I’m loving this dish.
Couscous has long been a staple food in North Africa’s Maghreb but it has become popular around the world in recent years. I remember discovering it on a long-ago trip to startlingly-beautiful and exasperatingly-strident Morocco.
Most of us here in the West think of couscous as part of a savory meal, but it is often served as a dessert in North Africa. For dessert, cooks add sugar, butter, cinnamon, raisins, nuts and cream to the dish. How good does that sound?
Couscous can be made from a number of grains but most traditionally it is made with crushed durum wheat semolina.
I love couscous. Like most Americans, I make mine using the pre-cooked dry couscous available in a box. Trader Joe’s had a very good Israeli couscous that I used for this recipe.
If you are a purist and have a lot of time, however, there is nothing better than hand-made couscous that is steamed over a simmering stew. Here is a Williams Sonoma video clip of a Moroccan chef making couscous in a beautiful couscoussiere, the traditional pot for making couscous. Just so happens that you can buy that beautiful hammered copper steamer for $199 on the Williams Sonoma site: Williams Sonoma Video on Making Couscous. It sits in the window of my local Williams Sonoma store and I ogle it every time I walk past the store.
This recipe is adapted from a Melissa Clark recipe that appears on the New York Times’ cooking site. The artichokes are added to this recipe with the chickpeas in step 3 below.
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