News You Can Bruise for 2004 September 14 (entry 0)

(6) Tue Sep 14 2004 09:54 PST Yum Yum Yam Yam Walla Walla Couscous: This is my reverse-engineering of a dish by that name that Seth had heard about when he was young. I'll present it in lovely CfE format.

3 yams, peeled and diced	Bake on sheet for 30 minutes at 325 degrees		combine
1 cup mixed dried fruit (eg. cranberries, raisins)
1 cup nuts (eg. walnuts)	toast
2 Walla Walla or other sweet onions, diced	saute in olive oil
ground cinnamon
cumin
2 cloves garlic, diced
2 cups water or broth	boil	combine and fluff
2 cups couscous

Discussion: I added more stuff to the recipe than to the dish I actually made, because the awesome expansion power of couscous made the end result look like a desert of couscous which expeditions of yams and cranberries had unsuccessfully tried to cross. Couscous can hold a lot of other stuff. I also added some garlic to the recipe because the couscous I made was too sweet and lacked bite. Put in the garlic when your saute is almost done so it doesn't burn; that's just a general rule of garlic. I used Hawaiian sweet onions because I couldn't find Walla Walla onions.

Not bad, for a first couscous recipe. And until I find a better one, I declare that this has the best name of any dish ever created.

Comments:

Posted by Riana at Tue Sep 14 2004 17:41

It's still funny, even without Walla Walla sweets. One way to obtain them is to matriculate at Whitman; they send you a box of onions the summer before your freshman year.

Also, the title of this dish invokes the Chicken Dance in my head. Clap-clap-clap-clap!

Posted by Seth Schoen at Tue Sep 14 2004 19:18

Leonard slightly misremembers the history of this food: I've never eaten it, but I discussed it with my neighbor, who invented it.

Posted by Seth Schoen at Tue Sep 14 2004 19:19

Instead of being given as an ingredient, shouldn't "3 yams, peeled and diced" by represented in the tree as "3 yams peel dice"?

Posted by Leonard at Tue Sep 14 2004 20:14

That depends on whether or not you think mise-en-place is a special case.

Posted by Susie at Wed Sep 15 2004 15:40

I liked the example much better than the explanation. But not as much as the dish itself! Yum yum!

Posted by jrobbins at Wed Sep 15 2004 17:28

I thought that you would like the cookingforengineers.com blog and format. I like it too.

BTW, my brother is now enrolled at www.calchef.com to start a second career.