A colourful Mexican couscous salad
Michelle Phetlhe | Tuesday March 7, 2023 06:01
Couscous is my mid-week meal secret. It’s so versatile and just requires hot water to make it. I like to jzooz/jazz it up with a little seasoning, salt, pepper garlic and sometimes some herbs, oregano or parsley.
This Mexican couscous salad is amazing and full of incredible flavours. Not only is this couscous salad recipe healthy and nutritious, but also very easy to make. Only one element needs to be cooked and that’s the couscous.
From there on, we mix it in a large bowl with the other ingredients and that's all that she wrote! Done! Research tells us that formerly, couscous was considered a North African delicacy. However, nowadays it is consumed all over the world and can be easily found in all grocery stores. It is classified as cereal that has been made into small balls of durum wheat or semolina flour. Keep your couscous in a cool and dry place and it will keep up to one year. This is true. I noticed the bag I purchased some time ago tucked at the back of the grains cupboard in the kitchen, clearly in good shape. Finding it was the inspiration for the dish. All I was sure of was that I didn’t want to make anything conventional.
To date, I have not experimented with mosutlhane as I have promised myself I would, I have a strong belief that this recipe would be equally successful using our native mosutlhane (couscous and mosutlhane could be considered cousins...definite similarities there). This past weekend, we had a wedding meeting to attend ko ga Mmemogolo Mma Diks. I was sure I’d be taking my note book to jot down instructions on how to prepare mosutlhane. One of the first few times I tasted it, was an amazing dish she had made at a makoti luncheon.
I didn’t make it to the meeting and hubby went to rep us both. I should have remembered to ask him to check if she has some, a ntabolele kopi tse pedi. I marvel at how simple yet flavourful this salad is. The canned corn and canned black beans I used cut down prep time significantly. Ladies and gentlemen, if you are in your kitchen, making a meal from scratch, cooking with love.....there is NO shame in using canned foods once in a while. Fresh produce is obviously better, but time happens to all of us. This salad can be served as a main dish. This was my execution on this occasion, with diced chicken breast and the whole family lapped it up, including the boys who can be finicky about raw vegetables or just ones that are obvious. They ate! You can serve it as a side should you want to include meat to the dish. This is also a great salad for office lunch as it’s not a hassle to make. Or prep it for the next pot luck, trust me, it’ll leave everyone pleasantly surprised. Give it a try and let us know how it goes on the Facebook Chellzkitchen page.
INGREDIENTS
1 cup couscous
1 cup vegetable broth or water
1 onion finely chopped
1 can corn kernels
1 can black beans
1 cup cherry tomatoes halved (optional)
1 bell pepper chopped
¼ cup cilantro or parsley finely chopped (as preferred) Cubed chicken breast (optional) Diced avocado
DRESSING
2 tablespoon lime juice 2 tablespoon olive oil (optional) 1 clove garlic finely chopped 2 teaspoon chilli powder (optional) A pinch of cayenne pepper Salt and pepper to taste
INSTRUCTIONS
In a saucepan, bring the vegetable broth or water to a boil. Remove from the heat, and add the couscous. Cover and let stand for 5 minutes. Separate with a fork and let cool. In a small bowl, mix the ingredients for the dressing. In a bowl, mix the cooled couscous and the rest of the ingredients. Pour the dressing and mix, serve.