Dinner Bowl #44

 

I may be a little overdramatic, but here's one of the tests of bravery I faced down in my pantry utilization cycle: Couscous with spinach and chickpeas (recipe from Spain on a Fork), roasted broccoli and cauliflower, and baked potato-carrot-spinach pakoras (recipe from 12 Tomatoes) with some cashew sour cream as a dipping sauce.

This was a test of bravery because it used up the last of my couscous. I've had the couscous for a while, and it's a problem I have with being irrationally averse to using up the very end of something, but the internal reminder that I can, indeed, buy couscous again if I want it, and just not eating the couscous I have does not result in me eating couscous, got me to go ahead. Plus, I knew I loved this recipe, having made it once before.

It didn't use up all my saffron, but it came close; after this, I have only a pinch. But you know what? That's okay, too. If I want saffron, I can buy more saffron. We are not in a mode where such things aren't available. (Would I buy more saffron? I originally bought saffron because it was on clearance, so who's to say. But maybe, if it were something that was going to make the dish, the way it is for this couscous. Or maybe not. I don't know if I like the world's most expensive spice enough to buy it if it isn't on clearance.)

This discussion of saffron reminds me of how much my spices seem to multiply. I just went through and inventoried all my spices and it made me feel a little silly. There are spices I've inherited from other people--I didn't buy them all myself--but there are kind of a lot of spices. Some of them are things I use all the time, while others need to find their way into something deliberately, because I don't often reach for things like berbere. But spice-utilization is incidental to overall pantry utilization at the moment, so it's just something that I guess will linger in the back of my mind for a while.

The roasted cauliflower and broccoli could not be simpler. I tossed the veggies in olive oil, seasoned them generously with some seasoned salt, and stuck them on a silicone mat-lined baking sheet to cook alongside the pakoras. But they were delicious in that addictive way that makes me want to stand over the stove shoveling vegetables in my mouth, so they were a win.

I've been looking for a pakora recipe that would let me bake them rather than fry them. I adore them fried, of course, but you don't always want to fry things. This recipe worked out great! It was not as flavorful as they would have been if I'd fried them, but this just wasn't the time for that. I could see making these for a falafel wrap or something, too.

Cashew sour cream is something I had on hand, so I used it, but I don't know if was the right dip for the pakoras. Oh, well. You can't have absolutely everything.