Middle Eastern cuisine makes a lot of use of beans of different sorts with couscous. So, to give it a Middle Eastern twist, for dinner yesterday, I made a salad in two parts, if you can call it that, since it can go very well with rice, with chicken, as a side dish with any meal, or simply on it's own. Given the high protein value of beans and health benefits of couscous, I could say that this is a very healthy, filling meal and very enjoyable, especially with all the colours and variety of textures.
I wanted to make a salad with lots of fresh, crunchy vegetables, and use couscous to add another dimension to it. I used tomatoes, cucumber, fresh green coriander, mint leaves, lemon juice, sweet corn and of course the red kidney beans.
The beans should be given a good time to soak, preferably overnight, or a good solid couple of hours. Then they need to boiled at a high temperature in salted water. To this I added cream, milk, some bbq sauce and the sweet corn and half of the couscous.
The veggies were chopped up in small chunks, the coriander and mint added to them and squeezed on top with the lemon juice, followed by the remaining half of the couscous.
Now, here is what you can do, you can combine the two together, i.e. the veggies and the beans or you could pile them separately onto your plate. Either way, it's pretty good, and excellent on top of freshly toasted buttered bread.
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