and pepper sprinkled on, the lid put on the frying pan and the whole lot left to get to know itself.

In the meanwhile I sliced some mozzarella, and scraped the skin off a cucumber. At the time I knew that I'd heard that this is a good idea, but couldn't remember why, and nor can I now. Anyone? Anyway, I added the cucumber skin to the cous cous (pretending it was fresh herbs) then gave it another stir for luck and spooned it into the waiting peppers. A slice of mozzarella was added to each pepper, which were both delicately placed on the grill pan (their stuffing made this rather precarious), after it started to bubble I put them on a plate and cut them in half so that each plate got two colours of pepper. It would look prettier to leave the peppers whole but variety is the spice of life so I varied my pepper, baby. Mm-hmm.

Cherry tomatoes, cucumber and rocket went nicely with these peppers. It seems like they won't be that filling, but appearances can be deceptive so eat them slowly and listen to the signals from your stomach. Remember that they're nice cold too.