Tasty Turkish Couscous | Kerryann Dunlop

Hi guys, Kerry-Anne here. I'm going to show you this amazing recipe from my book. It's a Turkish style couscous salad and it's inspired by my best friend Cicek who taught me how to make it. It's delicious, packed full of flavour, it's really good for you, it's great on its own, it's great as a side dish, it's great as a light snack or supper, it's just great all round. Let me teach you how to make it too. In this bowl I have got 250 grams of just plain old regular couscous. We're going to bring this to life with a nice pinch of salt, a nice pinch of pepper. I've got a teaspoon of ground cumin and a teaspoon of smoked paprika and I'm going to sprinkle that over the couscous and just stir it all in. I'm going to grab some boiling water and I'm just going to cover it because there's no exact measurement, depends on which vessel you're doing it in. This is quite a big bowl. I'm going to cover that with some cling film and put it to one side. Every single little grain of couscous is going to soak up all that water and then it's going to become nice and fluffy and then it will soak it up a lot quicker. Lovely. So first I've got a nice medium red onion and I'm going to finely chop this. I want to take off the end, I want to leave the root on because that's going to hold the onion together while I chop it. Cut it in half. Peel it quickly, well it might not be quickly. To finely chop the onion, come in closer. I'm going to put the knife in quite close together this time, not all the way to the root. We've got a nice fan effect now. So I'm going to chop that up and this little root is going to hold it all together for me so it doesn't spread all over the board. You don't have to be a top chef to be able to chop stuff small, you just have to be able to concentrate and then we'll move on to the cucumber. I've got a medium cucumber. We're just going to chop this again really finely like that. So we're left with like that kind of size and you want to do that with the whole cucumber. Okay now I need two medium ripe tomatoes. I'm just going to slice them about half a centimetre thick. If you don't know what half a centimetre is, it's about that thick. We're going to chuck these in with the cucumber and onion. I love chilli so I'm not going to take the seeds out but if you don't like it so spicy, please by all means take them out. If you don't like chilli, don't put it in. So again roughly, roughly. It doesn't need to be picture perfect. Get the chilli in there as well and we're going to chop some herbs. Half a bunch of coriander and just run your knife through it and then I want the same of flat leaf parsley. I've got some mint here and now we're going to chop it all together. I'm just using the rocking method here. You just put the tip of the knife on the board, place your hand on the back of the knife and just rock it backwards and forwards. That'll do and I've brought the couscous back over. Now I want you to come and have a look at this guys. Look at that. No water whatsoever. Right so we're going to fluff up this couscous and then I'm going to add a tablespoon of tomato puree to sort of lively it up and bring a little richness. Now you can do this with a spoon guys. Rub it in so that every single grain is covered with the tomato puree. You'll see now that the couscous is all orange looking and ready to take on some veggies. I've got the bowl with the chilli and the tomato and the cucumber and onion and that's just going to go straight in and we're going to toss it all together. Then we're going to add in our herbs. That's the parsley, the coriander and the mint. It just smells like summer. Now I've got a nice big fat lemon and I'm going to roll it on the bench just applying a little bit of pressure. All the little capsules inside the lemon that will burst them so you'll get twice as much juice for the same price. Let's cut that. Now I'm not going to put all of this lemon juice in just yet in case we use too much. My nan always told me you can always add but you can never take away. Same with salt. So I'm going to put half of the juice of the lemon. Grab some olive oil. A nice healthy generous drizzle. Remember it is a dressing it's not just a drizzle. We need to add a little bit of salt. Again you can always add but you can never take away and a bit more pepper. Give it a taste. Absolutely beautiful. You can have this with feta cheese on top, sprinkled with a few pomegranate capsules for a vegetarian light snack. You can have it on the side with some lamb chops and my aubergine salad. There's so many different ways you can eat this but to be fair it's just really good on its own. So there you have it guys. Simple, delicious and beautiful. My Turkish style couscous salad. Give it a go. Let me know how you get on. Let me know if there's any changes you make, anything different you do in the comments box below. Don't forget to click the link to subscribe but until then happy cooking guys. See you soon and if you fancy having a look at my book click this link and it'll take you to where you can buy it.