Jewelled couscous

This is my secret weapon when it comes to impressing dinner guests, particularly those who don’t eat much Levantine or North African food. Big piles of fluffy golden cous cous studded with glittering fruits and flecked with emerald green herbs.

And yet – shhhhhh, don’t tell anyone - it’s just so easy to make. There’s practically no cooking, very little preparation and you end up with this conical treasure trove of a dish that looks like it belongs in 1001 Arabian Nights.

The (not very secretive) secret here is to use good ingredients. A high quality stock, a variety of dried fruits and pomegranate seeds. The latter don’t just add a tart edge, they stand out like glimmering rubies, and really make the dish.

Saffron and a variety of dried fruits add a touch of luxury to proceedings. I use big golden sultanas, reddy raisins and small intense wrinkly currants. And, when I can find them, soft dried apricots. But I’m lucky, I live close to Turkish grocers where you can get all manner of exciting dried fruits.

But even if you don’t live near an Aladdin’s cave of a shop, most supermarkets and health food shops will have loads of different dried fruits to use. Apricots in particular, because of their tangy sweetness are great in the mellow cous cous.

Herbs give the finished dish a bit of fresh life, and stop it becoming too cloyingly sweet. Again, you want the freshest, zingiest you can find. Mint is probably best, I like to mix it with coriander and/or parsley as well. But why not experiment and see how thyme works, maybe even tarragon for an aniseed hit?

The cous cous
Serves four as part of a main meal
The only real proportions that matter here are the cous cous to stock ratio. Otherwise, everything else is a matter of taste. I cook this in a completely random way, dropping in whatever’s to hand, like Macbeth’s witches boiling up their potions.

To make it a super luxurious dish you could also add some ground cinnamon, coriander seed and ginger. This makes it something worth being the centrepiece of a meal as opposed to a side.

250g cous cous
450ml stock (I use home made chicken or Marigold low salt vegetable bouillon)
.5 pomegranate’s worth of pomegranate seeds
1 small handful each of sultanas, raisins, currents
100g (ish) finely diced soft dried apricots
A scattering of pine nuts or pistachios
A pinch of saffron
Fresh mint leaves – a handful
Fresh coriander leaves – handful
Fresh flat leaf parsley – a handful

Put the cous cous in a pan. Add the dried fruits and saffron and mix in. Pour over the stock, give the pan a bit of a shake to settle it all, cover and leave for ten minutes or so until all the stock is absorbed.

Chop the fresh herbs and extract the pomegranate seeds. When the cous cous is all pumped up, use a fork to fluff it up, stirring in the rest of the ingredients (holding back a few of the pomegranate seeds, nuts and herbs).

Tip out on to a large plate and roughly form a conical pile. If you are using ground spiced sprinkle them in vertical lines down the cone. Scatter over the last of the herbs, nuts and seeds. Serve.

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