Couscous à la volaille

On Saturday morning I went shopping at the fairly new and very big produce market in Saint-Aignan called Terre Y Fruits. It's not clear to me what the name means, but it is clear that the produce sold in the store is excellent. I hadn't been inside the shop or even at the open-air market in Saint-Aignan since February or March, and I went kind of crazy. Look at what I brought home — a load of local produce.

I had an idea, and the idea was to make couscous. So I was looking for aubergines (eggplant), tomatoes, celery, and turnips. We already had zucchini (courgettes) from this year's vegetable garden, and some carrots in the fridge. I also wanted lettuce, melons, shallots, and mushrooms. I let myself be tempted by a beautiful head of cauliflower, and now I have to figure out what to do with it. I'm thinking about oven-roasted cauliflower florets dressed with radish leaf pesto...

Above is the couscous as we had it for lunch yesterday. From the bottom right, going counterclockwise: The couscous vegetables cooked with spices in broth. The steamed couscous "grain" (a tiny pasta, actually) with re-hydrated raisins. A bowl of chickpeas (from a can) flavored with the couscous broth. And two meats that Walt cooked on the barbecue grill — turkey wings and chicken sausages flavored with merguez spices. The meats are why I call this a coucous à la volaille — couscous with poultry. (Often it also includes lamb...)

The vegetables cooked in the broth are carrots, turnips, eggplant, zucchini, green beans, tomatoes, onions, garlic, and artichoke hearts. The chickpeas are a garnish. The spices in the broth are the North African blend called ras el hanout — cumin, tumeric, paprika, cinnamon, fenugreek, fennel, curry, coriander seed, carraway, etc., all in powdered form.

Our local poultry processor and vendor makes very nice sausages with chicken, turkey, or duck, spiced with the couscous spices or just with piment d'espelette from Basque country, or just with onions and herbs. The turkey wings are now available at Super U, the Saint-Aignan supermarket.

Finally, here's the couscous as we ate a plate of it at lunchtime yesterday. It's served with a little bit of hot-pepper paste called harissa, which you mix with some warm broth in a ladle and drizzle over the vegetables and meats. There's a recipe in this post from 2014. Bon appétit  !