Chicken and Couscous

Carrying on, even in this time of holiday, indulging in lunch rather than supper. Have tried calling it Dinner but nobody really can. A lifetime of not calling anything Dinner is too strong a prohibiting force. Neither have we adopted Elphine's suggestion of Dunch. That is worse than anything. I personally have fallen into calling it Luncheon. It's not like we're just quickly eating lunch, throwing together a sandwich or something. No, we're actually stopping everything, and sitting around, and probably drinking a glass of wine.

In this case I started with a half an onion and a tablespoon or so of that clever minced garlic in a jar and one yellow and one red bell pepper. And because, well, just because, I sweated it in both oil and butter, until it was translucent and then added a whole whole lot of chicken, which I didn't have to cut up, because Matt stood there for what seemed like hours, cutting chicken, and also some of those carrots that have been precut into that little tube shape. And then over it all I lathered curry powder, paprika, and ground cumin, and Matt kept telling me to add more salt, but I didn't want it to be too much, so we squabbled away. Then two cups of stock and one can of diced tomato and it mellowed together for a bit until about ten minutes before we wanted to devour it and that's when I added the asparagus spears, dug out from the back of the freezer. Courgette would have been better but never mind. And then a whole packet of couscous, and a salad.

“What's for dessert?” inquired a philistine child, pretty sure nothing good could come from all the steaming, aromatic pans.

“Nothing,” I snapped. Honestly. There's very little in life so irritating as laying out something really delicious, and not full of anything weird that nobody can recognize, and immediately hearing “I'm not that hungry” which you know is an untruth, and then looking over and seeing a variety of kids holding up plates half full of food mouthing at you, “Can I be done?” No you can't “be done” which is an inelegant thing to say anyway, because being stupid.

Later all my own children were rewarded for picking and fussing by their grandmother, who took them out for frozen yoghurt. So we have all learned an important lesson. 1 Children are awful and 2 Who cares. The lunch was delicious.