couscous salad and greek chicken

When I was in Athens at the end of October, I bought a pack of various spice mixes from a street vendor. I stuck them on my shelf and promptly forgot to ever use them. I've been telling myself to remember to get the few ingredients necessary to put the spice blends into action, and I finally got around to it today. My vegetarian roommate was out, so I looked at the chicken recipe (chicken, lemon juice, spice mix, salt & pepper; cook in oven) and decided to give it a whirl. As a backup supplement, I also wanted to make a couscous salad, in part because of the box of couscous I bought however long ago that is also sitting on my shelf collecting dust. Tonight, in short, was an evening of 'use that stuff that you bought and forgot.' Unlike the packages of butter in my fridge, which I go through frighteningly quickly with baking projects. I digress.

So that chicken recipe isn't so much of a recipe, and I have no idea what spices are in the blend; I do not have that kind of a palate yet. But the couscous salad is a simple recipe that I found with a google search. Both turned out pretty well. I threw some cyrene (like feta) into the couscous salad to make it just that much more yummy.

2 cups cooked whole wheat couscous
1 cup chopped cucumber
1 cup chopped tomatoes
1/2 cup chopped red onion
1 cup canned garbanzo beans, drained
1/3 cup fresh mint, chopped
Juice of two large lemons
1 tbsp olive oil

Cook the couscous first; this is simple. Check the directions, but I'm pretty sure its equal parts couscous to water, plus a bit of olive oil. I used 2/3 cup couscous. Boil water, add olive oil, mix in couscous with a fork, cover and let sit for 5 minutes, fluff again, and it's ready to go.

Combine couscous, cucumber, tomatoes, onion, garbanzo beans and mint in a large bowl. Whisk together lemon juice and olive oil. Pour over couscous salad and stir well. Cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours [I only put mine in for about 40 minutes without consequence].

half a bushel of apples is a lot

so. what's the easiest thing you can do with half a bushel of apples? applesauce.

apples cook down quite a lot. for this recipe, i used about 25 apples--a mix of macoun and macintosh--and ended up with somewhere between 6 and 8 cups. tart and slightly sweet.

the beauty of applesauce is you can pretty much do whatever you feel like. i will, however, recommend that if you are going to make applesauce regularly and you don't like chunky applesauce that you should invest in a food mill. homemade applesauce tastes about 82735834 times better if you leave the skins on when you are cooking them down. the skins really have a ton of apple flavor in them.

as you can see, i found this out the hard way. i peeled, cored, and diced the apples and put them in a big stockpot.

then i added about a half a cup of brown sugar, two tablespoons of cinnamon, 1 tablespoon of nutmeg, and a dash of ginger. the apples should contain enough water to allow the apples to cook down without burning, but if you're at all worried add in a dash of apple cider to accelerate the process.

then all you do is put the pot on low heat, stirring occasionally, until the apples are mushy. that can take anywhere between .5 to 1.5 hours. i like my applesauce chunky, but if you want it to be smooth, stick it in a blender a few cups at a time or in a food mill.