Couscous au Poulet

Couscous au Poulet (Chicken Couscous)

PLATE OF SUNSHINE RATING: Cloudy with occasional sunny spells.

This chicken dish, Floyd’s favourite, was an unfortunate effort. It wasn’t awful, but I’m sure it would have been far tastier had I used more reliable vegetables and non-supermarket chicken.

It’s a truism that fresh, seasonal fruit and veg, and free range (preferably organic) meat taste better and make a less damaging impact on the planet. I’m lucky to have a really good butchers near home, but I’m rarely able to visit, as the opening hours clash with my working hours, and they aren’t open on Sundays. There are some decent greengrocers in the area, which I do use, but, again, opening hours don’t match my shopping hours, so often I’ll buy my ingredients from the Waitrose next to where I work.

When it comes to supermarkets, Waitrose fruit and veg are usually of a high quality. Yes, they’re a supermarket, and they’ve contributed in their own way to the enormous damage supermarkets have inflicted on small businesses and quality produce, but as supermarkets go they appear to be less shit than the others. And it’s not necessarily true that they are far more expensive than their larger rivals. I truly believe much of the produce in the larger supermarkets is a complete false economy, and although Waitrose may charge you more for certain goods – but by no means all – your tummy and general state-of-mind will be grateful for the slightly higher cost in the long run. You wouldn’t buy a Mini Cooper expecting the performance of a Lotus, and you wouldn’t go to a Michelin-starred restaurant and expect to pay McDonalds prices!

We’ve all become very reliant on cheap food, and lost all sight of the seasons. We can find strawberries and blueberries, once a summer treat, in the supermarkets all year round, thanks to the aeroplanes which fly them over from the other side of the world. It soon becomes apparent, though, that if you buy a whole turkey for £2 – as some supermarkets were charging over Christmas – the chances are you’ll be eating an item on the food chain just a notch or two above ‘horse-shit’.

For this recipe, I made the crucial mistake of buying my fruit, veg and chicken breasts from Morrisons. Now, don’t get me wrong, Morrisons have their strengths. Notably, if you’re looking for Radox bubble baths, 24-pack bags of Monster Munch, Colgate toothpaste, Mr. Kipling’s Lemon Slices, James Bond DVDs and Heinz baked beans, Morrisons are super-cheap and reliable. Fresh fruit and veg? Not so much. Even when British produce is in season I have struggled to find much of it on the shelves of Morrisons. I had a similar experience around Halloween last year, when my search for bobbing apples in Tesco led me to find row upon row of French apples, with not a single British one in sight.

So yes, the Couscous au Poulet taught me a proper lesson. Let’s look at the recipe, from Floyd on France:

1 boiling fowl, jointed (I was cooking for two, so just used some chicken thighs and breasts)

Oil for frying

4 cloves garlic, chopped

Salt and pepper

2 tins chick peas, strained, or 300g dried chick peas, soaked and pre-cooked

1 large onion, chopped

1 X 415g tin tomatoes

3 courgettes, sliced

1 red pepper, chopped

1 aubergine, chopped

1 tablespoon very hot paprika or cayenne, or (best of all) harissa

1 teaspoon turmeric

1 teaspoon thyme

2 bayleaves

500g couscous, cooked according to instructions on packet

How to make it:

Brown the chicken pieces in oil.

Season well with garlic, salt and pepper. Cover with all the other ingredients except for the couscous, add 300ml water and cook in a covered flameproof casserole on top of the stove on a low heat for about 1 hour.

When the chicken is tender, strain off the sauce.

Mix all the bits, including the chicken, with the couscous and re-heat by steaming over boiling water in a colander – the couscous must not touch the water or it will become mushy.

Serve at once with the re-heated sauce poured over it. Have a side dish of harissa to hand so that you can make each helping more spicy if desired. You could also add some spicy hot sausages, like Merguez, in the last moments of cooking. Throw in a few pieces of beef and lamb with the chicken and you have a Couscous Royale.

(Serves 4 to 5).

Sounds delicious, doesn’t it? As Floyd describes in his introduction to the recipe, it is “a happy mix of Arab and French cooking; spicy and yet delicate. And hugely filling.”

I should confess that I could not find harissa, and I did not add the spicy, hot sausages. I was cooking for myself and Ryan who is not a fan of the spice, so a tablespoon of paprika was as hot as I got.

It was indeed filling, and the chickpeas, tin tomatoes, paprika, turmeric, thyme and bayleaves combined to create a really lovely, diverse flavour. But the vegetables were clearly not good enough and the chicken was nowhere near as lovely as my local butchers’ fare. My produce let me down. Or, as a teacher might suggest, I let myself down.

Like all chefs, Floyd stresses the importance of the seasons and of freshness in fruit and vegetables. It is not always easy to cook seasonally, especially in an experiment such as this one, but I certainly learned my lesson that I cannot buy cheap vegetalia and expect to cook up a plate of sunshine happiness.

So, although this was by no means dire, and it was certainly filling, the vegetables and chicken lacked proper, rich, Floydian flavour. This Couscous au Poulet  was in stark contrast to my first Eddie On Floyd recipe, the Basque Chicken, which was full of fresh flavour. There are far worse chicken dishes out there, but I had hoped for so much more.

I will attempt this recipe again and do Floyd’s favourite justice. I promise.

Floyd entertains