Friday, November 6, 2009

UFM: What's For Dinner? Tabouli Couscous with Chicken

Sorry I've been MIA since the move back east.  It's been hard to get into the swing of reviews of NYC restaurants when I'm so new to such an enormous sprawling city with its many boroughs, restaurants and eateries.  I will continue to do so though, as I eat my way through the city, but I will be focusing on plenty of other aspects of Food in the meantime.  Besides the fact that I have been spending a lot of time in my hometown of Philly during the football season, and as of late, the World Series.  I may be a New Yorker now, but I will always be a Philly Girl at heart.

So what the heck am I doing with myself these days foodwise?  Well for those that that know me...
I Eat therefore I AM...
And one of the things I am doing more of here and there is cooking, which is why I am going to start posting more about the sort of things that I am cooking for myself and others.  Lately, I've been on a big couscous kick.  It's quick and easy and there are lots of things that you can do with it.  One of things that I have been doing is making it with Tabouli, which is typically made with cracked wheat, also known as bulghur.  Couscous is another form which is typically a semolina wheat that is moistened and rolled into tiny granules.  What ever the case, I am diggin' it and am trying to find different ways of preparing it.  My next attempt will be a couscous paella...



So for dinner at my cousin's house in Jersey this week, I decided to do a tabouli couscous with your typical tabouli ingredients such as cucumber, tomato, parsley and feta, and then I also added chicken to make it more of an all-in-one meal.   It was awesome, although there was a small incident during the prep.  After I had mixed everything together, I went to throw in a few shakes of some chili pepper flakes and the top with the holes fell off and half of the bottle went in.  Ugh.  We decided to scrape off the top layer of my creation into a small bowl and filled it with water.  Fortunately, most of the chili flakes floated to the top and I was able to save the dish.  Whew!  Disaster averted.
And although the dish a little on the spicy side, it was still delicious and each of the flavors came through.

Try it some time.  All you need are the following ingredients:
1 box of Couscous
Chicken Breast (cubed)
Tomato (diced)
Cucumber (diced)
Parsley (chopped medium fine)
Feta (cubed)
Lemon
Boil water for couscous then start to cook chicken.  Throw in couscous into boiling water.  Only takes 5 minutes.  Mix in the rest of the ingredients and then squeeze lemon in.