Chicken and Lamb Couscous
Inspired by a dish that’s traditional in Fes, Morocco — couscous with seven vegetables — this is one of our all-time favorite things to make. Basically it’s a vegetable-happy lamb-and-chicken stew that you serve over semolina couscous grains. Pass around extra broth for everyone to add as they like, along with harissa.
Eons ago, when we started making this couscous, we would prepare the couscous grains in fairly close accordance to the traditional way: steaming the grains several times several times, and raking it with our fingers in between steamings. We’d start the stew the previous day by soaking dried chickpeas overnight. And sometimes we’d make our own harissa. When we didn’t feel up to doing all that, we had a very good short-cut method that took the 5-minute instant couscous route, used canned chickpeas and harissa from a tube.
These days we have a new strategy, centered on the grains and the harissa. For the grains, a brilliant hack we learned from cookbook author Claudia Roden yields results close to multi-steaming in just 15 minutes, with minimal effort. It’s worlds better than the 5-minute method, and so totally worth it. For the harissa, we have become hooked on homemade: Its flavor and texture are spectacular, and it’s not difficult to make. Happily, harissa from a tube is not bad at all, so that’s a shortcut we can still get behind. For the chickpeas, it’s really a matter of your personal preference and circumstance. We slightly prefer this dish made with dried chickpeas, but it dramatically increasing cooking time, which is already long. Canned chickpeas are nearly as good, and so much quicker. Still, if you have some beautiful dried chickpeas, this would be a fabulous use for them.
If you’re interested in the traditional steaming-the-grains method, find it here.
The stew part is very forgiving; here are some ways you might want to tweak, adjust or improvise:
For the meat, you can use lamb shanks or cuts from the shoulder, or a combination. You could even buy lamb shoulder chops and cut them into three pieces each. When we use lamb shanks, we ask the butcher to cut them into three pieces each. Some Middle-Eastern or Mediterranean groceries sell what they might call “lamb cuts,” or something like that — large chunks from the shoulder and/or shank. These are perfect.
For the chicken, our recipe calls for whole legs cut in two or all thighs. You could also use a breast in there, or use a whole cut-up chicken, though the breast meat becomes a bit stringy and dry when cooked that long; we prefer dark meat for this.
For the chickpeas, instructions in the main recipe are for canned. If you’re using dried, soak 1 pound in water overnight. Drain them, and add them to the pot in step 1 with the chicken and lamb.
For the winter squash, feel free to substitute any winter squash you like in place of delicata. Simply roast it (peeling it if necesary), and use it in place of the delicata. Or leave it out altogether. For the zucchini, feel free to use other summer squash in addition to the zucchini, such as patty pan or crookneck. If you want to honor the traditional seven Berber vegetables, add chunks of peeled sweet potatoes with when you add the turnips, and add chunks of cabbage with the zucchini.
If you’re serving 4 to 6 people and want to serve the leftovers another day, just make one box of couscous the first day, and make the second box the day you serve the leftovers.
Serves 8-12.
Ingredients
About 3 pounds lamb shanks or lamb shoulder, cut into manageable pieces (each shank should be cut into 3 pieces)
1 pound (454 grams) dried chickpeas, soaked overnight and drained, or 2 15.5-ounce (439 grams) cans chickpeas, drained
4 whole chicken legs, separated into drumsticks and thighs, or 8 chicken thighs