The Ultimate Winter Couscous

from Yotam Ottolenghi's Plenty

• 2 medium carrots, peeled and cut into 3/4-inch chunks
• 2 medium parsnips, peeled and cut into 3/4 inch chunks
• 8 shallots
• 2 cinnamon sticks
• 4 star anise
• 3 bay leaves
• 5 tbsp olive oil
• salt
• 1/2 tsp ground ginger
• 1/4 tsp ground tumeric
• 1/4 tsp hot paprika
• 1/2 tsp chile flakes
• 2 1/2 cups cubed pumpkin or butternut squash (from a 10 oz squash)
• 1/2 cup dried apricots, roughly chopped
• 1 cup chickpeas (canned or freshly cooked) [I went with canned]
• 1 1/2 cups chickpea cooking liquid and/or water
• 1 cup couscous
• large pinch saffron
• 1 cup boiling vegetable stock
• 3 tbsp butter, broken into pieces
• 2 tbsp harissa
• 1 oz preserved lemon, finely chopped
• 2 cups cilantro leaves

Bake carrots, parsnips, shallots, spices, 4 tablespoons oil and 3/4 teaspoon salt at 375 degrees F for15 minutes.

Add, in my case, butternut squash.  This along with the parsnips and the milk from the mac and cheese were all bought at the Boston Local Food Festival I went to with Ori a few weekends ago.

Bake for another 35 minutes.

Add apricots and chickpeas and bake until hot.

Mise en place up until right before the last photo.

Prepare couscous and melt a lot of butter in.

Put vegetable mixture over couscous and cover it with a veritable carpet of cilantro leaves.  Additionally, harissa and preserved lemon are mixed into the vegetables after they have left the oven.
I actually really liked this dish without wondering where the meat was.
Apparently some lady complained to UK paper the Guardian (where Ottolenghi has a vegetarian column although he isn't one) that the dish had too many ingredients.  I find that somewhat laughable.  If a cook is ambitious enough this dish shouldn't be that out of reach.

Preserved Lemons 1.0

from Girl in the Kitchen by Stephenie Izard:

•  2 1/4 cups coarse salt
• 9 lemons
• 2 cups sugar
• 1 1/2 cups vodka
• 1 teaspoon fennel seeds
• 1 teaspoon black peppercorns
• 1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
• 1 teaspoon mustard seeds

Boiling the lemons in batches for five minutes.

I never managed to get this crazy amount of salt and sugar to dissolve into such a tiny amount of alcohol.  Sure, I've super-saturated pickle brine with salt and sugar many times, but I don't use alcohol to do it.

Throwing the jar down my bedroom floor for two weeks.  Crossing my fingers that they don't come out smelling ammonia-y like Mark Bittman says they could get if something's gone wrong.

I also wound up using bottled lemon juice to top off the liquid so the lemons would be submerged.

Strips of the result muddled with some club soda.  Pretty awesome beverage.  If I was in the mood or I had company, vodka certainly wouldn't be out of place.  And hey, it's not full of sugar and chemicals and is WAY more interesting that water with a squeeze of lemon.

I titled this entry 1.0 because I have recently read three different techniques for preserving lemons recently.  Partly due to fear of failure (stupid salt and sugar), I admit, and largely through curiosity, I definitely want to try Bittman's recipe when I run out of this batch.  Izard's had a longer shelf life and seemed more interesting in terms of spicing (oh I guess I could've played around myself) so I went with that first.

Zak Pelaccio's recipe in Eat wtih Your Hands (which I recently read and will inevitably cook out of) doesn't involve a liquid at all but involves packing the lemons with salt.  This techniques demands fridge space though and I'd have to be in the right moment for that.  I see myself making one of his two recipes for bacon soon...